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The
binary structure of Russian culture (and of Russian civilization and their
interrelationships) has at every crucial or pivotal moment of our country's
history manifested itself in the form of a debate, argument or dialogue about matters of urgent moment.
And this dialogue of opposing socio-cultural tendencies has remained unfinished
and, in principle, can never be finished. The problem has to do not only with
the fact that we are dealing with issues that do not admit of simple solutions,
not only with the irreconcilability of mutually exclusive positions taken by
the parties to the dispute. Any and all of the responses to the unfolding
dialogue have been ambivalent in and of themselves, quite apart of the opinions
of the adversary in question, whether real or potential.
It
would seem as if at the very moment when something in Russian culture is affirmed, it is also negated, overthrown by the very course
of development of Russian civilization. For this very reason, Russian culture
seeks to go beyond the limits and definitions imposed on it by itself and to
reevaluate them. Russian culture combines a centripetal
tendency, i.e. a tendency to affirm its self-identity, with a centrifugal tendency, that is, a
tendency to overcome such simple self-identity. Similar pendulum swings have
characterized Russian civilization, which has been nurtured from within, during
the course of its growth and evolution, by corresponding cultural stimuli.
Over
the course of more than a thousand years of Russian cultural history, the
processes of bifurcation, on the one hand, and union of opposites, on the other
hand, have alternated and competed with each other in extent and intensity. We
might even say, anticipating future chapters in this book, that the forces of
unity and disintegration, being in a constant state of conflict, have served to
balance the polar tendencies of Russian culture, as if neutralizing their
mutually exclusive principles. We may perceive, at different stages of our
national cultural-historical development, an insistent striving towards unity,
towards a synthesis, to be effected on this or that foundation. Nevertheless,
this unity, this cultural synthesis remains unfulfilled to the very end, being
gradually destroyed by the very same forces which were conducive to the
attainment of this unity. It was therefore necessary to begin the search for
this synthesis, for this unity once again, in a fundamentally different
direction.
The
mind-set of Russian culture has historically evolved as a complex,
disharmonious, unstable equilibrium consisting of the forces of unity and
disintegration, of integration and differentiation of antithetical tendencies
of the national-historical experience of the Russian people, that is, as a
socio-cultural equilibrium (often on the verge of national calamity or in
connection with approaching danger), which has made itself known at the most
decisive, critical moments of Russian history and which has helped Russian
culture to survive under
socio-historical and everyday conditions of extreme and sometimes insuperable
difficulty. Manifesting itself at every developmental phase of Russian culture
in the form of either a "bifurcation" or a "unity of
opposites", this balancing of the national consciousness between totality
and schism, the general and the specific, the ordinary and the extraordinary,
expresses not only the dynamism
immanent to Russian culture (passing over at times into unpredictability and
chaos), but also the high adaptability
of Russian civilization throughout its thousand-year history to any factors,
including openly anti-cultural ones. In short, it expresses the astonishing survivability of Russian civilization.