Vyacheslav Ivanov and Oswald Spengler: two models of culture (“Native and universal” and “The decline of the West”)

The article is dedicated to insufficiently studied problem of the comparative analysis of Oswald Spengler’s book “The Decline of the West” (1918-1922) and Vyacheslav Ivanov’s collection of articles “Native and Universal” (1917). This problem is of interest as it allows to understand Ivanov’s position as a religious thinker at the end of 1910s. Cultural and philosophical ideas and thesaurus of Spengler and Ivanov are considered. Thesaurus approach as a basis of comparative analysis allows to find universal constants of their thinking. Ivanov’s and Spengler’s books were published after the First World War and represent two models of European culture development. From one point of view, there is Spengler’s cultural and philosophical prophesy about history’s cyclicity and “the decline” of European culture that transfer into civilization. From another point of view there are Ivanov’s religious and philosophical ideas about overcoming crisis of culture on the basis of Christian ideas, Slavic unity and unitotality. The collection of works contains some relatively unknown Ivanov’s articles, for example, “Universal Deed” and others. In these articles he considers problems that concerned Spengler: “culture and civilization”, “Faustian culture”, “living soul of people”, “Europe and Russia”. Other articles are dedicated to the analysis of topics “Slavdom and Russia”, “tragic people’s soul”, “Church and culture”. His cultural and phenomenological project is a prophetic model of the united European Slavic-Russian culture. Ivanov relies on phenomenology of Christian consciousness, V. S. Solovyev’s philosophy and F. M. Dostoevsky’s ideas. He considers Russia the space of the “Russian idea” as an idea of the “living soul” and the source of new culture renaissance.