The article provides an analysis of “The State of European Jurisprudence” by Carl Schmitt. The article offers a brief reconstruction of Schmitt’s “mental geography”, that is, his thoughts on the place of Europe and Germany in the history of the 20th century, as well as on the geo-strategic affiliation of Soviet Russia. The first part ends with the author’s interesting reflections on how Schmitt would perceive the situation in the contemporary Russian Federation. At the beginning of the next section, the scholar presents his research framework which, in his opinion, allows him to adequately deal with the texts of such a complex author as Carl Schmitt. The second part also considers the different versions of a given paper and the context of its origin; this part pays special attention to Schmitt’s wartime lectures of 1943–1944 which already contained the semantic core of their subsequent 1950 publication. The third section reconstructs Schmitt’s reception of the history of jurisprudence which started in the 1920s. The fourth and final part analyses the structure of the paper itself. It presents Schmitt’s concept of the “cabinet of mirrors” as a kind of extremely successful illustration for the history of ideas: it is a set of referenced authors with whom he identified himself with during various years. The article ends with the conclusion stating the great heuristic potential of Schmitt’s oeuvre which contributes substantially to the understanding of current political and legal disputes. This article is a new version of a public lecture delivered by Reinhard Mehring, Professor of the Heidelberg University of Education, and a renowned biographer and scholar of Carl Schmitt. The article was revised for this Russian publication. The author, taking the particular interests of an Russian audience into account, added a special fragment on the significance of Russia’s image in Schmitt’s works.