Svetlana Lourié: Fighter for Historical Idealism
Svetlana Lourié.
We were extremely saddened to learn that the author and scholar Svetlana Lourié has passed away (August 25, 2021). Her sole contribution to our publication, “The Road to Transhumanism: How Man Became a Project,” an essay originally published in Russkaya Idea, and which she shared with us with characteristic generosity, continues to impress us by its profundity and prescience. Below are meditations on her life by her close friend and fellow scholar, Boris Mezhuev. — The Editors
I first heard about Sveta Lourié from the late Vadim Tsymbursky, and it was also Vadim who later introduced me to her -- in the early summer of the year 2000, if memory serves. I had just returned from America where I had spent a year as a teaching fellow.
The Russia I had returned to was completely different from the one I had left.
In the first place, it was a country that had just experienced a financial default. After the shock of the default, it was going through a slow, very gradual, return to normalcy. Many previous types of activity had suddenly lost their value. The reputations of many had been thrown into question, careers and positions were shaken.
Second, the Internet had just come into fashion, and new electronic media were making their first appearance. The word "blogger" had just become popular. Several dozen well-known names, names which are still heard today, took the stage.
Finally, and most importantly in our present context, the public demand for young patriotically-minded intellectuals had greatly increased. A new kind of “patriotism” was emerging, a patriotism that was intellectually rich, stylistically sharp, and technologically advanced. It immediately became clear to me that “patriots” of this kind had the potential to become the leaders of the new generation that was starting to take its place at the forefront of history.
Svetlana Lourié impressed me as being a person of this new patriotic generation which I later started referring to as the “political generation”. That very first meeting, the one initiated by Tsymbursky, took place in the old building of the Institute of Philosophy. Svetlana was there along with Yegor Kholmogorov and Konstantin Krylov, whose names, up until that point I, to my shame, had not even heard. And yet I had heard quite a lot about Svetlana Lourié -- both from Tsymbursky himself, who was enthusiastic about her work on the “cultural codes” of empire, and from colleagues at the Department of Culturology of the Moscow State Pedagogical University, where I was working at the time. She was already a well-known ethnologist and the author of the famous textbook "Historical Ethnology," aside from being a well-known sociologist. In this sense, her journalistic activity seemed to be something out of the ordinary for a person of her stature. To be sure, that era still knew how to appreciate non-standard people, and among those ‘non-standard’ persons, without a doubt Lourié and Tsymbursky were the leading lights.
The patriotically-oriented generation very quickly became cognizant both of its position in society as well as of its very limited role as an independent social movement. With consummate ease the old idealistic shell quickly fell by the wayside; and in its place came a naked pragmatism, accompanied, often enough, by a calculating egotism. It is not so much personal egotism we are talking about here as it is an egotism of the national kind. Nationalism quickly turned into a philosophy of naked material interest: "Whatever is beneficial for us Russians is good." Sveta, as we all know, was a bitter opponent of any such new interpretation of patriotism’s meaning, and she spoke out against it with her characteristic uncompromising directness.
Svetlana Lourié’s worldview, her scholarly credo, can be encapsulated by the phrase historical idealism. I would in no way, shape, or form compare, much less equate, her weltanschauung with that of Lev Gumilev.[1] Gumilev was a materialist, a vitalist, and a philosopher of life.[2] For him the ethnos is primarily a biological phenomenon conditioned by the systemic factors of the Earth's biosphere.
Svetlana Lourié was a pronounced idealist, and not only in the sense of her ardent devotion to the Orthodox Christian faith, but also in terms of her philosophy of history. For her, the most important thing in an ethnos – and in general, the most important thing in any socio-historical community -- was its religious component: its tradition, the religiously conditioned codes of behavior within the given polity. It is this facet of Svetlana’s thought, a facet to which she was firmly committed, that explains her well-known harsh words about Russians.[3] For Svetlana, Russians, to the extent that they represent nothing more than a purely biological material, are no more worthy of respect than is any other ethnic group. Outside of tradition, outside of a religious foundation, the ethnos, any ethnos, is devoid of historical meaning. This was the central tenet of Svetlana Lourié, who, in all probability was the most outstanding historical idealist of our pragmatic age.
A tough idealist such as Sveta can be a very potent weapon in the hands of sundry materialists -- to the extent, at any rate, that said idealist can be lured or tricked into serving the latter’s pragmatic interests. By the same token, idealists such as Svetlana become extremely unpleasant and inconvenient when they refuse to serve those interests. We all witnessed this at the end of last year, when the nationalists launched an internet campaign of persecution against Svetlana Lourié for her alleged “Russophobia” and Armenia-philism. What I heard at the time from some highly experienced people was that, in the person of Sveta, they were getting back at another, much more influential woman, one whose public statements had somehow run afoul of the behind-the-scenes instigators of the campaign. That other woman, though very guilty in their eyes, was, at the same time, of high-rank and had the wherewithal to answer in kind, and then some. Sveta, by contrast, was not dangerous to anyone. Except for the strength of her ideas and the analytical accuracy of her statements, she had no power at all. Therefore, she was chosen as a substitute victim. Well, what can I say? Not the worst of fates for a convinced idealist and Christian believer.
The ‘problem’ with Svetlana Lourié's views was that, for all her idealism, she remained a very sober analyst of Russian and international foreign policy. In its own way, her idealism was even quite paradoxical while at the same time being surprisingly deep: Svetlana Lourié believed that a power that remains true to the imperatives of its religious tradition can be truly successful in foreign policy. For example, she provided evidence for this conclusion in one of her best articles by pointing to the successes of post-Soviet Poland, which, in using the religious aspect of its political identity, was able to find a common language with Republican, that is to say, with the America of President Bush and President Trump, while at the same time advantageously distinguishing itself from secular "old Europe."
Unfortunately, I, was also unprepared to follow such uncompromising idealism in everything. I didn’t see anything particularly good in Republican right-wing America, neither Trump's nor, especially, in Bush's. Neither "crusades" against Islam, nor Protestant eschatological myths held any allure for me, and, frankly, pragmatic realism in foreign policy appealed to me more than ideological sectarianism. It seemed to me that there is more idealism even in the modern liberalism of a Joe Biden than there is in the desire of certain right-wing Republicans to paper over their material interests with religious rhetoric. My negative attitude towards neoconservatism and Protestant anti-Islamism was the basis of an ongoing disagreement with Sveta which began in 2003, since the time of the war in Iraq.
But then something of greater significance than foreign policy began bringing us closer together. She was a regular participant in almost all the internet and print-based journalistic projects that I happened to lead -- from APN to Izvestia to Terra America. In particular, however, she fell in love with our website "Russian idea", which she supported both financially and also with her own writings, which she allowed us to print without remuneration. She became one of our most frequent and favorite authors. She was discovered and greatly appreciated also by our friends in the United States, who appreciated her sincere Christian pathos and deep insight into the essence of modern events.
In Sveta's departure, of course, there is something symbolic and fatеful. The world – not just the world today, but any world at any time -- rarely tolerates such people, because there is something beyond this world to be found in them. Such people are not idealists because they see the world better than it actually is. They are people of the sort who seek out whatever truly is best and highest in the world. And when the world altogether abandons that better part, they themselves often abandon the world.
Like the author of these lines, Svetlana came to the bitter conclusion that the generation of patriots with whom she had entered the arena of Russian political journalism had been captured by positivism of the crudest, most cynical sort; a positivism, to be sure, which no longer even bothered to dress itself up in liberal or in "Orthodox" clothes. After waging a long war against liberal secularism, she had launched a new war against animalistic "nationalism." She fought on behalf of Christianity and what she herself called the "Orthodox empire." But she was unable, on her own, to turn back this new, and equally harmful nationalistic trend. To succeed, it is going to be necessary to educate a new generation, one which decides to place the spirit of religion on a higher plane than political interest. For people of that future “religious” generation, I am confident that Svetlana Lourié’s name will have special resonance and authority.
NOTES
[1] Lev Gumilev (1912 – 1992), the son of two famous Russian poets, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, is firmly associated with a movement, Eurasianism, which, however, he did not invent. Contrary to the ill-informed commentary of certain Western journalists in recent years, Eurasianism as a system of thought was the product of Russian émigré intellectuals writing from Western Europe, primarily France, in the 1920s. Nonetheless, during his long academic career as a historian, geographer and ethnographer affiliated with Leningrad State University, Gumilev made important contributions to Eurasianist thinking. As Mezhuev here notes, for Gumilev, geographic and ethnographic-biological characteristics are what is most defining for the Eurasian geographic mass of which Russia is the center and organizing principle. Gumilev was arrested several times during the Stalinist period, but was rehabilitated in 1956.
[2] Mezhuev’s reference to Gumilev as a ‘philosopher of life’ requires some unpacking. For Russian conservative intellectuals of the circle that includes Svetlana Lourié, Vadim Tsymburski and Boris Mezhuev, the word ‘life’ has none of the ‘romantic’ connotations that the casual reader might expect. As used in this specific context, the word ‘life’ is for them connected with the writings of Nietzsche and Spengler, for whom, as Mezhuev writes in his book Politicheskaya Kritika Vadima Tsymburskogo, “ … ‘life’ is the right of the stronger animals to devour the weak; it is that [historical] situation when this natural process is not impeded by a morality or a justice appearing from who-knows-where.” In the case of the Lourié, Tsymburski and Mezhuev circle, it is therefore quite important not to conflate their interest in Spengler as a source of methodological resources, and their moral assessment of Spengler (and, for that matter, of Nietzsche). As Mezhuev explains in the above-noted book, the philosophy of ‘life’ was manifested with striking clarity during the Yeltsin and early Putin era when newly rich and successful Russian capitalists looked down in scorn at homeless grandmothers and unemployed Soviet-era poets as losers incapable of dealing with the requirements of ‘life.’ Mezhuev and Tsymbursky, like Lourié, were repelled by such a ‘philosophy,’ and in at least this respect their world view is quite distant from that of Nietzsche and Spengler.
[3] Armenia’s disastrous armed conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh in Sept-Nov. 2020 resulted in the death of thousands of Armenian soldiers, most of them still very young men. Svetlana Lourié made an emotional public appeal to Russia not so much – or at any rate not only -- to assist the Armenian nation in the military sense (Russian peace-keeping forces put an end to the conflict), but even more emphatically, for Russians to express and to feel compassion for Armenia, a tiny nation that had suddenly experienced such a tragic loss. Lourié was then attacked by certain Russian nationalists who rejected her view that Russia had not only ‘interests’ in the sphere of geo-politics, but also moral duties. In response to these attacks, Lourié cited an idea variously expressed by Dostoevsky, to the effect that Russians, in the absence of their Orthodox Christian faith “are rubbish.” The nationalists were further enraged by Lourié’s use of this expression and continued to hound her.