Transl. from Bulgarian
Kalin Yanakiev
10/09/2016 14:29
THE METAPHYSICAL RUSSOPHILE
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SPECIES
IN THE PERIPHERY OF THE CONTINENT
There is a peculiar metaphysical Russophile whose archetype in this country [Bulgaria] bears no resemblance at all to the gray-haired rally-ists of Volen Siderov or the costumed "experts in nuclear energy" led by a former Bulgarian president.
The Metaphysical Russophile is other: he is a "conservative" and most often manifests himself on the pages of magazines that criticize liberal globalism and turbo-capitalism (but advertise wrist watches worth thousands of Euros). Sometimes he is on TV (never in arguing with an "opposing viewpoint" – as liberal "dabblers in politics" have to – this species is strictly "intellectual" and insists that the journalist send him his questions in advance). He is sarcastic and "deep". He cites the Russian classics and the great Russian elders. He stands above "politics", he is indeed on the territory of eschatology and the apocalyptics. For him, Russia is not nomen (name) but a numina(spirit). And anyone who for any reason are today in Bulgaria "Russo-phobes" [anti-Russians] (this notion was invented so they could more easily stigmatize [bash] with it anyone critical of Vladimir Putin and not sharing [the idea] that "Europe is in decay") is for him a mercenary and narrow-minded "liberal", without the capacity of a flight of the spirit, of religious depth and of noumenal speculation. The metaphysical Russophile is an archetype with a wistful index finger leaning on his cheek and of a worried face.
Here are some of his insights (taken from different representatives of this species) with my short comments.
* * *
Countries bordered with each other but Russia bordered with God – Rilke purportedly said.
Possibly. Even the greatest poets may say a stupidity of two (it even becomes them because in their mouth even stupidity sounds beautiful)... Russia border with God...
It never bordered on the muddy rural steppe, where the "Baryn" incited his dogs against farm-hand boy who accidentally hurt one of them and they tore him to pieces in front of his mother's eyes (just for info, this is after Dostoevsky).
It never bordered with the alcoholized Siberian barracks where brutalized men and women brew "hootch" from oiled stools, because the "typical Russian vertical of power" had lost sight of them somewhere there, below "along the border with God."
It never bordered with "nether-world [hell] GULAG", which almost coincided with its "endless" territory for full 70 years.
If Russia 'borders with God," then it also borders with hell. However, I am not saying anything blasphemous – every Christian should know that all the world here generally borders "upwards" with God and "downwards" with hell. This is, so to speak, its metaphysical location.
But Russia is not localized in "this world" like the other "profane" countries. This is what the metaphysical Russophile suggests to us.
* * *
"What "Westerns" will never forgive Russia is Orthodoxy" – Sergei Lavrov purportedly said recently and it were "entirely plausible". What a swoop, how deep! Not GULAG, not the conquering of half of Europe after 1945, not annexing Crimea in our own days! Not the murder with polonium of Alexander Litvinenko and of Anna Politkovskaya with a bullet. Not the weekly breaches of the airspace of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Great Britain, not Donbass and Lugansk. Not the spy base near Nis (which was – between the lines – reported even by Bulgarian media); not the barbaric bombings of Aleppo and the men, women and children killed by the chlorine bombs of the "friend" Assad. No! These are profane things that the surface "Russophobes" like to "focus on". In depth in depth – Russia may not be forgiven Orthodoxy.
How do they "forgive" [it] in the Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians? Or is it because in these lands, as far as it is not Russian, it is no Orthodoxy either but a pathetic wreck, a day-to-day "poshtina" [assumed piety] that still stands only thanks to the support of His Holiness Kirill, "Patriarch of Moscow and of all Russia."
Because in general there is no Orthodoxy outside Russia ever since the "Third Rome" appeared on the historical scene.
Orthodoxy even outside Russia is Russkost. If it is not, then it can only be "ecumenism", "creeping apostasy," "modernism", [or a] Cretan "Conference" of ten local remnants [of Orthodoxy]. All Orthodox who are not Russophiles (according to our hero) are but clandestine "liberals" – freeloaders of the Vatican or of the World Council of Churches.
They should be excommunicated!
* * *
In fact, for the sobbing in ecstasy Russophile "Christian" Christ seemingly after His ascension has not "ascended to heaven" – he does not "sit to the right of the Father" as per the Creed. He lives in Russia, where he continues wandering it "throughout on His bare feet." This is why all the "remaining" world cannot reconcile with the very "fact of Russia." "The fact Russia" is "heaven on earth", "the millennial kingdom of the Holy Spirit." Sorry, no way for some medieval Joachimites and millenarists! The metaphysical Rusophilia is millenarism with a constantly critically high mental temperature. A historio-sophic fever, that virtually may not be healed.
* * *
Have you noticed that for the metaphysical Russophile all Russian writers seem to be – all of them – an emanation of "Russia itself," an expression not of their own talent but of the "eternal Russia", of the metaphysical "fact" Russia? Russia, by definition, has won itself the right to appropriate its geniuses. They are it and it is they.
Therefore, when explaining Russia the metaphysical Russophile may freely use quotes of its geniuses, just as if he were citing "Russia" itself, and when one has to admit to Russia's sins one has to look at the "Jewish Bolsheviks", at the "communists" who are "Soviet" but not "Russian" and this difference "is denominational".
Speaking through Dostoevsky is "the sick at the heart soul of Russia", singing through Tyutchev is "the very heart of Russia", speaking through Solzhenitsyn is "the great suffering and the conscience of Russia". Have you ever heard that speaking through Dickens was "the soul of England", that some "metaphysical, eternal" France found expression through the novels of Victor Hugo, through the writings of Chateaubriand and François Mauriac? It was only in the decades of the Nazi "fever" of Germany that Wagner and Nietzsche, Goethe and Beethoven represented not themselves, but a personalized articulation of the transcendental "German" Geist.
European cultures and literatures have person types and nominalia – they are filled with nomina. The Russian literature is "universalia", it is numina. And it has its incarnations. For the metaphysical Russophile these further compact a Russia that by far is not just a political, ethnic and the like formation [entity]. It is a metaphysical Subject. This is, of course, so because the West is "bourgeois", "individualistic", "Calvinistic", while Russia is in an Orthodox way "holistic".
While I say this is a real idolo-latria. Building up a huge idol [figure – istukan] installed somewhere to the east of the Bug and the Dnieper [rivers], instilled in the "golden head" of which is the soul of the really living [beings] (the mentioned Dostoevsky, Tyutchev, Solzhenitsyn etc...) in order for the istukanto acquire a soul, so the souls of the living may become the soul of the istukan.
Alas, quite often, east of Bug and Dnepr the really living [beings] hand their own souls themselves to the istukan [idol]. This is called "non-bourgeoisie", "humbleness." And it powers the production of the [incarnated] embodied universalia mentioned: the "eternal Russia", the "metaphysical fact [of] Russia" etc...
* * *
Russia's vocation (of course that of the "eternal", of the "metaphysical", and not of that daily [Russia], which only the "liberals" have a sense for) was to "punish the strong [one] for his insolence" and to "attract the weak [ones] as a revenge against the strong ones", some 'remarkable Russian thinker (of today) claimed."
This certainly applies to "intelligible" [also – pernicious] Russia, which only those with a wistful index finger leaning on their cheek and of a worried face are capable of contemplating in this "world achievable to the mind."
Because the empirical one, of today, in these days of ours, has concentrated around the "great power" Syria is "punishing" the arrogant inhabitants of the city of Aleppo. Also it is "punishing" the population of eastern Ukraine (sorry, not them, but Mrs. Newland – because Ukraine does not exist, extant is only America which "makes up" such political entities for the sole purpose to eventually serve Russia to itself [help itself with Russia], in one set with the "turkey on Thanksgiving Day"). Russia has attracted today as the Magic Lamp of Aladdin the "weak" China, "Les Miserables" from Iran, Kim Jong-un asserting "his peculiar culture" – all the "weak" [ones], whom it is resolved to give a rematch against the strong [ones]. But ... this is a creeping liberal empiricism, the scarecrow for preserving the life of the "right" [voters] in Bulgaria.
The US – we remember this – fought a decade-long "dirty war" far away from their coasts, in Vietnam and were never able to explain to us what the heck their business was there. Russia, however, – our metaphysical Russophile explains – is saving Syria (sorry – it is saving the world in Syria) from the "global threat of Islamism" (nested right in Aleppo), it keeps its image of a great power capable "of punishing the strong [ones] for their insolence." Here is the metaphysical explanation for its military presence in the eastern Mediterranean. Don't you comprehend it, blind liberals? Read the said "remarkable Russian thinker" in order to understand it if you can!
* * *
The Russophobe liberals were experiencing bourgeois Europe and turbo-capitalistic America as "an anthropological norm", feeling an almost erotic thrill to be photographed with the US ambassador to this country. They may well do so indeed. But I've never seen a hotter metaphysical awe than the one inherent to our Russophiles. A hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago the Russian Tsar, no matter the age he would be when ascending his Kremlin throne, together with "his political body" (after E. Kantorovits) was instinctively and by definition our "grandfather" – "grandfather Ivan" [was the way Russia was referred to in Bulgaria] – an almost apocalyptic, almost iconic elder - πρεσβύτερος of the world.
Then, for more than four decades our Russophiles lived with the Russian as with an "elder brother", infiltrating in their own manner our sober and non-emotive language with the Russian double fawning and diminutive – they equipped us with "bratushki" [brothers – in Russian], they offered mouth to Brezhnev's potseluy [kiss – in Russian] "mouth in mouth" [rot v rot – in Russian]. And now they directly promoted Putin and the Putin's into bishops of our souls, without communion with whom we are imminently threatened by legalization of gay marriages and by replacing our biological sex with the phantom "gender." No, Putin is not just a politician, a statesman (as the Protestant Mrs. Merkel). He is κατέχων (the one who prevents the coming of the Antichrist and the end of the world).
It is possible that certain young careerists are mythologizing more than normal "Euro-Atlantism," America as the "world's destiny" etc... But I have not noticed the existence of anything even remotely resembling "Euro-Atlantic metaphysics ", the "eternally United States", the "father of Washington." No one has ever seen the "soul of Europe", no one has felt with one's skin liberalism's "apocalyptic state of threat".
And so, the childish exaltation of those being photographed with the US Ambassador seems to me quite harmless as compared to the religious [state of] pledge to the "eternal Russia." In the former there is something funny, the latter is sheer idolatry.
/ controversial /
