The Conservative Anticlericalism of the Engineer De-Skrochowsky

Abstract. The article is devoted to the controversy with Catholic clericalism, which was conducted in the last years of his life by a forgotten publicist — Konstantin Osipovich De-Skrochowsky (1836–1906). While living in Warsaw during this period, he actively published extensive compilations in Polish and Russian from the works of Western Protestant and anti-clerical, as well as domestic Slavophil publicists: from S. Shiniki and L. Taxil to Yu.F. Samarin and A.A. Kireev. But the publicist’s desire to turn away the broad Polish masses from “papism” did not meet with the understanding of the censorship department — just like his attempt to found a “pro-Russian” Jewish newspaper in Yiddish in the capital of the Privislyansky region. Speaking mainly on the pages of Slavophile and conservative publications, De-Skrochowsky did not show himself as an independent political or religious thinker. At the same time, it is precisely by referring to the texts of such authors that we see how Slavophile and pan-Slavist ideas were refracted in the worldview and biography of an ordinary intellectual of the second half of the 19th century, how complex and “non-conservative” in the everyday sense of the word was the then Russian “conservatism”.

Keywords: conservatism, nationalism, anti-clericalism, Catholicism, Polish question, Slavophilism, De-Skrochowsky.