Anti-Modern Dissent in Russia

• Applicant: Dr. Michael Hagemeister
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 263488320

Anti-modern dissent is part of the history of oppositional discourse in Russia. With its insistence on unity and integrity, it explicitly opposes Western modernity which is understood as the dissolution and destruction of the "holistic culture" (tselostnaia kul'tura) of the Christian Middle Ages. The threatened or already-lost original unity is to be protected or restored - such is the basic tenet of this holistic-synthetic thinking. Russia is regarded as predestined to achieve this goal. Although there are points of convergence with the Soviet ideocracy, this thinking often came into conflict with the dominant discourse of power (of the state, the institutionalized church, and the official ideology), due to its claim to universality. It thus presents itself as a type of dissent thinking (inakomyslie) in relation to both, the foreign "West" and with regard to the accepted and propagated norms and social self-conceptions of its own country. The present project aims to trace these multiple relations and to investigate the essential concepts of dissent thought with their assumptions, traditions and discursive particularities which, so far, have not been researched in their entirety. The reconstruction of the "internal relationships" between approaches which do not have much in common at first sight and therefore have not been analysed in conjunction with one another promises not only an understanding of a type of thinking that is very specific to Russia, but also insight into basic patterns and particularities of Russian culture beyond the prevalent Western ascriptions and models of interpretation. Starting with Pavel Florenskii's and Aleksei Losev's dualistically constructed theory of cultural types, the first part of the research project will focus on impulses and goals of their "monistic worldview" while also looking for parallels in the works of other thinkers such as Vladimir Solov'ev, Aleksandr Bogdanov, Nikolai Berdiaev and Valerian Murav'ev. Further, it will investigate how the holistic-synthetic drive to overcome all divisions was related to "official" ideology and religion by way of its distinction from and affinity towards them and how it continued to exert an undercurrent influence even in the face of marginalization and repression in Soviet times. The second part will be concerned with the presence of this type of thought in post- Soviet Russia, where it is not only being discussed in small circles on a oftentimes high theoretical level (¿Neo-patristic synthesis", ¿Political hesychasm", ¿Neo-Byzantinism"), but where it has proven to be greatly popular especially in more trivialized versions as encountered in movies and journals. An analysis of this line of thought thus offers an important key to an understanding of contemporary Russia.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants