And he not only reconciled himself and did not seek a way out of this evil circle, on the contrary, he wished that the evil black circle would remain so forever. That was his faith."

Reality appears to the hero's eyes as a page from the Apocalypse; this is the world created by the Gnostic Demiurge and the Antichrist: "And there, under the itch and clatter of restless airplanes, flocks of the cleverest black birds gathered: as soon as human fresh meat begins to smoke on the torn earth, there will be a great fare for crows!

And there, under the earth, cracked under the heavy ear, white grave worms flowed to begin their insatiable grub, "there will be a feast for the worm too!

And there they forged two great cups of silver: one for the bitterest sorrow, the second for flammable tears. And there, the demiurge called out to the demiurges:

"Come! let us make man in our image and likeness!"

And slowly the serpent penetrated from the lips of the ugly clubfoot of the fleshy man.

And there — and the silt was opened deep above the doomed earth by a punishing angel and, formidable, raised a burning torch — and threw it to the ground." [46]

The incarnations of the Antichrist are not exhausted by the boundaries of a particular person. For commenting on the historical presence of the Antichrist in the world, the contour scale of his incarnations is not so important at all. In a maddened mob or an ambitious dictator, a labor army or a camp empire, in a senseless war or a "general crisis of the nation"—in each of these cases we are dealing with the disintegration of the individual and with the transformation of a people into a conglomerate of massoid beings. In the audience of bullfights and auto-da-fé; in the fans at the stadium and in the enthusiasts at the rally; in the inhabitants of the soldiers' barracks and the convict barracks; in flocks of bored teenagers and in a store queue; in the station crowd and in the smoke of a communal apartment; in the souls and bodies of those who make up the super-large audiences of radio and television communication — in all these topoi of mass behavior, the anti-miracle of the birth of the Antichrist takes place; the impersonal spirit of collective possession [we digress here from the distinction between the crowd, the public, and the collective, proposed in the studies of J. Ortega y Gaceta, "The Revolt of the Masses" (1930) and E. Canetti, "The Mass and Power" (1960)].

When a person loses face, self-control, and personal will in a crowd, it means that in the huge, many-armed, and many-headed body, the masses exhibit a Common He-face: the thousand-eyed Argus, the thousand-mouthed source of choral shouting. Such an ant creature is not capable of creativity. Even when it digs canals and levees dams in obedience to an external will, its work remains a mimicry of inspiration, and its results are insignificant and useless. There is no place for creativity, since activity is carried out in the absence of a volitional choice of decisions; it is not inspired, but provoked by the slogan rhetoric of motivation. It is a desperate cyclopean impulse made under the pressure of an extreme (often far-fetched) necessity, which is vaguely recognized by the executors as a condition for survival. The moment of self-consciousness in such a titanic Hive Being is absent, because there is no organ of self-consciousness. The creative rhythm is imitated by the drum of the mode and the simple rhetoric of the summoning.

Mass consciousness is the anthropological synopsis of the Antichrist, explicitly unfolded on the scale of the nation. This Antichrist, scattered in impersonal and de-willed bodies, is sure to "gather" in someone's personal consciousness (leader, tyrant, ideologist). Let us allow ourselves not the best analogy: isn't it the same way that the reader of the novel "collects" his personality in communication with its characters and the author, becoming the master of the meaning of the text, which has finally taken place in the reader's consciousness and within the framework of the "I" of its owner?

The historical personifications of the Antichrist are vampnrically nourished by the sight, touch, fear and ecstatic love (the inversion of the "Fear of God") of the units of the ant Body that have given themselves to him. In the world of independent personalities, the Antichrist is lonely, surrounded by demons, he is bored, as he is bored with loneliness in the world of mirrors. From the crowd that gave birth to the personal Antichrist, each pair of eyes of the thousand-eyed Argus-Body lustfully contemplates its Antichrist, seeing in him the best version of its own unfulfilled personality.

The reason for the historical continuity of the generation of Antichrists by the Crowd is that the experience of dumbing down one generation does not serve as a lesson for the next. The memory of an anthill is discrete, it indifferently accepts as authentic pictures of the past fabricated for it. The Antichrist is a chronophage and a devourer of the past. The eschatological tension of the historical process is its native element, but it is experienced by the "man of lawlessness" not as a problem (for the true creators of history, eschatology is the problem of the meaning of history), but as a necrotic ousting from the world of its materiality and dense materiality. The future of the Antichrist is an ontological veil, a vertical plane behind which there is nothing, there are the backstage of the world, behind them the garbage of the previous scenery has accumulated. All the wealth of the Antichrist is in this rubbish, this is the wealth of the dead, the collector and guardian of the undead. The Antichrist is an ontological Plyushkin, the lord of dust and a symbol of the lower entropy of the Cosmos.

In the same way, in the socio-historical sphere, the Antichrist guards the crisis states of society and stands at the gates of human despair. Possessed by the Antichrist, man begins a struggle with the Good as a principle of ethical equality in the good. If the Good is the dangerous truth of an adequate world, then I do not want such an adequate Good and a dangerous common "truth" – so think Dostoevsky's "paradoxists". Individualism carries the evil of personal righteousness, which in a strange way becomes a source of power (in Evil there is a cosmic alternative to knowledge about the world – such that no one knows except the evil and powerful). In Evil, humanity and its institutions differ, and in it is the principle of distinguishing individual wills. Good does not have national forms, but the evil principle of the nation expresses itself in specific forms (cruelty, for example). Good is not an alternative, it is effective, and in this sense it is unrealizable or dead, like any result. Evil is ambivalent and inventive. Equality in Evil generates a sense of place. The consolidation of people in the face of danger" is possible only in a hierarchical world, N. Berdyaev, who was convinced of the freedom of World Evil as a condition of universal freedom, insisted on this idea. Unusual, outwardly unmotivated actions of evil people towards their neighbors are driven by a feeling of vindictive equalization: if I feel bad, let everyone feel bad. On the sublimation of the feeling of revenge grew the entire sentinel demonology of punishment and retribution. When everyone is unhappy, the measure of unhappiness (the boundary bar of the last sorrow) is pushed back into the indefinite future, and the present is evaluated as good.

Good is absolute, Evil is relative. In striving to become universal, Evil wants to coincide with the ontological contours of Good; when it succeeds, it is annihilated in its own abundance and becomes its opposite, the Good. This is the meaning of Tyutchev's theme of erotic suicide; a similar context is revealed by the words JI. Karsavin's remark that "to love is always violence, always the thirst for the death of the beloved in me" [47], or the remark of the hero, the bearer of the Antichrist consciousness, from A. Remizov's novel "The Pond": "You hate me with all your heart, hate me with all your soul, kill me, and love will come" [48].