Personality and Tradition in the Concepts of A. S. Khomyakov and the Aksakov Brothers: Dynamics and Continuity of Ideas

This article reconstructs the interpretation of the Russian Slavophiles A. S. Khomyakov and the brothers Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov on the relationship between the personal and the traditional in culture. The authors analyze the solution to the problem of the individual's assimilation of tradition during their development as a person and the formation of traditions themselves by the individual, the nation, and the state as subjects of cultural creativity (co-creation) in various spheres of life and circumstances. It is shown how, in analyzing the possibilities for changing church rituals, A. S. Khomyakov clarifies the dialectic of the external and internal, formal and substantive, in the transformation of tradition, when its content is determined by a supra-individual absolute subject. Against the backdrop of the clash of different logics and value systems, primarily liberal and patriarchal, in 19th-century Russian society, the authors elucidate the differences in Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov's understanding of the subject of folk tradition. Using the example of the debate over folk clothing, it is demonstrated that for Konstantin Aksakov, as for other Slavophiles, the people are a more significant subject of cultural creativity than the individual. However, he opposes the suppression of personal freedom, which he understands as an extension of the people's freedom. Konstantin Aksakov considers the conscious adherence to folk traditions in clothing as an external, material manifestation of spiritual strength to be one of the important manifestations of personal choice. New trends in Russian reality are evident in Ivan Aksakov's distinction between the People and Society, which elucidates the unique nature of conscious civic and unconscious patriarchal consolidation. The analysis of the dialectic of tradition and individuality by Russian Slavophile thinkers is further evidence of the positive implications of studying Russian intellectual tradition in the context of the "traditional turn" in contemporary Russian culture.