Russia and the West: Dialectics of Cultures Interaction and Opposition of Mythologies

Authors of this article state that any post-industrial society is divided into an elite and a mass (S. Bauman, P. Virilio). The elite is exterritorial and mobile, masses, on the contrary, are limited territorially and their movements are either tourism, or the labor migration. Culturally elites tend to interact among themselves more often than they do it with their nations. As for masses, they use, on the one hand, different objects of “other” cultures, but, on the other hand, they oppose each other at the level of mythologies. Of course, mythology is necessary for a mass person to feel himself a full member of the society, the result of a long historical process, the carrier of all the best qualities of his country’s representatives. But there is a contradiction there. Mass consciousness is willingly accepted, and the Russian mass person with pleasure uses the objects of material and spiritual culture created within the Western society. Some objects of national culture (vodka, Russian bath, Kalashnikov assault rifle, etc.) are also becoming very popular in the West. This interpenetration of cultures is paradoxically combined with mutual and completely outright rejection at the mythological level. The synthesis is our everyday life which unites conflicting elements of culture and mythology in a single unidirectional flow.