November 25 1990 years
A philosopher died in the Vnukovo Airport waiting room. Merab Mamardashvili. One of those who revived the culture of thinking in Soviet Russia. "The Georgian Socrates."
Russia is a country of perpetual pregnancy. Something is always happening, but nothing ever happens.
Born September 15, 1930 in the Georgian city Burn, in the family of a career military man.
His mother, who came from an old aristocratic family, instilled in her son a love of languages: from childhood, he spoke Georgian, Russian, and English fluently. He later mastered German, Italian, French, and Spanish. He could also speak Czech and Greek.
He became interested in philosophy in his youth: as he later recalled, he was perplexed by “the completely incomprehensible blindness of people to what exists.”
They stand nose to nose with something and don't see it. This happens because we don't learn from experience. And this happens endlessly—the same mistake is repeated over and over again. Russian history was full of the genius of repetition, sickeningly bad.
At 19, he entered the philosophy department at Moscow State University. He crossed paths with the future president of the USSR in the dorm. Mikhail Gorbachev.
He became one of the founders of an informal group of philosophers, the Moscow Logical Circle (its members attempted to go beyond traditional formal logic to create a more complete theory of thinking).
It's scary not to live in a dream, it's scary to wake up in someone else's dream
At 27, he became an editor at the journal "Problems of Philosophy." At 31, he defended his PhD dissertation, joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was sent to Prague, where he headed a section of an international journal on workers' parties. He traveled throughout Europe on business trips, interacting with the intellectual and artistic elite.
Shortly before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he was recalled to Moscow and banned from traveling abroad for nearly 20 years. He worked at the Voprosy Filosofii publishing house and taught courses for students.
At the same time, he began recording his thoughts on a tape recorder: these lectures were distributed throughout the country along with samizdat and songs by disgraced musicians.
Every ideology reaches a point in its development where its effectiveness consists not in the action of what it says, but in what it does not allow to be said.
By 1980, he was dismissed from all his posts because he refused to conceal the truth. He moved to Tbilisi, where he worked for 10 years as chief researcher at the Institute of Philosophy. He lived in his sister's apartment, in an unheated room.
Never be afraid to go too far, because the truth is even further.
(paraphrase of Proust's saying)
By that time, he had already become famous worldwide and was invited to lecture in various countries. Books, collections of articles, and lecture recordings were published.
He warned that the times of perestroika and liberalization could turn out to be just a small deviation on the nightmarish path along which the Russian Empire was moving (where Stalinism was not a perversion, but a natural continuation).
People still see pests everywhere. Any mutation, any shock can throw them into the crystal we call year thirty-seven.
He saw salvation from a return to the old rut in the development of civil society and in everyone beginning to build the "muscles of freedom."
Man is an effort to be man
Those who say that the people are not yet ripe for democracy, I call "enlightened scoundrels."
Freedom never comes too soon. There is no set time for it. Freedom comes by being practiced.
Since 1987 he began to take an active part in the political life of Georgia and became the main opponent Zviada Gamsakhurdia, who promoted nationalist ideas.
On November 25, 1990, Mamardashvili was flying from Moscow to Tbilisi to participate in the final round of elections. His fellow passengers, who turned out to be nationalists, began shouting, "You're not Georgian," and "You're an enemy of Georgia."
The 60-year-old philosopher died of a heart attack.
I've lived my whole life without hope. When you cross the edge of despair, a sunny valley opens up before you, I'd even say a joyful one.
(last interview, a month before death)
