The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Lotman’s second essay devoted to the East-West divide deals more with psychology than with the demonics of time-space. It has an intriguing title: “‘Contracting’ [dogovor] and‘The handing over of oneself [vruchenie sebya] as Archetypal Models of Culture” (1980). To grasp the dynamics of this peculiar binary, we should review the distinction between two pre-modern explanatory strategies: magic and miracle.

Magic (incantations, charms, spells, curses, talismans) is a formula, a “contract” drawn up with a concrete goal. It should be distinguished from divination - the reading of stars, moon, thunder, numbers, marks on the body-which is the “attempt to predict something or to reach a correct decision about it rather than to cause it.”17 Magic always works against a fixed or closed future: it desires to make something happen. It presumes that the proper recipe or artifact, invoked by a qualified practitioner, will produce that desired result. If a given charm fails to work, this does not mean that charms don’t work, only that

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the recipe was wrong for this particular application and the practitioner must learn the correct one. Magic is predictable. Belief in it gives rise to signs and to publicly accessible codes. In his classification of medieval Russia as a magic-driven culture, Lotman supplies four defining factors: reciprocity (the magician and the natural force respect each other); compulsion (the proper formula will compel the force to obey); equivalence (in the transaction between magician and nature, each side has a measure of responsibility and power); and a contractual relation (which can, of course, be “broken” through misinformation or deception). Contracts bind.

Magic is necessary because the workings of the world are fixed but hidden. Miracle, as Orthodox Christian believers understood it, was freer, less symmetrical, and thus less reliable than magic. It depended on intangibles and immeasurables: divine grace, strength of belief, the unknowable. The founding miracle for Russian believers was the Resurrection of Christ. During the dread and risk of that original Passion, for Jesus as well as for His disciples, there was no proof that anyone would rise again. (It might be said that into this slender stretch of time, the “second day” between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, Dostoevsky fit all of his great novels.) A sense for the miraculous could restore hope to the desperate in spirit. But one has no right to demand a miracle. Believing Russians (and this is the other side of Lotman’s binary, “handing over of oneself ”) assumed that a religious act was an unconditional gift, a voluntary, one-sided sacrificial offering of one’s whole person, quite the opposite of a contract. Since miracles are precisely unpredictable, they cannot entail compulsion and do not wait on reciprocity. If magic gives rise to mutually agreed-upon signs and codes, then miracle gives rise to symbols. There is no single way to make them mean for all members of a community, nor to communicate that singular, symbolic meaning. A miracle binds each witness on its own terms.

In closing this chapter, we might expand on some implications of Lotman’s models. Vis-a`-vis Russia, defenders of Western liberal democracy habitually feel rational, secular, “advanced,” progressive, law-abiding, tolerant of others’ rights – in a word, politically mature. But in the eyes of a Russian believer with the worldview Lotman has described, that bundle of liberal-political virtues is simply archaic or pagan magic, at a lower level of civilization and spiritual sophistication. Pagan Rome, together with the principles of pagan Roman law, was “magical”: compulsive, contractual, enforceable, imperial, and inevitably violent. The logic of magic tends to standardize all parties and variables, to remove the irreducibly individual human face. It is no accident that the Devil, a master at demanding the written contract, believes in conventional signs.

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But miracle itself has no logic. Nor is it dialogic. It is an unconditional gift, an orientation of myself to the world regardless of how the world treats me back.