ABSTRACT
To clarify Russia’s troubled and troubling status vis-à-vis the West, one must delve deeply into Russian cultural history. As has been shown in Chapter 2, Russia’s very origins as a Christian nation in the Byzantine commonwealth of nations provided the first substantive link between nascent Russia and Western Europe, but it also divided the country from the Catholic–Protestant West. Subsequent events have repeatedly brought Russia together with the West, but the spirit of confrontation has almost always poisoned these meetings. Has Russia ever achieved a genuine encounter with Western civilization? And, conversely, can the West claim ever to have encountered Russia?
