A Spy for an Unknown Country, translated and edited by Alisa Slaughter and Julia Sushytska (excerpt)

“Mamardashvili was admired as a ‘modern-day Socrates’ whose lifestyle was characterized by the practice of sustained self-reflection. The theme of his reflection was philosophy itself, which he regarded as a moral imperative to question all values and to contribute the value of non-understanding to the world of total and conventional understanding. In this sense he was a spy for an unknown country, and this beautiful collection presents a short guide to its mysteries.”

Mikhail Epstein, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University

Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook

The editors and translators: Julia Sushytska (PhD in Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook) is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at Occidental College and teaches philosophy courses at Whittier College. Her research focuses on metics: those who find or place themselves in-between major cultures, languages, or ethnicities.

Alisa Slaughter (MA in Comparative Literature, University of Arizona; MFA in Creative Writing, Warren Wilson College) is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Redlands.

ISBN: 978-3-8382-1459-7

ibidem

A Spy for an Unknown Country Essays and Lectures

by Merab Mamardashvili

Edited by Julia Sushytska and Alisa Slaughter

A Spy for an Unknown Country

“This welcome volume allows us to savor the sweep of Mamardashvili’s wide-ranging mind, swinging between philosophy and literature boldly and brilliantly. Whether he is discussing Proust or Tolstoy, Kant or Marx, the reader of the scintillating texts here assembled is treated to the unique insights of someone who moves with agility and in depth between Eastern and Western European sensibilities. The translation is sparkling in its lucidity, and the selection of texts is at once representative and irresistible.”

Merab Mamardashvili

Soviet-era philosopher Merab Mamardashvili developed an original and subtle philosophical system distinct from both his orthodox and dissident colleagues. This volume provides English-speaking audiences with a range of his lectures and writings on French and German philosophy, civil society, the European project, and literature. After many decades hiding in plain sight, he emerges as a Soviet thinker who writes in the double-voiced manner of an ideologically surveilled academic and a potent literary and theoretical innovator independent of his context.

ibidem

Table of Contents Preface by Caryl Emerson .................................................................... 7 Introduction ......................................................................................... 17 Texts included in this volume .......................................................... 53 European Responsibility ............................................................... 57 Topology of a Path: Lectures on Proust ...................................... 63 Lecture 1 ............................................................................... 65 Lecture 6 ............................................................................... 85 Lecture 11 ........................................................................... 107 What Belongs to the Author ....................................................... 133 Авторское—Original Facsimile of “What Belongs to the Author” ......................................................................................... 139 Consciousness and Civilization ................................................. 145 The “Third” State ......................................................................... 165 On Civil Society............................................................................ 177 The Illegal Joy of Merab Mamardashvili by Annie Epelboin ......... .............................................................................................................. 209 Verwandlung, or the Human Crucible by Miglena Nikolchina ...... .............................................................................................................. 217 A Note on Primary and Secondary Literature ............................. 237 Selected Bibliography...................................................................... 241 Acknowledgments............................................................................ 245 Contributors ...................................................................................... 247

The “Third” State1 I’ll begin by defining the character of our social thinking, by which I understand not the activity in professional departments of social sciences, but people’s social thinking in everyday life: in other words, the state of civic literacy. Speaking directly and succinctly, this state is simply monstrous—but, apparently, it couldn’t have been otherwise. The people who jumped out of history and life (I have in mind all peoples who live within Russia’s territory) could not have avoided being sick as a result.2 Human beings themselves are sick. We can see it when we look at how they react to events, to authority, to the surrounding world, and to themselves.

It is obvious that we are dealing with a disorganized, lost, feral consciousness that can be represented only in phantasmagorical images: as if the hair on a human head, for instance, didn’t grow outside but inside. Imagine these wild growths in which everything is entangled, where one half of a thought can never find another to create a complete, finished, legitimately-born thought. People still thirst for blood, they still see saboteurs everywhere, and this means that they are to all intents and purposes in that state of suspension when every mutation, every jolt, can harden them into a crystal, one we call the 37th year.3 It seems we will not be able to cleanse such a consciousness, or allow it to heal, if as professionals we continue using such wooden, ugly words as “mistake” “deviation” “unjusti1

2

3

This text first appeared in the journal Kinostsenarii [Screenplays]. Vol. 3 (1989): 182-186. The translators are following Soznanie i tsivilizatsiia [Consciousness and Civilization]. Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2019, 142-155.—Trans.

Mamardashvili probably has in mind the territory of the Soviet Union, or the Russian Empire. This topic, as well as Mamardashvili’s skepticism of every kind of nationalism, is discussed in the introduction to this volume.—Trans.

1937 in the Soviet Union was the peak year of the Great Purge—Joseph Stalin’s campaign of repressions that ran from 1934 to 1940. Communist party and government officials, peasants, the Red Army leadership, poets, writers, and cultural leaders were imprisoned, underwent torture and humiliation of various kinds, and were executed, or sent to the Gulag (forced labor camps) where they were worked to death. 1937-1938 was the period of the most intense purges, and is known as Yezhovshchina, after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, NKVD, that later became the KGB (its main successor today is the FSB).—Trans.

165

166 A SPY FOR AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY fied repressions” (as though there are justified repressions!?) “false denunciations” “excesses.”4 This meaningless string of words fatally signifies that, remaining in all of the pious, well-intentioned states that operating with such words requires, we cannot once and for all derive meaning from what happened to us, from what we experienced ourselves. That is why suffering and injured feelings, which such words conceal, will last forever. And every time we evaluate some events we will again and again talk about the fact that this is violence, lawlessness, and so on.

Even in his era, Saltykov-Shchedrin5 noted that Russian people (or, if you wish, Russian citizens)6 are ready to suffer infinitely, thinking that Russia is good because one suffers more here. But in the metaphysical sense, insofar as the world is set up, there can be no suffering in the plural just as there can be no death in the plural.

If somebody really suffers, they do it one time, as one exemplar.

Only by following this path can we derive any meaning from lived experience, derive it once and for all so that whatever was once experienced enters historical existence. Those who suffer multiple times constantly return to the kingdom of shadows, condemning themselves to a whirlwind where an uncompleted act, an un-

4

5

6

These terms were developed and used by the Soviet regime. They became a part of Soviet vocabulary, understood by everybody and nobody—convenient screens that allowed people to hide, and that relieved them from the responsibility and the effort of thinking. Some equivalents from the present-day Western context might come to mind.—Trans.

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (pseudonym Nikolai Shchedrin) (1826–1889) was a major Russian satirist.—Trans.

Not all citizens of the Russian Empire, then the USSR, and now the Russian Federation, are culturally or ethnically Russian, or consider themselves Russian. In addition, not all ethnic Russians, and not all of those for whom Russian is the first language, are Russian in the sense of identifying with Russian imperial politics, the cultural and political institutions of the USSR, or, most recently, the Russian Federation. Such people might be Russian without considering themselves part of the Russian nation. The situation in Ukraine during the political crisis of 2014-2015 illustrated this when some Ukrainian citizens of Russian background took to the streets to publicly declare their allegiance: “I am a Russian, I speak Russian, I want to live in Ukraine.” By specifying that he has in mind Russian, or, more generally Soviet, citizens, and not merely ethnic Russians, Mamardashvili underscores his point that the Russian and then the Soviet Empire infected all of the peoples it colonized.—Trans.

THE “THIRD” STATE 167 chewed chunk of truth, is forever dragged by the torrent of our life and consciousness.

It’s not accidental that I place such emphasis on “words.” The problem of a sick consciousness is also the problem of language. We live in a space where a monstrous trash heap of thought and language has accumulated. This space is maximally polluted by the byproducts of normal thought and spiritual activity, its mythologized shards. That’s why even when we want to think, when there is a call, an incitement to thought, we find ourselves at a loss. Something is already disrupted in the language itself, in its foundation.

Before we can begin to elucidate the causes of this illness, I would like to warn the reader about a particular way of perceiving this text. Philosophical thinking, professional at its core, has to operate with bigger units of time and space. Its logic is the following: to derive meaning from today, we have to think in big units that embrace and connect the 20th century, for instance, with the 18th; we have to think in terms of long-lasting forces that drift through, for instance, Russia’s history. And to do this we would have to at least make them visible, to establish an actual temporal and spatial measure of our (possible) thought about the events of this history.

Only in this case might we be able to see that the sum of problems about which we talk so much today can really be reduced to one— the problem of civil society.

To put it briefly, the problem consists in splitting or tearing apart the strong weld binding state and society together, in developing an independent social element which, on the one hand, would be a natural boundary of state authority, and, on the other, would not be propped up by any state guarantees or parasitism.

The Modern era began with this problem—the problem of the prebourgeois or pre-natural-law state of society. To convince ourselves that this is our state today, we do not need to look for special proof.

It is enough that we return to the problem of language.

I will point to a very simple element of the pre-civic state of our consciousness. For instance, we say “social labor”7 and imme7

“Social labor” or obshchestvennyi trud was one of the key terms in the Soviet lexicon. Most Soviet citizens were supposed to perform on voluntary basis a certain amount of social labor. Subbotnik is one example of such labor—the Sat-

168 A SPY FOR AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY diately presuppose the difference between social and individual labor. We think in approximately the following way: first we have to work for society and only then for ourselves. But this is the very welding of consciousness, that mocking word, through which, bypassing our will, something entirely different gets said, namely, that our labor is conscripted, uncreative, working off an obligation.

This situation is different from the very beginning of Modernity, from the new European society and culture that emerged. This problem doesn’t exist for the Enlightenment. The enlightened state of humanity corresponds to a level of maturity where labor is conducted by free producers who enter among themselves and with their employers into contractual relationships.8 Here there can be no difference between laboring for yourself and laboring for society; even if it emerges, this reflects the enserfed state of the economy, which in our time is considered a complete absurdity. But once again we cannot forget about the historic-cultural context in which we find ourselves.

At some point, Pushkin had an argument with Chaadaev,9 who first introduced our philosophical tradition to the opposition between “historical” and “non-historical” formations. Chaadaev tried to define Russia as a socio-cultural phenomenon, but encountered something strange that I would call “indescribability,” in the sense that there are things that can be described, and things that don’t yield to description. Russia became such a mysterious phenomenon for Chaadaev.

Indeed, they say about Russia that she does not belong either to Europe or to Asia, writes Chaadaev. It’s a world apart. Let it be so. But it still needs to be proven that humankind, apart from the

8

9

urday work done by many Soviet citizens, which was voluntary in name but mandatory in practice. A contemporary reader might think of “community service” as a punitive or corrective form of civic engagement.—Trans.

Mamardashvili may sound naive or Eurocentric here, but, as in “European Responsibility,” he is using “The Enlightenment” in the same way he used “Europe”: as a thought experiment or synecdoche for integrity: a regulatory ideal.—Trans Petr or Pyotr Chaadaev (1794-1856) was a Russian philosopher whose first of The Philosophical Letters Addressed to a Lady, critical of Russia’s cultural backwardness, incited the famous controversy between Westernizers and Slavophiles. This controversy is ongoing in today’s Russia.—Trans.

THE “THIRD” STATE 169 two sides that we define by the words East and West, also has a third side, which does not actually exist.10 In fact there can be no such thing. Our language gets that idea very well. We say “on one side,” and “on the other side.” And we will never say “on the third side.”

If we now connect this with other observations of Chaadaev, with our own experience, we will understand that in reality there can be no third side. But it can exist in irreality. In the mirror world.

For Chaadaev, evidently, Russia was such an indescribable country through the looking glass. It is not accidental that he called Russia “a gap in understanding,”11 something that does not exist in a historical world of distinct forms, principles, traditions, and clear articulations. Pushkin objected, but in fact his own life confirmed the correctness of this thought. He tried to create in Russia the tradition and principles of home and of family, almost with his bare hands, but in the irreal world one must pay for this with one’s life.

Concepts that people use in that irreal world are phantasmagorical.

They are the creations of a sick, feral consciousness. Among the first to understand this, by the way, was Gogol. It was he who developed a special technique of literary description of these otherworldly things. In this sense it is true that all Russian literature emerged from under Gogol’s Overcoat.12 Nabokov, who was himself sensitive to the topic of the otherworldly things, notes “…how can Chichikov be a swindler? The object of his swindle is irreal.”13 He is just as indescribable as today’s Moscow or Georgian millionaire. Just try to describe him in a literary-typological way as, for instance, Gobseck, Shylock, or some Rougon-Macquart was de10

11 12

13

Mamardashvili is paraphrasing passages from Chaadaev’s first of The Philosophical Letters Addressed to a Lady. See Philosophical Works of Peter Chaadaev, edited by Raymond T. McNally and Richard Tempest, Netherlands, Springer: 1991, 20, 24.—Trans.

See Philosophical Works of Peter Chaadaev, 24ff.—Trans.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a Ukrainian writer who wrote in Russian. His short story “The Overcoat” influenced Russian literature to the extent that, allegedly, Fyodor Dostoevsky said that “we all come from Gogol’s Overcoat.”— Trans.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) in his Lectures on Russian Literature discusses the character of Gogol’s Dead Souls, Paul Ivanovitch Chichikov, who travels around the Russian Empire buying the souls of deceased serfs.—Trans.

170 A SPY FOR AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY scribed.14 You will fail because the object of his striving is just as irreal as our Soviet money.

In the very beginning of the 20th century, Osip Mandelstam joined the dispute between Pushkin and Chaadaev—one of the few poets in the contemporary Russian tradition with a well-defined historisophic15 and metaphysical mindset. Agreeing on many levels with Chaadaev, Mandelstam at the same time asserted that Russia is after all “a historical formation,” because it has at least one organic structure that stands on its own feet, that lives according to its own laws, that has its own traditions and principles. This is the Russian language.

This was tragic because Mandelstam expressed his thought just when the process of the language’s falling out of history had already begun, when Blok’s presentiment started to come true: that someone could destroy the innermost sources of harmony, as opposed to merely treating their external products barbarically.

Mandelstam understood this also. His entire dispute with Chaadaev is qualified by one strange phrase: that if we fall away even from language, then we will decisively collapse into the abyss of nihilism. And that’s how it happened. But something else is also interesting here. It is just at this historical point, on the edge of a precipice, in Russia, against all odds, people appeared who continued the already existing literary tradition. I have in mind first of all Zoshchenko, Zabolotsky, Platonov.16 They were the first ones to begin describing strange people who speak “the language of the neighborhood warden,” the language of the humanoid being spawned by Bulgakov in his novel Heart of a Dog. 14

15

16

Jean-Esther van Gobseck is a character in the novel Gobseck by Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). Shylock is the principal antagonist of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The Rougon-Macquart family is depicted in Émile Zola’s (1840-1902) 20-novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart: Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire.—Trans.

The term “historiosophy” was coined by Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897– 1982), a scholar of Jewish mysticism, to refer to a specific understanding of history and metaphysics. The term can also mean, more generally, a philosophy of history.—Trans.

Soviet-era writers. Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958), Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903-1958). Andrei Platonov was a pen name of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov (1899-1951).

THE “THIRD” STATE 171 This language consists of otherworldly immobile blocks resembling cancerous growths. How can we think with phrases such as “the vegetable conveyor of the country”?17 Monstrous muscular model workers out of a propaganda poster emerge from behind this language,18 but to see or to think about what happens to the vegetables at that moment is decisively impossible. It is as though you immediately fall into a magnetic field and cannot escape its force.

Such a [disorganized] consciousness resembles a room in which, instead of windows, only mirrors exist, and you can see not the outside world, but instead your own reflection. Moreover, it resembles not who you are but who you should be. The least spark of consciousness can become trapped in these reflections and go mad.

The human being with such consciousness can have only one desire: to blow himself up, to annihilate himself and simultaneously the entire world. For the evil of the human heart is loathing of what, within oneself, is beyond one’s own strength. Only then is the hatred projected onto the outside world.

Something very similar happened to philosophical language.

Take any textbook on Marxist philosophy and you will see that the entirety of it consists of similar otherworldly expressions. It’s impossible to get them to move. It’s impossible to use them professionally. They resist being developed through thinking. This language was constructed according to a fairly simple mechanism.

Imagine a social democratic political circle of the revolutionary era where “the learned person” had to pack the entire world, with all of its most complex problems and content, into the heads of the audience. He had to do it in such a way that the head of the listener need not make any effort, need not strain, think, or torment itself. This could have been done by one means only: reducing the entire complexity of the world to simple formulas. For instance: “Why are there poor people?” “There are poor people because there 17

18

This is one of the standard phrases of the Soviet-speak used widely in daily propaganda.—Trans. “За этим языковым монстром сразу возникает образ этаких мускулистых, плакатных молодцов у конвейера.” This translates, literally, “From behind this language monster immediately emerges an image of muscular poster-men next to a conveyor,” and this image would have been clear to an audience familiar with socialist-realist posters of the Soviet era.—Trans.

172 A SPY FOR AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY are rich people.” “How can we make it so there are no poor people?” “We must eliminate the rich.”

I want to direct the reader’s attention not to the questionable content of this statement, but toward what it connects in the consciousness of the listener, and toward what it generates in the end.

First, it deprives the listener of the need for independent labor; it instils the idea that thinking requires no effort of mind, that it is sufficient only to hear or to read. Second, there is a mechanism of self-respect. Apart from the powerful need to be, to become, or to abide, as philosophers say, the human being also needs to understand. Human beings cannot live in a world that is incomprehensible to them. But the principle of its comprehensibility always fuses with the fundamental relationship of human beings to themselves both in the sense of being able to identify and to respect themselves. If, however, they reach a level of self-respect through simplified formulas, they would rather kill whoever tries to destroy these formulas than part with them. This is not surprising, because their simplified understanding of the complex world already merged with the fundamental human question of life and death.

Now imagine that we are trying to free ourselves from this “philosophical” language: we want to learn how to think and we propose, to counterbalance Stalin, such thinkers as Plekhanov, Bukharin, Lunacharsky.19 Nothing will come of it. The level of these thinkers is trivial. It was necessary first to pull down the mountains of humanistic thought in Russia, so that in this cleared space such people would look like the Mont Blanc of philosophical thought.

Their texts are not only monstrously boring, but also written in an altogether wooden, dead language. They a priori exclude living and free thought. That’s why, returning to our topic, I will say that without solving the problem of clearing the linguistic space in general and the philosophical space in particular, we will not advance any-

19

Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918) was a revolutionary and a founder of the socialdemocratic movement in Russia. Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician and a writer. Anatoly Lunacharsky (18751933) was a revolutionary and the first Soviet Commissar of Education.— Trans.

THE “THIRD” STATE 173 where, for we constantly live in a situation which Platonov described very exactly with one phrase. A character of his, instead of the “voice of the soul,” hears “the noise of consciousness” that is pouring out of a loudspeaker. Each one of us, at his own risk, in her concrete task, inside himself or herself, has to somehow withstand this “noise.” For as I already said, the human being with feral consciousness and simplified notions about social reality and its laws cannot live in the 20th century. They become dangerous not only to themselves but also to the entire world.

Today we talk about the need to take care of our common European house, but for this, at minimum, we first need to reinstate our membership in this house. The main task that confronts social thinking and the citizens of the Soviet Union is reunification with their homeland, and this homeland is irreversibly Russia’s European fate. True, until now we only actualized the “third” phantasmagorical side, and that is why the problem of “civil society” fell outside our field of vision for a long time.

As I already said, the core problem of “civil society” is to rupture the soldering of government and society, to develop an independent social element. Diverging from social and economic theories, I will try to explain the meaning of a word fundamental to any civil society: “private.”

European culture is first and foremost a Christian culture, and this is entirely independent of how many people go to church and perform confessional or church ritual. I mean that Christianity found its way into all institutions of European civil society, and exists already crystalized in them.

The idea of Christian culture is fundamental and simple. This culture belongs to people who are able in their private vocation20 to embody the infinite and the divine. When I say “private,” I have in mind the shoemaker’s job, the merchant’s and the worker’s activity, and so on. In the opposite cultural situation, one encounters a phe-

20

The Russian дело can mean affair, work, business, undertaking, cause, case (in the legal sense), or record of proceedings. In the present context Mamardashvili uses this word to mean an undertaking or a job that a human being does freely and fully engaged, hence the word “vocation” better conveys his idea.— Trans.

174 A SPY FOR AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY nomenon that hinges on a fantastic indifference of the human being to his or her own vocation. Why does this happen? Because nothing I do ever coincides with some mystical absolute and infinite point.

What I do lacks, according to such a template, any meaning; that is why I can be vile today in order to become impeccable tomorrow.

For European culture there is no such tomorrow. There is only what is now, inside a concretely-formed, completed undertaking. That is why some sociologists even try to turn economic theory upside down and set as the cornerstone the fact of religious consciousness.

I do not share this point of view, but to illustrate such a train of thought I will give one example.

Max Weber’s famous theory tied the very emergence of the phenomenon of capitalism with what he called the “Protestant ethic.”21 For capitalism to develop, Weber thought, it was necessary that, for instance, the act of trade, which is a private undertaking, become a carrier of some very profound values, including relationships with God, responsibility, and so on. When this happens, Weber thinks, a class of capitalists, entrepreneurs, merchants will emerge, along with such words as “burgher” and “private human being.” In the Russian language there is an analogue to this, “meshchanin,” or petty bourgeois. It was just in this meaning that Pushkin used the word in his famous poem.22 But for us the words “burgher,” “bourgeois,” “meshchanin,” and others have long become a symbol of vulgarity and philistinism.

I repeat: I don’t consider Weber’s theory correct insofar as it analyzes what caused the emergence of capitalism. I have my own criticisms. But his train of thought in this case is very telling and reveals a lot about the real character of European Christian culture.

If, on the other hand, we turn now to Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, we will see that the consciousness of the people was only lightly touched by the New Testament. Even Rozanov in his 21

22

Max Weber (1864-1920), a German sociologist and philosopher, the author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.—Trans.

In “My Genealogy” (1830) Pushkin claims that he is no aristocrat, even though he comes from a noble family. He calls himself a bourgeois, redefining the concept less as a class, and more as a status of freedom in a system where the nobility and aristocracy gain their positions by servile relationships to authority.—Trans.

THE “THIRD” STATE 175 time noted, fast on the heels of the first revolution, the proliferation of “the living Christs” and “the living Mothers of God”—something that is absolutely impossible in any literate religious consciousness.23 Here everything is moved by different forces.

“Speaking about Russia,” wrote Chaadaev, “they constantly imagine that they speak about the same kind of nation-state as others; in reality this is not at all the case. Russia is an entire world that is submissive to the will, the dispensation, and the whim of one human being, be it Peter or Ivan, it does not matter: in every case it is the same—the embodiment of despotism.”24 In other words, Chaadaev as a thinker would also maintain, if he were to participate in contemporary discussions, that there was no Stalinism, that it’s a fiction by means of which it is impossible to understand the phenomenon called by this name. In reality, Stalin is a product of a million “autocracies” or, more precisely, he is their focused reflection. He spoke about this himself, by the way, acknowledging that the party made him according to its image and likeness. The millions of “Stalins” is the social reality in which the multitude of autocrats live. This is exactly what Chaadaev called the “embodiment of despotism.” We are now trying to identify in that era something like an intellectual, a party or even a spiritual opposition movement. But in reality there was none, and there could not have been. Bukharin was simply a bit out of tune with the image with which millions of autocrats identified. Stalin turned out to be equal to their consciousness; that’s why he became what he became.

But this story has not ended. We have not learned to draw meaning from what we have lived through. Otherwise we wouldn’t talk about the cult of Brezhnev, who in reality also did not exist.

23

24

Mamardashvili is referring here to the idea of Russian philosopher Vasily Vasilievich Rozanov (1856-1919). The revolution mentioned is that of 1905.

Any moment of major crisis breeds instability, and with it the tendency to grab onto something tangible and stable; to foreclose the metaphorical gap. Rozanov cited Russian messianic movements as illustrative of a tendency to literalize, and to seek an embodiment of Christ or Mary in a living person, as opposed to understanding the Bible, or the New Testament, as allegory.— Trans.

Compare Chaadaev’s “Four Fragments (1854)” in Philosophical Works of Peter Chaadaev, 240.—Trans.

176 A SPY FOR AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY There was “the cult of Brezhnev,” by means of which a ritual dance was performed and a certain group of people busied themselves with self-glorification. Through him they talked about themselves, about their own authority, about their strength and so on.

I would like to end these meditations with a thought, still relevant for us, with which Chaadaev concludes the discussion of the fact that Russia is not just a state among other states. “In opposition to all laws of human society,” writes Chaadaev, “Russia is proudly strutting solely toward its own enslavement and the enslavement of all neighboring nations. And that’s why it would be salutary not only in the interests of other nations, but in its own interests to send her on a different track.”25 At one point this problem had already begun to be solved,26 but we were derailed and became feral. Now if we really want to save or take part in saving civilization on earth, if we want to go back to our European house and have a right to talk about it as its defenders, we ourselves have to first become civilized—more civilized or simply civilized people; in other words, to jump to a new track altogether.

25

26

Compare Chaadaev’s “Four Fragments (1854)” in Philosophical Works of Peter Chaadaev, 240.—Trans.

Most likely Mamardashvili has in mind the so-called Russian Enlightenment, when some Enlightenment ideas made their way from France and Western Europe to Russia. Such institutions as Moscow University (founded in 1755) and the Imperial Academy of Arts (founded in 1757) educated many of Russia’s intellectual elites.—Trans.

“Mamardashvili was admired as a ‘modern-day Socrates’ whose lifestyle was characterized by the practice of sustained self-reflection. The theme of his reflection was philosophy itself, which he regarded as a moral imperative to question all values and to contribute the value of non-understanding to the world of total and conventional understanding. In this sense he was a spy for an unknown country, and this beautiful collection presents a short guide to its mysteries.”

Mikhail Epstein, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University

Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook

The editors and translators: Julia Sushytska (PhD in Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook) is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at Occidental College and teaches philosophy courses at Whittier College. Her research focuses on metics: those who find or place themselves in-between major cultures, languages, or ethnicities.

Alisa Slaughter (MA in Comparative Literature, University of Arizona; MFA in Creative Writing, Warren Wilson College) is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Redlands.

ISBN: 978-3-8382-1459-7

ibidem

A Spy for an Unknown Country Essays and Lectures

by Merab Mamardashvili

Edited by Julia Sushytska and Alisa Slaughter

A Spy for an Unknown Country

“This welcome volume allows us to savor the sweep of Mamardashvili’s wide-ranging mind, swinging between philosophy and literature boldly and brilliantly. Whether he is discussing Proust or Tolstoy, Kant or Marx, the reader of the scintillating texts here assembled is treated to the unique insights of someone who moves with agility and in depth between Eastern and Western European sensibilities. The translation is sparkling in its lucidity, and the selection of texts is at once representative and irresistible.”

Merab Mamardashvili

Soviet-era philosopher Merab Mamardashvili developed an original and subtle philosophical system distinct from both his orthodox and dissident colleagues. This volume provides English-speaking audiences with a range of his lectures and writings on French and German philosophy, civil society, the European project, and literature. After many decades hiding in plain sight, he emerges as a Soviet thinker who writes in the double-voiced manner of an ideologically surveilled academic and a potent literary and theoretical innovator independent of his context.

ibidem