The Soil-bound Cult of "Immediacy" as an Aspect of Relationships Between Westernism and Slavophilism

In: Solovʹëvskie issledovanija, Heft 4, S. 35-48

Abstract

The paper deals with the meaning and the contexts of the term "immediacy" that was of great importance to the formation of the soil-bound trend (pochvennichestvo) in Russia in the 19th century. Having taken the place of Slavophilism, the pochvennichestvo still showed a keen interest in antiquity, tradition, custom, the ease of folk way of life and folk arts as the manifestations of a certain "native soil" that was endangered during the modernization of the traditional culture. The concomitant ideological shift is analyzed in connection with the evolution of the views of Apollon Grigoriev who was one of the principal ideologists of the soil-bound tradition. Meanwhile, the study takes into account not only the inner tendencies of Russian culture under modernization, but also the various formats of its interaction with the societies of already established modernity as a factor of external influence. It is pointed out that the tendency to combine the elements of modernity and tradition is obvious in all forms of western Romanticism as well as in the relationships between Westernism and Slavophilism. Hereupon, the term "immediacy" that was prototyped by German philosophy together with the subsequent term "mediation", became topical in Russia just in the context of the native-soil trend. It took the same path as Western Romanticism and exactly in the same way searched after a special concept of the organic unity. It is shown that Grigoriev, having been one of the first theorists of native-soil trend, tried to justify the pattern of the unity of Westernism and Slavophilism in such a way that it, nevertheless, could admit the preservation of "immediacy". In the issue, he had found the pattern of such unity in F.W.J. Schelling's philosophy and indirectly confirmed the existence of the generalities of modernization that is influenced by the culture of already established modernity.