The Russian religious philosopheres and theme of Trinity (original) (raw)

Having it both ways Rozanov, modernity and the Skopcy LAURA ENGELSTEIN VASILIJ ROZANOV liked to have it both ways. On the one hand, he bemoaned the age of mass culture, cursing 'that damned Gutenberg', for 'lick[ing] writers with his bronze tongue, so they all hardened "in print", effaced and subdued. My "self" exists only in manuscript,' he insisted, 'like every writer s "self".' (Rozanov 1911, 5.) On the other hand, he wrote for the commercial press and boasted of reading Nat Pinkerton to put himself to sleep. Working with and against the modern medium, he tried to make the published text an artifact. Cultivating the illusion of idiosyncrasy, he inserted family photographs (another technological innovation-but one that fixed an unrepeatable moment in time) into his prose, played with italics, uneven paragraphs, incomplete sentences, collages of quotations, juxtapositions, the clash of styles, the intrusion of profanity, the exposure of intimacy (what Viktor Sklovskij calls 'domesticity as literary technique' (1921, 21)). He thus offended the hierarchy of taste, while preserving the conceptual coordinates that structured the thinking of his age. This series included a linked chain of contrasting pairs: old and new, native and foreign (East and West), spiritual and rational, folk and elite. Following this logic, Rozanov added categories of his own: sensual and self-denying, manuscript and print, personal and impersonal. In this grand scheme, derived from Slavophile thinking, Russia appeared as the antithesis of the modernizing, increasingly rationalist (Protestant or secular) West. Latin Christianity had produced the authoritarian structures of the Catholic Church and the puritanical intellectualism of the Reformation. Russia, too, had its clerical regime and established dogmas, but in seeking to trace Russia's