I’ll start by searching for information about this work.Let me look for more detail on the contents and the English edition (The Invincible).I’ll pull the preface and publication details from the Roerich Museum page.# Unbreakable (Nerushimoe)
Unbreakable (Russian: Нерушимое, Nerushimoe; also rendered in English as The Invincible, with the transliteration Nerushimoye) is a collection of short essays and articles by the Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, and public figure Nicholas Roerich (Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh, 1874–1947). It was first published in Russian in Riga, Latvia, in 1936. The volume belongs to the large body of Roerich’s literary work, which he produced alongside his painting and his public activity on behalf of the protection of cultural heritage.
Author and Context
Nicholas Roerich was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, public figure, mystic, enlightener and philosopher. Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to the family of a well-to-do notary public, he lived around the world until his death in Punjab, India. Trained as an artist and a lawyer, his interests lay in literature, philosophy, archaeology and especially art. He is known first and foremost as a painter, but, as the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York notes, he was as prolific a writer as he was a painter, producing many articles, books, poetry, and almost-daily essays on life and events, which he called “diary leaves”.
Unbreakable appeared at a particular moment in Roerich’s career. In the mid-1930s he was living in Asia after the Central Asian expedition of 1925–1928, and he was campaigning for the international protection of cultural monuments. The Roerich Pact was signed on 15 April 1935 by the representatives of American states in the Oval Office of the White House. The book’s Russian-language edition followed within about a year of that event, and several of its essays deal with the Pact and its emblem, the Banner of Peace. A chronology of the Pact notes that in 1936 the books “Gates into the Future” and “Unbreakable” were published in Riga.
Publication History
The first edition was issued by the Riga publishing house Uguns (Угунс, “Fire”), which was associated with the Latvian Roerich Society; the Nicholas Roerich Museum’s archive lists “Нерушимое, Rīga: Uguns, 1936” among the publications of that society. The Latvian society’s publishing activity also included works about Roerich by other authors, such as a 1937 study of Roerich as artist and thinker.
The 1936 volume was the eleventh in a numbered series of Roerich’s collected works issued in Russian. Its preface describes it as “the present eleventh volume of his works, called by the author The Invincible“. Russian bibliographies cite the 1936 Riga edition as containing a collection of articles with a length of 349 pages.
The book returned to print in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period, when Roerich’s writings were again made widely available in Russia and Latvia:
- Riga: Vieda, 1991, 236 pages.
- Novosibirsk: Vico, Algim and Aura, 1992.
- A 2013 Russian edition of about 304 pages, which presents the work as a collection (sbornik) and is also available in electronic and audio formats through the LitRes platform.
The Russian-language descriptions of the later editions characterize the book through a statement attributed to Roerich: he stood unbreakably on guard over the achievements of culture and unbreakably laid the steps of a new human consciousness, “for every structure needs a foundation of firmness”. They add that a new life should be built on the unshakable foundations of the cultural achievements of all peoples.
The English Edition
The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York issued an English-language edition titled The Invincible. A first edition was published in hardcover in 1974, running to 379 pages. The museum later reissued it as part of its Nicholas Roerich: Collected Writings series: a paperback appeared on May 22, 2017, ISBN 1947016083, with a hardcover following in October 2017. In the series, the book appears among the museum’s other reissued volumes, such as Altai-Himalaya, Heart of Asia, Shambhala, Realm of Light, Fiery Stronghold, Beautiful Unity, Himavat, Heroica, and Diary Leaves.
The museum’s English edition opens with a preface noting that The Invincible (Nerushimoye) was published in Russian in 1936 in Riga by the publishing house Uguns, and it reproduces the Russian preface in full.
Contents and Themes
Unbreakable is not a continuous narrative or treatise but a mosaic of brief essays, many only a page or two long, each bearing a one-word or short-phrase title. The English edition lists more than eighty pieces. Among them are “Fearlessness,” “Aesop’s Fable,” “The Far-Seeing Eye,” “Culture, The Victorious,” “Self-Destruction,” “Benevolence,” “The Unrepeatable,” “Ancient Sources,” “Worth,” “Madness,” “Stars of Death,” “Attentiveness,” “Serov,” “The Winged Plague,” “Steadfastness,” “Epidemics,” “Artists,” “Tactica Adversa,” “Monsalvat,” “The Banner,” “Russia,” “Gates into the Future,” “The Great Images,” “King Albert,” “The Middle Ages,” “Prophecies,” “Catacombs,” “Regeneration,” “Invincibility,” “Golden Prague,” “Combating Ignorance,” “Gorki,” and “Signs of the Era.”
The essays are dated and placed by the circumstances of their writing; one Russian text of the collection, for example, carries the note 22 December 1934, Peking, and “The Banner” is dated 15 April 1935, Tsagan Kure, the day of the signing of the Roerich Pact. This reflects Roerich’s habit of writing short occasional pieces during his travels and residence in Asia.
Several recurring concerns run through the collection:
- Culture as a guiding principle. The preface presents Roerich as standing invincibly on watch over culture, molding the steps of the consciousness of the new man, and battling ignorance, superstition, and prejudice. Culture, in the preface’s formulation, is for him a hearth of light.
- Response to contemporary events. The preface describes the author as vigilantly watching all that happens in life upon the planet and reacting constantly, like a sensitive barometer, to all events and manifestations of life, positive as well as negative. Essays on epidemics, madness, self-destruction, and the habits of modern society sit beside tributes to individual figures, such as the painter Valentin Serov and King Albert of Belgium, and reflections on historical eras such as the later Roman Empire, Byzantium, and the Middle Ages.
- Fearlessness and perseverance. The opening essay, “Fearlessness,” begins by stating that science, if it is to be redintegrated, should primarily not be limited, and thus be fearless. The theme of unwavering courage in the face of ignorance and adversity gives the volume its title.
- The Banner of Peace and the Roerich Pact. Essays such as “The Banner” and others in the volume address the protection of cultural treasures and the emblem intended to mark them. Russian bibliographies of the Pact cite these essays specifically, and the volume has been a standard reference for Roerich’s Pact-related writing; one of the essays is cited under the English title “Banner of Peace” in the museum’s Roerich Essays publications.
- Appreciation of other traditions. The preface praises the author’s disposition to approach everything without negation and intolerance, and to observe in each cultural endeavor something positive. It links this attitude to the cultural societies Roerich founded, in which he sought to realize a “League of Culture.”
Significance
Within Roerich’s bibliography, Unbreakable is a representative example of his late essay writing: concise, aphoristic, moralizing, and often exclamatory in tone, mixing observation of current events with historical parallels and appeals to a “cultural construction” of life. Its audience was chiefly the circle of Roerich societies in Europe and America and Russian-speaking émigré readers; the Latvian society in Riga was a particular centre of this readership. Individual essays from the volume have been cited by later writers on the Roerich Pact and the Banner of Peace, and its title essay-cycle has been republished repeatedly since the end of the Soviet era. The book has also been translated into other languages, including Latvian, as shown by reader reviews of a Latvian translation.
Like much of Roerich’s writing, the collection reflects the philosophical outlook he shared with his wife, Helena Roerich, and the Agni Yoga teaching, and it continues to circulate chiefly among readers interested in Roerich’s cultural philosophy, his spiritual views, and the history of the movement for the protection of cultural property in wartime.
