Abstract
This book offers an interpretation of Russian cultural history. It analyzes selected literary and artistic works as documents of representative chapters (""pictures"") of Russian mentality and spirituality, according to the chronologic line: from Antique ""pre-history"" till the present.
The interpretation follows contemporary methods of post-colonial history, area studies and histoire croisée. The result is not an unified history of one Russian empire and one ""Russian spirituality"", but a complex of various national, cultural and religious traditions (many different ""Russias""), forming together the area of Slavic-speaking Eastern Europe.
Simultaneously, this book follows specifically Czech tradition (Karel Havlíček Borovský, T. G.
Masaryk, Václav Černý a. o.) of critical intellectual analyses of Russian culture in its ambivalence towards (Central) Europe. The main points of these analyses have been a refusal of simplified Pan-Slavistic thesis about ""genetic"", ""fatal"" common historical destiny of Slavic-speaking nations; and also differentiating between pro-European and anti-European, democratic and autocratic lines in Russian thought and religion.