Original scientific paper
Variations of the End of the World
Lev Kreft
; University of Ljubljana
Abstract
The source of the issue of the end of the world in Christian imaginary is the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Christian Bible and New Testament. The tradition of its versions includes many different interpretations and visions of the end times (eschatology). The aim of this paper is to name some of them because they are typical expressions of their historical moment, and influential afterwards. The purpose is not to list a comprehensive totality of interpretations or even a Hegelian dialectic process of exhausting all three possibilities of development of the idea of the end. To delineate a field where the end of the world flourished as an idea with many variations, pillars such as Tertullian, St. Augustine and his refugees from Rome, Edward Gibbon, Immanuel Kant, and Nikolai Fedorov are mentioned. Their examples are shortly described in order to organize a grid table which can become a pedestal for historical avant-garde interpretations of the end of the world. Only three versions are named herein, which albeit different from previous tradition that may seem randomly selected, are directly connected amongst themselves as three mutual oppositions: Russian avant-garde, Ljubomir Micić’s Zenitism, and Anton Podbevšek’s Slovenian Titanic mission.
Keywords
interpretations of the end of the world; avant-garde variations; West and East versions; the end as tragedy or salvation; world after the end of the world
Hrčak ID:
330834
URI
Publication date:
13.5.2025.
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