Note 514 — Chapter IX · PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (C) PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL

The immeasurable difference between the Faustian and the Russian souls is disclosed in certain word-sounds. The Russian word for heaven is “nyebo,” which contains in its n a negative element. Western man looks up, the Russian looks horizontally into the broad plain. The death-impulse, too, of the respective souls is distinguishable, in that for the West it is the passion of drive all-ways into infinite space, whereas for Russians it is an expressing and expanding of self (Sichentäussern) till “it” in the man becomes identical with the boundless plain itself. It is thus that a Russian understands the words “man” and “brother.” He sees even mankind as a plane. The idea of a Russian’s being an astronomer! He does not see the stars at all, he sees only the horizon. Instead of the vault he sees the down-hang of the heavens—something that somewhere combines with the plain to form the horizon. For him the Copernican system, be it never so mathematical, is spiritually contemptible.

While our German “Schicksal” rings like a trumpet call, “Sud’bá” is a genuflection. There is no room for the upstanding “I” beneath this almost flat-roofed heaven. That “All are responsible for all”—the “it” for the “it” in this boundlessly extended plain—is the metaphysical fundament of all Dostoyevski’s creation. That is why Ivan Karamasov must name himself murderer although another had done the murder. The criminal is the “unfortunate,” the “wretch”—it is the utter negation of Faustian personal responsibility. Russian mysticism has nothing of that upstriving inwardness of Gothic, of Rembrandt, of Beethoven, which can swell up to a heaven-storming jubilation—its god is not the azure depth up above. Mystical Russian love is love of the plain, the love of brothers under equal pressure all along the earth, ever along and along; the love of the poor tortured beasts that wander on it, the love of plants—never of birds and clouds and stars. The Russian “volya,” our “will,” means principally non-compulsion, freedom not for something but from something, and particularly freedom from compulsion to personal doing. Free-will is seen as a condition in which no one else can command “it,” and in which, therefore, one may give way to one’s own disposition. “Geist,” “esprit,” “spirit,” go thus: ↗; the Russian “duch” goes thus: ↳. What sort of a Christianity will come forth one day from this world-feeling?