Almost all of Alexander Mikhailovich's ancestors served as high-ranking military officers, but In the sixth grade, he left the cadet school and began studying for the matriculation exams for admission to the university.

Nikolai's mother, Alina Sergeevna Berdyaeva, was half-French and came from the top levels of both French and Russian nobility.

A fiery 1913 article, entitled "Quenchers of the Spirit", criticising the rough purging of Imiaslavie Russian monks on Mount Athos by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church using tsarist troops, caused him to be charged with the crime of blasphemy, the punishment for which was exile to Siberia for life.

[5]: 32  Novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book The Gulag Archipelago recounts the incident as follows: [Berdyaev] was arrested twice; he was taken in 1922 for a midnight interrogation with Dzerjinsky; Kamenev was also there....

But Berdyaev did not humiliate himself, he did not beg, he firmly professed the moral and religious principles by virtue of which he did not adhere to the party in power; and not only did they judge that there was no point in putting him on trial, but he was freed.

[8] After his expulsion from the USSR on September 29, 1922, on the so—called "Philosophers' ships", Berdyaev and other émigrés went to Berlin, where he founded an academy of philosophy and religion, but economic and political conditions in the Weimar Republic caused him and his wife to move to Paris in 1923.

He transferred his academy there, and taught, lectured and wrote, working for an exchange of ideas with the French and European intellectual community, and participated in a number of international conferences.

[5] According to Marina Makienko, Anna Panamaryova, and Andrey Gurban, Berdyaev's works are "emotional, controversial, bombastic, affective and dogmatic".

[13]: 11  At first he systematically developed his theory of love in a special article published in the journal Pereval (Russian: Перевал) in 1907.

[15] Berdyaev was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church,[16][17] and believed Orthodoxy was the religious tradition closest to early Christianity.

[19][20][21] However, neopatristic scholars such as Florovsky have questioned whether his philosophy is essentially Orthodox in character, and emphasize his western influences.

[23] Paul Valliere has pointed out the sociological factors and global trends which have shaped the Neopatristic movement, and questions their claim that Berdyaev and Vladimir Solovyov are somehow less authentically Orthodox.

[28] Currently, the house in Clamart in which Berdyaev lived, now comprises a small "Berdiaev-museum" and attached Chapel in name of the Holy Spirit,[29] under the omophorion of the Moscow Patriarchate.