The subject of the article "Philosophy of the inanimate: historical memory and monuments in the national narrative. Several scenes from the Russian experience" presents an analysis of a number of aspects of the relationship between power, time and monuments of material culture, including works of architecture. It is suggested that etatist discourse includes a certain vision of history that appears to be managed/guided, linear and associated with the indispensable presence of "triumph" attributed to the "eternal" state. In the article subject-object relations are analyzed in the construction of a national narrative with the usage of a historical myth. The emphasis is placed on the fact that these mechanisms are most evident in a modern and mass society. In addition, the problem of the "body" is touched upon in the political and philosophical sense: this aspect is based on the concept of the "monarch's double body" of the historian E. Kantorovich, the poststructuralist criticism of M. Foucault and the theory of the modern anthropologist K. Verderi, in this way the symbolic aspects of inanimate objects in political space are discussed.