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If a culture has no established neutral zone, it starts to be thrown from one extreme to the other, from piety to godlessness, from asceticism to debauchery. Binary thinking leads to revolutions, to a “revolving” model of development where opposites rapidly change places, but no gradual evolution occurs. All the extremes are accentuated: God and the devil, holiness and sin, spirit and flesh, religion and atheism, Christianity and paganism, the God-Man and the Man-God, the state and the individual, power and anarchy… Even when Russian culture makes an attempt to unite its poles, this is not accomplished through their evolutionary moderation, but by their direct confrontation, as in the images of the “excessively broad” person in Dostoyevsky who simultaneously contemplates the void below and the void above, the ideal of Sodom and the ideal of the Madonna.

Russian culture has acquired a means of working with these oppositions that consists of “twisting” and “inverting” them: the lofty and grand reveals its demonic traits, while the low and petty displays traits of spiritual asceticism. The culture’s dynamism comes through in its supercharged paradoxicality. If Peter the Great and even Russia itself take on demonic features in Pushkin’s and Gogol’s depictions, it is also true that one of the littlest “little men,” Bashmachkin, evolves as a literary type to become Prince Myshkin, the most exalted image in Russian literature. This model of the ironic “inversion” of opposites allows us to penetrate into the persistent structural idiosyncrasies of Russian culture, which recur in its various historical stages: pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post– Soviet.

Joseph Brodsky famously stated that “appetite for metaphysics distinguishes a work of art from mere belles-lettres.” A peculiarity of this book is the attention to the metaphysical underpinnings of Russian literature, to its intellectual “underside,” the indirect and “accidental” positing of eternal questions that sets it apart from philosophy. The author is more interested in the metaphysical “unconscious” of Russian literature than in the more or less well-known philosophical and religious views of its creators. The book examines, for example, Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman and his “Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish,” both written in October 1833, as two variations on a single metaphysical theme: “the power of humans over the sea and the vengeance of the unrestrained elements.” The book explores the image of Russia in the famous lyrical digressions in Dead Souls as a development of Gogol’s demonology (“Viy”, “The Portrait”), with Russia unwittingly presented as a witch. The poetry of Pasternak and Mandel’shtam is interpreted in the context of the Jewish spiritual traditions that they inherited but hardly realized completely—Hasidism and Talmudism.