Author of quotes: Who are the Russians

Perhaps we can name three stable components of Russian self-awareness. We have already talked about this in part, but we need to repeat it again. The first component of national self-awareness is Orthodox ideas about good and evil, about the world and man. They go with us through the centuries, despite heresies and schisms, revolutions and reactions, atheism and new outbreaks of religiosity. They have firmly entered into the ideological matrix of the Russians, and no reformers can knock them out of it. The second is the collective memory of the historical choices that Russia had to make, being, in the words of Mendeleev, “between the hammer of the West and the anvil of the East.” The third is the Russian type of thinking, combining peasant common sense with cosmic feeling. As the poet said about the Russian mind, “it soberly judges the earth, bathing in a mystical darkness.”