Menzel, Birgit; Hagemeister, Michael and Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer (eds). The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 373 The reception of these myths and representations of monarchy is an area that would benefit from greater exploration. While Wortman suggests that inherent contradictions developed in the myth of monarchy, it is important to grasp the ways in which the image of the monarch were understood and interpreted by both Russia’s elites and its people more generally are important. The ‘naive monarchism’ of the Russian peasant, to use Daniel Field’s phrase, is an important component in the perception of the monarch. The politics of the Russian empire were more than just a dialogue between monarch and elites, and the broader reception of the symbolic ideas of monarchy are significant for comprehending the development and eventual collapse of the Romanov regime. This thought-provoking collection of essays reminds us of the complexity of Russian political culture: Wortman’s work on the Russian monarchy is significant and original. School of History Peter Waldron University of East Anglia Menzel, Birgit; Hagemeister, Michael and Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer (eds). The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions. Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe, 17. Otto Sagner, Munich and Berlin, 2012. 448 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. €48.00. The twenty-one essays in The New Age of Russia are the fruitful result of an international research conference on the metaphysical roots of Soviet civilization, held in Berlin in March 2007. They examine an enormous number of esoteric phenomena, including holistic medicine, ceremonial magic, UFOs and space travel, popular occultism, mystical literature, shamanism, Eastern mysticism, theosophical doctrines and parapsychology, among others. BerniceRosenthal,oneofeditors,startedthisparticularballrollinginJune1991, when she organized a conference on Russian occultism at Fordham University. The New Age of Russia appears fifteen years after Rosenthal’s path-breaking The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, NY and London, 1997), a collection of essays by the American, European and Russian scholars who participated in the 1991 event. A comparison of the two volumes reveals how this second event evolves from the first and how the field has expanded and matured. The principal essays of The New Age of Russia are organized into three chronological sections. Each section addresses particular representations of occult thought in its time period. Not surprisingly, the essays are asymmetrical, in that some are synthetic, others analytical, while methodologies and approaches to the material vary considerably. SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 374 In the first section, which covers the pre-Revolutionary and early Soviet period, an engaging essay by Julia Mannherz introduces the contradictory nature of popular occult entertainment in the late empire. Konstantin Burmistrov’s eye-opening survey of the many occult circles and groups that existed in the 1920s and 1930s follows; his essay introduces intriguing new material from the FSB archives. Oleg Shishkin’s essay on Bolshevik occultists explores the complex topic of secret Soviet government research into the occult. Marcus Osterrieder discusses Nicholas Roerich’s ‘political occultism’ without succumbing either to politics or adulation, and Michael Hagemeister reveals the occult roots of Soviet space exploration in his discussion of Konstantin Tsiolkovskii’s theosophical interests. The second section, ostensibly covering the high Soviet period (1930–85), focuses on occultism in the Space Age. Birgit Menzel’s comparative essay surveys and locates Russian ‘occuculture’ in the context of its European and American counterparts of the period 1960–85, while Leonid Heller looks at occultism in literature and popular fiction. Matthias Schwartz explores the occult aspects of Soviet science fiction from the 1920s to Tarkovskii’s film, Stalker (1979), and Marlène Laruelle provides a lucid discussion of the cultish revival of Nikolai Fedorov’s Cosmism, a peculiarly Russian attempt to ‘synthesize Gnostic beliefs and scientific progress’ (p. 239). The essays of the third section explore the emergence of Russian esotericism from the occult underground in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods. This section is longer and necessarily less ‘shaped’ than the first two, since its time frame has yet to complete it historical run. Demyan Belyaev’s essay addresses popular and boulevard esotericism, occult self-help, fraudulent psychics and the role of the media in a disintegrating post-Soviet landscape. Mark Sedgwick discusses the neo-Eurasianist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, creator of...