Mikhail Epstein

This groundbreaking work by one of the world's foremost theoreticians of culture and scholars of Russian philosophy gives for the first time a systematic examination of the development of Russian philosophy during the late Soviet period. Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness under the Soviet regime, Mikhail Epstein provides a comprehensive account of Russian thought of the second half of the 20th century that is highly sophisticated without losing clarity. It provides new insights into previously mostly ignored areas such as late-Soviet Russian nationalism and Eurasianism, religious thought, cosmism and esoterism, and postmodernism and conceptualism. Epstein shows how Russian philosophy has long been trapped in an intellectual prison of its own making as it sought to create its own utopia. However, he demonstrates that it is time to reappraise Russian thought, now freed from the bonds of Soviet totalitarianism and ideocracy but nevertheless dangerously engaged into new nationalist aspirations and metaphysical radicalism. We are left with not only a new and exciting interpretation of recent Russian intellectual history, but also the opportunity to rethink our own philosophical heritage.

Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (19531991)

Ideas Against Ideocracy

Written from a non-Western point of view, this work offers a fresh perspective on the postcommunist literary scene. The four sections of the book - literature, ideology, culture and methodology - reflect the range of postmodernism in contemporary Russia.

The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture

After the Future

Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover

Mikhail·鏓pshte鎖n

Aleksandr Genis

Presents essays and manifestos on recent Russian literature, culture, and religion

New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture

Russian Postmodernism

Inside the disintegrating Soviet Union, Raisa Gibaydulina, a professor of scientific atheism at the Moscow Institute of Atheism, compiles a selection of articles, sermons, manifestos, and other writings by members of banned religious sects. Copies of this classified reference manual, The New Sectarianism, are smuggled to the West, where intellectuals attempt to assess the late-Soviet spiritual movements. A record of Gibaydulina's own spiritual quest is preserved in the notes and letters she writes during the post-Soviet years before her death in April 1997. Such is the form of Mikhail Epstein's fictional Cries in the New Wilderness, first published in Moscow during the last years of the Soviet Union and now available in English, in an expanded version. Drawing on his own participation in Moscow's intellectual associations and in expeditions to study popular religious beliefs in southern Russia and Ukraine, Epstein recreates the spiritual experience of an entire Russian generation. His is not a documentary book, however, but a "comedy of ideas," in which he constructs from the voices he hears in the culture around him the bizarre religious and philosophical worldviews of Foodniks and Domesticans, Arkists and Bloodbrothers, Sinnerists and Good-believers, Steppies and Pushkinians. As a counterpoint to this medley of comic, grotesque, poetic, banal, poignant, and harrowing voices is the voice of the commentator, Professor Gibaydulina, who struggles to maintain her scientific atheism in the face of this startling variety of religious experiences. Gibaydulina's response to the crumbling of the Soviet Union and her quest for a new, creative atheism adds a tragic note to Epstein's polyphonic work.

From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism

Cries in the New Wilderness

"This book explores the challenges to the process of secularization in Russian society during the period of its dominance by the Orthodox Church, and subsequently during the Soviet atheistic era. Both are based on the binary opposition of values ('sacred' and 'profane') and do not admit of a 'middle ground' where truly secular culture develops. The book present the foundational categories of Russian spirituality, such as 'the demonic' and 'the apophatic,' 'banality' and 'inversion' drawing on the work of Russian writers and thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries .... The author considers modern Russian culture's need for a neutral 'middle ground' between its extreme polarities. He also explores the dangers of comprehensive neutralization in culture and the necessity of retaining elements of the dual model along with the introduction of intermediate elements. When combine, these views do not cancel each other out, but rather produced a 'ternary' model of a cultural symbiosis between the extreme and the media, despite their apparent incompatibility."-- P. [4] of cover.

Russian Spirituality and the Secularization of Culture

Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover

"This ... book is about blank spaces in language and culture and their formative role in major artistic movements of the 20th century. The book proposes new sign that denotes the absence of any sign is conveyed by quotation marks around a blank space: " ". This no-sign can be applied to many subject areas, including philosophy, theology, ethics, aesthetics, poetics, and linguistics. " " signifies, more adequately than any of these terms, the Absolute, Dao, the Endless, the Inexpresiible, Différance, i.e, the ultimate condition of any signification. Each discipline has its own " ", certain 'unspeakable' assumptions that need to be presented inside disciplinary frontiers, as a blank margin moved inside the medium. " " allows language to speak the unspeakable. The book presents " " not only theoretically, but also graphically, in its format and design."--Half t.p. verso.

Quotation Marks

In this book, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic theory of modalities (possible, actual, necessary) and their impact on the philosophy and culture of modernity and postmodernity, focusing on the creative potentials of possibilistic thinking for the humanities.

Modalities in Thought and Culture

A Philosophy of the Possible

Explores the most tormenting problems of Russian literature in provocative engagements with its major authors, from Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky to Nabokov, Platonov and post-Soviet postmodernists. Focuses on the ironies and paradoxes that transform sublime ideals into their opposites and trigger the forces of evil and self-destruction.

Mikhail Epstein

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