Our Time as it is (Regarding Norman Cousins' article “Modern Man is Obsolete”. The Saturday Review of Literature. New York. Neue Auslese V. 1946). In Ukrainian Historical Journal, No 3, 2015, pp. 194-211.

The material (a contemporary edition of Petrov's article) consists of two parts: a foreword by historian Oleksii Yas, which provides a brief overview of Viktor Petrov's article, and the article itself with added historiographical notes. The article is devoted to a detailed analysis of the social, political, and ideological changes that humanity experienced in the postwar period. The author uses the historiosophical methodology (in modern language, the methodology of the philosophy of history) to outline the peculiarities of the era he witnessed and the differences between this era and the previous ones (the Middle Ages and the Modern Age). Petrov's philosophical and anthropological conclusions and warnings about humanity's entry into the ‘age of atomic energy’ (p. 202) are in line with what Cousins is talking about. In particular, Cousins' thesis about the gap between ‘revolutionary technology and revolutionary anthropology’, which was characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century, seems to be significant for Petrov. In the end, the author agrees with the key conclusion of Cousins' text: ‘we are entering the age of nuclear energy completely unprepared’ (p. 202).

Vlada Davidenkо