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Religion, National Character, and the “Rediscovery of Russian Roots”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

George L. Kline
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Discussion
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Slavic Review , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 1973 , pp. 29 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1973

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References

1. Alexander, Ianov, “Slavianofily i Konstantin Leont’ev,” Voprosy filosofii, 1969, no. 8, p. 98.Google Scholar

2. The terms pochvennik and pochvennichestvo—derived from pochva (“soil“)—were made current by Dostoevsky and Apollon Grigoriev in the 1860s. Pochvennichestvo may be freely rendered as “cult of the soil and primitive immediacy“; pochvenniki are those who profess this cult. As the expression “primitive immediacy” suggests, the nineteenth century pochvenniki were, in a sense, antirationalist; contemporary Soviet pochvenniki (or pseudo-pochvenniki) are, in several senses, anti-intellectual.

3. Grigorii, Pomerants, Neopublikovannoe (Frankfurt, 1972), p. 172.Google Scholar

4. Ibid, p. 172n.

5. A rough American equivalent for kvasnoi patriotizm (an expression used by Chaadaev in polemic with the Slavophiles) would be “coca-cola patriotism“; and for prianichnoe slavianofil'stvo (“honey-cake Slavophilism“), “apple-pie Americanism.“

6. Pomerants, Neopublikovannoe, p. 327. Ianov emphasizes that the spokesmen for the official narodnosf of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s were much more xenophobic and anti- Western than the early Slavophiles. See his “Zagadka slavianofil'skoi kritiki” (“The Mystery of Slavophile Criticism“), Voprosy literatury, 1969, no. S, pp. 92, 93.

7. Pomerants, Neopublikovannoe, p. 163. The parenthetical remark refers to the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign of the Polish Communist Party and government. As for the military relevance of the new Russian chauvinism—a question which Mr. Haney says he is not competent to discuss—I would note the prominent role currently being played by Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasilii Chuikov, hero of the battle of Stalingrad, whose memoirs (parts 2 and 3) were serialized in Molodaia gvardiia during 1971 and 1972. One should also keep in mind that Chalmaev’s 1964 brochure, Geroicheskoe v sovetskoi literature (The Heroic in Soviet Literature), and his 1965 book, Mir v svete podviga (The World in the Light of the Heroic Exploit), both include extensive discussions of military heroism and exploits on the field of battle.

8. The most explicit public expression of anti-Semitism by a Soviet neo-Slavophile that I have seen is contained in the recent three-part article by Mikhail F. Antonov, “Uchenie slavianofilov : Vysshii vzlet narodnogo samosoznaniia v Rossii v doleninskii period” (“The Slavophile Teaching : High Point of Popular Self-Consciousness in Russia in the pre-Leninist Period“), in the samizdat Moscow journal Veche. (We know of Antonov only that he is a young Moscow architect who in 1968 was declared “not answerable for his actions” and committed to a special psychiatric hospital. See Khronika tekushchikh sobytii, Apr. 30, 1969; English trans, in Peter, Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, London, 1972, p. 431 Google Scholar.) Antonov repeatedly attacks “homeless” or “rootless” (bezrodnyi) and “cosmopolitan” Russian intellectuals—using the familiar Stalinist code-words for “Jewish intellectuals” (see Veche, no. 2 [May 1971], pp. 21, 23). He decries the contemporary “violent attack on the soul of the Russian people by innumerable rootless cosmopolitan elements” (no. 3 [September 1971], p. 24) and stresses that the intelligentsia is “alien” to the Russian people and given to—another favorite Stalinist term—“groveling [nizkopoklonstvo] before the West” (p. 25). Antonov sees the present and pressing “task of the Russian people” as beating off the “attack of rootless and cosmopolitan elements“ (ibid., p. 37). Making his meaning absolutely clear, Antonov rebukes Stalin for having entrusted the “fight against the cosmopolitanism of the intellectuals” to the intellectuals themselves (no. 1 [January 1971], p. 17). It is significant that the editors of Veche printed a letter from a reader (apparently Moslem), in no. 4 (January 1972), raising the question of Great Russian anti-Semitism and discrimination against other national minorities. The editors’ answer was evasive, citing a nineteenth-century Georgian (General Bagration) and Armenian (Loris-Melikov), both of whom rose to high station under the tsars, as evidence of nondiscrimination. (This information is based on the account given in Khronika, Mar. 5, 1972.)

After I had completed this essay I came upon the chilling account of Soviet anti- Semitism in Mikhail Agursky’s samizdat review of Iurii Ivanov’s Ostorozhno : Sionizm (Caution : Zionism!, Moscow, 1970), under the title, “Selling Anti-Semitism in Moscow“ (trans. Peter Reddaway), New York Review of Books, Nov. 16, 1972, pp. 19-23. According to Agursky, “nationalist ideology presented in communist language is becoming a singularly effective political force” (p. 19) and is developing into a “deification of the [Russian] people, a racism with gnostic overtones, which aspires to fill the religious vacuum that has formed.” His estimate of the seriousness of Russian anti-Semitism is no less alarming than Pomerants’s : “The only way,” Agursky writes, “to end the Russian- Jewish conflict in Russia would be to allow mass emigration by Jews to Israel” (p. 23).

9. Pomerants, Neopublikovannoe, pp. 171-72 (italics added).

10. Pomerants quotes a stanza from Khomiakov’s powerful religious-political poem “Rossii” (“To Russia“) written in 1854, on the eve of the Crimean War, which includes a vivid catalogue of Russian “sins” (ibid., p. 174).

11. See Molodaia gvardiia, 1972, no. 8, editorial.

12. Antonov, “Uchenie slavianofilov,” Veche, no. 3, p. 39. In invidious contrast to allegedly integral and communal “Leninism-Orthodoxy” stands allegedly fragmented and individualistic “Marxism-Catholicism” (ibid., p. 45) !

13. Efim, Dorosh, Zhivoe derevo iskusstva (The Living Tree of Art) (Moscow, 1967), p. 158.Google Scholar

14. Antonov cites with approval an anti-urban tract of Soloukhin's (in Literaturnaia gazeta) which maintains that the Soviet city-dweller has ceased to be a genuine Russian, and that only the rural Russian is now a true bearer of natsional'nost' and samobytnost' (cultural “independence” or “self-sufficiency“). See Antonov, “Uchenie slavianofilov, “ Veche, no. 1, p. 34.

15. Dorosh, Zhivoe derevo iskusstva, p. 125.

16. Antonov, “Uchenie slavianofilov,” Veche, no. 3, pp. 37-38.

17. lanov, “Slavianofily,” p. 97. lanov notes that after long Soviet neglect, Leontiev is suddenly fashionable. His name has appeared more frequently during the past fifty weeks (as of summer 1969) than during the previous fifty years ! But Leontiev the thinker is treated inconsistently and superficially. Thus he is called by some (i.e., Chalmaev, whom Ianov does not name) the “Chaadaev of the 1860s-1880s,” but by others a mystical and superstitious Russian chauvinist (ibid., pp. 97-98). An article on Leontiev has appeared in Veche, nos. 3 and 4 (September 1971 and January 1972), but I have not seen it. In another article Ianov points to a similarly widespread Soviet ignorance concerning the Slavophiles. See his “Zagadka,” pp. 100-101.

18. Ianov cites it in “Slavianofily,” p. 99.

19. Thus far the only Soviet reprinting of a Slavophile author is the volume of Khomiakov’s poetry included in the bol'shaia seriia of the Biblioteka poeta in 1969.

20. Ianov develops the distinction between Slavophilism and “official narodnost'”— with numerous quotations from nineteenth-century sources—in “Zagadka,” pp. 95, 103, 107, 111, and 114-15. He also criticizes those Soviet commentators who have failed to recognize this distinction (pp. 99, 112).

21. “Chernye doski” in Zimnii den' (Moscow, 1969), pp. 137-38, 165-66, 194, 199-200, 214, 257, 281. Even here one suspects an anti-Semitic podtekst; many of Soloukhin's readers will be aware that the harsh antireligious campaign of the 1930s was headed by a Jew, Emelian Iaroslavsky (Gubelman), and that Jewish Party members played a considerable role in the confiscation of church treasures and the closing of churches—all of which aroused strong anti-Jewish feelings among Russian Orthodox believers. (See Agursky, “Selling Anti-Semitism in Moscow,” p. 20.)

22. In addition to the passage cited by Mr. Haney, the most impressive concerns the old peasant woman Dunia. (See Soloukhin, “Chernye doski,” p. 263.)

23. Chalmaev’s two books, mentioned earlier, are full of party rhetoric—for example, references to the “heroic exploits” of the CPSU (Geroicheskoe v sovetskoi literature, p. 8). This brochure, which went to press in September 1964, just before Khrushchev's fall, quotes him twice; Chalmaev's 1965 book does not mention him at all. The brochure admiringly quotes V. Kochetov (pp. 25-26); the book lavishes fulsome praise on several of Kochetov's works (Mir v svete podviga, pp. 325-42).

24. Pomerants, Neopublikovannoe, p. 164. I confess that I find Mr. Haney's comparison of Chalmaev's alleged “search for the broad Russian soul” with that of the “lesser Slavophiles“—apparently he means Aksakov, Samarin, and P. Kireevsky—offensive to the memory of honest, intelligent, and sensitive thinkers.

25. Ibid., p. 165.

26. Soloukhin himself recognizes these last two classes of motives. See “Chernye doski,” pp. 126, 132, 213. Brodsky sees such motives as involving an obsession with mere things, a kind of “fetishism.“

27. Dorosh, Zhivoe derevo iskusstva, p. 236.

28. Ibid., p. 233.

29. Alexander, Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Garnett, Constance, trans. revised Higgens, Humphrey, 4 vols. (London, 1968), 2 : 539.Google Scholar

30. Dorosh, Zhivoe derevo iskusstva, p. 124.

31. Ibid, p. 132.

32. Soloukhin repeats and elaborates this distinction (“Chernye doski,” pp. 212-13).

33. The remarkable Soviet motion picture Andrei Rublev—which I saw in Paris in 1970—may well increase interest in Russian Orthodoxy as well as in Old Russian culture. But “interest in” is not yet “commitment to.” Moreover, this film operates at a cultural and intellectual level quite distinct from that of the writings of Soloukhin and Chalmaev.

34. Gaidenko, P. P., Tragediia estetizma : Opyt kharakteristiki mirosozertsaniia Serena Kirkegora (Moscow, 1970).Google Scholar

35. This point is made persuasively by Georgie Anne Geyer in her lively and informative, if occasionally somewhat inaccurate, account, “A New Quest for the Old Russia,” Saturday Review, Dec. 25, 1971, p. 17.

36. Pomerants, Neopublikovannoe, p. 166.

37. Dorosh, Zhivoe derevo iskusstva, p. 139,

38. This last point was suggested to me by Arcadi Nebolsine.