When, in 1930, a specialist in Marxist poetics wrote that the image of the Antichrist had "a tendency in the work of representatives of particularly reactionary groups to turn into a mystical symbol of Bolshevism," he was, of course, right, especially since this article quotes the remark of the hero of "The Road to Torment." We are talking about Lenin: "In one plane, physically, he is a monstrous provocateur... In the other, the Antichrist. Do you remember the predictions? The terms come true" [41]. The theme of Lenin as the Antichrist was also mastered by the political journalism of the century. Of particular interest here is its nuance: the pseudo-asceticism of the revolutionaries (in a similar way, G. Hesse, peering at Alyosha Karamazov, spoke of "dangerous holiness", and Askoldov spoke of the "bestial saint" in the composition of the Russian soul). As a close example, let us point to the recently published memoirs of P. Struve. "Even from a religious point of view," he writes of Lenin, "his personality poses the problem of rational and diabolical righteousness. It is as far from the righteousness of Christ as the fantastic image of the Antichrist is from the legendary image of Christ." [42]

A monument to a rare synthesis of socio-philosophical analysis and theological hermeneutics was Bulgakov's book on Revelation, which the author considered to be the fourth volume of his trilogy On God-manhood. The word "Antichrist", in addition to its usual meanings, here takes on the role of a tsdeologem, generalizing the anti-human pathos of fascist, racist and communist doctrines. [43] However, it was not only Russian thinkers who thought in the mode of such analogies. For example, in 1934, an anti-fascist essay by the Austrian writer J. Roth "Antichrist" was published.

The completion of the classical ideas of the Antichrist for Russian thought was in the 20th century D. Andreev's book "The Rose of the World" (completed in the 50s). The personality of Stalin is presented here in the attributes of the "preliminary" Antichrist. If Lenin is only a draft of the Antichrist for the author, then Stalin is a decisive rehearsal for the future and the last Prince of Darkness. "Behind the images of the two leaders of the Russian Revolution," Andreyev asserts, "the shadow of a more terrible creature clearly appears, a planetary being< ... >the executor of a great demonic plan." [44]

Andreev's visionary meta-historical philosophy builds its reality in the space of other-being layers: what Blok, following Nietzsche, called "eternal change", takes place there: the powerful demons of Evil and the primates of Light converge in a duel for the integrity of history and culture. Like Fedotov, Andreev believed that the cultural memory of mankind does not end beyond the boundaries of this existence, but passes beyond the boundaries of this century, receiving metaphysical embodiments in the forms of pure meanings. The Antichrist in The Rose of the World is first and foremost a culturophobe and a hater of the creative initiations of the Holy Spirit. His dark genius creates a world of false values on earth, to the joy of a self-deceiving human mind. However, at the end of time, the spiritual Council of historical cultures will form the Rose of the World, the providential architecture of God's Cosmos will be completed, and the Antichrist will cease to exist quasi-existing.

Below we will try to summarize the ideas about the Antichrist in the Russian tradition. The word "Antichrist" will be used (1) as the name of a mythological character (an opponent of Christ and a human medium of dark forces); (2) as the name of the evil substance of the world (in the schismatic tradition: "spiritual Antichrist"); (3) as a summary designation of the demonic reality behind the names: devil, Satan, Lucifer, devil. The Prince of Darkness, Beelzebub, Samael, Behemoth, Abraxas, Woland and others of this series. Since the opponent of Christ (the Antichrist) and the opponent of God (Satan, Lucifer), for all the difference in their natures, are functionally equal (the man-Antichrist is an anti-man and not quite a man; the anti-angel Lucifer is an anti-god, but his power is limited precisely by the fullness of his protest), it would not be too risky to bring these hypostases of evil closer together. Let us try to understand their place in the national picture of the world.

The birth of the mythologem of the "inner ("spiritual) Antichrist" was the first attempt to understand him structurally. But along with the emerging knowledge of the substantialized Antichrist, another – and also "spiritual" – idea of the inner space of the "I" grows quite quickly, into which the little Antichrist can enter. This is the space of proud self-consciousness, egoistically rejected from the "other". The mirror broke, and a fragment hit the eye. A well-known parable tells us about a "me" divided into irreducible points of view; Skepticism and disbelief, despair and nihilism become his lot. The loss of the integral "I" is the loss of the face and its grace-filled opportunity to become a face (as it was supposed to be in the providential fate of man, a god-like being). The face turns into a mask, through which the confused and morally blinded "I" looks at the world.

The triad "face-face-mask" was discussed in detail in Russian ethical thought, when it posed (especially energetically in the neo-Kantian tradition: A. Vvedensky, I. Lapshin) the problems of "I" and "other", "alien "I", "I" and "you", etc. (N. Berdyaev, N. Lossky, P. Florensky, L. Karsavin, S. Frank). Through the mirror shard, the external world is also seen in a mirror sense, and either in the literal sense (as in the story-parable by A. Platonov, the girl, due to the flaw in her inner vision, takes the disgusting for the beautiful and avoids the good), or in the sense of a double inversion of true values. On the paths of evil, this cunning double inversion of the picture of the world is possible: it is brought to the desired wholeness, but in a "reversed" form (not eliminating the primordial mirroring). The mimicry of Good becomes even more convincing because of this. Evil, turned around its axis, does not show the Good, but the other side of the same Evil. Evil has no "good" underside, it itself is "back" to the meaning commanded by the Cosmos, "perverted" "from" it. Evil can be represented as a whimsically curved plane of a one-dimensional world, an ethical Möbius strip. Evil is doomed to a one-dimensional, hopelessly flat topology, all the more capricious its configurations in the planes of existence. Deprived of "its own" eternal place in being, Evil can only ontologically parasitize and exploit the Good, copy it in the forms of imaginary. Evil is an ontological epidemic of being, it is hidden in the pathological twists and turns of the world's flesh.

But Evil needs actors, convinced free agents. Agents are recruited by means of epistemological intrigue; its prototype was the dialogue of the Serpent of Eden with Eve. The story of the apple tells about the birth of the passion of knowledge. The temptation of a person who wants so much to throw himself into the abyss under his feet is the temptation of gnosis (see the analysis of three temptations in N. Berdyaev's article "The Grand Inquisitor"). Knowledge is not just "much sorrow"; it does not quench, it conceals death, false likeness to God as a step towards it, and epistemological suicide. In relation to Adam, Eve appears as the Antichrist-provocateur with the promise of ready-made knowledge, deadly for the perfect beings of Eden. It is not without reason that the demonic reputation of the First Eve, Lilith, who became, according to the Talmud, the mother of Ahriman (the spirit of destruction and catastrophe), as well as the wife of Samael (identified in the Jewish tradition with Satan), who in the text called "On the Origin of the World" is presented in the attributes of an anti-god, is so rich in variants. In "The Rose of the World" by D. Andreev, Lilith is the Antichrist in female form and the mother of the last Antichrist.

Good is entirely essential, it is the "yes" to the world manifested in its entirety. But it quickly satisfies a person, rewarding him with a special kind of spiritual satiety, for which he is never ready and from which he distances himself, sensing danger in satiety. In Dobra there is no "plot", intrigue, final mystery, "there is no zest", as Fedya Protasov said in "The Living Corpse" by L. Tolstoy. Good innocently testifies to itself in the forms of routine, guilelessly, like dawn and rain. Good is not perceived as a multidimensional phenomenon, and this is the misfortune of the fallen consciousness, accustomed to epistemological intrigue in the space of the "antinomies of reason," to cognitive adventurism. In Evil there is an impulse towards the new, consequently, towards the future, in which the will to history is clothed. Good is ahistorical, it is in the eternal plane of existence. And this is his trouble: there are no good roads to the Good. The road of holiness (the acquisition of the Holy Spirit as the goal of Christian life) is closed to the ordinary person, it is the path of ascetics and escape from history.

The philosopher could have asked the Tsar to forgive the murderers of Alexander II, but Seraphim of Sarov did not stand up for the condemned Decembrists, because most likely he had not heard of them, just as he had not heard of Pushkin.

In order for man to be saved and for evil in the world to be overshadowed by the creative doing of good, man is given the choice and dialectics of movement towards Good along the paths of Evil. The Antichrist is the negative genius of Evil and a historically formed activity. Satan and Antichrist are distinguished as ontological and historical. History in the aspect of the Antichrist is a picture of historical life in its internal catastrophes, fractures, points of application of the force of insidious inhibitions, breaks, steps, jerks – in a word, the entire geometry of the traces of movement and blows of the historical spring, the course of the "mole of history" and the pulleys of the deus ex machina. If Christ, the pastors and apostles, the holy ascetics and prophets are the "salt" of the earth, sanctifying its grace-filled nature through intercession for the highest Good, then the Antichrist is the healing "poison" of history, the inoculation of Evil and the instrument of God's Wrath. By God's connivance, the Antichrist entered historical space. The throwing of man into the world of time, i.e., history, is the action of an angry Deity. Is it not here that the therapeutic and prophylactic principles that form the basis of the strange mythologem "Fear of God" originate? It contains a lesson in "true wisdom" (Job 28:28; Proverbs 1:7; 9:10), "service" to God (1 Kings 12:14), "reverence" (2 Kings 17:36) and "reverence" (Neh. 1:11). But the main thing is that the Old Covenant of Good is imprinted in this phrase: "The fear of the Lord is to hate Evil" (Proverbs 8:13). On the fear of God he founded himself not a purely emotive, as in the Old Testament, but a logical principle of discernment of that which is so similar in the completely evil world of signs, but so opposite in essence: the angel and the aggel, Lucifer the Lucifer and the Morning Star (Rev. 2:28; 22:16; 2 Pet. 1:19). The Devil, Satan, Beelzebub, Abaddon, demons and evil spirits have been preserved in the demonic pantheon of the New Testament and organically fit into the enemy legions of the evil spirits of the Slavic myth. Connected with them by the threads of inspiratively successive Evil, the figure of the Antichrist presented something new. Like Satan, he is "the ruler of the darkness of this world" (Eph. 6:12); like the devil, he is "a spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience" (Eph. 2:2); like Abaddon, he is "a murderer from time immemorial" (John 8:44) and, like all of them, is an apostate and the father of lies. His novelty is that he is a man and that he can be fought by human means of exposure. He is a false messiah and is identified by signs of false righteous rhetoric. He is full of words, like a fish in scales. As soon as the evangelistic role of Christ was opposed by the false priority word of the Antichrist, the struggle against the latter became a matter of culture. The historical duty of the Christian turned into a rhetorical task: recognize the enemy by his words. The Jews found this task beyond their strength. Christ was accepted as a false messiah, so that Golgotha and the redemption of the faithful on the cross could take place. The Jews did not save Christ, but they saved Christianity. The eternal lesson of Golgotha never became historical: a lie is more convincing than the truth, a false messiah is more charming than a righteous man, the priority word of truth gives way to the elegant rhetoric of another benefactor of humanity.

The man of history is immersed in the world of fictions. The main parameters of its social existence are deeply relativized. The Antichrist is the 20th symbol of historical fictitiousness. Impersonal, he cuts the face of the world. Having no inheritance, he owns the world. Devoid of perspective, he promises an eternal reign of equality on earth. Fiction of an event, it initiates historical eventfulness. Inhuman, pleasing to man. Fundamentally unsystematic, he builds programs of well-being. Doomed, embodies Fate. He is a living figure of the relational world, which becomes through its negation and inner self-discrimination. The Antichrist is the figure of transition, the dynamic moment of its self-movement and self-negation, the figure of the death of the process, the provocation of destruction. Like Satan, he can only build mimicries of order, denying ready-made structures of existence. The evil joy of destruction cannot be his joy; He draws "his" food for emotions from within the stolen corporeality, leaving it states of anguish, despondency and sadness, even despair (precisely defined by Orthodoxy as the most sinful and fraught with the disintegration of the "I").

The Antichrist is well aware that his kingdom will be brought to an end, and the teleology of his presence here turns out to be imaginary. Lies have no system, said V. Rozanov; S. Bulgakov and N. Lossky denied Evil a reasonable goal-setting. The pseudo-creative nature of the World Evil and its confidants fosters an ontological habit of Evil in the most stable pictures of the world. It is at the center of romantic and symbolist pictures of the world. It is at the center of the image of the Universe for the adherents of the Marcionite heresy and for Satanails of all stripes.

In A. Remizov's novella "The Ditch" (written in 1914-1918), its hero, Anton Petrovich, reflecting on the early Gnostic Basilides (about whom L. Karsavin wrote an article with the expressive title "The Depths of Satan" [45]), "life was imagined<... > a vicious circle of hopelessly existing from eternity and insurmountable by nothing in the centuries black evil.