As The Day already reported, the Academic Council of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy National University has awarded an honorary doctorate to Sergei Averintsev, a prominent philosopher, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and professor of Vienna University.
The skeptical apprehension that the new generation of Ukrainians does not know who Averintsev is has proven groundless. No doubt, his solid works like Plutarch and Ancient Biography or The Poetics of Early Byzantine Literature can hardly be considered intellectual best-sellers today like they were in the 1970s, when any, even the most specialized article by this philosopher (for example, “Stoic Worldly Wisdom through the Eyes of an Educated Syrian of the Pre-Christian Epoch: The Exhortative Epistle of Mara bar Sarapion to his Son”) was respectfully handed from one person to another in intellectual and dissident circles.
This phenomenon can be quite difficult to understand for the younger generation, which lives in a world with no less lies, yet more freedom to openly call it a lie without any risk of being repressed for it. In the Soviet times, there was no such freedom — the most an educated, decent person without heroic ambitions and a conscious choice to subject himself to the tortures of dissidence could do was to hide, keep silent, and stay away from the shameful spectacle going on around him, which was euphemistically called “affirming Marxist-Leninist ideology.”
Sergei Averintsev did not take part in that: in some miraculous way, his publications combined colossal erudition and competence on the one hand, with scientific decency and lack of compromise on the other. His texts were viewed as messages from some other, normal world, where culture is simply culture and not an “arena of ideological struggle.” Impressive was not only the content of his works, but also their style and tone, full of profound intrinsic dignity and aloofness from the vain and politically fashionable.
Sergei Averintsev inherited most of his intellectual honesty and obstinacy from his father, a well-known microbiologist. Sergei recalls how in 1952 his father, a quiet and humble man, vehemently refused to fire two employees of his department only because one of them was Jewish (during the persecution of “rootless cosmopolitans without kith or kin”) and the other one had “enemies of the people” among her relatives.
Almost four decades later, his son, the same kind of humble and quiet reading room researcher, firmly declined the USSR State Prize as a sign of his protest against the bloody massacre staged by the Soviet authorities at the Vilnius television center. This type of “strength of the weak” is brilliantly described by Vaclav Havel in an essay under the same title; it was also brought up by the participants of a round-table discussion with Averintsev, which took place in the editorial office of the Dukh i litera (Spirit and Letter) university journal. Taking part in the discussion were Vadym Skurativsky, Mykola Riabchuk, Leonid Finberh, Kostiantyn Sichov, Kateryna Petrovska, and Viktor Malakhov.
Q.: Once a clever Englishman called Soviet encyclopedias encyclopedias of lies listed alphabetically. However, at the turn of the 1950s and sixties, some things started to change in this country. The first volume of The Brief Literary Encyclopedia, which came out in late 1961, introduced thoughtful readers to the then little known Sergei Averintsev, whose name soon afterwards became for Soviet intellectuals and free-thinkers as emblematic as those of Bakhtin, Losev, Lotman, and Mamardashvili. The notion of a researcher-encyclopedist takes on truly special accuracy and fullness in your case — dozens of your encyclopedia entries are well known to specialists as brilliant contributions to the above-mentioned seven-volume Literary Encyclopedia, the famous two-volume Myths of the World collection, and the three-volume Christianity. However, the most surprising was your contribution to the five-volume Philosophic Encyclopedia, since this publication was under special ideological scrutiny. Yet, it turned out to be (at least its fifth volume) perhaps the most “revisionist” of works. How did this happen?
A.: It was a combination of various circumstances. First and foremost, there were people who had good will and resolution to do something. Besides, it was all happening in the 1960s, when the authorities had a great fear of “Marxism with a human face”, of people being interested in the ideas of the young Marx, etc. But as far as the “religious obscurantism” goes, nobody at the time was expecting any passion for it. Entries on religious subjects for the Philosophic Encyclopedia were naturally commissioned at the outset from ardent atheists. It happened that an entry from some important atheistic official arrived at the time when Yuri Popov came on board of the encyclopedia’s editorial office — a man combining remarkable qualities: decency, courage, and profound composure. He sent the entry to me for review — God forbid, I did not debate the content in principle, I only noted regretfully that such and such facts were missing, and such and such circumstances were not mentioned. While doing it I tried to figure out what names and circumstances were simply not familiar to the author. The author, of course, was beside himself with rage — he tore my review to pieces and flung them at Popov, banged his fist on the table and yelled something like, “I will break all my contracts with you! I will not write anything for you, and you’ll regret it!” And then a story of fraud started. Yuri Popov asked me to write an entry on Christianity. I said to him, “Yuri, if you’re crazy enough to commission this entry from me, I would be very ashamed if I lacked the craziness to write it.” Realizing that my name at the end of the entry would be highly undesirable, Popov first commissioned Yuri Levada, a totally secular but decent man (not an ardent atheist anyway), to write a brief sociological entry on world Christianity. Levada, being totally aware of our plot, wrote his piece, which was later pasted at the end of my large entry. Even though my name was also there, Levada’s name came last, and if some lazy official or censor quickly glanced through the entry, he saw only the second name. At the time, Levada was already shocking some sociologists by his liberalism, but he was not familiar to the professional atheists. Yuri resorted to other wiles as well. All that seemed very funny, but when the work was published, a huge scandal broke out.
Q.: The volume caused quite a stir not only in the USSR but also in the West. A story has it that even French Communists were outraged by “Mr. Averintsev’s non-critical coverage of theological subjects.”
A.: I recall a very funny misunderstanding with a Western reader of the Philosophic Encyclopedia’s fifth volume. When the book came out and the scandal around it reached the Party Central Committee’s Ideological Commission, all denunciations were necessarily supplemented by translation of a review written by a Munich Jesuit, who, thank God, is still alive and well. Just imagine: why on earth would a person living in Munich read a Soviet Philosophic Encyclopedia? Of course, to understand Soviet policy, why else — where are they going over there? So our dear reviewer wrote that while nobody was taking notice, Soviet ideology was displaying signs of abruptly changing its attitude to religion and philosophical idealism. The reviewer was also calling everyone’s attention to the fifth volume. I must admit that for a long time we could not figure out how he noticed it all there. A while later, I realized that he could not have seen it any differently.
Q.: This sounds a bit like a popular joke about the American President, who was told about Stalin’s brutalities and said in response, “It cannot be true! If he had done at least a little bit of what he is charged with, he would not have been reelected!”
A.: I also can tell you almost a joke about a German friend of mine, who was on a visit in St. Petersburg and, having read and heard a lot about the Summer Garden, wanted to see it on the first day of her stay. How does a Westerner enter a park? Naturally, she came to the main entrance, only to find a sign on the gate saying, “The Summer Garden is closed for drying.” The same evening, she told her St. Petersburg friends about her bad luck. They had a good laugh out of it and then explained to her the absurdity of her behavior: if she had gone round the corner, she would have found a hole in the fence. And how could she not have noticed that the Summer Garden was full of people strolling along its paths? After that my friend came up with a law that should be included in all textbooks on Soviet studies as the Emma Ribbental law: “There is a wall all around you, but it always has a hole,” meaning that everything is prohibited by definition, but, on the other hand, if you go round the corner, everything is allowed.
Q.: You have been talking about more or less “vegetarian” years, but what is your attitude to what is happening in Russia now?
A.: Now, at the end of the century and the millennium, people around the world are a little confused. They used to be frightened and miserable, but not confused. Some basic axioms turned out to be questionable, deconstructed not only in people’s minds, but also in reality. As far as Russia is concerned, it seems that everyone today is baffled by the potential consequences of the current political changes. It is unclear how far inflation will go. Recently, during a telephone conversation with a publishing house, I asked if we could for some time postpone a final agreement on the terms of our contract, and I heard in response, “We really cannot say anything at this point. It may be that our publishing house or even all similar publishing houses will shut down within the next few months.” Of course, they referred to economic reasons, but people are concerned about the political prospects as well. The fact that people have changed their excessively serious attitude to politics is in and of itself a good sign. However, I am afraid, that we, Eastern Slavs, and especially Russians, are very much obsessed with ethical extremes — either noble sacrifice, or naked and senseless vice. Meanwhile, there is a happy medium — decisions that are not 100% spiritual and ethical, but which are motivated by practical needs and by the notion of universal utility and prosperity, a very old notion that we still have not mastered adequately.
Q.: And how do you view the new geopolitical reality? It seems that many people in Russia have yet to come to terms with it.
A.: It’s true. In Moscow, I happen to come across my fellow countrymen who surprise me by saying that they could have never imagined the collapse of the Soviet Union. I respond by saying that the collapse was exactly what I had been waiting for. I expected the Soviet Union to break up, but I did not expect at all, for example, the Moscow public transportation system to fall apart. The subway still runs, but the buses and trolley cars are at a standstill. As for the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Khrushchev changed the status of the Crimea back in 1954, my mother (who was half Ukrainian, by the way, and when I was a child, she sang songs for me in bed, and most of them had lyrics by Shevchenko) said calmly, “If Ukraine secedes, we’ll have problems.”
Q.: And what contemporary philosophical literature attracts your attention now?
A.: When I was growing up in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet Union, I knew, at least from rumors, that I was a contemporary of some great composers, artists, and writers. Later I also learned about great contemporary philosophers. Shortly before the death of Herman Hesse, I was obsessed with the idea of sending him a letter from Moscow. But the gods passed away one after another, and when I now travel around the world and have a chance to look at any book in a library, I understand less and less whose contemporary I am. Such must be the time we live in. I do not partake of discussions about the imminent end of philosophy, poetry, and other such things. And by not doing it, I do not mean to claim that there will be no such end. I simply do not know. No doubt, we all should realize and remember that someday we will all die. But we should also do our own work based on the assumption, albeit false, that our lives will continue. In a sense, we should be ready to pass away at any moment, but in another sense (which is perhaps not any easier), we should be prepared seriously, substantially, and perhaps even naively and self-confidently to stay and carry on our work. I believe this is what our attitude to life should be.








