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Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of Earth
Book by Leo Gumilëv, Lev Gumilev
382 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
March 25, 2023
There is something epic and humbling about the old Russian masters. There they sat, atop the great Eurasian plain, not Europe’s afterthought but its fount. That which came before; that which is always there.
Russia moves in waves. It ebbs and flows and ebbs again. Aleksandr Nevskyy; Ivan the Terrible; Catherine the Great. The explosion of the Russian masters like Lermontov and Dostoyevsky and Pushkin. The Soviet period with Gorky and Lenin. Lev Gumilev. Gumilev was the son of Anna Akhmatova and Nicolai Gumilev. He was a committed Soviet, and as such he suffered the worst of Stalin’s rage. He went to the gulag, for 14 years. When the Cheka investigated Osip Mandelstam (who died in the gulag) for a poem he wrote about Stalin called “The Kremlin Highlander” they found a copy of the poem in Lev’s written hand.
I don’t know how Gumilev, after 14 years in the Siberia and inside Stalin’s oxygenless Soviet Union acquired the tremendous knowledge displayed in this, his most famous book. Modern intellectuals in the West have tunnel-vision, product of too great a prosperity which allows the specializations that bifurcate and narrow the field of view, especially of the historian and ethnographer and anthropologist. There is nothing narrow about Gumilev’s masterpiece. He stands atop his Eurasian plain like a collosus and casts his wide gaze across the full scope of the human experiment on planet earth. From arcane tribes who battled the Parthians to the Olmec and their Aztec hangers-on.
The world he describes is one of struggle and strife and a particular trait he calls “drive” but which has been better translated as “passionarity“; man’s struggle for greatness against all odds and belying his personal comfort, safety, and future. Alexander the Great and Napoleon and Jesus and Mohammad and so many others; names we know who defined moments in time and who also set in place whole movements of cultures and peoples and ethnicities.
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere is Gumilev’s academic treatise on where ethnicities come from, why some turn into ‘super-ethnicities’ that command all of history for a season (like Rome or Byzantium), how some find stasis and lasting meaning (the Basques and the Armenians), why some fall away before they achieve greatness (the Nestorians) and so many other things. For Gumilev groups of people who share common traits, a common future, interact in a social and economic system into which they are born and upon which they depend start to form a unique ethnicity. This is something that is always happening, never once and done but a synthesis of peoples that never ends.
But they key for Gumilev is a person, an individual, somebody who enters into the turbulent waters of what is going on and projects out beyond it with decision and power. Genghis Khan comes to mind. A product of their environment, drawing from the isotopic abundance of their land, defining it and allowing it to define them and how they react to it and dominate it and live within their environments and find balance. There is much of that ancient Russian contemplation of blood and soil in Gumilev’s treatise; that vast Eurasian steppe as this tremendously difficult but ultimately glorious thing that defines Russians and hones their view of the world around them.
There are a lot of people these days looking at Russia and its Ukraine war; at China and Persia and the Turks and wondering if what is coming now is a return of their moments. But they are missing what Gumilev understood. Cycles never come around twice; China, Russia, Persia – the Ottoman Empire – they all had their seasons. What we are witnessing in the instability and the violence is the falling away of the strictures of the modern Western mono-ethnicity (a unitary landless cultureless ethnicity sold, ironically, as a love of diversity, which is incidentally an artificial construct of utopians and has little to do with the incredible American experiment, but that is another topic — and one I will get to soon). And as the West falls away people are returning to what is comfortable and nostalgic to find meaning in what is over, not project to what is coming. The wars are not explosions of ‘drive’, as Gumilev would have defined and recognized them, but instead are the last phases of ending ethnicities in their last great expansion like a star that is weak and dying becomes a red giant before collapsing upon itself as a dwarf or finishing itself off in a supernova that is violent and terrible.
Something is coming next, something new is bubbling up as the West enters a period of decline (a decline which has been coming for a while, which has been slow, but which seems to be accelerating as we deny more and more that which made the American system powerful and good). This is not to be feared, that was the best takeaway from Gumilev’s masterpiece. This has happened before; and it will happen again. We did not attain utopia, nor did we find perfect cultureless opinionless balance. We lived under the shadow of great men – Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison – men with tremendous drive, tremendous “passionarity” who gave meaning and energy to the world in which we abide and to which we owe so much. Men who risked everything for an empire that has been the greatest in world history, about which much has been and will be written, and in whose apogee we live now – and we are therefore lucky.
Russia moves in waves. It ebbs and flows and ebbs again. Aleksandr Nevskyy; Ivan the Terrible; Catherine the Great. The explosion of the Russian masters like Lermontov and Dostoyevsky and Pushkin. The Soviet period with Gorky and Lenin. Lev Gumilev. Gumilev was the son of Anna Akhmatova and Nicolai Gumilev. He was a committed Soviet, and as such he suffered the worst of Stalin’s rage. He went to the gulag, for 14 years. When the Cheka investigated Osip Mandelstam (who died in the gulag) for a poem he wrote about Stalin called “The Kremlin Highlander” they found a copy of the poem in Lev’s written hand.
I don’t know how Gumilev, after 14 years in the Siberia and inside Stalin’s oxygenless Soviet Union acquired the tremendous knowledge displayed in this, his most famous book. Modern intellectuals in the West have tunnel-vision, product of too great a prosperity which allows the specializations that bifurcate and narrow the field of view, especially of the historian and ethnographer and anthropologist. There is nothing narrow about Gumilev’s masterpiece. He stands atop his Eurasian plain like a collosus and casts his wide gaze across the full scope of the human experiment on planet earth. From arcane tribes who battled the Parthians to the Olmec and their Aztec hangers-on.
The world he describes is one of struggle and strife and a particular trait he calls “drive” but which has been better translated as “passionarity“; man’s struggle for greatness against all odds and belying his personal comfort, safety, and future. Alexander the Great and Napoleon and Jesus and Mohammad and so many others; names we know who defined moments in time and who also set in place whole movements of cultures and peoples and ethnicities.
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere is Gumilev’s academic treatise on where ethnicities come from, why some turn into ‘super-ethnicities’ that command all of history for a season (like Rome or Byzantium), how some find stasis and lasting meaning (the Basques and the Armenians), why some fall away before they achieve greatness (the Nestorians) and so many other things. For Gumilev groups of people who share common traits, a common future, interact in a social and economic system into which they are born and upon which they depend start to form a unique ethnicity. This is something that is always happening, never once and done but a synthesis of peoples that never ends.
But they key for Gumilev is a person, an individual, somebody who enters into the turbulent waters of what is going on and projects out beyond it with decision and power. Genghis Khan comes to mind. A product of their environment, drawing from the isotopic abundance of their land, defining it and allowing it to define them and how they react to it and dominate it and live within their environments and find balance. There is much of that ancient Russian contemplation of blood and soil in Gumilev’s treatise; that vast Eurasian steppe as this tremendously difficult but ultimately glorious thing that defines Russians and hones their view of the world around them.
There are a lot of people these days looking at Russia and its Ukraine war; at China and Persia and the Turks and wondering if what is coming now is a return of their moments. But they are missing what Gumilev understood. Cycles never come around twice; China, Russia, Persia – the Ottoman Empire – they all had their seasons. What we are witnessing in the instability and the violence is the falling away of the strictures of the modern Western mono-ethnicity (a unitary landless cultureless ethnicity sold, ironically, as a love of diversity, which is incidentally an artificial construct of utopians and has little to do with the incredible American experiment, but that is another topic — and one I will get to soon). And as the West falls away people are returning to what is comfortable and nostalgic to find meaning in what is over, not project to what is coming. The wars are not explosions of ‘drive’, as Gumilev would have defined and recognized them, but instead are the last phases of ending ethnicities in their last great expansion like a star that is weak and dying becomes a red giant before collapsing upon itself as a dwarf or finishing itself off in a supernova that is violent and terrible.
Something is coming next, something new is bubbling up as the West enters a period of decline (a decline which has been coming for a while, which has been slow, but which seems to be accelerating as we deny more and more that which made the American system powerful and good). This is not to be feared, that was the best takeaway from Gumilev’s masterpiece. This has happened before; and it will happen again. We did not attain utopia, nor did we find perfect cultureless opinionless balance. We lived under the shadow of great men – Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison – men with tremendous drive, tremendous “passionarity” who gave meaning and energy to the world in which we abide and to which we owe so much. Men who risked everything for an empire that has been the greatest in world history, about which much has been and will be written, and in whose apogee we live now – and we are therefore lucky.
July 25, 2017
Bir başyapıt
July 25, 2010
This is very controversial and not very accepted theory of ethnogenesis.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION in which the need for ethnology is substantiated and the author sets out his views on ethnogenesis, without his line of reasoning, to which the rest of the treatise will be devoted, and in which the author will lead the reader through a labyrinth of contradictions
Chapter One
ABOUT THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE in which it is show that superficial observations lead the investigator up the garden path, and means of self-control and self-checking are proposed
Chapter Two
THE PROPERTIES OF AN ETHNOS containing a list of the features of an ethnic phenomenon as such compiled so as to make it possible to give a general explanation of ethnogenesis, the process in which ethnoi arise and disappear
Chapter Three
THE ETHNOS IN HISTORY in which the generally accepted ways of studying ethnic phenomena are set out and it is shown that the sought-for result cannot be obtained
Chapter Four
OUR INNER NATURE in which is shown what part of man belongs to nature and what not, and what part of the world outside the human body is outside nature, and also why everything said here and above still does not answer the problem of ethnogenesis
Chapter Five
DRIVE IN ETIINOGENESIS devoted to description of the attribute without which the Processes of ethnogenesis do not commence and will not proceed, and also to its significance for ethnic system and emotional filling as a measure of activity and resistivity to external effects
Chapter Six
THE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE SCIENCES in which an attempt is made to explain the described phenomenon of ethnogenesis by comparing the data of allied and related sciences. In contrast to the foregoing, this part of the book is hypothetical but any other explanation will not affect the description of the character of ethnogenesis given above
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION in which the need for ethnology is substantiated and the author sets out his views on ethnogenesis, without his line of reasoning, to which the rest of the treatise will be devoted, and in which the author will lead the reader through a labyrinth of contradictions
Chapter One
ABOUT THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE in which it is show that superficial observations lead the investigator up the garden path, and means of self-control and self-checking are proposed
Chapter Two
THE PROPERTIES OF AN ETHNOS containing a list of the features of an ethnic phenomenon as such compiled so as to make it possible to give a general explanation of ethnogenesis, the process in which ethnoi arise and disappear
Chapter Three
THE ETHNOS IN HISTORY in which the generally accepted ways of studying ethnic phenomena are set out and it is shown that the sought-for result cannot be obtained
Chapter Four
OUR INNER NATURE in which is shown what part of man belongs to nature and what not, and what part of the world outside the human body is outside nature, and also why everything said here and above still does not answer the problem of ethnogenesis
Chapter Five
DRIVE IN ETIINOGENESIS devoted to description of the attribute without which the Processes of ethnogenesis do not commence and will not proceed, and also to its significance for ethnic system and emotional filling as a measure of activity and resistivity to external effects
Chapter Six
THE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE SCIENCES in which an attempt is made to explain the described phenomenon of ethnogenesis by comparing the data of allied and related sciences. In contrast to the foregoing, this part of the book is hypothetical but any other explanation will not affect the description of the character of ethnogenesis given above
June 19, 2014
Гумилев очень зажигателен, а его теорией пассионарности зачитывался не один человек, однако он не ученый, а чистый эзотерик, который этнос воспринимает как биополе определенного ритма. Хорошо, не эгрегор.
September 1, 2012
Good luck finding one. But If you do it will rock your world.
March 17, 2020
What a tour de force in the field of scientific thought. For one - Gumilëv applies a scientific approach to proving his theories and disproving others while creating a systematic approach to the scale of human history that goes against what (at least I have experienced) is being taught in schools. Once you stop looking at history as discrete episodes and stop judgement, you are free to observe inevitable wave patterns in birth, climax and decline of ethnos. The theory is beautiful and it’s building blocks - drive and sub-drive (passion), egoism and biosphere a.o. are clearly backed with observations of gathered short and long-term history episodes and periods as a whole.
What is scary is that you can clearly see where the Western super-ethnos currently stand by analyzing behavior in societies and their leadership. Egoism in the latter and lack of drive are on the rise putting us on the slope of decline. Let’s hope Gumilëv is right and that we will turn into something else and hopefully without the pain of assimilation.
4 stars simply because the book is hard to read. It’s more thesis than a book and you can definitely see that in the last 1/3 of the book where almost every sentence is there to prove the theory laid out in beginning. Still - this is a book everyone should read, theory everyone should learn and understand.
What is scary is that you can clearly see where the Western super-ethnos currently stand by analyzing behavior in societies and their leadership. Egoism in the latter and lack of drive are on the rise putting us on the slope of decline. Let’s hope Gumilëv is right and that we will turn into something else and hopefully without the pain of assimilation.
4 stars simply because the book is hard to read. It’s more thesis than a book and you can definitely see that in the last 1/3 of the book where almost every sentence is there to prove the theory laid out in beginning. Still - this is a book everyone should read, theory everyone should learn and understand.
May 28, 2021
An interesting look at the essence of humanity, and the possible consequences of different ways of its development. Although some of the opinions expressed in the book seem a bit pseudoscientific. It is entirely possible that they are justified, at least they try to explain the results of the "universe 25" experiment.
This book does not dismiss them as "paradox of the observer" or give the far-fetched explanation blaming the density of test population, dismissing the observed phenomenon of "Behavioral sink", revealed as the result of the aforementioned experiment as it does not "fit" into the initial hypothesis.
This book does not dismiss them as "paradox of the observer" or give the far-fetched explanation blaming the density of test population, dismissing the observed phenomenon of "Behavioral sink", revealed as the result of the aforementioned experiment as it does not "fit" into the initial hypothesis.
April 16, 2022
Первую половину книги прорываться было тяжеловато, слишком много специфических терминов и концепций. Теория пассионарности начинается с середины — тут уже увлекательнее, но быстро становится скучно. Интересно, что Гумилев уловил такое явление, но полностью разобрать не успел, свел все к эзотерике, силам космоса. А еще эта книга просто набита историческими фактами, правда воспринять и переварить их в таком формате не выходит (разве что вы сверхчеловек).
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October 17, 2023tsitaat lk 821
Mida arvate väitest, et eestlased on väljasurev rahvas?
Te olete jõudnud etnogeneesi sellesse faasi, kus saabub praktiline surematus. Teid võib küll tappa, kuid ise te etnosena enam välja ei sure. Iga etnos läbib oma aktiivse eluperioodi suhteliselt kiiresti - umbes pooleteise tuhande aastaga. Kui ta selle aja vastu peab, pole enam suurt midagi karta. Tõsi küll, kordan, kui teid just füüsiliselt ei tapeta.
Mida arvate väitest, et eestlased on väljasurev rahvas?
Te olete jõudnud etnogeneesi sellesse faasi, kus saabub praktiline surematus. Teid võib küll tappa, kuid ise te etnosena enam välja ei sure. Iga etnos läbib oma aktiivse eluperioodi suhteliselt kiiresti - umbes pooleteise tuhande aastaga. Kui ta selle aja vastu peab, pole enam suurt midagi karta. Tõsi küll, kordan, kui teid just füüsiliselt ei tapeta.
September 17, 2017
Книга, читая которую понимаешь, что твои знания в истории - просто капля посреди океана произошедших событий.
February 14, 2021
Подобно на Тойнби или Шпенглер, Гумил��ов е ценен не толкова с фактологичността на твърденията си, а със стройността на теорията, чрез която ги представя.
January 29, 2018
Твір про погляди Гумільова на процес творення націй та вплив на цей процес різних чинників. Автор висунув так теорію пасіонарності та обґрунтував її. Теорія дуже цікава.
February 12, 2018
Формат: Аудиокнига Язык: Русский
Честно говоря "Древняя Русь и Великая Степь" Льва Николаевича мне понравилась больше. Данная книга, хотя и является по видимому его главным детищем в вопросе теории этногенеза, показалась мне достаточно поверхностной с точки зрения докозательства самой теории. Наблюдаю скорее натягивание фактов на теорию, да и отсылки к эволюции, мутациям, солнечной активности и т.п., на мой взгляд очень слабоваты.
В целом теория этногенеза мне в целом нравится, но я готов ее воспринимать скорее как философское учение, а те научную теорию. Но после произведений Гумилева в моем лексиконе твердо поселяется слово пассионарий, да и определенные групповые процессы я действительно сравниваю с фазами развития этноса по Гумилеву.
К перепрочтению - вряд ли, хотя и не жалею что прочитал данную книгу.
Честно говоря "Древняя Русь и Великая Степь" Льва Николаевича мне понравилась больше. Данная книга, хотя и является по видимому его главным детищем в вопросе теории этногенеза, показалась мне достаточно поверхностной с точки зрения докозательства самой теории. Наблюдаю скорее натягивание фактов на теорию, да и отсылки к эволюции, мутациям, солнечной активности и т.п., на мой взгляд очень слабоваты.
В целом теория этногенеза мне в целом нравится, но я готов ее воспринимать скорее как философское учение, а те научную теорию. Но после произведений Гумилева в моем лексиконе твердо поселяется слово пассионарий, да и определенные групповые процессы я действительно сравниваю с фазами развития этноса по Гумилеву.
К перепрочтению - вряд ли, хотя и не жалею что прочитал данную книгу.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 23, 2019
Дочитать до конца не смог. Автор подумал, что это будет отличной идеей применить "естественнонаучный подход" к истории. В результате получилась претенциозная каша из исторических сводок, необоснованных выводов и "применения" законов физики. Последние почему то должны действовать в исторических процессах, хотя даже сам автор до конца не разобрался ни в самой физике, ни в тех аналогиях которые он проводит в тексте. Так что мой совет: не читайте, если только не хотите получить рак мозга.
August 2, 2012
The translation may have introduced some difficulty, but the book for me showed a great deal more promise than it could deliver.
July 11, 2022
Сложно, обемно и понякога трудно за осмисляне на всички огромни описания на връзки и зависимости.
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