Russian culture as a civilizational phenomenon: aspect of values

Abstract

The article is devoted to the understanding of the Russian culture as a phenomenon of Eastern Christian civilization. The author analyzes the main historical stages of the formation of the Russian culture in its interrelation with religion, worldview and social political life of the corresponding period against the background of substantial facts, principally based on the Russian literature and philosophy. Proceeding from the principled diagram of civilization as a concentric system of social casings, located around the religious valuables kernel, the author keynotes the continuity of the country’s cultural code despite the revolutionary shifts in time, irrespective of the existence of the Peter the Great Western-like reform, February or October coup d’état in 1917 or collapse of the USSR late in XX century. The basic methodological categories of the given analysis are the paradigms of the classical, modernist and post modernist style as integral features of history and theory of the Russian Orthodox civilization on the whole, starting from Baptizing of the Russ and ending with the contemporary crucial stage of its existence. The principled attention is drawn towards the general European and world context, which take place in this country’s culture and which on the one hand are an aspect of the global ideological development, and on the other are the unique creative acts of our centuries-old tradition. In this aspect this country’ spiritual culture with all its worldwide nature (Dostoevsky F.M.), early XXI century is becoming a kind of an alternative for a post modernist destruction of a man’s image as an integral being. The utmost expression of the latter are the trans humanistic tendencies in the “decline of Europe”, threatening to turn Homo Sapiens into an artificial cyborg.