“Disappointed” in the “West”: the clash of the real and the ideal as the reason for the reassessment of certain concepts in Russian society of the XIX–XX centuries on the example of its individual representatives

The concept of "West" is one of the constants of Russian culture. From the 19th century, the time of the reception of this concept in Russia, to the present, it has occupied a strong place among the basic concepts that describe the world around Russia. As a rule, there are two mutually exclusive approaches to assessing the "West": either unconditional delight, or unconditional condemnation. A balanced approach, recognizing the positive and negative aspects of Western civilization, is less common. An interesting case is the transition from love for the "West" to disappointment or even hatred for it. This article is devoted to this case. Its purpose is to reveal the strategies of "disillusionment" in Western civilization among the representatives of Russian culture during the 19th-20th centuries. For this, sources of personal origin were studied, such as diaries, memoirs, letters, in which the authors in one form or another recorded a change in their attitude towards the “West”. The texts of well-known authors, such as A. N. Tolstoy, S. A. Yesenin, Z. N. Gippius, as well as less well-known ones, were studied. For example, the memoirs of I. M. Bogolepov, the son of the famous Russian and Soviet economist M. I. Bogolepov. The son, unlike his father, went to the West and experienced there an acute disappointment in the culture, which seemed to him exemplary before a direct collision with it. As a result of work on the research topic, the author came to the conclusion that the mechanisms of disappointment in the "West" depended on events in Russia itself. So, in the XIX century, a part of Russian society has gone from the perception of Western states and societies as identical to Russia, but, unlike it, went the “right” way, to the realization of the “otherness” of these societies and states in relation to their Fatherland. In the era of Revolution and later, among emigrants, "West" frustration was caused by "West" refusal to "save" Russia from the Bolsheviks. This position was perceived by emigrants and opponents of the Bolsheviks in Russia as a betrayal. Another mechanism of disappointment in the "West" among the Russian intelligentsia after the Revolution is associated with the unwillingness of Western elites to distinguish between "Soviet" and "Russian", as phenomena that are not identical and even hostile to each other. Part of the intelligentsia perceived the Revolution as evidence of Russia's readiness to build a new society, which they could not do in the "West". It also led to disillusionment with the idea of the "West" as a model for Russia's development. In the final part of the article, the author asks whether the desire of inner thinkers to find the ideal model for the development of society was the result of their independent scientific research and how much it was the inertia of ideas of the Enlightenment, whose intellectuals sought the answer to the same question. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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