Unobvious sources of the lectures "The foundations of Russian culture" by Alexander Schmemann

The course of lectures of the Russian theologian of the first wave Russian exile, Alexander Schmemann, “The Foundations of Russian Culture” is largely based on the judgments of intellectuals and critics from the Parisian Russian diaspora: Georgy Adamovich, Georgy Fedotov, Georgy Florovsky, Vladislav Khodasevich. From them Schmemann adopted the ideas about the unified cultural ideal of the Pushkin era, about culture as a subject of special responsible work, and about the nature of schisms in Russian culture. But Schmemann was an innovator in assessing the very autoreflexion of Russian culture, and here he went further than his teachers. For him, autoreflexion includes wit, and therefore not only generates models or projects for the development of Russian culture, but also a more comprehensive model of culture as a game that allows us to look at the challenges of Russian culture from the outside. The influence of the ironic judgments of Gogol and Vladimir Soloviev on Schmemann’s position in assessing Russian modernism is demonstrated. The research permits us to characterize Schmemann’s position as a metacritic of Russian critical thought, despite his adherence to the stylistics of literary criticism: he does not so much talk about the paradoxes of Russian culture as he shows how the system of initial attitudes of key Russian thinkers permits a phenomenon to be described as paradoxical. Discovering the nonobvious sources of the lectures under consideration also provides insight into the potential of literary criticism in constructing a general theory of Russian culture.