Nicholas Roerich: Loud Silence

Abstract

The article is devoted to the artist and thinker N. Roerich, whose work not only covers the Russian and Soviet periods of our history, but according to its internal logic breaks up into two stages – national and cosmopolitan. If the “early” Roerich turned to the Ancient Slavic theme, to the study of the spiritual roots of Russia, for which he was accused of “leavened patriotism”, in the more mature period of his activity he became an apologist for universal values. According to A. Benoit, he made the transition to broad humanity. However, the author of the article shows that Roerich moved not just to universal values, challenging the opposition of the West and the East, antiquity and modernity, science and religion, but sought to assert universal cosmic values that undermined the idea of human exclusivity. Roerich's synthesizing thinking dissolved not only cultural, but also ontological differences. The success of Roerich's ideas in the Soviet and post–Soviet period of our history, according to the author of the article, indicates not the political reasons – Roerich's own attempts to synthesize Buddhism and communism – but the more fundamental shifts at the anthropological level. The crisis of Christianity, man’s rejection of the church conciliar consciousness, that is the rejection of the usual forms of subjectivity and at the same time the need for these forms, give rise to the phenomenon of a new mysticism. The popularity of Roerich's ideas is the wrong side of a society that organizes external life, but does not offer the completeness of the organization of a person's inner life. The author shows the anthropological fl aws of the phenomenon of new mysticism and reveals the meaning of universal values in terms of “spiritual subtraction”.