“VseiaSvetnaia Gramota”: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Utopian Comparative Studies

The post-Soviet cultural landscape is characterized by the popularity of nationalistic ideas and narratives, which apply conspiratorial explanatory models and suggest various versions of “alternative history.” This is framed, in particular, with amateur concepts of language — a sort of cryptolinguistics. This type of cryptolinguistic discourse is illustrated in this article with the case of the so-called VseiaSvetnaia Gramota (the“WorldWide Charter”), which teaches that an esoteric Slavic alphabet “encodes” the entire universe. The doctrine’s discursive design and its interpretive patterns give us an opportunity to track the connections between Western esotericism, the history of philology, and nationalism.