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RUSSIA’S DECONSTRUCTIONIST WESTERNIZER 4 These essays have helped me bear [the last eight years] by placing me in a broader European cultural space. [This space] has not yet been accepted by most of my fellow citizens as an integral part of themselves, [for whom] many aspects of openness are still traumatic, but I am far from being the only one who lives in it. —Diagnostic (Vremia diagnoza) (2003) A cultural iron curtain . . . is lowering slowly over Russia. —Swastika, Star, Cross (Svastika, Z vezda, Krest) (2006) A spectre is wandering across Russia, the spectre of religious nationalism and intolerance. —Swastika, Star, Cross RETURNING to Berlin in January 1927 from a two-month stay in Moscow, Walter Benjamin wrote scathingly of his home city: “For someone who has arrived from Moscow, Berlin is a dead city. The people on the street seem desperately isolated, each one at a great distance from the next. All alone in the midst of a broad stretch of street. . . . What is true of the image of the city and its inhabitants is also applicable to its mentality: the new perspective one gains on this is the most indisputable consequence of a stay in Russia.”1 Almost seventy-five years later, in 2001, the prominent Russian philosopher Mikhail Ryklin felt a similar anomie upon returning to his home city, Moscow, after a prolonged stay in Berlin: “Coming back from Berlin, I notice the same things on the streets of Moscow [as Benjamin Citations from works by Ryklin are given in the text with the following notation: DD: Dekonstruktsiia i destruktsiia: Besedy s filosofami. Series Ecce Homo (Moscow: Logos, 2002). PL: Prostranstva likovaniia (Moscow: Logos, 2002). SZK: Svastika, Z vezda, Krest (Moscow: Logos, 2006). VD: Vremia diagnoza (Moscow: Logos, 2003). 1. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary. trans. R. Sieburth (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 112–114. Mikhail Ryklin’s “Larger Space of Europe” Confronts Holy Rus' Ru ssia’s Dec o n st r u c t io n ist West er n iz er 97 saw in Berlin]: there are more cars than people, it smells of cheap gas, passers -by are alienated from one another, in the metro one sees predominantly gloomy, unsmiling faces. Today’s capital of Russia is the city most alienated from itself that I have ever lived in” (PL: 260). Mikhail Ryklin (1948–) is what we will call a “neo-Westernizer” in a post-Soviet Russian world increasingly surrounded by rightist reinventions: neo-nationalists, neo-Slavophiles, neo-fascists, and neo-Eurasianists.2 In the atmosphere of bigotry and ultra-nationalism enshrouding Russia since the late 1990s, embattled groups devoted to social, cultural, and religious tolerance could find a principled, if esoteric, ally in Ryklin. In contrast to his ultraconservative contemporaries, who sometimes view the other formerly imperial, totalitarian European capital—Berlin—as a component of a reconstructed imperial network of cities and states, Ryklin takes it as a model for a post-imperial, post-totalitarian alternatives to empire. Through his concept of post-imperial Berlin Ryklin resists rightist trends toward another iteration of mass conformism and authoritarian rule. In contrast to Dugin, who projects Berlin as the westernmost city in an axis linking major continental world centers , Berlin, Tokyo (sic), and Teheran, with Moscow at the hub of power, Ryklin views Berlin as a “reality check”: “In many ways in my life Berlin corrects the lack of ‘reality’, which one senses so strongly in Moscow” (PL: 260).3 This chapter probes Ryklin’s quest for a non-authoritarian Russian identity . Our markers on this quest are the psycho-geographical metaphors he uses to examine the current Russian crisis of identity and to build the psychological groundwork for a different identity. Of particular interest are his concepts of “center,” “border,” and the “West.” Ryklin has two main goals. His first concrete goal is to reinvent Moscow as the center after its existence for decades as the Stalinist site of what he calls forced mass “jubilation.” Second, Ryklin psychoanalyzes himself, probing his personal identity, examining what in his experience created his sense of personhood, and diagnosing the unconscious workings of the Soviet mentality in himself. Before turning to a discussion of Ryklin’s particular imagined geography , it is helpful to place his thinking in the broader context of Eastern European and Russian philosophizing and theorizing of the past thirty years. Ryklin’s public “Westernizing,” his project of symbolically opening 2. Two books that treat these rightist formations are Wayne Allensworth, The Russian Q uestion...

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