Nikolai Klyuev’s “India-Russia” as a Symbol of the Total Unity of the World

Nikolai Klyuev, a native of the Old Believers of the Russian North, brought a deep understanding of the folk tradition to poetry. The North became a refuge for Schismatics who fled from the church reforms of the 17th century. They continued the tradition of the manuscript book and retained ancient knowledge about the structure of the universe. Such an artifact as The Pigeon's Book, according to the historian M.L. Seryakov, is older than the Rigveda. The Russian culture of the Silver Age discovered its antiquity in India resurrecting the legend of Hyperborea. The topic of India entered Klyuev’s life early, thanks to his mother. In his autobiographies, he claimed close acquaintance with the world of the East and Belovodye. “White India” for Klyuev is the “sacred ancestral home of humankind”, and the path from goes in different directions: to the Middle East, North Africa (Egypt), India, and even to China. In the eighteenth century, the French astronomer Jean-Sylvain Baillie formulated the Arctic hypothesis of the origin of humankind. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Fabre d’Olivet, A. Saint-Yves d’Alveidre, W.F. Warren, and B.G. Tilak developed this hypothesis. In 1912, Klyuev became close to the Workshop of Poets (Nikolai Gumilyov was one of its founders) and collaborated with the Acmeist magazine Giperborey. Klyuev’s awareness of the secrets of the past was based on the Old Believer book wisdom rather than on new-fashioned esoteric teachings. One of the sources of secret knowledge for Klyuev was the experience of Khlyst mysticism. N.I. Barsov, N.K. Roerich, N.R. Guseva, E.S. Lazarev, A.V. Kondratiev indicated the proximity of the Khlyst teachings to Hinduism. The common roots of Russia and China are found in the dragon cult, which is confirmed by Academician B.A. Rybakov; and A.V. Rachinsky and A.E. Fedorov point to the semantic proximity of Russian temples and the Indo-Iranian tradition of architecture. In his preference of the East to the West, Klyuev was close to N.F. Fedorov, the founder of Russian cosmism. The poet shared Fedorov’s ideas about the future of the Earth and the peoples inhabiting it, who will be able to overcome the conditions of a “non-brotherly state” in the name of the unity of humankind. Klyuev’s image of “India-Rus” is of a universal scale. Klyuev’s idea about the unity of humankind is relevant today. To the turn of the twentieth century, accepting the ideas of the philosophy of all-unity and cosmism, Russian literature declared the need for the peaceful coexistence of various cultural and historical communities in the name of the preservation and development of all humankind.

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