38.
Russian: *
Primitive was Spengler’s reference to Russians, as a still youthful people in contrast with the senile West. Hence ‘primitive’ is not synonymous with backward (as ‘primitive’ tribal peoples), but youthful. To Spengler, the ‘primitive peasant’ is the well-spring from which a race draws its healthiest elements during its epochs of cultural vigor. And the peasant’s work, on the land in agriculture is not to be denigrated. Agriculture is the foundation of a High Culture, enabling stable communities to diversify labor into specialization from which Civilization proceeds.
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Every High culture reflects its soul (in its mathematics, music, architecture; in the arts and the physical sciences). The Russian soul is not the same as the Western Faustian. The basis of the Russian soul is not infinite space (as in the West’s Faustian soul), but is ‘the plain without limit’. The Russian soul expresses its own type of infinity (albeit not that of the Western which becomes enslaved by its own technics at the end of its life-cycle).
The Western Culture imposed on Russia by Peter the Great, what Spengler called Petrinism, is a veneer. While it might be argued that the Soviet state enslaved man to machine, Spengler would cite this as an example of Petrinism. He calls this process “pseudomorphosis”, the bending of a young culture by a dominant older culture, and he points to the examples set by the Magian Culture.
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During the Winter of the Faustian civilization, it will not create further great forms of art and music (this creativity belongs to the youthful or ‘ spring’ epoch of a civilisation) but instead will dominate the world under a technocratic-military dispensation, before declining into the oblivion experienced by all prior world civilisations. It is after this Western decline that Spengler alluded to the next word civilisation being that of Russia. He could only hint at the possibilities.
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Spengler claimed that Russian Orthodox architecture does not represent the infinity towards space that is symbolised by the Western Gothic Cathedral nor the enclosed space of the Mosque of the Magian Culture, but instead gives the impression of sitting upon a horizon. He believed this Russian architecture is ‘not yet a style, only the promise of a style that will awaken when the real Russian religion awakens’. He was writing of the Russian culture as an outsider & by his own reckoning must have realised the limitations of his view.
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[credit: Kerry Bolton, OSWALD SPENGLER AND THE SOUL OF RUSSIA (http://katehon.com/1275-oswald-spengler-and-the-soul-of-russia.html)]