Towards the Spiritual Convergence of America and Russia: American Mind and Russian Soul, American Individuality and Russian Community, and the Potent

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With this preface written especially for the free, 2014 electronic version of his 1990 book, the author wanted to take the opportunity thereby provided to explain a bit to the reader (now reading sometime after this new, unrevised edition was published and released into the internet world) about how the author saw his younger work written some 25 years before 2014 — for he himself had definitely not stopped studying, growing, maturing, nor had he stopped his daily social and life observations and reflections, nor his experiences and travels, and this all not only of Russia and America. Additionally, the Russian nation of and to which in part he published his 1990 essay no longer existed.

Many completely unexpected yet deeply intriguing experiences in Leningrad and Moscow in the latter 1980s lead the author to seek readings on that theme often named the “Russian soul”, and when library research and a direct personal query to the head of a preeminent Slavic department in the USA indicated there was no such work per se, the author — then involved also in a wider spectrum of studies and lectures in what sub specie academiae is often called the “history of ideas” (evidenced in his public “Chrysopylae Lectures” given contemporaneously in California, and in part in apartments in Moscow and Leningrad) — decided to write towards making some greater sense of his experiences, discoveries, studies, and observations related to the differing American and Russian psyches (“national characters”), their traditions, histories of ideas, each societies’ “philosophies of man” (individually and socially), and all related to the shared “vertical” ideas of man present in the differentially-shared essential ideas of Christian “anthropology”.

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