The essay aims to outline the crucial characters of Russian philosophy that, born from the contact with the modern European culture, has built its specificity within a subtle relationship of identity and distance from the western culture. The latter was, in fact, reinterpreted on the basis of the idea of an accomplishing end of the history which, considered by the Russian intelligencija as an authentic and peculiar universal mission, allows to define the philosophy that came out of it as a real paradox. The paradox in itself didn't consist in refusing the modern western philosophy, but in welcoming and returning it - by the idea of an accomplishing end of history as a mission - according to an image that distorted the fundamental principles, producing, at a conceptual level, alterations similar to the anamorphic distortions of reality when reflected by convex and concave mirrors