Kantor, A. M. Power and Affect: in the Shadow of Russia

Abstract: The most important today’s imperative is to fully understand the Russian society which we try to reform. This, in turn, requires us to reflect on the past and current states of the Russian culture. Otherwise we risk to look like the order of intellectual hermits from Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. In the book the hermits tried to escape from a dirty and noisy real world by playing Chinese music and guessing riddles solely for themselves.