PECULIARITIES OF SELF-ORIENTALISM IN THE POLITICAL LAN-GUAGES OF V. V. KOZHINOV AND E. V. LIMONOV IN 1990s

Abstract

The current article is dedicated to the specifics of how the image of the “East” correlated with Russian national identity in the political languages of Russian nationalists in the 1990s. The focus is on situations in which certain positive features of the imaginary “East,” as opposed to the “West,” were associated with the Russian nation. The proclamation of such an image of Russians in this text is called “self-orientalism.” The article was carried out within the framework of intellectual history. The main sources are the texts of a representative of the “Russian party,” author and literary scholar V. V. Kozhinov, and the writer, poet and leader of the National Bolshevik Party E. V. Limonov. A number of statements made by Kozhinov and Limonov are analyzed in the context of their polemics with the “Westernizers,” and in the context of the popularization of “Eurasian” political philosophy. The text of V. V. Kozhinov illustrates a remarkable case, which can be called “Byzantine Eurasianism.” Kozhinov believed that there are “Eurasian” states by nature that tend to retain a multitude of “peoples” (“nations”) within their structure, in contrast to the unifying and “mono-national” “Western” states. According to Kozhinov, Russia also possessed this “Eurasian” principle, but inherited it from “Byzantium.” Limonov claimed that Russians possess a “collectivist” character because they adopted the “Byzantine,” “Eastern” version of Christianity. The “collectivism” of Russians, according to Limonov, is a product of them being “Asianized.” When the NBP was founded, orientalist “Asian” idioms became more common in Limonov’s language, according to them, the kinship of Russia and the “East” was not denied, but they began to be used to characterize negative phenomena and processes.