Information about the author:
Olga V. Shugan
Olga V. Shugan, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, А.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 а, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5885-2287
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Abstract:
The article analyses the discussion about O. Spengler’s book “The Decline of Europe,” which arose in the 1920s in Russia and in the West, and M. Gorky’s attitude towards it. Gorky perceived Spengler’s ideas through the prism of the eternal confrontation between East and West, which made him think about the fate of not only Europe, but also Russia and, even more broadly, the entire civilization. The crisis in Germany and other countries which took part in the First World War, the popularity of the ideas of the “Eurasians” about the West as evil, and finally, the growing interest in the East, all this led Gorky’s thogths of coming struggle between races and radical changing in the geopolitical picture of the world.