VseiaSvetnaia Gramota: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Utopian Comparative Studies

Abstract

Post-Soviet cultural landscape is characterized by considerable popularity of nationalistic ideas and narratives applying conspiratorial explanatory models and suggesting various versions of “alternative history”, which are framed, in particular, within amateur concepts of language - a sort of cryptolinguistics. This discourse is illustrated here with the case of the so-called “Vseiasviatnaia gramota” (“Worldwide Writing”), a teaching, according to which an esoteric Slavic alphabet “encodes” the entire universe. The doctrine's discursive design and interpretative patterns give us an opportunity to track the connections between Western esotericism, history of philology, and nationalism.