KONDAKOV— II

Page 29

As Yurii Lotman has observed, Russian culture is characterized by a constant alternation of periods of “structural equilibrium” and periods of rapid cultural development and unpredictable historical momentum, when such equilibrium is fundamentally disturbed. Periods marked by structural equilibrium claim for themselves, subjectively speaking, a central place in the cultural universe and assess their potential uncritically in the spirit of a national-historical, religious or national-political messianism. Dynamic periods marked by structural disequilibrium situate themselves within the semiotic and cultural periphery of world culture. They are inclined to a lower self-appraisal, suffering as they do a kind of national inferiority complex, and are marked by a striving to “overtake” the cultural center which appears in an ambivalent form, that is, both as a form of attraction (as a standard, as a touchstone, as a model to be admired and imitated), and in a potentially dangerous and hostile form (aggression, annexation, suppression of individual distinctiveness from without).

Thus, under the rubric of structural equilibrium in Russian history, we may place the periods of early (pre-Christian) Kievan Rus’, Muscovy, the Russian classics of the XIX century, and the Soviet period (especially the Stalinist period). On the other hand, the periods of structural disequilibrium may be represented by: ancient Rus’ on the eve and during the period of Christianization, Rus’ on the eve of the Mongol conquest and under the yoke of the Golden Horde, Russia on the eve of, during and after the Petrine reforms (the XVIII century), the Silver Age and the post-revolutionary 20’s of the XX century and the post-Soviet period (beginning with “perestroika”). The predominance of now centripetal, now centrifugal tendencies in society and culture, the alternation of periods marked chiefly by interests reflecting the center and periods marked by interests reflecting the periphery, express, by virtue of their periodic nature, the swinging of “the pendulum of civilization”, the pulsating development of the nation as a culture and civilization.

Having developed historically over the course of the thousand year history of Russia, with its endless “explosions”, “ruptures”, leaps and intervals marked by gradual growth, the mind-set of Russian culture is distinguished by a unique, one might say, fundamental contradictoriness, duality, ambivalence. This contradictory unity of culture, leaving no room for a middle ground and gravitating in everything to mutually exclusive extremes, has had two effects: on the one hand, it has reflected (and to some extent has predetermined, brought about) a deeply rooted socio-cultural instability, the oft-repeated unpredictable course of events expressing itself in swings from one extreme to another (the “pendulum effect”), -- phenomena associated with the Eurasian frontiers of Russian culture.

On the other hand, it is precisely this duality, this ambivalence of every significant phenomenon of Russian culture and civilization, of the very core of Russian culture itself, that has opened up for Russian culture (and Russian civilization) inexhaustible possibilities for a flexible, almost instantaneous adaptation to the most abrupt (even mutually exclusive) changes of socio-historical reality, to all conceivable social cataclysms and explosions—revolutions and civil wars, terror and despotic state rule, alien cultural influences, conflicts with other nations and conflicts between nationalities [within the Russian Empire, USSR or the Russian Federation], religious and atheistic forms of fanaticism as well as moral-political indifference. In this respect, we may consider the obvious discreteness in the historical development of Russian culture, its potential for a “schism” and the celebrated “breadth and sweep” [of the Russian soul], its capacity for containing two fundamental oppositions within the framework of a single, unified, semantic whole as phenomena that are mutually conditioned and constantly supportive of each other. These phenomena manifest themselves in Russian culture first diachronically and, secondly, synchronically.

Over a thousand years of Russian cultural history testify convincingly to the fact that the essence of the national mind-set of Russian culture consists precisely in the dual nature of its core, being literally a unity of opposites or, perhaps, more precisely, a unity split in two. As a result, each of the two halves of this whole—at any stage of the historical development of Russian culture—asserts itself at the expense of a permanent conflict (dialogue, polemics, competition, argument, ideological confrontation and, at times, direct, uncompromising war) with its opposite. Without this struggle, critique, unmasking, permanent debate, the very existence of each of these two countervailing polarities would lose all meaning: they are mutually complementary: the “victory” of one polarity in this struggle is tantamount to its “defeat” since it disturbs the equilibrium of the binary system as a whole. By disturbing the balance of forces, it leads to catastrophic consequences for the whole, which loses the plenitude necessary for sustaining itself. The dialogical character of the relationship between the two polarities creates a constant “flickering” of contradictory meanings, a permanent conflict of opposing gravitational forces, the potential instability of the system as a whole, the unpredictable course of its development (which, properly speaking, was reflected in the dilemma made famous by Tyutchev and Guberman, respectively: “You cannot know Russia with the mind” and “It is time, mother-f…..s, to understand Russia with the mind”), its exceptional dynamism and inner intensity, its energy as a culture existing in a permanent, meta-cultural context, -- rich in meaning, filled with contradictions, fundamentally multi-layered (ethnically, economically, socio-politically, religiously, linguistically, and so on).