Religion, National Character, and the “Rediscovery of Russian Roots”

Abstract

Although I sympathize with Mr. Haney's wish to avoid the irrelevant associations of the vague and emotively charged terms nationalism and chauvinism, I find his substitute term culturalism highly-even if in the end harmlessly-ambiguous. In precisely what sense of the term are contemporary Russian culturalists interested in and devoted to the Russian of earlier times? Mr. Haney tells us that they are interested in both haute and popular [culture]. But there would seem to be another pertinlent sense of the term culture, that of the cultural anthropologists, for whom is, roughly, any set of values and norms that function in a given society. In this sense, one can speak of the culture of the Australian bushmen or, trendily, of contemporary drug cultures (or subcultures). In Mr. Haney's first sense of culture-high (that is, art, religion, law, iiorality, philosophy)-the termi is more or less synonymous with civilization. In this sense one speaks of the culture of the Italian Renaissance. The final sense of the term-popular culture-is perhaps intermediate between the other two, containing elemlents of both. In this sense one speaks of mass culture. This last sense strikes me as relatively unimportant in the writings of contemporary Russianl culturalists. They are concerned primarily with in the other two senses: consideration of Russian in the anthropologist's sense leads them to questions about basic national values, national character, and what one Soviet commentator has referred to sarcastically as the genetic code of the Russian peasant.1 Consideration of high leads them to a study, and celebration, of old churches, icons, medieval Russian literature, pre-Petrine church music, and Slavophile philosophy. Those of the new Slavophiles or pochvenniki2 whose culturalism is