Leontyev and Rozanov

This year is the double anniversary of Konstantin Leontyev: 170 years since the birth and 110 from the day of death. A mysterious cultural reactionary, Russian Nietzsche survived a short posthumous glory: by the efforts of the figures of the Russian cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century, he was nevertheless introduced into the cultural turnover of that doubtful time. Under the influence of Leontiev, at one time the largest Russian thinker was at one time - Berdyaev, who wrote in the very beginning of the 1920s two very Leontiev books - “Philosophy of Inequality” and “New Middle Ages”. The second made Berdyaev to European art famous: the cycle of Leontiev’s thoughts, developed in it, came very much to the time - after the First World War, against the backdrop of a deep crisis of European democracies, in an atmosphere of universal cultural relativism, so as not to say collapse. Leontyev saw a proto -fascist writer - and the word fascist in the early 1920s was still quite neutral, it was not associated with Hitler, few then known, but with Mussolini, the latter among his fans of European whales as Churchill and Bertrand Russell. I'm not talking about Russian Merezhkovsky, who made a new European Caesar from Mussolini, opposing wild eastern hordes at the borders of a new European Rome. When Merezhkovsky wrote about Napoleon, he had in mind the Mussolini, like Gogolevsky Pereshchin: write Spain, read - England will come out. Then fascism showed himself in all nudity, the medicine turned out to be a worse than the disease, and not that the fashion passed on it, but also about the old hopes associated with it, it began to speak indecent. So Leontyev sank, unable to acquire a European name. Some movements around him began to produce in post-Soviet Russia quite dark, some kind of stable monks, fans of wooden oil, in the manner of Judas Golovlev. Leontiev can not be loved, but still he did not deserve such glory.

Perhaps, it is not worth comparing him with Nietzsche, as they tried, but he lively reminds Oscar Wilde, with his sort of aesthetics that deviates into some criminalism. I believe that in the Reding prison he could sit at that time and write de profounds there. Actually, he himself arranged such a prison - in the form of an optina desert. His scriptures became quite Christian over time, it was Byzantine, grave Christianity as the last hope against the all-forces of egalitarian-utilitarian democratic progress. At the same time, this black monk until the end of days loved all sorts of alkibuades, that is, the aesthetics of being, the wealth of his everyday and cultural forms. Leontiev was an aesthetics ontology: beauty as the last criterion of truth, and truth as a flowering fullness of being. That is, Nero and a scientist slave Epicteet, and a fish, this very epictate on occasion is devouring.

The moralistic Christianity of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky Leontiev called Rosov, it should, Christianity, be black. The basis of Christianity, according to Leontiev, is the fear of God, transcendental egoism, as he called it. Leontiev was afraid of the eternal torment of Hell - hence his gloomy Byzantinism, which is a certain natural, or something, a barrier against all sorts of temptations of aesthetic being and being aesthetics. Leontiev called himself a great and sophisticated sinner; For the current enlightened readers, his riddles are not represented, and they don’t seem especially sophisticated: such sinners of Pond-Prudy in San Francisco on some Fulton Street. The first to guess about secrets (I want to say about children's sins) Leontiev began Vasily Rozanov; It seems to me that it was from this experience that his revaluation of Christianity came from. He once published letters to him Leontyev, using his manner, accompanied them with his own vast notes (sometimes interesting letters themselves), and in one of these notes he wrote about the criticism of Leontyev Pink Christianity of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy:

But if the “love of Christianity” seemed to Leontyev’s “love” of the named writers, their call for “fraternal love”, what could it seem, in relation to Christianity, “alkybiadism”, “beautiful passions” by Leontiev? Here, in these years and in those brochures, in essence, a deep religious whirlpool of Christianity began. His core was the question: what is the core in Christianity: morality, brotherly love, or some mysticism, with which "fraternal love" and not particularly important?

Vasily Vasilievich throws out the questions dynamic, and we know how he eventually answered them. But our topic today is not here. Today we are interested in seeing how both thinkers relate to the question, then called the Eastern?

Leontyev was a long time in the diplomatic service, he knew the Slavic East well, which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. And it’s interesting: the Slavs - “brothers” by the then nomenclature - he did not like, but liked the Turks. The Slavs fell as well as a European progress and changed into a jacket hated by Leontyev, and the Turks retained a lot of picturesque remnants of the ancient oriental life. This was the special case of Leontiev’s aesthetics. At the same time, he expressed one thought, which, in the manner of Thomas Opuskin, would like to call the granular: the movement of pan -European egalitarian progress will be stuck on Asian and generally non -European borders and will cause acute nationalist - now we would say - the fundamentalist - reaction. Therefore, he remembered all the long -forgotten Byzantium - like such a line against the Russian decaying Europeanism. However, Leontyev did not even assign special hopes to this, seeing this process of universal equalizing mixing and the death of cultures inevitable, historically fatal.

This is how Rozanov objected to this in the afterword to the same letters:

Humanity has worn out: in civilization there are no more emerging ideas and at the same time ethnographic material ... is exhausted ... But in what sense it can be said that, for example, the Russian people are historically worn out if they literally live no more complicated and fragrant, not more corrupted, and not culturally than Vladimir Monomakh? the peoples, "squeezed" and "rose" already everything that is capable of this (although do we know this well?), then in the space of Eastern Europe literally thousands of historical life, not millions; People and people, not peoples. Finally, did the Muslims live and obsole up? What is a Jew and is it over with him? It is obvious that the main nodes of history were not even tied, and not to be untied into a direct and smooth, rational, understandable thread. Nothing in history is not clear - it means that it is all in the future. The life of the Greeks, the Romans, already by the time of Alexander the Great and Tivery - spoke in internal explanation, was equal to Fokion, Demosthenes, Juvenal and Tacitus. We still do not understand anything from the well -known phases of world history: what? For what? How will all this end? .. Not only the core of the Russian tribe was not touched, the Lithuania did not live at all, the gloomy Finns did not say anything: but look at the fresh, like a vigorous apple, Tatars with robes: are these well done, these obvious children, not corrupted at all ... are not able to live an hour of good history? The right, both Solovyov and Leontyev tried humanity by St. Petersburg lawyers, St. Petersburg journalists, unsuccessful professors of Moscow, Kharkov, Kyiv. God with them! What is the phase of world history. "Simple - these are unsuccessful contemporaries.

A somewhat outdated, directly saying the archaic language of this statement should not obscure, and does not obscure it of a completely relevant meaning. Rozanov’s relevance, in comparison with Leontyev, in his absolutely natural, organic universality, directly Russian, if we recall Dostoevsky’s claims, his notorious “worldwide responsiveness” of Russians .. No traces of the so-called Euro specialricism by Rozanov. You can’t call Leontiev as a special Eurocentrist either, he knows the East, but everything is in some kind of sadomasochist way: so to speak, the only field of contact is the Crusades. If something is worth preserving in the east, then his opposition to the same European egalitarian-utilitarian progress. He has a turn of consciousness, which is the name of demonic aesthetics. And in the current, so to speak, last times, this is already directly dangerous.

Recently, a fashion for one old philosopher was revived in the West: the dialectic of the master and the slave. This fashion was restored by Francis Fukuyama, the author of the sensational theory of the end of the story, which was supposedly indicated with the fall of communism. Now it turns out - if it has not become clear quite deafening! - That the notorious Cold War and the claims of world communism were a historical and cultural misunderstanding that Russia and the West truly have nothing to share, moreover, they have a common enemy. Fukuyama himself lowered on the brakes and doused his hypothesis in the book "The End of History and the Last Man." But it was in this book that he recalled the one thought of Hegel, who now acquired a strange one, so as not to say sinister, relevance. Hegel in the "phenomenology of the spirit" says that the phenomenon of rule is based on readiness for death. The master is the one who is ready for death, and historically the first rulers were no coincidence warriors. Only in this readiness does a person acquire an absolute self -awareness. Then, as always with Hegel, this self -awareness becomes universal, everyone is reconciled with everyone and the story ends.

This construction is quite fantastic as a philosophy of history, but in the very thought of speaking to death as a way to power there is an undoubted psychological truth. Philosophers repeatedly reflected on the phenomenon of power, on its absolute mystery, paradoxy: how can one person rule over everyone? Yes, at least over three or four, if these three or four are obviously stronger than one? The authorities are not just forced by force, but by this ability of the ruler to move on for the brink of death. Power creates an aura of death around itself, it exists in the field of inhuman experience. In the depths, it is not social, but existential. Readiness for death also means readiness for one’s own death. Therefore, the emperor -warrior is essential - say, Napoleon, and the camp groin, say, Stalin. Stalin joined the mysticism of power, undoubtedly, in the experience of his exes, which he carried out in his youth in the Caucasus along with the famous raider of Kamo.

How do modern self-assholes terrorists see this angle? Less terrible than you might think, based on Hegelian philosophers. Their experience is unexpected - it is socialized, control from the outside. They do not give rise to power existential, but protrude pawns in foreign hands, they are not active, but passive. Guns of someone else's will, and not the creators of their own will as power. There is no real mysticism in their experience, it is entirely pragmatic, if you can use such a sober word to refer to collective madness. But it is precisely the collectivity of madness that weakens it, and does not enhance it. It is not mysticism already, but arithmetic. And when it comes to arithmetic, to the multiplication table, then no one will count America here: it will always prove that twice two four, not five. There are no words, collective madness can shake the world; But it is not able to manage it. And all the experiments known from history show that this does not continue for a long time.

So let's remember one such experience, and from the recent ones. And then again we will give the word V.V. Rozanov, who wrote from Germany shortly before 1914:

Although I am not a politician and I don’t follow the unions or for the straightforwardness, but the thought of the Union never fought as stubbornly as here, among the Berlin street crowd. “Honestly shake the hand of these honest people, these conscientious workers” means to immediately grow up a few arshins up. “The character of Alexander the First is the Constitution,” they said in the first decade of the 19th century ... But her, the German character, as their special German history gave him to humanity, all their past is really “stands“ stands a constitution ”,“ stands a signed agreement ”, and, in a word, as you like, write the value of a spade in your own words, but retain that“ German character is gold ”. I would not be frightened by the fact of war with the Germans. Obviously, this is not a nervous people who, having won, would have finished ... the powerless, fragmented existence of Germany, which has been drawn for a thousand years ... It shows that the German is in the mass or a "simpleton" in politics, or it just does not have an appetite - all eat around. That's why I would not be afraid of the war with Germany.

This statement may seem monstrously insolvent, and it was represented by Erenburg in his memoirs for some occasion. But then run over those two wars that Vasily Vasilievich, according to him, would not be scared - and you will see, among other things, that he is also right. The Germans and such. True, Thomas Mann convincingly proved that just their simplicity, gust in politics and led to well -known events. But Hitler is not there, but the Germans remain - and almost the same kind in the townsfolk that Rozanov saw them. And the sparkle is in the experience. I got out of it already, one might say. That is, Hitler, existential tension cannot be a permanent state of history and culture. Entering the culture truly, people lose this initial demonism. This is culture: to exercise power not by the fear of death, but through elected representative institutions.

The tension of the current Islam is that it still has not entered modern culture. It seems to be a truism, but it is true.

And from here there are quite important conclusions that yesterday could still seem politically incorrect. America will have to do some - it seems that long - time to part with two favorite toys: the idea of multiculturalism and the notorious globalism. By the way, one another was immanently refuted, but somehow tried not to notice this. The now -famous columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a whole book, called Lexus and Palm Branch. The idea is that the Lexus car will bring peace to Earth and in humanity. This is globalism with universal employment of happy humanity. True, Friedman, not being so simple, added that in the parallel of an invisible hand that controls the market, a new economic order - this very globalism - requires an invisible fist, that is, a unified and quite actively supported political system. The prerequisite of this possibility was just multiculturalism: they get along, they say, the people of the premy countries and faith in the United States of America! So, throughout the world, this is possible. This resembled one purely American statement of the famous Ted Turner, who spoke of the unlimited capabilities of the Americans in the sense of all billionaires: "Bill Gates managed! I managed! Well, you will be able!" But just as not all Americans can organize CIN-EN or microsoft, and not all of humanity is ready or able to step on the path of worshiping Lexus car.

Globalism, together with multiculturalism, was another gigantic utopia of modern mankind - about the possibility of creating a rational order, reconciling wealth and freedom, prosperity and safety - what is called American Dream. The implementation of this utopia will have to be postponed - at least for the foreseeable future. The agenda became much more elementary and in the elementaryness of its much more urgent task: to ensure the unity of mankind on the simplest principles of public order - the order that in the 19th century, even before all totalitarianisms, was called the neutral term police order. Only the current policeman, alas, will not be able to do with some Colt of the time of Smith-Veson and about "Henry. There is no more country by which his funny tramps traveled, ready to violate the law on occasion, but also not capable of which offenses are possible in this blessed country and in this best of the worlds-the world of pink Christianity and other politically correct religions. Leonty will not be, but also, but also. Rosanov ceased to be.