Petr Chaadaev was one of the most brilliant, cultivated, and perceptive Russians of his time. Despite having been declared officially insane and publicly silenced by Tsar Nicholas I in 1836 after the publication of his "First Philosophical Letter," Chaadaev maintained friendly contacts and lively intellectual interchanges with some of his most distinguished contemporaries, including Aleksandr Pushkin and Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov. In Germany in 1826 he had met Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, who expressed a high opinion of the qualities of Chaadaev's mind and spirit. Most of the Western European celebrities who visited Moscow in the two decades after 1836 managed to meet Chaadaev--among them Hector Berlioz, the Marquis de Custine, Franz Liszt, and Prosper Mérimée.

Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev was born on 27 May 1794 in Moscow to a family of prosperous landed gentry of Lithuanian origin on his father's side. His mother's father was the noted Prince Mikhail...