“They don’t escape from a besieged fortress”. S.S. Averintsev about Russian culture

Abstract

The personality and work of Academician S.S. Averintsev never ceases to occupy the imagination of philologists, culturologists, philosophers, theologians, historians and art historians. The humanities scientist, who had a vast outlook and an immense range of scientific interests, left his individual mark in many branches of knowledge. A specialist in ancient and Byzantine cultures, S. Averintsev constantly dealt with the problems of Russian culture, either directly or indirectly referring to its study, paying special attention to the place of Russian culture in world culture, its dialogue with the cultures that preceded it and adjacent to it – the Hebrew and other Middle Eastern cultures, with ancient, and above all ancient Greek, with Byzantine and Western European cultures. It is necessary to note the originality of the scientist’s approach to comprehending and analyzing millennial cultures, which were considered by Averintsev each time as a whole, as giant megatexts, which, in the course of their analysis, can be “folded” by the researcher to several capacious metaphorical formulas that can be compared with each other and trace intertextual connections. between them. The identification of such generalizing “microformulas” of huge megatexts is possible only in the historical context of “great time”, covering centuries and millennia of national and world history. Comparative-historical and typological analysis of cultural megatexts through their formulaic “clots” allowed Averintsev to carry out cultural-philosophical readings of any megatexts and trace in them allegorical allusions to the events of Russian culture and current modernity.