Let us turn from the seventeenth century to the present day. If Bacon and Descartes laid the foundations of a new European worldview, then today’s Russia, at least in words, is ready to reject this worldview entirely and offer the world a ‘culture independent of European influence’ or (even better) a ‘truly European’ culture. If these are just words, they are troubling. What does this desire to reject Europe mean? Let us look at what is happening critically. By the way, a ‘critic’ is not a scolder, according to the common understanding, but an interpreter. Let us try to interpret what we see — without enthusiasm or disgust. I have already written about it, but it is not a sin to repeat myself, and times have changed. The mental epoch between the ‘new order’ and something unknown is over. In the two years that have passed since its end, some features have emerged — not a ‘new epoch’, but a new understanding of things.
What do we see? First of all, a turn away from liberal opinions. This turn is taking hold of both those who are tired of the liberal understanding of things that cannot be so understood, and those who are happy to return to the ideas of the ‘new order’ — and those, of course, who join every fashionable movement because it is profitable and requires no mental effort.
Under the guise of liberal opinions, Russia in ‘91 rushed into formlessness. Even the semblance of external form that Bolshevism gave seemed coercive. Freedom was seen as formlessness, meaninglessness, lawlessness. [1] This happened for a number of reasons, including the typical Russian understanding of freedom as debauchery, while freedom is self-rule. Now we want to push back against this formlessness, and with it, against the ideas that are ‘liberal’ in name.
The departure from everything liberal is accompanied by a revival of Eurasianism. Cleansed of some extremes (‘Genghis Khan’s wagons’, i.e. Asian heritage, are no longer sworn by), it now possesses many minds. Where there is Eurasianism, there is a repulsion from Europe, if not a direct rejection of the European heritage. Such a rejection is much easier in words than in deeds. It is easier to teach Chinese instead of English to Moscow university students (and then to abandon this teaching) than to erase from Russian culture its true foundation, i.e., enlightenment understood in European terms. But to simplify this enlightenment, to return it to the state of a factory producing ‘engineers and tractor drivers’, is quite possible. I am not at all claiming that our enlightenment of the 1990s and beyond was good; quite the contrary. But a ‘factory of engineers’ is essentially no better than a ‘factory of stockbrokers’. Both have nothing to do with personality development; except that the engineer gets more ‘hard knowledge’; but ‘hard knowledge’ does not develop personality. This is proven by history.
Russia again wanted an order in which it would have ‘engineers and tractors,’ but no writers and poets, except those who could be useful to engineers and tractor drivers in their leisure hour. Russia would like to turn away from the West and return to ‘its’ culture, unmarred by Western borrowings. But what is this ‘own’ culture? The culture of old Russia? The culture of St Petersburg Russia? The culture of the ‘new order’ (those engineers and tractor drivers)?
However, the culture of old Russia was irrevocably gone; the last remnants of it in the countryside were scattered by the ‘new order’. The culture of the Peter the Great’s Russia — the application of European mental forms to the domestic mental soil, which, with all the inconsistency of the Romanovs and the Romanov enlightenment, created the Russian educated man — was discarded by the revolution as too complex and, moreover, based on freedom. What remains is the culture of the ‘new order’: mass technical enlightenment, which does not affect the mind and soul, or rather, it affects them as shallowly as possible.
Romanov culture
Only the Romanov-Russian culture, which lived fully alive for several decades after the end of historical Russia, can be called fruitful of these cultures. We can say about ‘Soviet culture’ what Rozanov rudely and unfairly said about the Russian kingdom: it ‘slipped away in three days’ as soon as the printing press was liberated in 1991. Having passed the ‘factory of engineers,’ Russia rushed out to have fun…..
This Romanov culture seems to the modern observer something ‘old’, while it is still very young. It experienced childhood under Pushkin (who was far ahead of his age); it was a teenager under Dostoevsky; it reached its first maturity, paid for by delusions, between 1917 and 1939 — in emigration. For all her strength and elasticity, she is a branch of the European tree; neither Pushkin nor Khodasevich could have exclaimed, ‘We don’t need Europe!’
The task of mental ‘Europeanisation’ of Russia by the Romanovs was not set in pure form, but it was solved by the power of things. Everything that Peter and his successors gave a purely technical meaning (techniques, skills, knowledge, forms) had its own power, the power of transformation. The Russian European was developed not because the authorities wanted it, but because it was impossible to use cultural tools without experiencing their hidden effect. Beginning with treatises on geometry and navigation, the Russian eventually discovered European literature and opened himself to its action. Here is the difference between Romanov’s Russia and the ‘new order.’ The Bolsheviks borrowed the technique, strictly separating it from the general cultural influence; worse, they arranged everything in such a way that this influence became impossible.[2]
The usual moralistic (read: leftist) comparisons between the work of Peter the Great and Bolshevism are one-sided. Peter acted with a whip, but created on Russian soil a more complex cultural system than what had existed before him; the Bolsheviks used the same whip to impose elementary, primitive institutions — which they eventually had to overcome, creating new inequalities for the sake of some culture. The new order brought no enlightenment except technical enlightenment. Any deeper enlightenment after 1918 was the fruit of Stalin’s (unfortunately) incomplete restoration.
The figures of the new order, who had enslaved the very free Romanov Russia, reproached the Romanovs with ‘serfdom’. In fact, their fault was not in the ‘serfdom’, but in the fact that they instilled too quickly and too many people with an idea of human dignity incompatible with the old Moscow order. Europeanism penetrated life before it had time to transform it. It was a disease of growth, inevitable where the results of thousands of years of cultural life are assimilated over several generations.
Another weakness of the Russian character was the weakness of the will. The Romanovs, like the Bolsheviks after them, favoured more the ‘virtues of emergencies’, of dash and onslaught, than the virtues of quiet firmness. There was, however, a firmness without which we would see neither Romanov power nor White resistance. This weakness of personality was also manifested in the intelligentsia type: complacent, weak-willed, unstable before mental winds. But with the same reservation: the former intelligentsia did not consist of Chekhov’s Ivanovs alone. However, a certain formlessness (called in a positive sense ‘soulfulness’) was characteristic of the Russian man. ‘The most insignificant Frenchman has a form; in Russia only genius creates a form for himself,’ Dostoevsky remarked.
All these flaws in Russian development go back to the original and irrecoverable flaw: we are heirs to no one. It is impossible to grow into a great nation solely on its own root. Cultural unities are of three kinds: founding, that is, leaving an inheritance; inheriting; and not inheriting to anyone, i.e. groundless. The boundaries between the types, however, are permeable: one can move from the second type to the third (which is happening gradually in the West), from the third (by an effort of will and only partially, but despite this — fruitfully and powerfully) to the second. The latter happened to Russia under the Romanovs, but the transformation was incomplete, inconsistent and did not reach the end.
Western Influence
The history of the West seems to us to be sprinkled with a golden powder that hides flaws, makes the ugly person interesting, gives everything mystery and charm. The ‘native’ is devoid of this charm. Saltykov in ‘The Story of a Town’ showed this charmlessness of Russia from the point of view of an intellectual. It is easier for us than for him; we see the same, albeit faint, European glow on Russian antiquity. Everything ‘Soviet’ — colourless, without the lures of intelligence and feeling — lacks this glow.
The West was not only the golden dawn over Russia. Golden dust was brought from there by the wind and it settled on things and people. Western beginnings were assimilated in Russia by both mind and faith. Faith, not only because we are more religious than Western nations, but because throughout the nineteenth century in Europe reason and faith struggled, not Catholic faith, as one might think, but the faith of Rousseau and Marx, to name the main teachers of the new age.
The ennobling Western influence (ennobling when it led to the complication of thought) must be separated from the creation of the myth of the West, manifested, for example, in Lieskov’s ‘Lievsha’. Lieskov could have known that in the 40s of the nineteenth century the situation of the English labourer was not better, but rather worse than that of the Russian. ‘Read the complaints of English factory workers: your hair stands up in horror. How many disgusting tortures, incomprehensible torments! What cold barbarism on the one hand, on the other hand what terrible poverty! You would think that we are talking about the building of Pharaonic pyramids, about Jews working under the scourges of the Egyptians. Not at all: it is about Mr Smith’s cloths or Mr Jackson’s needles. And note that all this is neither abuse nor crime, but takes place within the strict limits of the law,’ Pushkin said on this occasion. But Lieskov needed a ‘tendency’. He sacrificed truth for it.
Western influence not only deepened the Russian man, feeding his mind and feeling with new subjects. It also distracted him from the business, which can be conditionally called ‘to be himself’. The name of this distraction is ‘universalism’.
The Onslaught of Universalism
Dostoevsky once pointed out the ‘universal responsiveness’ of the Russian man. He understood this responsiveness as a positive trait. But is ‘universalism’ a good thing? Does it enrich the nation and the individual, or does it distract from inner and original (i.e. deep) development? I equate ‘distinctiveness’ and ‘depth’ because they tend to be related. ‘Alltheworldness‘ (another of Dostoevsky’s words’) suppresses and entertains the individual; one can either belong to ‘alltheworldness’ or live an inner life. Let us ask Dostoevsky: is ‘universalism’ not another name for ‘alltheworldness’? If ‘alltheworldness’ is shallow, universalism seems to us to be something worthy. Belonging to something huge cannot be bad, it seems to us. Greatness of size is always easily confused with greatness of substance (say, great evils are easily mistaken for great deeds).
Universalism has two sides. There is universalism as an onslaught of some external culture, claiming world significance, for which ‘there is neither Greek nor Jew’. The other universalism affects a person belonging to a local, private, national culture, and makes him see his home not in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but ‘beyond the sea’, or at least makes him believe that his place is ready for him not at home, but there — beyond the sea.
We were constantly tempted by the temptation of universalism under the Romanovs. More than once, the Russian man thought that instead of working on himself and his country, he was called upon to ‘say a new word to the world’. This temptation returned in 1991, when the collapse of the ‘new order’ was understood not as an opportunity to continue the national development interrupted by the revolution, but as ‘joining the world civilisation’ (understood as modern Euro-America). At that time we knew nothing about the development and internal contradictions of this supposedly ‘world’ culture; Western influence seemed to be wholly beneficial. The propaganda of Soviet times, which painted everything Western as black, contributed to this misconception, while we knew very well that if propaganda calls something ‘black’, it is most likely white, at best grey… The fact that our liberation from socialism coincided with the highest rise of ‘Western’ self-consciousness also contributed to this error. ‘The ‘free world’ felt itself to be indeed ‘the world’; the expression ‘shining city on a hill’ was still freshly coined and quite expressed the then feeling of the ‘free nations’. It was essentially a triumph of the black-and-white thinking vividly and seductively expressed in J. Tolkien’s famous novel. Without wishing it himself, Tolkien provided Western society in the second half of the twentieth century with a ready-made ideology. The author of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was inspired, of course, by the Second Great War; he had no future confrontation in mind; moreover, as a man, Tolkien understood that ‘on the side of the Germans there are some elves, and we (Anglo-Saxons) have some orcs’ — but there was no place for this understanding in the novel. To the emerging new ‘universalism’, ready to carry its values all the way to Kamchatka, ‘The Lord’ came in very handy.
Universalism, of course, is not a new phenomenon. Rome wanted to be universal. Christianity wanted to be universal. Both of them destroyed everything local, national, private — bringing new values in place of the destroyed secluded ones. Universalism and seclusion are the two poles of social and cultural development. In seclusion, culture withers; in worldliness, it becomes flat, vulgarised, shallow. Heights are reached for a short time and in small unities, which have left seclusion, but have not reached universality, not even stepped on the path leading to it. The greatness of Athens, old England, old Japan is in fruitful communication with a limited part of the world with complete independence of development. Actually, the same applies to the education of the individual. Everything wise and honourable once remained in the Greek polis and did not pass into the empire; the empire inherited personalities of quite a different scale. Where the polis appealed to the few, to individuals, the empire appealed to peoples. The same boundary is between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One cannot, however, fully participate in the universal without nurturing the private in oneself. The true universal is the totality of private achievements.
This rule we constantly forget, we despise the ‘rotten West’ and prophesy its end with every new onslaught of Western socialism. The leftist wave we are witnessing seems higher, more powerful than the former ones. Socialism has been modified and placed on new, more expansive ground. Before, it was about the salvation of humanity through the liberation of the ‘suffering class.’ The new socialism has freed itself from ‘class’ attachments and turns directly to morality.
Pan-moralism
The current leftist worldview can be called ‘pan-moralism.’ It demands moral judgements about things that are not morally measurable; one could say that it abolishes all judgements other than moral ones. Something like this was already in the old socialism. Talk of ‘bloodsucking capitalists’ and ‘the suffering proletariat’ already introduced a moral element into judgements on purely technical questions. But whereas the former socialism targeted mainly economic relations, trying to replace them with ‘moral’ ones (and naturally creating unprecedented slavery as a result), the newest socialism reconsiders the relations of sexes and peoples, introducing the ‘ethical’ into them. Whites must repent because they are white; men must repent because they are men; and white men doubly so, beginning with Plato and Aristotle. Now in every relationship, not just economic, oppression and violation of justice, ‘injustice’ is found. The background of this attempt is purely biblical, and we have already spoken of it. ‘All strength is injustice; all weakness is righteousness; the relation of the strong to the weak is injustice.’
Christianity calls for mercy for the weak — this is its ‘middle line’. However, in places it goes much further than this line and demands, through the prophets, that the strong become like the weak (not the other way round). Height and strength are hostile to this spirit. And here the cause of Christianity is continued by the liberal and social doctrines. The elimination of the strong and the cultivation, the conscious reproduction of the weak are preached. Socialism in the Soviet or liberal variety creates a society of the weak, the led, the governed.
This all-encompassing moral worldview is nothing new, except for its belief in the salvific nature of legal procedures and lawyers. The lawyer acts in it as a priest. Earlier waves of pan-moralism, from the advent of Christianity to socialism, also found morality where it did not exist and should not be, also put man in front of the mirror of morality and demanded that he constantly look into it….
The novelty is that today’s moralists intend, as Rozanov said, to ‘drop acid into the very centre’ of not just economic, but domestic, everyday relations. If carried through to the end, such an upheaval could be more destructive than ‘economic socialism’. The ethical worldview is always a destructive, anti-state worldview.[3]
The ‘New Order’, which since the 1930s has been constantly looking into the mirror of morality, is faced here with a contradiction. The state, like lovers, has a secret from ethics. When one preaches a worldview that is both moralistic and ‘patriotic’ at the same time, one is preaching a combination of the incompatible. ‘The New Order’ got out of the situation by prescribing to its subjects a moralism from whose purview all actions of the revolutionary state would be excluded (they were to be given unqualified approval). Strictly-moral judgements were required only in relation to the outside world, and to the whole of Russian history. A strictly moral view was encouraged in everyday life — but not in relation to the powers that be, i.e. to the figures of the ‘new order’ from the lowest to the highest. All this double-mindedness was echoed at the end of the ‘people’s power’… [4]
The left mind does nothing and does not want to do anything; positive goals are alien to it (state building, geographical discoveries, trade, culture); its dominant desire is to preserve its virginity, its ideological untaintedness by some action, and every action has the stamp of sin. Action is sin. The supporter of the leftist idea hates action. Therefore the whole national history turns for him into a string of sins, into something that must be condemned and forgotten. So it was in Russia, so it is in the West.
And nowadays we respond to the purely moralistic newest left-wing doctrine (even if its values are unfamiliar in Russia) with no less moralistic ‘pillars of the State’. But the misfortune of the forcibly asserted morality is that it does not hold without violence and causes rejection and ridicule in free people. The fate of the Christian Church, which spoke a lot about morality and was not always moral, is an example of this.
At the same time, the Russian ‘opposition’ is no less concerned with moral issues. It is not even because it constantly accuses its opponent of venality, unscrupulousness, and serving the authorities that it is ill-mannered and unable to argue. The reason is different. She cares neither for the thought nor for the cross-fertilisation of minds that takes place in a proper argument; what she cares for is how to take and keep the place of the moral man among sinners. ‘The moral man’ inevitably thinks “rightly”; all who think wrongly are immoral. Here, too, is a moral sermon!
However, moral prescriptions are not fruitful, for whatever purposes they are compiled. To leave Europe or to remain in it — in both cases, development requires self-deepening of the personality and its capacity for the creation of values rather than technical comforts. What is needed is the capacity for higher forms of cognition.
Creation of Values
In the realm of thought, there is a watershed between creativity by inspiration, the source of which is outside the thinker, and inner mental work: thoughts that hit other thoughts and thus produce new thoughts. The mind, at its core, is not a factory, but a door. Creativity is an inner silence and some even inner self-effacement, when not you live, but the object of thought lives in you; in this respect it is like love. Creativity requires ‘laziness’, i.e. attention that slides leisurely from subject to subject. In other words, creativity needs autumn, i.e., mental fullness without boiling.
Creativity is non-involvement, freedom — from all burdens, from fascination, from joy even, because all our joy is about something external… Creative labour does not need the whole world, it is self-sufficient, it is all inside. Immersion in the subject, clarity, richness of inner connections are given only by renunciation of the external, no matter how much this external requires the whole personality of the creator. Creativity is opposed to and not favoured by the absence of grace, enchantment. Enchanted by the object of thought is connected to it, feels it from within. Creativity is born out of inner restlessness — so. A man with reconciled inner contradictions would be barren. But it is also born out of fascination, dissolution in the world, in thought. Creativity is first of all the art of self-complication, of ascending to greater degrees of order, clarity, self-knowledge. The poet knows more about himself than the ‘layman.’ Rhymed lines are the last and most external manifestation of poetry.
But creativity, as I have remarked many times, does not revolve in the void. The labour of the writer is supplemented by the labour of the reader. The peculiarity of all profound books is that they presuppose many thoughts already familiar to the reader and see him ready to go beyond the previous circle of ideas — following questions that he does not know, but at least anticipates. The unprepared reader, however, has nothing to do with them. Semi-education has given rise to generations of intellectual children who understand a book only if it describes something tangible to the hands or visible to the eye. The ability to be excited by remote mental questions is as foreign to them as the ability to fly. The son of this heavy-minded age reads a book in his leisure hour-if not to add to his cottage a new privy, the description of which he expects to read in it. And a book is labour, not entertainment, and ‘higher education’ in its modern form does not prepare for this labour.
To stay in Europe or to leave — in any case, we need to give individuals food and soil for creative labour in its highest form. Otherwise, Russia, like the militantly moral Europe of these days, will have nothing to offer the peoples but moral proscriptions.
[1] It affected everything, including architecture. If under the ‘new order’ Russian cities were crowded with ‘boxes’, under ‘freedom’ they were filled with monstrous barns. Architecture best reflects the spirit of the time.
[2] Of course, historical Russia was a becoming Russia, not a frozen image, but a nation in struggle for this image. In the West there was much more of the definitive, the solid. All the values of old Russia that point the way to us were values of becoming.
[3] This is why Thomas Hobbes, a witness to the English Revolution, called for depriving the people of the right to judge morality and religion, proposing the slogan later adopted by liberal thought: ‘what is moral is what is lawful’. In this way he hoped to deny ground to religious-political sectarians like those who had undermined the English monarchy before his eyes.
[4] The ‘high-morality’ of the ‘new order’ reached the point of hostility to everything that reminded of the existence of sex. A sexless image of the human was imposed. Perhaps the hatred of the erotic was the fruit of jealousy. It was the ‘party,’ not men or women, that was to be loved with passion. ‘The party’ was sung with a fervour as hot as the sex was repressed in those who sang. Every diversion from governmental aims was pursued, including love. Dostoevsky was not censored under the old order — it was Katkov, publisher of the ‘Russky Viestnik,’ who personally forbade the ‘unnecessarily’ frank chapter of ‘ The Devils’. Under the ‘new order’ neither Dostoevsky, nor ‘ The Devils’, nor this chapter could be imagined. Everything passionate, everything relating to the love of the sexes went into the realm of profanity and anecdotes, being forbidden even in poetry — for which, therefore, both sources of inspiration, erotic and religious, were closed.
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