One of the peculiarities of the new sectarianism is its attempt to bring religion into everyday life, directly into the conduct of ordinary affairs. With the weakening influence of the Church and its traditional rites, believers have transferred their ritual needs to the mundane objects and processes of domestic life: the preparation of food, housekeeping chores, relations with family and friends. Having transferred their sense of the sacred to this sphere, they find in it something like a church. From the Church’s point of view, of course, such creeds must be characterized as heresies, but from the point of view of scientific atheism, they are relatively innocuous varieties of the new sectarianism.
These people attribute an extraordinary significance, for example, to food preparation, practicing something like a division of the clean from the unclean, i.e., a certain kind of ritual purification. Indeed, they view eating itself as a religious act, a humble acceptance of food “from the Giver”—although it is evident to us that they are actually “giving” this food to themselves. Such people develop an altogether inappropriate solemn-pathetic attitude towards the most trivial things. They come to imagine that even a grain of sand contains something divine, something around which they can construct a whole ritual of praise, reverence, and sanctification. Or, in order to be “at one with their own creative being,” they will spend months fashioning some mundane item that they could have easily bought in a store. Finally, they come to think of their homes not just as places of residence, but as “spontaneous and unpremeditated shrines” in which the mystery of everyday life is celebrated. Every home is, as it were, an abode of “the joyful Divine Wisdom,” an “inner sanctum, into which God distills the whole external world”—i.e., an image of the heavenly life beyond the grave.
It is easy to see that all these “theological” constructions are simply false and fly in the face of common sense. Among these sects, everything natural in human life is assigned a supernatural meaning that is entirely superfluous and can be disposed of quite easily. The most effective way of refuting the “Foodniks,” “Domesticans,” and “Thingwrights” is simply to demonstrate how unnecessary and unrealistic their theories are. Food is no more nourishing when eaten with “reverence”. Wisdom lies not in attributing some sort of holiness to one’s particular place of residence, but in dwelling in any residence with dignity and a good conscience, in a manner that is useful and brings joy to other people. Of course, the only way of releasing these “Everyday” sectarians from the narrow, isolated shell of their existence is to integrate them into the general circle of our community’s concerns, into the accelerating pace of our social life.
Foodniks
Foodniks sanctify the very act of consuming food, and conduct theological inquiries into the usage patterns of various foodstuffs. For Foodniks, the whole sphere of food and drink is full of sacral significance; they exalt it into a ritual whose elements vary with the particulars of various dietary regimens.
When we eat, we display through the sheer materiality of this act the supreme ethical faculty of humility. All living beings require food, thus ipso facto acknowledging their dependence on the Provider, their own defectiveness and incompleteness. No one can exist on his own; everyone needs something more, something besides his own flesh; and this carnal need, strange as it may seem, is profoundly spiritual, drawing us beyond the limits of the flesh as such, in which we would be irretrievably mired if not for hunger. Hunger is the origin of spirituality, the primordial vulnerability of life and the belly is the innate wound that teaches through suffering and prepares us for salvation, like a prototype of the cross. Hunger is the cross in the pit of our belly, crucified together with Him Who thirsted.
The expression of thirst and hunger in a living being can sometimes be repulsive, but even more repulsive is perfect, indifferent repletion. Man and beast alike are compelled to bow their heads in order to lift a morsel of food to their lips, to graze on a clump of grass—they are compelled by a natural inclination to bow at this moment before the Lord. (I.Z., “The Theology of Food”)
Hunger is not just a physiological condition; it is an existential emptiness. Non-being has crept up on a man. He is free because he is hungry. He can nestle up to the source of Being—not by eating to satiety, but by acknowledging his insatiability. Hunger is a moral imperative: humble yourself, for you are not your own; you are but a piece of a part, always longing for a bite from another piece, and never capable of repletion in this life. That is why we are enslaved by hunger: it forces us into dependence on earthly food. And that is why we are liberated by hunger: in its insatiability, it sharpens our thirst for the celestial food that truly satisfies.
Humility is nowhere more manifest than in the very posture of eating—with bowed head, as if in token of humiliation and gratitude.
Note that Western people, better bred than we are, eat with erect posture, raising their spoons up high to their mouths—it’s as if they stand above their food and condescend to its level, or rather, deign to permit it to ascend to their level. Here in Russia people eat like slaves, bending low over their plates, as if grovelling before their food. But the question is, whose slaves—the food’s or the Foodgiver’s? One cannot judge these people without grasping this point.
After eating, the warmth of grace spreads through the body—not just because it has been filled, but because it has received mercy, it has fulfilled the commandment of humility, it has prayed through each life-giving particle it has ingested. Prayer is the direct disposition of oneself before the Lord to receive His gifts into one’s soul and body: “I am at your mercy, I take you . . . . ”
This is how gluttony becomes transformed into supplication and prayer. “Give us this day our daily bread,” cries every creature, acknowledging its inability to feed itself and bowing before the beneficence of its Creator. (A.Kh., “The Wisdom of Hunger”)
Receiving hospitality is almost the same thing as receiving alms. That is why, when you are seated at a table where guests are being served by their host, you feel as if you are at the gates of a church. . . . It does not matter who is offering the bread to whom, who is richer and who poorer: the offering itself is blessed both in the giving and in the receiving. Blessed is the wealth of the host who feeds, blessed the poverty of the guest who is fed. . . .
Honor your host, for he is in the image of your Father, who shared His flesh with you. Honor your guest, for he is in the image of your Son, who feeds on your flesh. There is equal grace in being a guest and being a host. It is holy to give food and holy to receive it; the giver is the brother of the receiver. . . . He who offers food takes upon himself the spirit of the Father; he who receives it, the spirit of the Son; and between them is the Holy Spirit, breaking bread in the unity of the Trinity. . . . (B.Ts., “The Sacrament of Hospitality”)
Any act of eating, and not only the eating of holy bread, is itself holy, for when we eat, we are relying on the mercy of the giver and on Him Who gives to the giver himself. In the act of eating, everyone shows his neighbor his weakness; that is why this act is considered shameful in certain non-Christian communities. The custom requiring that eating be done in solitude allows people to turn away from each other in repugnance at their dependence on food. But we are called to share our weakness and shame with our neighbors. Those who eat together are united by the weakness they involuntarily display. From this arises the current of spiritual warmth at table, the brotherhood of those who kneel at the same fount in sharing their food, and the gratitude of all in response to the mercy of the One.
This is the gift of bread, the most vital need. At table it is clearly revealed to a man that his own flesh is itself a gift: his soul hungered after incarnation, and Someone has fed his soul flesh. Bread, taken as hospitality, is the image of the breath of life, received as a gift from the Lord. (Yu.A., “Spiritual Rules for Behavior at Table”)
The Foodniks claim that the most important events of human religious history took place through food.
It was through food that sin arose—from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And it is through food that redemption comes—from the tree of the cross, through the blood and flesh of Christ. The promise by which Satan deceived Adam, “Eat and you shall not die,” was fulfilled in the Son of God, whose flesh we eat and whose blood we drink . . . .
Yet again in our own time, mankind has fallen into sin through the temptation of food, sating himself on it so as to forget its Creator. . . . It was no accident that a high priest of the pagan Temple of Food instituted the rite of cannibalism among men. This was a blow directed against the Foodgiver, in order to seize this gift from God’s hands. Food itself was proclaimed to be the God before whom man bows and serves. Hunger was proclaimed man’s first and holiest need, the need by whose satisfaction man would be liberated from God. All of history came to be regarded as the history of man’s procuring of food, the changes in the ways and means of food production. It was said that before he could think and believe, a man must have first eaten and drunk, must have reproduced his own flesh. This theory first arose in Foodnik circles, but later gradually took on the character of pagan food-idolatry. . . . What we need is a philosophy that, while beginning from hunger, would arrive not at the idolatry of the material, but at the self-sacrificial beneficence of the maternal, the universal womb that conceives the human child from the Father and nurses it at the breast of the earth.
. . . Food is holy not because it satisfies man’s flesh but, first and foremost, because it intensifies that spiritual thirst which can be slaked only by the fruits of the Tree of Life; and second, because in eating, man assimilates to his flesh the low, unspiritual plant and animal world and exalts it by transforming it into the nutritive elements of his developing mind and free soul. Through food, man humanizes external nature and simultaneously transcends the human in himself, striving to satisfy his highest needs.
Starting from the fundamental fact of hunger, some arrive at the fetishism of food, while others arrive at the worship of the Foodgiver. Christianity and materialism have a common starting point: “Give us this day our daily bread.” But from here, one takes the high road, the other the low road. In food, the risk of the fall coincides with the hope of salvation. . . . Man is vile in his greed, but at the same time he is equipped for this thirst that nothing can satisfy—in his quest for food he both robs his neighbor and offers up his prayers. It is hunger that brings him into this life, proclaiming itself in the cries of the newborn. It is hunger that leads him on towards the other life, for the flesh is sated with the delicacies of this world, while the spirit keeps thirsting for more and more, for eternal life. . . .
If a man did not know hunger, he would not be dependent on the material world, but neither would he strive towards the spiritual world. Without hunger he would be satisfied and self-sufficient; it is hunger that makes him human by dividing his body into flesh and spirit. An animal can also be hungry, but only incompletely: its hunger is satisfiable. Man, in satisfying one hunger, feels the other more sharply. Man is the insatiable animal. (V.R., “On the Sweetest Worlds”)
Among the Foodniks are several distinct groups of Dietarians, who sanctify not food in general but those particular varieties of food needed for the spiritual healing of individuals and entire nations. From their point of view, food is a more important factor than the condition of the arts and sciences in defining the health or illness of a society. Or rather, culture and its fundamental categories are the system of dietary rules, the elaboration of a society’s relation to its food, the method of preparing and consuming it.
Culture, in its primary sense, is the cultivation of the soil for the gratification of the belly; or, according to an old but exact metaphor, it is the “feast of the spirit.” While culture has developed in many spiritual directions over the millennia, its essence remains what it always was: the gratification of a refined taste, the quest for variety. Culture is the sequence of dishes served and removed at table: sweet following sour, boiled following raw, vegetable following meat. So tragedy is followed by comedy, a bucolic landscape is followed by a technocratic utopia, and predatory imperialism is served with a sauce of peaceful coexistence. . . . At the highest level, dietary preferences turn into the various types of worldview: the esthetic worldview, honoring (sweet) beauty, or the ethical worldview, honoring (bitter) justice; the ecological (raw) or technocratic (cooked) worldview; the democratic (abundance of food) or the aristocratic (refinement of seasonings); the pacifist (vegetarian) or the activist, ranging all the way to the revolutionary (carnivorous, or even cannibalistic); the religious (fast days) or the secular (meat days); the conservative (canned goods) or the radical (root vegetables). . . . Culture is the table ritual of all mankind. (Yu. A., “Culture and Diet”)
The Dietarians are subdivided into several groups, each of which offers its own principles of a healthy diet: we know of fasters, vegetarians, raw-eaters, Yin-eaters, Yang-eaters, salt-freeniks, sugar-freeniks, etc.—more than forty groups in all. Here are some extracts from the preface to The Philosophy of Food, an anthology certified by the Interconfessional Soviet of Dietologists:
...It is remarkable that great significance has been attributed to the choice of food in all religious systems: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity. In the holy codices such as the Pentateuch or the Talmud or the Koran or the rules of Christian monasteries, enormous space is given to questions of the preparation and consumption of food. Clean and unclean food, kosher and tref, fast day and meat day, permitted and forbidden—this is the fundamental opposition separating the sacred world from the profane and defining the whole life of believers in opposition to the “pagans,” the “goyim,” the “unbelievers,” the “uninitiated.” Not only were food products classified by their ethico- hygienic qualities, but they also defined the sacred rhythm of human life by their intertwining with the structure of the religious calendar: feasts, fasts, and neutral days were distinguished by the permission or prohibition of one or another kind of food.
What accounts for the significance of the “lower,” physiological levels of life for its highest levels, as realized in the religious self- consciousness of society? To bring man into connection with the other world, religion establishes the strictest limitations on his contacts with this earthly world. It selects such foodstuffs as stimulate man’s animal energies, contribute to his noble behavior, liberate him from his material inclinations, tame his bestial instincts, avert the sin of murder and the torture of animals. It is precisely for this reason that food of animal origin is most often excluded from the diet. Or if it is used, as among the Jews, then the slaughter itself is conducted by a special method—instantaneous and painless, so that the animal’s terror and suffering may not remain in its cells to be transmitted to man.
. . . Thus, there is a certain justification for the trite saying “You are what you eat.” This formula is not the exclusive property of reductionist materialists; it could be affirmed, with certain reservations, by the ideologues of many confessions. True, it would sound a little different to say “You are what you don’t eat,” i.e., you become human through abstinence, through refusing certain kinds of food on the grounds of their being unclean or overstimulating. But in either case—that of extreme materialism or extreme spiritualism—the very being of man is defined through a system of dietary requirements and prohibitions. “Give us this day our daily bread” is the general truth of both Christianity and Marxist materialism. The difference, of course, is crucial: does man live by bread alone, or does he need spiritual “bread” as well? But bread, as the first object of eating, signifies man’s original defectiveness, as well as his means of perfecting himself. Bread is the alphabet of human essence, a separate part of man’s flesh, which must be gotten by the sweat of his brow from external nature. And if hunger sometimes turns him into a beast, it also distinguishes him from the beasts; for their hunger passes, while his does not.
. . . The primal holiness of food is also confirmed by contemporary mythological research. The language of foodstuffs is mankind’s most ancient sign system, and lies at the foundation of all semiotic processes in culture. “Fried,” “baked,” “boiled,” “steamed,” “dried,” “salted,” etc.—the flavors and the methods of food preparation profoundly influenced men’s ideas about the place of certain elements (“fire,” “water,” “air”) in universal systems of classification, in differing types of ideologies and aesthetic states. Thus, “sweet” corresponds to the idyllic sense of the world, “bitter” to the tragic, “salty” to the satiric, and “sour” to the elegiac.
. . . All this allows us to assert that Dietetics—the combination of dietary prescriptions and the methods of selecting, preparing and consuming food—is the most important and dynamic component of human material and spiritual culture. . . . This is why Dietology is one of those disciplines without which it is impossible to give a scientifically exact definition of the phenomenon of man or to study the laws of his historical development.
In recent years, Dietology has come to the fore of the human sciences. Its methods are gaining a general philosophic acceptance and influencing the methodologies of the other sciences. As sociology was the engine of general ideas in the humanities in the first half of the 20th century, and linguistics in the second half, so by the beginning of the 21st century dietology will very likely take its place as queen of the liberal arts and sciences. The convertibility between the substance of the world and the flesh of man is the central question, whose solution will have broad implications for both the human and the natural sciences. For food is precisely that in which substance and flesh converge; it is the symbol of their union, their wedding crown. Dietology is destined to become the essential foundation and confirmation of the anthropic principle, the assertion of man’s interdependence with the physical parameters of the Universe, which has penetrated so deeply into contemporary science: “the Universe is such as it must be in order that man could arise and exist in it.”
But this conclusion, which science has reached so paradoxically in spite of its own naturalistic prejudices, only repeats the divine commandment to the effect that the whole world was created for the use and sustenance of man. For the destiny of the organic world is to be food for man; the highest of the creatures was prefigured by the imprint of food in the very frame of the earth and all that lives in it. “And God said: Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing plant which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food” (Gen. 1.29). Dietology is the central discipline linking the natural and the human sciences, uniting the human approach to the Universe with the cosmic approach to man himself. . . . (P.V., A.G., “Dietology: The Science of the 21st Century,” preface to the anthology The Philosophy of Food)
Domesticans (Houseniks)
This is a religio-cultural order that preaches the values of domestic life and creatively multiplies them. The Order of Domesticians, as it is sometimes called in Western Europe, is widespread in many countries of the world, but the experience of their Russian brethren is generally considered to be particularly edifying because it was they who had to discover how to preserve hearth and home in the Age of Homelessness.
In those days, all life, action, and speech had taken to the streets, to the droning hives of the town squares. A brutal kind of social life brutally pursued a man to his very doorstep, trampling at his threshold and panting at his door. But the poor little apartments did not give up their secrets. They had taken treasuries of knowledge and faith into their safekeeping, transforming themselves over the decades into catacomb churches, museums, and laboratories. In this way they not only fulfilled their mission to the culture of our own country, but gave the whole world a model of the domestication of civilization. . . . Just as the great transition from the primitive era to civilization was marked by the domestication of wild animals, so the transition to the next era will be marked by the domestication of technology, industry, and politics. Once it was the state of nature that was wild and alien to civilized man; now it is the artificial environment, civilization itself, that has become a wilderness, and the next step of human development will be to adapt civilization more closely to man, to house it within the walls of his private life. . . . Nowhere has civilization shown such unbridled and rapacious qualities as in Russia, and nowhere else has domestic life undergone such a cruel test, taking upon itself the task of preserving the authentic values of civilization, which civilization itself had renounced. (L.N., “The Domestication of Animals, Ideas, and Machines”)
In the works of the Domesticans, the home is presented as an ideally organized, personified space, adapted to the personality of its owner and reproducing his inner world.
My home is my second “I,” a spatial image of my soul. Some souls are simple, open, loving; others are reserved, cold, haughty. Every type of soul has its own peculiar type of household arrangement. The street and the town square are the soul of the masses . . . there no one is himself, we all get pushed onto the crossroads of other people’s views and opinions, and every “I” acts like “someone else.” But the home is a space that has been appropriated, where even outsiders can “belong” to one another. The home is an “I” at the outer limits of its capacity, which can include others as well.
In the biblical Book of Proverbs, the entire world is represented as a House built by Divine Wisdom, the dwelling place of God Himself. “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way . . . before He made the earth or the fields, or the first of the dust of the world. . . . Wisdom has builded her house: she has hewn out her seven pillars” (Prov. 8.22, 26; 9.1). The house is prior to earth and fields, for these are already turned outward, flung open, exposed; they have left the house of Wisdom like prodigal daughters. . . . Thus our everyday house is built on the model of that original dwelling of Wisdom, as man himself is made in the image and likeness of God. (M.A., “The House and the Soul”)
The proud singers of brilliant peaks and stormy waves—what contempt they pour on the domestic hearth! They jeer at the ordinary householder, absorbed in his daily life, they beat at his windows and proudly point out to him that he came from the street and really belongs to an unwalled world, “wide open to the raging of the winds.” And only in a distant corner of our memory do we still preserve an image of the sage who, just like our ordinary householder, quietly keeps house and does not participate in the life of the street, but only contemplates it from his window. Is there any difference between our householder and this sage? Only one: the householder has never left his home, while the sage has returned to his, enriched by his knowledge of the world where he found nothing better than his own home, his own original place. Indeed the world as a whole—if only we stop drifting about its middle reaches and go straight to its ultimate thresholds and doors—the world as a whole is wisely built, cosy and homey....
The householder has no history. The sage’s history is departure and return. The home he has returned to is not just a cosy place: it is his lot in life. He has visualized everything in it from afar, with longing, and now everything in it has become a revelation. The householder has never left his home; the sage, by returning to his, has made it coextensive with the whole universe: even in the very arrangement of the furniture one can sense that Thought has been at work here, bringing home the distant times and spaces it has known. Outwardly, though, there is no way of distinguishing the householder from the sage, both bundled in their housecoats, holed up in their domestic fortresses. They have the same armchairs, the same taste in flowers and upholstery. The sage’s journey is present in his home, but only the most attentive eye can occasionally catch a glimmer of it as the furniture of his soul slides over the furniture of his house. (V.N., “ ‘I am a Householder . . .’: The Wisdom of Homemaking in the Poetry of Pushkin”)
In recent times, not only religio-ethical but also socio-technical theories have placed the home at the head of the coming world order. With the development of information systems, the home is taking on not only family life but social and productive functions as well. Those activities of labor, distribution, management, and communication that used to take people far away from home are now being moved into the home itself. Thus, the home is becoming an all-purpose institution: a factory, a library, a movie theatre, a school, an art gallery, a political club, a warehouse, a store. In the advanced countries, the electronic dwelling is already absorbing the entire system of municipal, national and even planetary and cosmic communications: the walls are becoming more and more permeable, and, while still giving a comfortable sense of privacy, they let in everything one needs, thus providing a domestic model of the universe. In the words of an American Domestican-futurologist, “The extension of the electronic dwelling...points to a renaissance of the home as the central institution of the future, which will come to perform more and more economic, medical, educational and social functions.” (O.T., “The Third Wave”)
Thus, the world is becoming more and more domestic: in the growth of technical equipment we can observe a higher providence, for it is said that “God will bring the orphans home” (Ps. 67.7). Fragmented humanity, broken up into millions of cocoons, each a martyr of isolation, is now finally being reunited with itself. But not, this time, on crowd-filled streets, but in a domestic seclusion suddenly become celebratory and sociable, populated with friends, thoughts, and books. Through domestic seclusion, God is bringing the orphans into the home of all mankind. (I.K., “The Holes-and-Corners Gospel”)
Adam’s expulsion from Paradise was the beginning of world history, so stern and unsparing to man. History has produced thorns and thistles in place of spiritual bread. Life on its stony soil has been naked and savage; sweat and blood has been the return on man’s labor here. But an image of Eden is preserved in the mystery of the human habitation. Here the householder has built himself a paradise on the model of that paradise from which he was once expelled. Here everything warms and feeds him, indulges and protects him, is kind and merciful to him. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil pokes its twisted branches through windows and doors, pleading and urging: Open up, taste, try. The hiss of the many-headed serpent intrudes from the streets and squares: Come on out, lord of the world, test your riches, make trial of your power, and you will become as God.—No! Stop up your ears and close the shutters! Here in your own home the tree of life, your family tree, is growing, its boughs laden with the fruits of domestic wisdom and love. Love for wife and children, satisfaction with the little that life has given you, because it was given precisely to you. . . . This red fruit will not crumble in your hands into black rot, like the wicked gifts of knowledge and history: freedom, equality, the sweet rights of citizenship all turn, as the poet said, into the bitterness of “poisoned bread and polluted air” (Osip Mandelstam).
How mercifully God has arranged it! Everything you need is here, close by, and everything you don’t need is there, far off. The Devil wants it just the other way: he tries to shove you into the very heart of places where you have no business: the boss’s office, a crowded meeting, a busy market. He likes to carry you off as far as he can from your own kith and kin, tearing you from your roots so that you begin to pine away. Your house, according to ancient tradition, is the paradisical tree of life, in whose very heart you live until you cross the threshold into the circles of hell. (G.G., “Theology of the Home”).
Domesticans are not just stay-at-home old fogeys who would rather have a few friends over than go to a noisy party, and avoid traveling whenever they can. Domesticans take a constructive approach to domestic affairs—active housekeeping rather than passive staying home. They try to turn their homes into studios, museums, temples—that is, to bring into their own homes the whole complex of practical and artistic pursuits that are usually distributed among several different, narrowly functional buildings. Out there in the theatres and casinos, in the factories and fields, many subjects have one predicate: thousands of people are dancing or playing roulette, turning out machine parts or loading conveyors or following the plow. But here in the home, a single subject has many predicates: master and servant, son and father, worker and teacher, reader and maker. A home is an infinity turned back on itself, a synthesis of all the arts, sciences, trades, and faiths that are scattered abroad to the far corners of civilization. . . .
Domesticans profess the principle of “much in little.” They try to squeeze into the small volume of their home as many spheres of knowledge and sociability as possible, centered in books and guests. They have special rites for the reception of guests. They gather around the kitchen table, in the warmth of their cooking, near their peaceful ovens, to celebrate the mystery of universal human brotherhood, inaccessible to the streets and squares. Brotherhood can be perfected only at the hearth of a single home. In ancient times it was the clan that gathered around the fire, while in present-day kitchens Domesticans perform the miracle of uniting guests unrelated by blood.
The warmth of the domestic hearth extends not only in space, where it attracts guests, but also in time, where it unites descendants with their ancestors. Domesticans venerate things that have come down to them by inheritance, and make special niches for them—the so-called “penatangles,” from the Latin name (“penates”) for the household gods who (so unlike the mischievous Russian house-spirits!) were considered faithful guardians of the house. Here one may find an old- fashioned watch, a magnifying glass, a book that grandfather liked to read. . . . Thus the Domesticans have revived the ancient tradition of honoring household gods—not as allegorical statues, but as actual things that have been of service to the house and can transmit the warmth of love, sincerity, and mutual understanding from one generation to the next. A home, according to the Domesticans, is a nexus of various times and spaces, a meeting place of near and distant ones, of the living and the dead, where all belong to each other.
Domesticans prefer to homeschool their children. They rarely take membership in libraries, preferring to keep all necessary books at hand in their own homes. If conditions permit, they hang pictures, keep a piano, and set aside space for games, an aquarium and a little herbarium. . . . In a word, the home becomes a refuge for that authentic culture which has been expelled from mass society. Such is the law of development of a world civilization that brings together its various professions, interests, and worldviews in the warmth of the domestic hearth. . . . Culture at its height was always created in narrow circles, on noblemen’s estates—under the domestic roof and not under a circus tent with hungry crowds panting after bread and spectacles. Culture has come to pine for domesticity. It is weary of the coldness of cosmic space, social alienation and mass solidarity, avant-garde enthusiasm and modernistic tragedy, collectivistic heroics and private irony. It needs a home—not the external, mechanical solidarity of the crowd, but the clan-closeness of the family. The move of culture into kitchen and dacha, apartment living and single room, signals the era of the Second Domestication. (I.M., “A Course in World Housekeeping”)
From Cries in the New Wilderness, Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002
Mikhail N. Epstein (Epshtein) was born in Moscow in 1950 but has lived in the United States since 1990, where he teaches at Emory University. He remains one of Russia's most respected philosophers and theorists, and the author of a range of quirky, highly individualistic, somewhat Borgesian projects--invented researches, disciplines, arts, neologisms on subjects as varied as “touch art,” new movements in Russian poetry, and "post-atheism." He works through what he calls "potentiation" that "both inherits the method of deconstruction and moves beyond it"-- towards a kind of constructive inventiveness. His latest project is “On the Future of the Humanities: Paradigmatic Shifts and Emerging Concepts”.
Translations of Epstein’s 17 books and approximately 400 essays and articles can often be found in library catalogues under his Russian surname, Epshtein.
Eve Adler (1945 – 2004) was an American classicist who taught at Middlebury College for 25 years, a graduate of Queens College and Brandeis University.