Michail Maiatsky

The article deals with the problem of compatibility of applying two predicates to the contemporary Russian regime: conservative and cynical. This application is not obvious: conservatism is a defender of established and/or past norms and institutions, while cynicism opposes them and strongly favours ‘life by nature’. Cynicism is a highly complex ideological and praxeological formation. In its ancient forms and variants, it existed for almost a thousand years before being revisited by medieval, Renaissance and New European thought. To understand the functioning of cynicism in contemporary Russia, it is necessary to take into account a combination of factors of different chronological reference interacting within Putinism: the Chaadaevian “deficit paradigm” (in which a flaw becomes an advantage, or even a sign of superiority), the Marxist concept of the proletariat as the vanguard force of world history (a concept nationalised in favour of the Russian proletariat) and, finally, the last important ‘station’: specific Soviet cynicism as a defensive-reactive rejection of communist ideology.

At the beginning of the twentieth-century, Germany witnessed the emergence of the ‘George-Kreis’, a creative, intellectual association led by the poet Stefan George (1868‑1933). Conceived in defiance of, and as a radical alternative to the University milieu, the Circle (forming part of a broader ‘spiritual movement’ championed by George) promoted Plato as its political and educative model. Between 1910 and 1933, the ‘Georgeans’ published six monographs on Plato, as well as numerous articles and translations, some of which are still reedited today. This article charts the development of Georgean platonism (in part, drawing on archival materials) in order to analyse the hermeneutic principles of the Circle’s ‘platonistic cult’ elaborated in reaction to the readings of University-based philosophers and philologists (notably, Paul Natorp and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff). Deliberately anachronistic, the Georgeans practised a sort of self-justificatory ‘fusion of horizons’. They believed that, by frequenting the Circle and conversing with George, esteemed as the most genuine and faithful inheritor of the Platonic spirit, they were better qualified than their academic peers to interpret the ancient philosopher’s mind. By way of conclusion, the article reviews the impact of Georgean Platonism on contemporary and subsequent Platonic studies.