Russian as an Enigma1
Russian thought lives where night parts with the day, in the cold dusk of the Russian forest. There is no “Russian philosophy” as such, and such a thing could never come to be. Philosophy means touching upon secrets, upon what is concealed, and vertically ascending to the heavenly world beyond.
Where are we to go if the beyond is within us? Russians have no border between “there” and “here.” We live in “herebeing.” And in here-being, we experience the sacred in every moment of our lives. Our thought is woven with dreaming and enmeshed in the structure of dreams.
Russians are spirit-seers. Our thought cannot grasp what it comprehends. It is what it comprehends. In our land, in the space of our soul, the comprehended and the comprehending merge. This is the mysterious, secret course of things, the frantic course of things. We have no subject — it is absolutely poor. We have no object — it is negligible and small. Perhaps, Russians today are in their thought and existence closest of all to authenticity. We do not comprehend this — we live it. It pierces the structure of the Russian soul, it cuts into our inner tissue, at times painfully.
Witnesses of the God-Forsaken
In the West, the subject stands at the center of everything, or rather, it once stood there before they destroyed it. First, the West was forsaken by God, and now it has been forsaken by the subject.
But us? We have something else. We are hurt by the Godforsakenness of Europe, we are the witnesses of Europe’s having been forsaken by God. We are God-bearers. We are the witnesses of subject-forsakenness, but… the Russian subject — what is it? A poor subject. So big that it starts to seem too small and poor. This poverty is not poverty in the sense of lack or need, but rather a poverty that surpasses riches and emeralds. It is like the poverty of a monk. The subject is so poor that it is almost absent– its will, its intention, is barely visible through the fog of the indistinguishable. Not only does it lack a trajectory, it lacks any point of initiation for a trajectory — no intending, no intended, no intention.
The Russian subject is the poor subject, a secret, mysterious force, the sphere of subtle being. This is real existence. It is hope that is not directed towards anything. It is Being itself. The Russian is too broad to be a subject. This meek, humble, directionless poverty is something confused, and hardly understands its own true wealth — that which, without being known, is already at the center of Being, at the center of Absolute Truth, at the center of the eternal light of the Good, in the punishment of the soul, where words are too exhausted to express the infinity and greatness of God.
References:
1. The present text was a speech delivered at the premiere of the late Andrei Iryshkov’s multimedia project and documentary film The Feminine Principle in Russian Philosophy at the Gorky Art Theater in Moscow on 27 January 2020.
Excerpt: from Eschatological Optimism by Daria Platonova Dugina
Translated by Jafe Arnold
Art by Alexey Belyaev-Gintovt, contemporary Russian artist.
https://vk.com/alexeygintovt , https://www.facebook.com/guintovt
Compilation of texts and thoughts by Daria Dugina narrated in English, about The Traditionalism, The Philosophy and The Russian World and quotes from her book and poems, so that her soul will be remembered for all eternity.
