The Return of Holy Russia by Gary Lachman

Author:Gary Lachman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mysticism/History
Publisher: Inner Traditions
Published: 2020-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

IN HER BOOK Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia, Lesley Chamberlain gives some examples of the beautiful souls of the day. One was the poet Dmitry Venevitinov, whom the Slavophile writer Ivan Kireevsky—a beautiful soul himself—characterized as a poet whose “every feeling is illuminated by thought, whose every thought is warmed by the heart” and “whose best song is his own life, the free development of his full and harmonious soul.”6 The novelist Ivan Turgenev wrote of the poet and philosopher Nikolay Stankevich, whose “Circle” was another influential discussion group, like Odoevsky’s, that he was “full of higher truth” and that his conversation could carry others into “the realm of the Ideal.” Stankevich was the son of a wealthy landowner, as many of the beautiful souls were, and a reader of Schelling and Goethe. His smile, Turgenev said, was “extraordinarily welcoming and generous.” “In his whole being . . . there was a kind of grace” and “an almost childlike naivety.”7 He believed that all of nature is “evolving toward reason,” a Schellingian/Hegelian conception, and he died of consumption at the age of twenty-seven.8

In some ways descriptions of these beautiful souls resemble nothing so much as descriptions of gurus or saints, or of their followers in the 1960s and ’70s, who sought salvation through a return to a childlike innocence. And in a parallel that students of that time will be sure to recognize, the failure of “flower power” and other political acts of love to change society quickly led in the late 1960s to more practical approaches, many including violence, a shift that would happen more than a century earlier in Russia.9 It was out of Stankevich’s Circle that Mikhail Bakunin, the archetypal anarchist, would start his career, with the motto that “the passion for destruction is a creative passion.”10

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