Euroasian Concept of Turanian Character of the Inhabitants of Russia
50th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Kazan 2007
Tatarstan is the place of meeting of two cultures — Turkic and Slavonic, the place of cohabitation of the peoples whose national ideas have been formed on the basis of different religious traditions — Islam and Christianity. No matter how different the two religions are dogmatically, their real practices and the character of the rules of life of the people are determined by the mentalities and national psychology of the Tatar and Russian peoples. As the well-known Russian philosopher, the adherent of the Eurasian theory Nikolay Trubetskoy showed in the first half of the 20th century, the two peoples were so similar, that he even introduced a special term — Turanian character. It is characterized by militancy, exclusive firmness, devotion to traditions, devotion to traditional spiritual values and dislike of all kinds of reflections and abstractions. (Трубецкой, H. C.: О туранском элементе и русской культуре // Россия между Европой и Азией: Евразийский соблазн. М.: Наука, 1993. С. 61).
The Turanian psychological character is most peculiar to Turkic people and shows itself, above all, in their language and music. The following psychological features are marked here: relative poverty and simplicity of the material and full subjection to simple laws, synthesizing the material into a single whole characterized by utmost clarity. One main feature is dominant in all the spiritual creativeness of the Turkic people — focusing on relatively poor and rudimentary material. From this point we can turn to Turkic psychology itself. A typical Turkic person does not like to go into detail. He prefers to deal with simple and clear images, united into clear and simple schemes. This psychology determines both the way of living and the world outlook of a Turkic person. He prefers symmetry, clarity and stable balance in everything and in a ready defined form. He prefers ready ideas; searching for and creating the mainframe schemes on which his life and his world outlook are to be built are always painful for him. Therefore, certain conservatism is peculiar to him, and his world outlook is extremely stable.
The positive feature of Turanian mentality has played a beneficial role in Russian history, especially before the reign of Peter the Great, when it gave the Russian state strength and stability. In spite of the fact that Orthodox Christianity was adopted by Russians not from Turanians, but from Greeks, the attitude of Russians to Orthodoxy and the role which Christianity played in their life were considerably based on the Turanian mentality.
Russian philosophers were in the first place interested in existential problems, in the essential problems of life and death, and only in the second place – in the problems of the validity of scientific cognition, scientific rationality, etc. The same feature is peculiar to Tatar culture, which developed within the solid forms of Islam. The Tatar culture is characterized by its aversion to that side of Western rationality, which is connected with different kinds of reflections and abstractions, with high, transcendental idealizations tearing the living tissue of the world of life, the harmony of Nature and Man of the traditional society. From the very start Islam was characterized by the thesis of indissoluble unity of theory and practice (taffakur and tashkir), the thesis of practical motives of cognition. On the one hand, the latter led to extreme development of empiric investigations in the Muslim world beginning from the end of the first Millenium, but on the other — impeded the adoption of European science of the new time with its spirit of the active subject (for details see: Р. М. Нугаев: Ислам и наука// Татарстан, 1994. № 7–8).
The given arguments are of preliminary and largely speculative character and they cannot veil the contradictions unavoidable with the coexistence of Russian and Tatar national concepts, which can only be smoothed away by the principles of federalism.
Литература
- Трубецкой H.C.: О туранском элементе и русской культуре // Россия между Европой и Азией: Евразийский соблазн. М.: Наука, 1993.
- Нугаев Р. М.: Ислам и наука// Татарстан. 1994. № 7–8.