All things are possible
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| Lev Shestov |
In his paragraph on The Russian Spirit, Shestov gives us a real clue about Russian literature. European culture is a rootless thing in the Russians.
With us, it is our very blood and bones, the very nerve and root of our psyche. We think in a certain fashion, and we feel in a certain fashion because our whole substance is of this fashion. Our speech and feeling are organically inevitable to us.
With the Russians it is different. They have only been inoculated with the virus of European culture and ethics.
The virus works in them like a disease. And the inflammation and irritation come forth as literature. The bubbling and fizzing are almost chemical, not organic. It is an organism seething as it accepts and masters th^ strange virus.
What he Russian is struggling with, crying out against, is not life itself: it is only European culture which has been introduced into his psyche, and which hurts him, The tragedy is not so much a real soul tragedy, as a surgical one. Russian art, Russian literature after all does not stand on the same footing as European or Greek or Egyptian art. It is not a spontaneous utterance. It is not the flowering of a race.
It is a surgical outcry, horrifying, or marvellous, lacerating at first; but when we get used to it, not really so profound, not really ultimate, a little extraneous. What is valuable is the evidence against European culture, implied in the novelists^ here at last expressed. Since Peter the Greai Russia has been accepting Europe, and seething Europe down in a curious process of katabolism. Russia has been expressing nothing inherency Russian.
Russian's modern Christianity even was not Russian. Her genuine Christianity, Byzantine and Asiatic, is incomprehensible to us. So with her true philosophy^. What she has actually uttered.
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