Some evening reading: The Russian pseudomorphosis

If anyone has comments or questions on these readings, I’m happy to address them in the comments!

Oswald Spengler | The Decline of the West, Vol. 2 (1922):

“In a rock stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks occur, water filters in and the crystals are gradually washed out, so that in due course only their hollow mould remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain;  molten masses pour in, stiffen and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to do so in their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists call this phenomenon Pseudomorphosis.

By the term ‘historical pseudomorphosis’ I propose to designate those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile practices, and instead of expanding its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous…

An example of ‘historical pseudomorphosis’ is presented to our eyes today in Russia… The Muscovite period of the great Boyar families and Patriarchs, in which a constant element is the resistance of an Old Russia party to the friends of Western Culture, is followed, from the founding of Petersburg in 1703, by the pseudomorphosis which forced the primitive Russian soul into the alien mould, first of full Baroque, then of the Enlightenment, then of the nineteenth century. The fate-figure in Russian history is Peter the Great. The primitive tsarism of Moscow is the only form which is even today appropriate to the Russian world, but in Petersburg it was distorted to the dynastic form of Western Europe. The pull of the sacred South - of Byzantium and Jerusalem - strong in every Orthodox soul, was twisted by the worldly diplomacy which set its face to the West. The burning of Moscow (by the retreating Russians as Napoleon’s Grande Armée approached), that mighty symbolic act of a primitive people, that expression of Maccabaean hatred of the foreigner and heretic, was followed by the entry of Alexander I into Paris, the Holy Alliance, and the concert of the Great Powers of the West. And thus a nationality, whose destiny should have been to continue without a History for some generations, was forced into a false and artificial history that the soul of Old Russia was simply incapable of understanding… In the townless land with its primitive peasantry, cities of alien type fixed themselves like ulcers - false, unnatural, unconvincing. ‘Petersburg,’ says Dostoevski, ‘is the most abstract and artificial city in the world.’ Born in it though he was, he had the feeling that one day it might vanish with the morning mist…

After this, everything that arose around it was felt by the true Russian soul as lies and poison… Depths of religious feeling, flashes of revelation, shuddering fear of the great awakening, metaphysical dreaming and yearning, belong to the beginning, as the pain of spiritual clarity belongs to the end, of a history. In (the Russian) pseudomorphosis they are mingled…