Георгий Гачев

Georgy Gachev: In cultura, In memoriam

Abstract

A memoir of the author’s interactions with Georgy Gachev in 1978–2006 and an examination of the latter’s place in Russian intellectual and Soviet cultural history, with an emphasis on his conceptual and literary debt to Vasily Rozanov. Both thinkers belong to a uniquely Russian tradition of natural philosophy which also includes figures such as Nikolai Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Vladimir Vernadsky. Gachev’s «life-meditations» are a «post-Rozanov» syncretic genre that combines elements of an intimate journal and a culturological study. Th eir style recalls Solzhenitsyn’s polemical writings. For the last four decades of his life, Gachev was engaged in a vast, encyclopedically structured project, the purpose of which was to anthologize and sequentially describe the «national images of the world», i.e., his own, highly personalized reception and interpretation of Russia, Bulgaria, the United States, France, the Islamic world and other cultural or civilizational spaces. As a body-centric thinker and Rozanov acolyte, Gachev wrote a great deal about sex (which is urban) and Eros (who is rural), depicting the «Russian Eros» as a furtive and «debilitated» figure.