THE AUTHOR, WHO HAS WRITTEN RUSSIA

Russia's main writer is the novelist Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevskiy. Russian culture and the Russian mentality accumulates to him, as if to some magic point. All the previous anticipates Dostoyevskiy, all the following results from him. No doubt he is Russia's greatest national genius. 

Dostoyevskiy's heritage is immense and almost all investigators agree upon the central importance of his novel, "Crime and Punishment". If Dostoyevskiy is the main author of Russia, "Crime and Punishment" is the main work of Russian literature and the fundamental text of Russian history.* 

Consequently, there is nothing accidental or arbitrary about it, and there cannot be. Certainly this book must contain some mysterious hieroglyph, in which all Russian fate is concentrated. Deciphering that hieroglyph is the equivalent of attaining knowledge of the unfathomable Russian Mystery. 

THE THIRD CAPITAL - THE THIRD RUSS

The novel is set in St. Petersburg. This fact, in itself, has a symbolic meaning. What is the sacred function of Petersburg in Russian history? By understanding this, we come near to Dostoyevskiy's position. 

St. Petersburg takes on sacred significance only in comparison with Moscow. Both capitals are bound up with each other by a ial cyclic logic, by a symbolic thread. Russia has had three capitals. The first one - Kiev - was the capital of a national, ethnically uniform state, situated on the periphery of the Byzantine Empire. That northern frontier formation did not play a very important civilizational or sacred role. A usual state for Aryan barbarians. Kiev is the capital of the ethnic Russ. 

The second capital - Moscow - is something much more important. It took on a special significance at the moment of Constantinople's fall, when Russ turned out to be the last Orthodox Christian Kingdom, the last Orthodox Christian Empire left. 

Hence it follows: "Moscow is the Third Rome". The idea of the Kingdom in the Orthodox Christian tradition has a special eschatological role: the State, by recognizing the completeness of the Church's truth is, according to Tradition, the obstacle in the way of "Ruin's son", the hindrance to the advent of the "Antichrist". 

The Orthodox Christian State, constitutionally recognizing Orthodox Christianity's truth and the Patriarch's spiritual sway, is the "cathechon", or "deterrent" (from Saint Paul the Apostle's second Letter to the Thessalonians). The introduction of Patriarchate in Russ became possible only at the moment when the Byzantine Empire had fallen as a kingdom and, consequently, the Constantinopolitan Patriarch had lost his eschatological significance. For this significance is concentrated not just in the Orthodox Christian Church hierarchy, but in the Empire which recognizes the authority of that hierarchy. Hence follows the theological and eschatological significance of Moscow, of Moscow Russ. The Byzantine Empire's fall signified, in the apocalyptic view of Orthodox Christianity, the approach of the "apostasy" period, of general recreancy. Only for a short time does Moscow turn out to be the Third Rome so as to postpone the Antichrist's advent, to put off the moment when his arrival becomes a general, universal phenomenon. Moscow since then is the capital of an essentially new State. Not a national State, but a soteriological, eschatological, apocalyptic one. Moscow Russ, with its Patriarch and Orthodox Christian King (or Czar), is a Russ which is absolutely different from the Kievan one. It is no longer on the Empire's periphery, but is the last stronghold of salvation, the Ark, the ground cleared for New Jerusalem to descend. "There will not be the Forth one". 

St. Petersburg is the capital of the Russ which comes after the Third Rome. In some sense there is no such capital, there can't be. "There won't be a Forth Rome". St. Petersburg establishes the Third Russia. Third by quality, structure and sense. It is neither a national state, nor a soteriological ark. It is a strange titanic chimera, the 'postmortem' country, the nation that lives and develops in a space that is beyond history. Petersburg is a city of "Nav" ("Death's incarnation", Old Russian), a city of the reverse side. Hence follows the assonance of the Neva River (on which Petersburg is situated) and the Nav. The city of moonlight, water, strange buildings, alien to history's rhythm, to national or religious aesthetics. The Petersburg period of Russian history was the third sense of its fate. That was a time of special Russians, of ones beyond the ark. The old believers were the last to embark the ark of the Third Rome by the christening fire which committed their huts together with them to flames. 

Dostoyevskiy is the writer of Petersburg. He is not intelligible without Petersburg. But Petersburg itself would remain in the virtual, illusive state without Dostoyevskiy. Dostoyevskiy revived it, made this enigmatic city actual, having had revealed its sense (only then does anything exist, when its sense shows through itself). 

Only in Petersburg does Russian literature appear. The Kievan period is the period of epic legends. Moscow period is the time of soteriology and national theology. 

Petersburg brings literature to Russia, the unholy rudiment of what used to be a valuable national thinking, the extolled trace of what has gone. Literature is a covering, a surface speck of sidereal waves, a vacuum, which is moaning with despair. Dostoyevskiy heeded this call of emptiness so much that everything gone, erased, forgotten was, as it were, resurrected in his heroic spiritual doing. 

Dostoyevskiy is more than literature. He is theology, epic legend. Therefore his Petersburg seeks the idea, the sense. It constantly turns to the Third Rome. It agonizingly scrutinizes the sources of the nation. 

The main character of "Crime and Punishment" is named Raskolnikov, being a direct reference to the Schism (or "Raskol"). Raskolnikov is a man of the Third Rome, "geworfen" (or "thrown") into navi Petersburg. The suffering soul, which by a strange logic suddenly found himself after self-immolation in the damp labyrinth of the Petersburg streets, yellow walls, wet roadways and morose gray skies. 

THE CAPITAL

The plot of "Crime and Punishment" is a structural analogue to Marx's "Capital": the prophecy of the coming Russian Revolution. It was simultaneously a draft to a new theology, a theology of being forsaken by God, what would become the main philosophical problem of the Twentieth Century. That theology could be called the "theology of Petersburg", navi thoughts, the intellectualism of ghosts. 

The story is extremely simple. The student Raskolnikov sharply senses the social reality as a revelation of evil, a special sensation that is so characteristic in some Gnostic, eschatological teachings. 

The potassium cyanide of civilization. The degeneracy and the vice flourishes where the organic connections, spiritual meanings and anagogic spirals of hierarchies that ascend unimpeded to heaven, are lost. The perception of unholy reality. The insufferable loss of the "Third Rome". The horror before the encounter with the universal Antichrist element, with Petersburg. Raskolnikov guesses absolutely correctly that the symbolic pole of evil is a perverted womanhood (Kali). That is that damned by religion loan capital, which equalizes the living with the lifeless and creates monsters. That is the decaying, degradation of the world. All this is the crone-usurer, the Baba-Yaga of the modern world, the Winter-Woman, Death, murderer. Out of her dirty place she spins Petersburg's web, sending through its black streets Luzhins, Svidrigaylovs, dvorniks and Marmeladovs, the "black brothers", secret agents of the capitalist sin. 

The toils of the Underworld entangle taverns and brothels, dens of misery and ignorance, and stairwells and gateways plunged in semi-darkness. Because of her senile sorcery, the Sophia, God's wisdom, turns to pitiful Sonechka with the yellow ticket. The hub of the wheel of Petersburg's evil is found. Rodion Raskolnikov completes the ontological reconnoitering. Certainly, Raskolnikov is a communist. Though he is closer to the socialist-revolutionaries, to the narodniks. Certainly, he is familiar with the contemporary social teachings. He knows foreign languages and could have familiarized himself with Marx's "Manifesto" or even with "Capital". What is important is at the beginning of the "Manifesto": "...a specter is wandering Europe...". This is not a metaphor, it is a precise definition of that special mode of being that comes about after a society becomes unholy, after "God's death". From that time on we are in the world of wraiths, in the world of visions, chimeras, hallucinations, of navi plots.** For Russia this means "journeying from Moscow to Petersburg", the incarnation into the city on the Neva, into the ghost-city. This incarnation could never be complete. 

The communist specter makes all reality ghostly. Having settled in the consciousness of the student, who searches for the lost Logos, it plunges him into a current of distorted visions: there an old libertine drags a drunk teenage girl somewhere; there Marmeladov cries in a heart-rendering way, after he has sold the last shawl of his lady-love to get money for alcohol; there demonic Svidrigaylov, the envoy of the web eternity, which is under the wardship of the usurer-crone, sidles toward Rodion's pure sister. But is this a delusion? The ghost, having possessed the consciousness, in fact rids the unconsciousness. The reality unveiled is frightful, intolerable, but true. Is it evil to understand evil? Is it an illusion to reveal the illusory character of the world? Is it insanity to realize that the humankind lives according to the laws of ill logic? The ghost of Marxism, the narcotic of disclosure, the Gnostic call to uprising against the evil Demiurge... The bloody pain of these wounds is more acute than the image of a brightly lit hall, full of well-dressed couples, whirling in the dance. 

Raskolnikov, killing the old crone, commits a paradigmatic gesture, carries out a Deed to which, in an archetypal way, the Praxis as Marxism perceives it, is reduced. Rodion Raskolnikov's Deed is the act of the Russian Revolution, the summary of all Social Democratic, Narodnik and Bolshevik literature. This is a fundamental gesture of Russian history which just came about after Dostoyevskiy, having been prepared long before him in enigmatic initial points of the national fate. All our history is divided into two parts - before the murder of the usurer-crone by Raskolnikov and after the murder. But being a phantasmal, supertemporal moment, it cast flashes forward and backward into time. It shows itself in peasant uprisings, in heresies, in Pugachov's and Razin's rebellions, in the split of the Orthodox Christian Church (Schism, Raskol), in the advent of the dark time (the events at the beginning of 17th Century Russia), in all the complicated, multi-stage, insatiable metaphysics of Russian Murder, which spread from the profundity of the initial Slavic birth to the Red Terror and Gulag. Any hand raised over a victim's scull was impelled by a passionate, vague, profound outburst. It was participation in the Common Deed and its philosophy. Killing and Death brings near the Resurrection of the Dead. 

We Russians are a blessed nation. Therefore all our manifestations - lofty and shabby, comely and terrifying - are sanctified by otherworldly senses, by rays of the otherworldly city, are washed by transcendent moisture. In the abundance of the national Grace the good and the evil are mixed, pour from one to another, and suddenly the dark lightens, whereas something white becomes a mere hell. We are as unknowable as the Absolute. We are a divine nation. Even our Crime is incomparably superior to some other's virtue. 

DON'T "KILL NOT"

Between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Russian consciousness was in a strange way possessed with comprehending one of the ten commandments - "kill not". They discussed it as if it were the Christianity essence. Theologians, revolutionaries, and terrorists constantly repeated it (Savinkov was mad for that commandment) as well as humanitarians, progressives, and conservatives. Both the theme and the argumentation around it were so important that it affected, to a considerable extent, all modern Russian consciousness. Although the significance of that formula faded with the advent of Bolsheviks, it reemerged at the end of the Soviet period and began to haunt intellectuals' brains with the renewed force. "Kill not" is not an exactly Christian and New Testament commandment, but is the Judaic and Old Testament one. This is a part of the Law, the Torah, that regulates, as a whole, the exoteric, outer, social and ethical norms of Israeli popular life. That commandment doesn't have any special significance. You can find something analogous in most traditions, in their social codes. In Hinduism the equivalent is called "ahimsa", "non-violence". This "kill not", as well as the rest of the paragraphs of the Law, regulate human freedom, directing it to the stream which, according to the spirit of Tradition, belongs to the better part, to its "right-hand side". In addition, it is significant that "kill not" does not have any absolute metaphysical sense. As well as all exoteric statues this commandment just serves with the others in keeping the collective existence in order and for preserving the community from falling into chaos ("The Law has committed nothing", according to Saint Paul the Apostle). In principle, if one compares the Old Testament reality with the modern one, the formula to "kill not" approximately corresponds to the inscription "smoking is forbidden", put up in the theater's foyer. Smoking in a theater is not allowed, it is not good. When some strained spectators begin to smoke, it's a state of emergency for the usherettes. Such people are condemned by public opinion and subjected to repression by the servants of justice. 

It is very significant that the Old Testament is full of defiant non-observance of that commandment. Murder is all around. It is committed by not only sinners, but also by righteous men, kings, anointed sovereigns, even prophets. Elijah's favorite pupil, the prophet Elisha, was especially stern: he had no mercy even for innocent little ones. They killed during wars, killed natives and aliens, killed criminals and those who have killed, killed women. They had no mercy for infants, the aged ones, goyim, prophets, idolaters, sorcerers, sectarians, relatives. A lot of things were destroyed. In the Book of Job, Yahweh - without any special reason except a fairly superficial controversy with Lucifer - treats in a sadistic way his own chosen and virtuous man.

When the latter, covered with leprosy, gets indignant at this, Jahwe cows him with two geo-political*** monsters: the land called Behemoth and the sea called Leviathan, i.e. Jahweh mortifies him in the moral sense too. Modern Biblical investigation proves convincingly that the original text of the Book of Job comes to its end at the peak of the tragedy, and the naively moralistic end was added by Levites long after, who were terrified by the primordial, rigid nature of that most archaic of "Old Testament" fragments. 

In other words, in the Judaic context where the commandment to "kill not" was directly taken from, it has neither any absolute character nor any special significance. 

There was no controversy on that theme and apparently no reflection was given it with any express purpose. That is not to say that the commandment was never taken into account. It was: they tried not to shed blood for no purpose. They also bewared the rabbinical court. If someone was finished off in vain, a punishment followed. The usual law. The ordinary commandment. Nothing special. The standard of human conduct. In Christianity everything is different. Christ is the fulfillment of the Law. The Law ends with him. The Law's mission is carried out. In some sense, it is removed from the agenda. Exactly "removed", but not repealed. The spiritual problems pass on to a radically different plane. From now on the Post-Law, the era of Grace, begins. "The protection of Law is overcome". Strictly speaking, the advent of such an era signifies the unimportant character of commandments. 

Even the very first commandment of worshipping One Lord is overcome by the New Testament, by the Precept of Love for Him. Through the Incarnation, the Logos-God brings about absolutely new relations between the Maker and all creation, and among the creatures themselves. From then on everything happens under the sign of Emmanuel, by the beneficial formula, "God is with us". God is not somewhere far away, He performs not just the role of Judge and Law-giver, but also the role of the Beloved and Loving One. The New Commandment does not reject the ten previous ones, but makes them unnecessary. 

New Testament humanity is in a cardinal way different from the old, Judaic (or heathenish) one. It bears the sign of transcendent Love. That is why the dichotomy of Law- "worship - worship not", "singular - plural", "steal - steal not", "seduce - seduce not" and, finally, "kill - kill not"- doesn't make sense anymore. 

In Christian holiness, all means are expressed positively. The new man needs no rules here, he lives for one thing - the sober, everlasting, undiluted Love, staying in prayer and contemplation. Here, there's not just "kill not". The Christian saints would laugh at such caution for in them the duality is already abolished, the barrier between self and non-self is crushed. Moreover, they want to be killed, they aspire to suffer, they long for martyrdom. However, valuable Christian life doesn't have any relation to the old Ten Commandments. They are once and forever overcome in the sacred christening. Further, there is only the realization of Grace.

But let's consider a Christian not in holiness, not in monkshood, not in asceticism and the hermitic life. Will the idea set by the Old Testament order be valid for him? No. He is christened, which means born from above, and consequently God is with him too. Inside, but not outside. Therefore, even being a sinner, the unworthy one too lives beyond the old man, in the new being, in the stream of the undeserved light of Grace. Observing or not observing Old Testament legislation has nothing to do with the intimate essence of the Christian existence. 

Of course, it is more convenient for a society to have dealings with those who are obedient and observe rules. For a Christian society too. But all this doesn't have any common measure with the Church sacrament, with the mystical life of a believer. Here the most interesting element begins. A Christian, by overstepping some Old Testament commandment, in fact demonstrates that he did not complete in himself the mysterious nature of the New Man, the potential personality cast by the Holy Spirit in the font of christening. 

But who can boast that he has reached full deification? The more one is holy, the more mean, sinful, terrible he seems to himself before the face of the Shining Trinity. Consequently, as in the case of the yurodivy ("God's fools") who disparaged the human aspect, falling can be, in a paradoxical Christian way, a sacrament. 

Observing the Ten Commandments isn't a decisive factor for an Orthodox Christian. Only one thing is important for him: Love, the New- absolutely New- Testament, the Love Testament. The Ten Commandments without Love is the way to hell. And if Love is, then they have no significance anymore. This was all clear to radical Russian intellectuals. In Boris Savinkov's book, "The Pale Horse", a terrorist named "Vanya" (a literary character, inspired by Ivan Kalyayev) says before committing a murder: "And the other way - Christ's way to Christ... Listen, if you love a lot, really love, you can then kill, can you not?" 

And further - 

"...one must undergo a cross torment, one must determine on doing all this out of love and for love. But absolutely out of love and for love... So I live, and what for? Maybe I live for my death-hour. I pray: Lord, give me death in the name of love. You cannot pray for murder, can you?". 

Savinkov lived, thought, wrote, and murdered after Dostoyevskiy. But nothing is added to Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov murders not just for humankind's sake (though for it too), he murders for the sake of Love. In order to go through suffering, he has to die, to kill death in himself and others. Ivan Kalyayev, as well as Savinkov himself, are profoundly Russian, profoundly Orthodox Christian, profoundly "dostoyevskian-type" people: having an evidently divine character, along with the entire nation, and filled with such lofty, paradoxical and Orthodox Christian Thought, a comparison which makes the most refined and profound Western philosophical schemes turn insipid. Russians don't formulate a theology, they endure it, live it throughout all there lives. This is the theology, coming through pores, through breath, through tears, through sleep and grimaces of wrath. Through torment and torture. Through the wet and bloody, carnal and spiritualized element of the New Life. 

With Love and for Love's sake one may do everything. This doesn't mean, that one must do everything and that all commandments should be countermanded, rejected. On no account. One should just demonstrate with one's life and gestures that there is - and this is the chief thing - another measure of being, the new light, the light of Love. 

The place of the usurer-crone's murder is St. Petersburg. So this is the place of Love in Russia, locus amoris. 

Rodion raises two hands, two angular signs, two sinew plexus, two runes over the wintry shriveled skull of the Capital. In his hand there is a coarse, gross, crudely made item. With this item, the central ritual of Russian history, and of Russian mystery, is committed. The wraith materializes, the moment falls out of the system of earthly time (Goethe would have gone immediately crazy, having seen which moment in fact stopped...). Two theologies, two testaments, two revelations meet in the magic point. This point is absolute. 

Axe is its name.

LABRIS

The short genealogy of the axe.

The most brilliant hypotheses concerning this item - its origin and its Symbolism - was advanced by Herman Wirth, a German scientific genius and a specialist in the sphere of human prehistory and ancient letters. Wirth showed that the twofold axe was the primordial symbol of the Year, of the circle, of its two halves, one is following the winter solstice, the other is foregoing it. The standard (not twofold) axe correspondingly symbolizes one half of the Year, as a rule the springtime, the ascending half. 

Moreover, the utilitarian use of an axe for chopping trees, also according to Wirth, bears a relation to yearly symbolism, for the Tree in Tradition means Year. Its roots are the wintry months, its crown are the summer ones. Therefore chopping trees is correlated, in the primordial symbolical context of the sacred societies, with the advent of the New Year and the old one's end.

The Axe is simultaneously the New Year and the instrument with which the old is destroyed. Simultaneously it is a cutting instrument, splitting Time, snipping the umbilical cord of its span off in the Winter Solstice's magic point, when the Sun's greatest Mystery of death and resurrection comes about. 

The rune in the ancient runic calendar depicting the axe was called "thurs" and was dedicated to God Thor. It fell on the first months of the New Year. Thor was the Axe-God or its symbolic equivalent, the Hammer-God or Miollnir. With this Hammer-Axe, Thor smashed the skull of the World Serpent, Irmunganthr, who floated in the lower waters of darkness. Again the obvious solstice myth, connected with the point of the New Year. The Serpent is the Winter, the cold, the lower waters of the Sacred year, where the polar sun descends to. Thor, here he is both the Sun and the spirit of the Sun, overcomes the cold's grasp and sets the Light free. On the later stages of the myth, the Sun-Light figure is divided into two - the savior and the saved - and then into three with the addition of salvation's instrument, the axe. In the primordial form, all those personalities were something united - god-sun-axe (hammer). 

The earliest inscription of the axe sign in the ancient Paleolithic caverns and rock carvings were analyzed by Herman Wirth in the light of the entire ritual and calendar structure. He traced the amazing constancy of the axe proto-sense through the most different by both age and geographic location cultures and languages. He showed the etymological and semantic relation of words which mean 'axe' with other symbolic notions and mythological subjects, which are also associated with the mystery of New Year, the middle of Winter, the Winter Solstice. 

Especially interesting are the indications that the symbolic meaning of "axe" is strictly identical with two other ancient hieroglyph-word-items: "labyrinth" and "beard".

The "Labyrinth" is a development of the idea of a year spiral, twisting to the New Year and then right away starting to untwist. "Beard" is merely the masculine sun's light in the autumn-winter half of the year circle (the hair as a whole are the sun's rays). Therefore in the runic circle another rune - "peorp" - looks like the axe, but means the beard. In the middle of the Labyrinth lives Minotaurus, the monster, the human-bull, the equivalent of Irmunganthr, the World Serpent and... the usurer crone. Dostoyevskiy described the ancient mythological subject, the secret paradigm of a symbolic succession, the primordial ritual, which our ancestors practiced for many millennia. But this is not just an anachronism or uncoordinated fragments of the collective unconscious. In fact the matter is about a much more important eschatological picture, about the sense and gesture of the End of Times, about the sacred apocalyptic moment, when time collides with Eternity, when the fire of Doomsday blazes. 

The Russians are the blessed nation, and Russian history is the resume of world history. To us, like to a temporal, spatial and ethnic magnet, the destiny sense of centuries gravitates with increasing progression. The First and the Second Rome were just for the Third one to appear. The Byzantine Empire was the prophecy of the Holy Russ. The Holy Russ in the apocalyptic way drew itself to the wraith-city named St. Petersburg, where Russia's greatest prophet Fyodor Dostoyevskiy appeared. The scene of his main novel, "Crime and Punishment", is set in the labyrinth of Petersburg's streets and the novel's main characters are Russia's main characters. Among them, the most important are Raskolnikov, the usurer-crone and the axe. In addition, the axe is the beam that connects Raskolnikov with the usurer-crone. Consequently, world history - through the history of Rome, through the history of the Byzantine Empire, through the history of Russia, through the history of Moscow, through the history of St. Petersburg, through the history of Dostoyevskiy, through the history of "Crime and Punishment", through the history of the novel's main characters - is reduced to the AXE. 

Raskolnikov splits the capitalist crone's head. The name "Raskolnikov" ("Raskol" means literally a "split") itself indicates the axe and the operation it makes. Raskolnikov performs the New Year ritual, the Doomsday mystery, the celebration of the Sun's resurrection. 

Capitalism, creeping to Russia from the West, from the sunset side, carnally represents the world serpent. Its agent is the spider-crone, spinning a web of usurious slavery. She is also part of it.

Raskolnikov brings the axe of the East. 

The axe of the rising sun, the axe of Freedom and the New Dawn. 

The novel should have ended in a triumphal way with the full justification of Rodion. Raskolnikov's crime is the punishment for the usurer. The era of the Axe and proletarian Revolution is proclaimed. But... additional forces entered the affair. The investigator Porfiriy turns out to be especially insidious. That representative of Kafkian jurisprudence and Pharisaical pseudo-humanitarianism begins a complicated intrigue to defame the main character and his actions in Raskolnikov's own eyes. Porfiriy, in the mean way he juggles the facts, leads Raskolnikov up a blind labyrinth of doubt, nervousness, and mental derangement. He doesn't just try to put Rodion in jail, but seeks to suppress him in a spiritual way. The main character should have treated that scum the same way he did the crone: "Smash the serpent's skull". But our personage turns out to be unable to gather himself up... Then the rest of the tissue of the myth also turns out to be unraveled. Raskolnikov, according to the primordial scenario, should have gotten Wisdom-Sophia out of the brothel, like Gnostic-Simon did with Helena. Even the scene of reciting the gospel narration about Lazarus's resurrection remained from the original version: Sophia, rescued by Love and upon being released from usurious slavery propagates the universal resurrection. But here for some reason she joins in a conspiracy with the "humanitarian serpent-worshipper", Porfiriy. She begins to suggest to Raskolnikov an idea: that the old woman, she said, should have been spared, that she was "not a shaking louse". The society of love of animals, including the world serpent from pitch-darkness. A care for a capitalist's tear.

How can this all be explained?

Dostoyevskiy was a prophet and had the gift of clairvoyance. He foresaw not only the revolution (the stroke on the skull with the axe), but also its degeneration, its betrayal, its being put on the market. The Sophia of socialism gradually degraded to humanitarian Pharisaic dithering. Porfiriys penetrated the party and undermined the basics of the Soviet country's eschatological reign. 

First they gave up the permanent revolution, then the purges, and then Sonya, under the guise of the late-Soviet intellectuals, again started whining about the silliest - to "kill not"... And blood gushed as a river. This wasn't the blood of usurer-crones, but that of really innocent children.

There exists a virtual version of "Crime and Punishment", which has an absolutely different ending. It has to do with the new, coming period of Russian history. Till now we lived through the first version. But now that's all over. The new myth is incarnating, the scarlet sword of Boris Savinkov is scorching the hands of a new youthful Russia, the Russia of the End Times.

Axe is the name of that Russia. 

NOTES

* Let's take notice right away of the fact that quite a few of the concepts in this article are suggested by reading the very interesting work of V. Kushev, "730 steps", in which the author analyzes the paradigm of "Crime and Punishment". 

** Stirner wrote in "German Ideology": "Mensch, es spukt in deinem Kopfe!", what could be approximately translated as, "Man, it is your head what is haunted by ghosts". Regarding the exact translation of the German verb "spuken", it is derived from "der Spuk" (a wraith) and is analogous to the French "hanter" and the English "to haunt". Father Seraphim indicated to us an interesting analogy, having remembered that in Old Russian there existed the verb "stuzhati", meaning the same as the German "spuken" - to be overcome by the evil ones, be possessed by the invisible beings. Jacques Derrida in his text "Hamlet and Hecuba" (1956) pointed out the similarity between Shakespeare's drama and Marx's "Manifesto". In both cases everything begins with the ghost, from expecting its appearance. Derrida points out precisely that "the moment of the ghosts doesn't belong to usual time". In other words, time in the world of ghosts doesn't have any common measure with the time of the human world. It is very closely connected with the very essence of Petersburg, the ghost-city, living beyond the sacred time of Russian history in some subtle sleep, sidereal dizziness. This is the ghost-like eternity of Svidrigaylov. This "flying Dutchman-like" city, its lights, its chandeliers, its candles and bulbs, and its Enlightenment are nothing more than St. Elm's lights, the fictitious luminescence of a marsh-like quasi-existence. Stuzhalyy gorod, the haunted city, la ville hantee... The place of insanity, illness, fever, perversions, vice and...dawning consciousness. 

*** In modern geopolitics, Leviathan and Behemoth means sea power and land power correspondingly. The Leviathan is Atlantism, the West, America, the Anglo-Saxon world, and market ideology. The Behemoth is the Eurasian, continental structure, and is associated with Russia, hierarchy and tradition. 

Translated by Vladislav Ivanov
Edited by DAN