Is the Western Soul adequately tamed to tame the Russian Soul?

To ask whether the Russian soul is “untamed” is to confront the central myth of modern liberal civilization. Modernity is built upon a comfortable, bourgeois delusion: that human existence can be domesticated, optimized, and brought under the mechanical control of rationalist legalism, behavioral psychology, and technocratic governance.

When the modern West looks east toward Russia, it often projects its own fear of the primordial, labeling the Eurasian expanse as “barbaric,” “wild,” or “untamed.” Yet this is a profound misunderstanding of existential geography. From the standpoint of deep metaphysics and the Fourth Political Theory, we must declare a radical premise: the Western soul exists, and it is every bit as wild, abyssal, and untamed as the Russian soul. The distinction lies not in the existence of this untamed core, but in how each civilization relates to it. While Russia maintains a direct, poetic, and spiritual openness to the abyss of Being (Seyn), the modern West has attempted to construct an elaborate cage of social contracts, psychological techniques, and institutional control to pretend the abyss does not exist.

Can the human soul ever truly be tamed? To answer this question, we must examine Shakespeare’s most disturbing comedy of power, The Taming of the Shrew, alongside the modern psychoanalytic, anthropological, and cultural revelations of Jacques Lacan, René Girard, and George Steiner, balanced by the prophetic literary titanhood of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Russia’s great poets.

I. The Techne of Domestication: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew

If we seek the literary blueprint for the Western project of taming the untamed, we find it in William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Behind the farce of sixteenth-century courtship lies a brutal, allegorical demonstration of how modern Western techne attempts to disarm the wild human spirit.

Katherina (“the Shrew”) represents the untamed soul—passionate, rebellious, fierce, and entirely un-domesticated by the polite, hypocritical social conventions of Padua. She refuses to conform to the commercialized marriage market where human beings are traded as assets.

Enter Petruchio, the quintessential early modern Western man. Petruchio does not court Katherina through love, sacred understanding, or spiritual synthesis; he approaches her as an engineer approaching a raw natural element to be mastered. His strategy is a masterclass in behavioral conditioning and sensory deprivation:

• He deprives her of sleep and food under the pretense of “loving care.”
• He systematically degrades her perception of reality, forcing her to agree that the sun is the moon if he commands it.
• He gaslights her until her raw, authentic, untamed spirit collapses under sheer physical and mental exhaustion.

When Katherina delivers her famous final speech on obedience, bourgeois critics celebrate the triumph of “order.” But what has actually occurred? Has Katherina’s soul been tamed, or has she merely learned the cynical art of performative compliance to survive a sadistic oppressor?

Shakespeare leaves a dark, ironic undertone: Katherina’s inner wildness has not been transformed into virtue; it has been driven into the underground of her consciousness. Petruchio has achieved behavioral control, not spiritual transformation. The Taming of the Shrew exposes the foundational truth of Western modernity: “taming” is never a spiritual reconciliation—it is an exercise in coercive conditioning, an imposition of artificial order upon an indomitable nature that secretly bides its time.

II. The Western Abyss: Lacan, Girard, and Steiner on the Unconquerable Core

The illusion that Western civilization successfully domesticated human nature collapses completely under the gaze of twentieth-century Continental thought. The West did not tame its soul; it merely built a hyper-rationalized pressure cooker to hide its violent, untamed depths.

1. Jacques Lacan: The Real and the Impossible Jouissance

In psychoanalytic theory, Jacques Lacan demonstrated that human subjectivity is permanently split. Civilization constructs the Symbolic Order—the realm of language, law, social etiquette, and Petruchio-like rules. Yet, beneath and beyond this fragile Symbolic web lies The Real (le Réel), that which radically resists all symbolization, logic, and domestication.

Lacan identified jouissance—a chaotic, intense, paradoxical drive where pain and pleasure coalesce, a wild energy that utterly refuses to submit to the utilitarian “pleasure principle” of bourgeois survival. For Lacan, the soul cannot be tamed because the Real cannot be erased. When the Symbolic Order becomes too rigid, oppressive, or artificial, the Real erupts from beneath as madness, terror, or revolutionary violence.

2. René Girard: Mimetic Violence and the Sacrificial Mask

The anthropologist René Girard deconstructed the myth of Western enlightenment by uncovering the mechanics of mimetic desire. Human beings do not desire objects autonomously; we imitate the desires of others. This leads inevitably to envy, rivalry, and an untamed, explosive momentum of all-against-all violence.

Archaic societies managed this untamed fury through the sacred mechanism of the scapegoat. The modern West claimed to have outgrown such “barbarism” through secular law and individualism. Yet Girard warned that by removing the sacred rituals while leaving mimetic desire intact, the West did not tame violence—it merely stripped away the emergency brakes. Beneath the polished veneer of Western democracy lies an untamed ocean of mimetic resentment, perpetually seeking new victims to sacrifice under the cover of hyper-moralistic ideology.

3. George Steiner: Barbarism in the Heart of High Culture

In In Bluebeard’s Castle, George Steiner confronted the ultimate scandal of the modern Western world: high European culture, literacy, and philosophical refinement did not tame the human spirit. Steiner pointed out that the twentieth century’s most horrific atrocities were executed by people who read Goethe, listened to Schubert, and lived at the absolute apex of Western civilized achievement.

Steiner proved that “civilization” is a remarkably thin crust over a subterranean fire. High culture does not tame the soul; in fact, when high culture becomes empty, secular, and decoupled from transcendent truth, it creates a deep, subconscious boredom—a pathological hunger for catastrophe. The Western soul, starved of genuine sacred transcendence, secretly craves the destruction of its own domesticated cage.

III. The Russian Prophets: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy Mapping the Abyss

Where Western modernity deployed Petruchio’s psychological conditioning, Lacanian symbolic control, and Girardian legal structures to pretend the wild soul was tamed, Russian literature openly embraces the untamed as the very locus of human truth and divine grace.

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Metaphysical Breadth of the Abyss

Fyodor Dostoevsky is the supreme cartographer of Russian Dasein. He recognized that the human spirit cannot be reduced to the neat equations of Western utilitarianism or Enlightenment rationalism.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitry Karamazov gives voice to the raw, un-hedged breadth of existence:

“The Russian man is too broad, I would narrow him down.”

Dostoevsky demonstrates that the Russian soul encompasses the most extreme, un-reconciled polarities: the saintly purity of Alyosha or Prince Myshkin on one hand, and the dark, abyssal passions of Dmitry or Stavrogin on the other. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov attempts to adopt a cold, Westernized, Napoleonic formula for murder, only to discover that his native spirit rebels against mathematical calculation, demanding the raw, untamed experience of suffering and spiritual resurrection.

Dostoevsky declared that the true mission of the Great Russian spirit is to be the “All-Human” (всечеловек)—a universal capacity to absorb, suffer, and redeem the tragic contradictions of all world cultures. The Russian soul remains untamed because it refuses to settle for partial, earthly solutions; it demands absolute salvation or absolute apocalyptic fire.

2. Leo Tolstoy: The Uncontrollable Ocean of the Narod

If Dostoevsky captures the untamed psychological and metaphysical interior of the individual, Leo Tolstoy reveals the untamed, cosmic force of the Russian Narod (the collective organic people) in history.

In War and Peace, Tolstoy stages the grand historical collision between the Western Apollonian drive for mastery—embodied by Napoleon Bonaparte—and the untamable expanse of Eurasia. Napoleon enters Russia with supreme confidence in his strategic calculations, his military science, and his historical ego. Yet, he is swallowed and destroyed by something he cannot quantify or tame: the Russian winter, the vast geography, and the instinctual, collective soul of the Russian peasantry embodied by characters like Platon Karataev and General Kutuzov.

Tolstoy shows that true historical force does not belong to the arrogant planners of empires who attempt to impose artificial order upon existence. It belongs to the deep, silent, untamed stream of life itself. For Tolstoy, the Russian soul is untamed because it is aligned with the cosmic flow of God’s creation, resisting the artificial cages of Western statecraft.

IV. The Poetic Horizon: Russia’s Openness to the Abyss

Russia’s poetic prophets give voice to this untamed essence not as a flaw, but as Russia’s divine mark and metaphysical destiny.

Fyodor Tyutchev captured this fundamental ontological posture:

“Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone,
Nor measured with a common yardstick:
She has a special stature—
In Russia, one can only believe.”

Tyutchev explicitly rejects the Western “yardstick”—the quantitative, analytical attempt to measure, categorize, and tame reality. Russia’s refusal to be tamed by Western rationalism is an ontological choice to remain rooted in mystery, faith, and the unmeasured breadth (shirota) of existence.

Alexander Pushkin, in The Bronze Horseman, portrayed the tragic clash between Peter the Great’s rationalist, Westernizing effort to build an imperial city upon the swamps and the elemental, untamed flooding of the Neva River—the wild forces of nature and spirit that inevitably overflow their artificial banks.

At the twilight of the European order, Alexander Blok unleashed the ultimate manifesto of the untamed Eurasian spirit in The Scythians:

“Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians,
With greedy, slanting eyes!”

Blok warned a decaying, hyper-rationalized West that beneath Russia’s surface lies an ancient, wild, Dionysian fire—a force capable of immense love and apocalyptic destruction, refusing to be domesticated by the dying logic of European liberalism.

V. “If the Soul Be Ever Tamed?” An Ontological Verdict

We return to the central question: If the soul be ever tamed?

Ontologically, metaphysically, and historically, the answer is an uncompromising No. The soul cannot be tamed—it can only be suppressed, mutilated, or falsified.

1. Taming vs. Masking: What Petruchio achieved with Katherina, and what modern liberal technocracy achieves with Western citizens, is not the taming of the soul, but its neurotic suppression. It is the enforcement of a behavioral mask. As Lacan and Girard demonstrated, the suppressed untamed core does not evaporate; it accumulates latent tension in the unconscious until it explodes as psychological pathology or systemic civilizational collapse.
2. The Post-Human Futility: The only way to truly “tame” the soul would be to eliminate Dasein entirely—to replace living, spiritual humanity with post-human, cybernetic algorithms, biological optimization, and transhumanist machinery. This is the ultimate goal of the globalist “Great Reset”: to create a completely predictable, domesticated creature that no longer possesses an abyss, a tragic choice, or a relationship with God. Yet this is not the taming of the soul; it is the murder of the human essence.
3. The Eruption of the Real: So long as man remains man—so long as he experiences love, death, freedom, and the haunting presence of Being—the soul remains wildly, gloriously untamed.

Conclusion: The Untamed Soul as the Seed of Another Beginning

The tragedy of the modern West is not that it lacked an untamed soul, but that it allowed Petruchio’s whip, Venetian ledgers, and technocratic hubris to convince it that the soul should be tamed. In doing so, the West traded its own Faustian, tragic, and profound spiritual depth for the flat, materialist boredom of consumerist conformity.

Russia’s historical, geopolitical, and spiritual mission as the heartland of Eurasia is to remain the fortress of the untamed. Through the visions of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and the songs of Pushkin, Tyutchev, and Blok, Russia refuses to let its spirit be domesticated by the desert of modern nihilism.

The soul cannot be tamed. And in that unconquerable, abyssal fire lies our ultimate hope: that when the artificial cages of modern technocracy crumble under the weight of their own inner contradictions, the untamed spirit of man—in the East and in the true West—will arise to inaugurate Another Beginning (Der andere Anfang) for world civilization.