A few years after his death, Vasilij Rozanov’s intuition, as described in The Apocalypse of Our Times, that the authentic essence of Russia—along with Eastern Judaism, of which Russia was so much a part—would both be swept away by the revolutionary storm, returned forcefully to the mind of his former friend and rival, Dmitrij Merežkovskij. The latter, by then exiled in Paris, paid full tribute to Rozanov’s perspicacity in an essay of 1928 entitled, Which of you? Judaism and Christianity,1 with a reflection which thematizes the “mystery of the Russian Revolution” from the point of view of a “social demonology.”2 The question of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, as well as the consequences of events in the aftermath of October 1917, are to be analyzed, according to Merežkovskij,
“on a religious level,” and not on a “national or political-international” one, just as Rozanov had done “a quarter of a century earlier” in the meetings of the St Petersburg Society. This crucial question “was thus posed before
‘the Apocalypse,’ and here it is, posed once again, in ‘the Apocalypse.’”3 In Rozanov’s prophetic statement of the problem could be perceived both the crash of approaching thunder, and the din of those who would bear down upon Russia: “It was an evil which we did not heed at that time;
* translated into english by karen turnbull.
1 Dmitrij s. merežkovskij, “kotoryj že iz vas? iudaizm i christianstvo,” in Carstvo Antichrista. Stat’i perioda emigracii, ed. A. n. nikoljukin (st petersburg: rChgi, 2001), 349-363.
2 Dmitrij s. merežkovskij, “tajna russkoj revoljucii: opit social’noj demonologii,” in Carstvo Antichrista. Stat’i perioda emigracii, op. cit., 470-559.
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it would be worse if, once again, we did not heed it.”4 While the goal of the Revolution was to establish the “Kingdom of the Antichrist,” the categories of religious phenomenology which Rozanov formulated, from The place of Christianity in history onwards, served in this context to enable Merežkovskij, who studied them meticulously, to understand how this could have happened and to try to see whether, on a religious level, some form of salvation from the Bolshevik dictatorship could be foreseen for Russia. The crux is that, contrary to the “Judeophobic” tradition that runs through much of the thinking of the “religious Renaissance,”5 Rozanov had seen very clearly that “actual” communism does not necessarily proceed from the essence of Judaism. Indeed, as Merežkovskij recognized, reporting from a broad florilegium of Rozanov’s quotations and cryptoquotations, Rozanov had understood—from the very beginning, and with the utmost clarity in The Apocalypse of Our Times—that the Messianic waiting of the people of Israel is not aimed at a secular translation in a political-utopian sense, as is the case with the misguided Messianism which is the basis of progressive-revolutionary thought. For Merežkovskij, the latter is, instead, characterized by a demonic mixture “of Aryan with Mongolian, of Europe with Asia, of ‘Eurasia,’”6 an ambiguous concept, dear to the hearts of a large number of the Russian Intelligentsia, which—in the form of “Scythianism”
and “Pan-Mongolianism”—had been flirted with by the great figures of the Symbolist and decadent culture, from Solov’ëv to Blok. For Merežkovskij, it represented nothing other than a portent of the sinking of “Atlantis”7—the metaphorical continent which symbolized Western civilization in one of his last essay-novels—as actually came to pass with the Bolshevik revolution.
Rozanov had ingeniously intuited that Atlantis was formed of two souls, the second of which, the Hebrew soul, contains the eternal theogonic turmoil
4 ibid.
5 see Cesare De michelis, La giudeofobia in Russia. Dal libro del Kahal ai Protocolli dei savi di Sion (turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001).
6 Dmitrij s. merežkovskij, Carstvo Antichrista. Stat’i perioda emigracii, op. cit., 359.
7 on these aspects of merežkovskij’s work, see Aleksandr n. nikoljukin, “fenomen merežkovskogo,”
in Merežkovskij pro et contra, ed. Aleksandr n. nikoljukin (st petersburg: rChgi, 2001), 25-26; on the Atlantis motif, cf. Boris Ju. poplavskij, “po povodu ‘Atlantidy-evropy,’” in ibid.,
which can positively fertilize Aryan rationalism, thus preventing it from falling prey to the “religion without God—[of] an anti-religion; Buddhism,”8 or, in other words, that “Mongolian-Aryan” para-religion which is Leninism:9
The pure Aryan is a genius in art, in science, in philosophy, in politics, it is only in religion that he is not [a genius]... The pure Semitic is a genius in religion: it can be said that, throughout history, he does nothing but create religions; in the worst case—in Egypt, Babylon, Canaan—he creates gods, in the best—in Israel—God. The Aryan teaches the people to know and to doubt, the Semitic to believe and to pray. The former has atheism in his blood; the latter, religion. The former is a “deicide,” the latter is father of gods (bogootec). To create God, Aryan virility requires Semitic femininity; to leaven the Aryan dough, Semitic yeast is needed; to ignite the Aryan tinder, Semitic fire is necessary.10
Even Christianity—the best there is, and which will always exist in the world—“is the flower and fruit of this Semitic-Aryan polarity-infatuation,”
which, in its harmonic and miraculous fullness, lasted only a moment:
The will which overcame the world: “Thy kingdom come”—came into being in the first Judeo-Christian communities, from Peter and John to Paul. But this is only one point, a flash, an instant. To the daughter of Israel, the Son is only a Lover, and the Groom is the Father. She turned back to the Father from the Son, but could not forgive her “Seducer” (as Jesus of Nazareth is called in the Talmud).
And the love ended in hate, the brief union in eternal detachment.
But a vestige of love remained in the world; the shadow of love is Christianity, and only from this shadow can we gauge what love once was.11
Only Rozanov, after his brief lapse into anti-Semitism, penetrated to the bottom of the “theo-dramatics” that characterizes the processuality of the religious meta-history of the West:
8 Dmitrij s. merežkovskij, Carstvo Antichrista. Stat’i perioda emigracii, op. cit., 350.
9 ibid., 354.
10 ibid., 350-351.
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Rozanov, it would seem, understood the mystery of the Judeo-Christian polarity, as no other Judeo-Christians and no other Jews did; he understood the sacred and terrible mystery of Israel—the immanent-transcendent sex, the sex of man in God...12
If the mystery Israel of is circumcision as the wedding ring that joins God to His people, and if the mystery of circumcision is in turn “theogamy”
(Bogosupružestvo), then Rozanov’s merit lies in having “unashamedly”
revealed the risk—disastrous to Aryan-Christian civilization—of the breaking of this sacred bond which has transformed the ancient non-dialectic polarity of the West into an outright split. After the completion of the revolutionary Apocalypse, this truth, which links the “blood of circumcision” inseparably to the “blood of Golgotha,” arises once more in all its dramatic significance:
The Blood of circumcision and the Blood of Golgotha ... here is “the Apocalypse” of all the Judeo-Christian centuries and of the present day. “Shameful wound, pudendum vulnus,” says one of the ancient priests about the wound of the castrated god Attis. And the wound of the incision—of the circumcision—between the two Testaments is equally “shameful.” Herein lies the sexual Noli me tangere mystery of all Israel; the enflamed tip of the flesh—the “extreme flesh”—the extreme modesty and fear.13
For this reason, Rozanov’s shameless courage now takes on, in Merežkovskij’s eyes, an almost providential significance because, in order to teach the entire European civilization, he has taken upon himself the tremendous risk of removing “that veil from the face of Israel”:
Rozanov—the “transcendent shameless one,” the “pre-established”
one—was sent into the world to expose this “shameful wound,”
because it is nonetheless necessary to lay it bare: from “shameful” it [the wound] may become mortal.14
While this “wound” had never seemed as lethal as [it did] “in our times, on Russia’s body,” its “gory incision,” according to Merežkovskij, follows two
12 ibid., 351-352.
13 ibid., 353.
14
lines: the first “anti-Christian” one is also fundamentally anti-Semitic and is represented by Weininger, who “like Rozanov, is also Judeo-Christian, but in the reverse order: Rozanov has detached himself, or would like to detach himself from Christianity for Judaism, whereas the other [Weininger] [goes]
from Judaism to Christianity.”15 The point is, once again, of a political-theological nature: for Weininger, in fact, communism represents the pinnacle of the penetration of Judaism and of the “absolute Feminine” into the flow of Western civilization, since “property is connected inextricably with particularity, with individuality”16 and forms the opposite of the equation represented by the terms “Hebraism-femininity-impersonality.”17 For this reason, in Sex and Character, Weininger distinguishes between “socialism”
(Aryan; Owen, Carlyle, Ruskin, Fichte) and “communism” (Judaic; Marx).
In reality, Merežkovskij writes, “we know today, from experience, that this is not absolutely the case: the root of communism is Hebraic; the flower and the fruit is Russian, Aryan, or, more precisely, Mongol-Aryan (Lenin).”18 Along with this, which presents significant points of intersection between the characteristics of Russian “Judeo-phobic” tradition, which can also be seen in the imjaslavie, there is, however, another line: “Gogol’, Čaadaev, Dostoevskij, Vladimir Solov’ëv, Rozanov—all the secret, nocturnal soul of Russia—Semitic-Aryan, Jewish-Christian.” The merging of such diverse figures in a single “family” can be explained, according to Merežkovskij, if one takes into account that the “spiritual contagion” of the Aryan world by the Semitic world occurs at the “deepest [level] of the conscience—in the emotions, in the will, in the blood,” whereas the superficial differences, even striking ones, give way to convergence on the three fundamental pillars of “Semitic religious dynamics”: “theogonic sex” (bogoroždajuščij pol);
“fixation on the prophetic spirit” and the “desire for the end of the world—
for ‘Apocalypse’. These three forces (sily) all act, openly or secretly, in the Semitic-Aryan soul of Russia.” 19 The proof of this can be seen, for example,
15 ibid., 354.
16 otto Weininger, Sesso e Carattere, (pordenone: edizioni studio tesi, 1992), 399.
17 Dmitrij s. merežkovskij, Carstvo Antichrista. Stat’i perioda emigracii, op. cit., 354.
18 ibid.
19
in the “mystical delirium,” the “sexual perversion” and the “apocalyptic panic” that characterize the various phases of the oeuvre of Gogol’, an
“Aryan, frightened out of his wits—as Rozanov had already seen—by the ancient ‘ancestral bogeymen,’” or the extraordinary and terrible experience of Čaadaev, who,
according to the gendarmes and the Russians atheists, was also a fool... a worldly Adonis, a ‘womanish prophet,’ a lover of women who loved no-one either because he was born a eunuch, or because he had castrated himself for the Kingdom of Heaven, a poor knight
“of the unattainable, for the mind that sees,” Lumen coeli, of the Sancta Rosa… an Aryan burned to ashes by the Semitic fire.20
Dostoevskij’s same anti-Semitic hysteria is, for Merežkovskij, ambiguous and revealing. “Remember what Dostoevskij wished to be with his anti-Semitic panic: ‘The Jew is coming! The Antichrist is coming!’ and what he was—an angry prophet, epileptic and sentimental, exactly like the purest of the Semites, Muhammad.”21 While Solov’ëv—in whom Merežkovskij early on recognized extraordinary ante litteram “ecumenical” merits—was in this sense perhaps the most significantly complete figure:
Remember Vladimir Solov’ëv, with his face like that of an Old Testament prophet, and his apocalyptic “Tale of the Antichrist,” the three visions of the One [i.e. The Divine Sophia]—whether she be the ancient Semitic Astarte or the Christian Mother of God—the
“three appointments” in Moscow, London and Egypt—the ancient desert from whence came Israel, the “prayer for the Jews” before death, and you will, perhaps, understand that if there ever existed, after the Apostle Paul, a Christian who knew that “all Israel” would be saved, that Christian was Vladimir Solov’ëv.22
The finishing line of this genealogy of the Russian “Judeo-Christian” soul is Vasilij Rozanov: “Finally, remember, at last, as the one whom everything has reached, and in whom everything is fulfilled—Rozanov, with his lament
20 ibid., 355.
21 ibid., 355-356.
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which lacerates the soul of Russia: ‘Which of you?’”23 Yet, in confirmation of Rozanov’s predictions and pessimism, it was not this second “line”
which asserted itself, but the first. In this sense—contrary to the prognosis which Merežkovskij advanced in 1902 in his great book on Dostoevskij and Tolstoj, and in his 1905 essay on Dostoevskij, The Prophet of the Russian Revolution24—the Revolution turned out to be a triumph of nihilism of the
“spirit” over the life-giving heat of the “flesh”:25
But all this wise, mysterious, nocturnal Aryan-Semitic, Jewish-Christian soul of Russia, did not win; the winner is the daytime soul—Aryan only; not Jewish and not Christian—from L. Tolstoj to ... shameful and terrible as it is to say—to Maxim Gor’kij. But even Tolstoj is perhaps “Christian”? Yes, and of the purest kind:
he cleansed Christianity of Judaism—of sex, of prophetism, of the Apocalypse, the New Testament—of the Old, the Progeny (Synovstvo) of the Fatherhood (Otčestvo) .... Two fatal constellations, two signs which determine the destinies of Russia—the Lion and the Lamb—the Aryan, Buddhist lion and the Semitic-Aryan, Jewish-Christian lamb—the sign of L. Tolstoj and the sign of Dostoevskij.
Under one, Russia has fallen into ruin; may she not be saved under the other? Her day of sin has arrived under the sign of the lion; will her holy night be reached under the sign of the Lamb?26
Thus, to the siren-calls of anti-Semitism which emerged once again in Russia (even in those who, among the Intelligentsia émigrés, held that Bolshevism had undeniable Hebraic roots), Merežkovskij, following Rozanov’s lead, responds by referring to the foundation constituted by the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4, and repeated by Christ in Mark 12:29:
23 ibid.
24 in this essay, merežkovskij had countered the “new Christianity” announced by the great writer with the “circumcised and Judaized” reactionary orthodox vision which coexists with the former in his work (see roberto valle, Dostoevskij politico e i suoi interpreti. L’esodo dall’Occidente, [rome: Archivio izzi, 1990], 41-46).
25 see Dmitrij s. merežkovskij, Tolstoj e Dostoevskij. Vita-creazione-religione, 2nd ed. (Bari:
laterza, 1947).
26
“Which of you two?” Is a tremendous question, but the reply is even more tremendous: “Jesus, not Yahweh”. This means: the Old Testament is annihilated by the New—the Son who kills the Father.
I have long since understood this and for a long time now I have responded to my “temptors” of the left: he who is a friend of Israel cannot be other than Christian, and of the right: a Christian cannot be an enemy of Israel. Anti-Semitism is absolute anti-Christianism...
Who destroyed Russia? The Jews? No, the Russians. Lenin—a mel-ting-pot of Russian and Mongolian—of the Aryan West with the East, not a Semitic generator of gods, but a Mongolian deicide. Lenin is already “Eurasia.” From Lenin to Rasputin—here is the movement of what is “genuinely Russian,” ah, of that which is “Christian,” of the spirit of the Antichrist, which has destroyed Russia.27
2. The Ambiguous Polarity of the Sacred: Sex and Skopčestvo