String of History

The outstanding domestic thinker Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev is known as the author of the passionary theory of ethnogenesis. Introducing the concept of "passionarity," he distinguished opposites within it: religious aspirations and virtues, self-sacrifice leading to holiness, and vices, in particular — passion based on selfishness. The scholar asserted that a person’s activities are guided not by ideas but by ideals, by their relationship to the surrounding world. He proposed the principle of bipolarity of the ethnosphere and applied it to religious studies, grouping religious systems based on their attitude towards nature and the surrounding world. He highlighted the concept of "antisystem," understanding it as the systemic integrity of people with a negative worldview, striving to simplify natural and social systems, to reduce the density of systemic connections.
Lev Gumilev's unique lecture course, published based on the scholar's audio archive, provides insight into the wide range of his scientific research and original generalizations. He was not an armchair scientist — he was a magnificent lecturer. Possessing a broad spectrum of nuances of the Russian language and a profound understanding of human nature, he could scientifically, yet succinctly and accessibly, present his theory to representatives of any social class and age. His scientific lectures and seminars were publicly available, extremely popular in the 1980s, and took place in packed halls.
The author of the introductory article to L.N. Gumilev's book "String of History" is O.G. Novikova, Candidate of Technical Sciences, Senior Researcher at the State Hermitage Museum. The book is equipped with a name index and a list of illustrations.
The book is addressed to historians, geographers, philosophers, ethnologists, and a wide circle of interested readers.