В Поисках Неевропоцентричного Взгляда На Прошлое: Отклики Эмигрантских Историков на Евразийскую Историю России Г. В. Вернадского

SUMMARY:

Ab Imperio continues publication of archival materials related to intellectual history of Russian emigration. In this issue we offer our readership a whole range of documents: correspondence between the Eurasianists George Vernadsky and Petr Savitsky, the conspectus of a lecture by the well known legal scholar Taranovsky, who delivered a crushing critique of Eurasianist writings, and reactions by V. Bartold and N. Kareev to George Vernadsky’s “Scheme of Russian History” and Petr Savitsky’s geopolitical ideas. All documents are focused on the work by George Vernadsky, which represented the only attempt at writing a course of Russian history from a Eurasianist perspective. The publication is introduced and commented by Alexander Antoshchenko, who published a number of works on the subject.

Eurasianism is particularly suitable for illustrating paradoxes of modernity in Russian context. Obviously a nativist, quasi-Romantic intellectual movement, which denied the existence of universal values inherent in the Enlightenment understanding of historical processes, Eurasianism at the same time displayed novel features: the Eurasianists, who were not unlike their contemporaries in Italy, Germany or France, vehemently criticized democratic order and placed their hopes on an “organic” state ruled by “idea”. They were equally interested in high culture and technology. Moreover, the Eurasianists owed a great debt to the modernist culture of the last decades of imperial Russia, a cultural ferment bent on experimentation and innovation in the forms of art. It was this relation that prompted the designation of the Eurasianists as “Slavophiles of the epoch of futurism”.

The Eurasianists denied that Europe was at the top of the pyramid of social, economic and cultural development of the world. Nicholas Trubetskoi, who compared European civilization to that of Australian aborigines and found no essential difference, boldly proclaimed this idea. But this highly theoretical proclamation needed substance, and it appears that Vernadsky’s history was an attempt to follow suit and produce such history. The published materials illustrate reactions to this venture by Russian émigré intellectuals.