The Only European. Why Philosopher Merab Mamardashvili Did Not Emigrate from the USSR

This publication was prepared by the media project “Country and World — Sakharov Review” (project Telegram channel — “Country and World”).

Eyewitnesses recount how once, for some reason, academician Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov arrived at a pebble beach on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus wearing a suit, tie, and accompanied by an entourage. The purpose was to discuss something with Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili. The philosopher at that moment, puffing on his famous pipe, was either Kantianly or Cartesianly reflecting on something, lying in swim trunks on a towel and gazing out to sea. Witnesses said Primakov began passionately telling Mamardashvili something important. Removing the pipe from his mouth, the philosopher uttered in his famously soft baritone familiar to the country’s intelligentsia: “Zhenya, take off your clothes.”

Perhaps this is one of the finest truly philosophical pieces of advice in the world’s cultural heritage. It is multilayered and polysemous. It calls for simplicity, naturalness, fitting one’s place in the world, humbling pride for the sake of understanding the essence of things. Also, it implies dressing appropriately for the weather. And in the call to undress, there is a philosophical approach – cleansing the essence from the husk of everyday life. Incidentally, Mamardashvili mentioned “essence” when explaining to Louis Althusser why he did not emigrate from the USSR, despite being an absolutely European philosopher with a European model of everyday behavior (for which Merab, who dressed stylishly and fashionably, was criticized in Alexander Zinoviev’s “Glaring Heights”): “I stay because it is here that one can see the bare essence of things.”

European Responsibility

For the thinker, the option was not so much emigration as semi-emigration. After spending two months in Paris without official permission, he was barred from traveling abroad for many years, until 1988. Instead, he emigrated into the French and Italian languages, moving to Tbilisi, to the Vake district, on Chavchavadze Street, 24, where his sister Iza lived. Here, in a room overlooking a Tbilisi courtyard, he lived, occasionally visiting Moscow.

But even here he found no peace or detachment from the hustle and bustle, and here, in the new times, conflict awaited him. “Truth is above the nation. Merab Mamardashvili” – with this banner a group of students marched onto the street in front of the Georgian parliament in autumn 1988. Such depth was unknown even to the banners of May 1968 in Paris. Yet such depth was familiar to Russian philosophical journalism – in the person of Pyotr Chaadayev.

In that same year, 1988, the last European of Russian (Georgian? Soviet?) philosophy found himself in Paris at the international symposium “On the Cultural Identity of Europe.” His speech, published in Russian in 1991 in the Literary Gazette, was titled “European Responsibility.” According to Mamardashvili, a human being is only the possibility of becoming a person. Preserving the person within the human requires constant effort. The same applies to freedom in Mamardashvili’s philosophy: to maintain freedom, one must practice it constantly; to retain the qualities of a citizen, one must daily affirm a civil society emancipated from the state. The same applies to culture: to avoid falling into barbarism, one must “practice the complexity and diversity of life.” “I emphasize the word ‘practice’,” Merab continues, “because culture is not knowledge.”

And the same goes for Europe: to remain European, effort is required; one cannot relax. A year later, Francis Fukuyama would announce the end of history, and Europe would relax. But history will return. Mamardashvili warned: “What is happening today is similar in nature to what the First and Second World Wars demonstrated to us: we are at the same point that gave rise to these catastrophes in the depths of European culture; before us lie the same danger and the same responsibility.”

Mamardashvili recalled the times when Europe ceased to be itself, a situation exploited by Hitler. This closely resembles some dark thoughts of the characters in Romain Gary’s novel “European Education,” which tells of the Resistance during the Second World War: “Europe has the oldest cathedrals, the oldest and most renowned universities, the largest libraries, and provides the best education… But ultimately, all this praised European education teaches only how to find in oneself the courage and strong, convincing reasons to kill a man.”

Avoiding effort is a refusal of responsibility. Responsibility of Europe for its European-ness, of democracy for human freedom, of the person for remaining a person. This too is Mamardashvili: “Man is a creature of fantastic inertia and stubborn cunning: he is ready to do anything to avoid moving himself and putting himself into question.” Thus, the potential person does not become a person, and totalitarian regimes are born – with the acquiescence of man and the unwillingness to practice freedom, which demands that very effort.

Effort Over Time

Was Mamardashvili heard? Hardly, although interest in the USSR was enormous and overwhelming at that time, and he was considered the country’s leading philosopher. He was definitely heard within the country, where before his perestroika fame he was not in samizdat but in magnitizdat somewhere between Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich. This was not just uncensored knowledge, but extracensorship reflection. The Georgian Socrates unfolded a picture of reflection in Russian for his listeners.

My friend, a very curious and advanced young man (in those years), admitted years later that he would fall asleep listening to Mamardashvili on tape. A measured baritone, something intelligent but not fully understood… That is why the role of Yuri Petrovich Senokosov, who transcribed Merab Konstantinovich’s lectures, was so important. Mamardashvili’s thoughts needed to be seen with one’s eyes. In the form of letters. It was easier to think that way. In print, the philosopher’s oral thought looked like written text.

Philosopher Erich Solovyov wrote: “Mamardashvili owes Russia his uniquely European significance. The unique style and philosophical symbolism he presented to the world could only have been born in a society of total power and total intellectual subjugation.” His striving for Europeanness, absolute inner freedom, and, generally speaking, fearlessness, for which he constantly paid with punishments from the authorities, manifested in everything. Even, so to speak, in everyday life.

Joseph Brodsky immortalized the innocent Merab in “The Shore of the Incurables”: the Venetian woman whom the future Nobel laureate pursued “ended up entangled with a highly paid Armenian fool on the periphery of our circle.” Everything here is a jealous falsehood. Including the circle, which did not exist: when Mariolina de Giuliani, the Slavist from “The Shore” who “moistened the dreams of a married man,” found herself alone in Moscow, all the recommended Italianists shied away from her, fearing the KGB. Merab didn’t care; he helped her greatly. And there was no romance between them. Years later, in an interview, Mariolina stated bluntly: “He was the most interesting person among those I met, unlike Brodsky… Merab was simply a genius! Of course, he was also a womanizer, but very smart.”

Mamardashvili practiced freedom. Freedom, above all, internal freedom – in an unfree society. When the “external chains” fell, it turned out that the Soviet man, supposedly becoming post-Soviet, had “internal chains and deformations.” This detonated years later, today.

Mamardashvili passed away at 60. Only 60, although he seemed an elder, a sage. From inside today’s catastrophe, it seems he left in time because he himself, his image, his philosophy corresponded to the late Soviet era, when culture, appearing half-underground and half-open, proved incredibly productive. But only possible in those circumstances. Meanwhile, it is precisely the kind of thinking characteristic of Mamardashvili that is lacking now. But he, absent here for three and a half decades, explained everything long ago: “Democracy means… the separation of state and society… The state is an organ of society, no more.”

Mamardashvili’s last lecture was in October 1990 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, titled “Vienna at the Dawn of the 20th Century.” And again about effort: “…life itself can be defined as effort over time. The effort to remain alive.“

A month later, he was no longer alive. He spent the night at his closest friends’, in the legendary apartment on Kutuzovsky where all Moscow intelligentsia gathered – at Yuri Senokosov and Lena Nemirovskaya’s. In the small room to the left of the entrance, on the sofa that remained there until the moment Yuri Petrovich and Lena were forced to emigrate. He died at Vnukovo airport. The efforts he made were enough to consider his legacy a warning to future generations. Mamardashvili’s experience is an experience of inner freedom. So important now.