| The visionary works of Daniil Andreev (1906–1959) were written in a Stalinist jail and made public only with the advent of glasnost in Russia, in the late 1980s. They represent various forms of expression of a global interreligious mentality focused on the “free amalgamation of all religions of Light.”;The Rose of the World is a lyricized semi-academic treatise that addresses the transphysics and metahistory of our world, drawing upon a wide range of Western and Eastern religious, aesthetic, and philosophical traditions. The purpose of this dissertation is to introduce and analyze Andreev's theosophical doctrine and to determine its significance in our postmodern cultural context.;Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogue is used in this study as its methodological and structural basis. Participation in a dialogue is, for Bakhtin, a “petitionary advertedness outward from oneself, toward God.” However, dialogue is a form of discourse, and therefore it inevitably partakes of the failure of discursive thought to cognize the supersensible by means of linguistic labeling and conceptualization. It is thus not the verbal representation of an idea of the Absolute that is conducive to the knowledge of the supersensible, but the dialogic experience, the “act of pure axiological passing-beyond-oneself.” Such dichotomies as rationality and mysticism, science and art, conceptualization and symbolization appear as closely related to this epistemological difficulty.;Dante, Swedenborg, Blake, several Romantic and neo-Romantic poets and theoreticians, and a number of prominent Russian symbolists have been chosen as “representative men” who approached the above problematics each in his own unique way, in different historical contexts. Their dialogue allows to determine Andreev's position of a successor and innovator within the mystical tradition in literature and to simultaneously establish the dialogic approach to anagogic signification as the most adequate in the postmodern context. |
