| The mature Russian intellectual tradition formed in the first half of the nineteenth century and the famous dispute between the movements of Slavophiles and Westernizers has a special place in it.; The Slavophiles compared real elements of the West with the idealized elements of the Russian Orthodox culture, while the Westernizers compared real problems of still patriarchal and bureaucratic Russia with an idealized image of the Western type of society. That is why, as I tried to show in this work, both the teachings and works of the Slavophiles and Westernizers and their followers were essentially utopian. They represent the two poles in the everlasting attempt to define, on the one hand, the proximity, and, on the other, the distance between Russian and European literatures.; An unreserved belief in the Russian simple folk was a central utopian point on which the Slavophiles and the Westernizers agreed. Since both of the movements experienced a strong influence of Hegel's philosophy, the Marxist utopia finally got the upper hand in this environment. The central idea of Marxism is the fight for the cause of the humiliated and the oppressed (simple folk), and the utopian pseudo-religious belief in Eden on Earth, which is supposed to be built as the result of the fight.; The leading Russian poets, such as Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely of the beginning of the twentieth century, had an acute feeling of the approaching catastrophe. The themes of the "end of history" and of the approaching of dark times are very explicit and in their works, in which Apocalypse was the central theme. Blok and Bely turned out to be the oracles of the coming changes. With all their genius and imagination they depicted the mortal combat of Christ and antichrist in the souls of the Russian people in the beginning of the twentieth century. |
