The concept of Hellenism by Georgy Chistyakov and the heritage of Russian modernism

Georgy Chistyakov, Russian theologian, philologist and culturologist, proposed an original concept of the Hellenistic era, continuing the method of Aristid Dovatur, and polemically sharpened. I prove that this concept, in which Hellenism was presented as a complex evolution of cultural paradigms, and individual fi gures found themselves inside these turning times, was a way to comprehend the experience of European and Russian modernity in a diff erent way, move away from the prosopographic approach and the narrative of individual achievements and understand the structural patterns of the development of culture. In this sense, Hellenism was understood by him as a foretaste of the Christian culture of vocation (mission), independent of the previous manifestations of individual talent. This concept I put in the context of Russian (S. S. Averintsev, M. L. Gasparov) and world (Michel Foucault, Leo Strauss) theories of the Hellenistic era as a contradictory combination of mimetic and individualistic principles. The roots of this concept I fi nd in the early artistic work of Chistyakov, aesthetically dependent on Russian idealistic symbolism. I prove the productivity of this concept for understanding the patterns of cultural development in the transitional era is shown.