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Russian literature
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Post-Revolutionary literature. Great Purge and
Intelligentsia
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Mikhail
Sholokhov
Nikolay Zabolotsky
Vladislav Khodasevich
Georgy Ivanov
Marina Tsvetayeva
"Poems"
Vladimir Nabokov
Isaak Babel
Yevgeny
Zamyatin
Nikolay
Erdman
Yury Olesha
Mikhail Zoshchenko
Daniil Kharms
Boris Pilnyak
Andrey Platonov
Ilya Ilf and
Yevgeny Petrov
Viktor
Shklovsky
Yury Tynyanov
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bulgakov
"Master i Margarita" ("The
Master and Margarita")
Pavel Florensky
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Lossky
Sergei Bulgakov
Ivan Ilyin
Vladimir Ilich Lenin
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Post-Revolutionary literature
Literature under Soviet rule.
Soviet era
The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 radically
changed Russian literature. After a brief period of
relative openness (compared to what followed) in the
1920s, literature became a tool of state propaganda.
Officially approved writing (the only kind that
could be published) by and large sank to a
subliterary level. Censorship, imprisonment in
labour camps, and mass terror were only part of the
problem. Writers were not only forbidden to create
works that were dissident, formally complex, or
objective (a term of reproach), but they were also
expected to fulfill the dictates of the Communist
Party to produce propaganda on specific, often
rather narrow, themes of current interest to it.
Writers were called upon to be “engineers of human
souls” helping to produce “the new Soviet man.”
As
a result of Bolshevik rule, the literary tradition
was fragmented. In addition to official Soviet
Russian literature, two kinds of unofficial
literature existed. First, a tradition of émigré
literature, containing some of the best works of the
century, continued until the fall of the Soviet
Union. Second, unofficial literature written within
the Soviet Union came to include works circulated
illegally in typewritten copies (“samizdat”), works
smuggled abroad for publication (“tamizdat”), and
works written “for the drawer,” or not published
until decades after they were written (“delayed”
literature). Moreover, literature publishable at one
time often lost favour later; although nominally
acceptable, it was frequently unobtainable. On many
occasions, even officially celebrated works had to
be rewritten to suit a shift in the Communist Party
line. Whereas pre-Revolutionary writers had been
intensely aware of Western trends, for much of the
Soviet period access to Western movements was
severely restricted, as was foreign travel. Access
to pre-Revolutionary Russian writing was also
spotty. As a result, Russians periodically had to
change their sense of the past, as did Western
scholars when “delayed” works became known.
From a literary point of view,
unofficial literature clearly surpasses official
literature. Of Russia’s five winners of the Nobel
Prize for Literature during the Soviet period, Bunin
emigrated after the Revolution,
Boris Pasternak
had his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) published
abroad,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(b. 1918) had most of his works published abroad and
was expelled from the Soviet Union, and Joseph
Brodsky (1940–96) published all his collections of
verse abroad and was forced to emigrate in 1972.
Only Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–84) was clearly
an official Soviet writer.
Mikhail
Sholokhov

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, (b.
May 24 [May 11, Old Style], 1905,
Veshenskaya, Russia—d. Feb. 21, 1984,
Veshenskaya, Russian S.F.S.R.,
U.S.S.R.), Russian novelist, winner of
the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature for
his novels and stories about the
Cossacks of southern Russia.
After joining the Red Army in 1920 and
spending two years in Moscow, he
returned in 1924 to his native Cossack
village in the Don region of southern
Russia. He made several trips to western
Europe and in 1959 accompanied the
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to the
United States. He joined the Communist
Party in 1932 and became a member of the
Central Committee in 1961.
Sholokhov began writing at 17, his first
published book being Donskie rasskazy
(1926; Tales of the Don), a collection
of short stories. In 1925 he began his
famous novel Tikhy Don (“The Silent
Don”). Sholokhov’s work evolved slowly:
it took him 12 years to publish Tikhy
Don (4 vol., 1928–40; translated in two
parts as And Quiet Flows the Don and The
Don Flows Home to the Sea) and 28 years
to complete another major novel,
Podnyataya tselina (1932–60; translated
in two parts as Virgin Soil Upturned
[also published as Seeds of Tomorrow]
and Harvest on the Don). Oni Srazhalis
za rodinu (1942; They Fought for Their
Country) is an unfinished epic tale of
the Soviet people’s bravery during the
German invasion of World War II.
Sholokhov’s popular story “Sudba
cheloveka” (1957; “The Fate of a Man”)
also focused on this period.
Sholokhov’s best-known work, Tikhy Don,
is remarkable for the objectivity of its
portrayal of the heroic and tragic
struggle of the Don Cossacks against the
Bolsheviks for independence. It became
the most widely read novel in the Soviet
Union and was heralded as a powerful
example of Socialist Realism, winning
the Stalin Prize in 1941.
Sholokhov was one of the most enigmatic
Soviet writers. In letters he wrote to
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, he boldly
defended compatriots from the Don
region, yet he approved the sentencing
that followed the convictions of the
writers Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel
on subversion charges in 1966 and the
persecution of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Stalin’s view that Tikhy Don contained
errors was public knowledge, but the
novel remained a classic of Soviet
literature throughout Stalin’s rule. The
artistic merits of Sholokhov’s best
novel are in such stark contrast with
the mediocre (or worse) quality of the
rest of his work that questions have
been raised about Sholokhov’s authorship
of Tikhy Don. Many authors, among them
Solzhenitsyn, publicly accused Sholokhov
of plagiarism and claimed that the novel
was a reworking of another writer’s
manuscript; Fyodor Kryukov, a writer
from the Don region who died in 1920, is
most often cited as Sholokhov’s source.
Though a group of Norwegian literary
scholars—using statistical analysis of
the novel’s language—proved its affinity
with the rest of Sholokhov’s oeuvre and
despite the recovery of the novel’s
early manuscript, which had been
believed lost, a considerable number of
authoritative literary figures in Russia
today believe that the novel was
plagiarized.
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The first years of
the Soviet regime were marked by the proliferation
of avant-garde literature groups. One of the most
important was the Oberiu movement that
included Nikolay Zabolotsky, Alexander
Vvedensky, Konstantin Vaginov and the most famous
Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms. Other famous
authors experimenting with language were novelists
Andrei Platonov and Yuri Olesha and
short story writers Isaak Babel and
Mikhail Zoshchenko.
Nikolay
Zabolotsky

Nikolay Alexeyevich Zabolotsky -
(Russian: Никола́й Алексе́евич
Заболо́цкий; May 7, 1903 - October 14,
1958) a Russian poet, children's writer
and translator. He was a Modernist and
one of the founders of the Russian
avant-garde absurdist group OBERIU.
Nikolay
Alekseevich Zabolotsky was born on May
7, 1903 near the city of Kazan. His
early life was spent in the towns of
Sernur (now in the Republic of Mari El)
and Urzhum (now in the Kirov Oblast). In
1920, Zabolotsky left his family and
moved to Moscow, enrolling
simultaneously in the departments of
medicine and philology at the university
there. A year later, he moved to
Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) and
enrolled in the Pedagogical Institute of
Saint Petersburg State University.
Zabolotsky had already begun to write
poetry at this time. His formative
period showed the influences of the
Futurist works of Vladimir Mayakovsky
and Velimir Khlebnikov, the lyrical
poems of Alexander Blok and Sergei
Esenin, and the art of Pavel Filonov and
Marc Chagall. During this period,
Zabolotsky also met his future wife, E.V.
Klykova.
In
1928, Zabolotsky founded the avant-garde
group OBERIU with Daniil Kharms and
Alexander Vvedensky. The group's acronym
stood for "The Association of Real Art"
(in Russian, Объединение реального
искусства). During this period,
Zabolotsky began to be published. His
first book of poetry, Columns (Столбцы,
1929), was a series of grotesque
vignettes on the life that Lenin's NEP
(New Economic Policy) had created. It
included the poem "The Signs of the
Zodiac Fade" (Меркнут знаки зодиака), an
absurdist lullaby that, 67 years later,
in 1996, provided the words for a
Russian pop hit. In 1937, Zabolotsky
published his second book of poetry.
This collection showed the subject
matter of Zabolotsky's work moving from
social concerns to elegies and nature
poetry. This book is notable for its
inclusion of pantheistic themes.
Amidst
Stalin's increased censorship of the
arts, Zabolotsky fell victim to the
Soviet government's purges. In 1938, he
was sent for five years to Siberia. This
sentence was prolonged until the war was
over. In 1944 after his appeal he was
freed of guard, but still continued the
sentence in exile in Karaganda. In
Siberia he continued his creative work
and was occupied with translation of The
Tale of Igor's Campaign. This followed
with his release in 1945. Upon his
return to Moscow in 1946, Zabolotsky was
restored as member of Union of Soviet
Writers. He also translated several
Georgian poets (including Rustaveli's
epic poem The Knight in the Panther's
Skin, as well as more modern Georgian
poets such as Vazha-Pshavela, Grigol
Orbeliani, David Guramishvili) and
traveled frequently to Georgia.
Zabolotsky also resumed his work as an
original poet. However, the literature
of his post-exile years experienced
drastic stylistic changes. His poetry
began to take a more traditional,
conservative form and was often compared
to the work of Tyutchev.
The
last few years of Zabolotsky's life were
beset by illness. He suffered a
debilitating heart attack and, from 1956
onward, spent much of his time in the
town of Tarusa. A second heart attack
claimed his life on October 14, 1958 in
Moscow.
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In the 1930s Socialist realism became the officially
approved style. Several acclaimed Soviet novelists
of the time were Maxim Gorky, Nobel Prize winner
Mikhail Sholokhov, and Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy;
and poets Konstantin Simonov and Aleksandr
Tvardovsky are being read in Russia to this day.
Other Soviet celebrities, such as Alexander
Serafimovich, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Alexander Fadeyev,
Fyodor Gladkov or Demyan Bedny have never been
published by mainstream publishers after 1989.
Few of the
pre-World War II Soviet writers could be published
without strictly following the Socialist realism
guidelines. A notable exception were satyrics Ilf
and Petrov, with their picaresque novels
about a charismatic con artist Ostap Bender.
Writers like those
of Serapion Brothers group, who insisted on the
right of an author to write independently of
political ideology, were forced by authorities to
reject their views and accept Socialist realism
principles. Some 1930's writers, such as
Mikhail Bulgakov,
author of The Master and Margarita, and Nobel-prize
winning
Boris
Pasternak with his novel Doctor Zhivago
continued the classical tradition of Russian
literature with little or no hope of being
published. Their major works would not be published
until the Khrushchev Thaw and
Pasternak
was forced to refuse his Nobel prize.
Meanwhile, émigré
writers, such as poets
Vyacheslav Ivanov,
Georgy Ivanov and Vladislav Khodasevich;
novelists such as Gaito Gazdanov, Mark
Aldanov and
Vladimir
Nabokov and short
story Nobel Prize winning writer
Ivan Bunin,
continued to write in exile.
In
the early years following the Revolution, writers
who left or were expelled from the Soviet Union
included
Balmont,
Bunin,
Gippius,
Vyacheslav Ivanov,
Kuprin, and
Merezhkovsky. Émigrés also
included the poets
Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) and
Georgy Ivanov
(1894–1958).
Marina Tsvetayeva
(1892–1941), regarded as one of the great poets of
the 20th century, eventually returned to Russia,
where she committed suicide.
Vladimir Nabokov, who later wrote in
English, published nine novels in Russian, including
Dar (published serially 1937–38; The Gift) and
Priglasheniye na kazn (1938; Invitation to a
Beheading).
Vladislav Khodasevich

Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich
(Russian: Владислав Фелицианович
Ходасевич) (May 16, 1886 - June 14,
1939) was an influential Russian poet
and literary critic who presided over
the Berlin circle of Russian emigre
litterateurs.
Khodasevich was born in Moscow into a
family of a Polish nobleman and a
converted Jewish woman. He left the
Moscow University after understanding
that poetry was his true vocation.
Khodasevich's first collections of
poems, Youth (1907) and A Happy Little
House (1914), were subsequently
discarded by him as immature.
In the year 1917, Khodasevich gained
wider renown by writing a superb short
piece The Way of Corn. This poem is
eponymous with Khodasevich's best known
collection of verse, first published in
1920 and revised in 1922.
Patronized by Maxim Gorky,
Khodasevich and his wife Nina Berberova
(herself a distinguished littérateur,
1901-1993) left Russia for Gorky's villa
in Sorrento, Italy. Later they moved to
Berlin, where they took up with Andrei
Bely. Khodasevich's complicated
relationship with this maverick genius
ended with a scandalous rupture,
followed by the latter's return to
Moscow. In his memoirs, Bely presented
an unforgettable, expressionistic, and
very partial portrayal of Khodasevich.
During his first years in Berlin,
Khodasevich wrote his two last and most
metaphysical collections of verse, Heavy
Lyre (1923) and European Night (1927).
The former contained the most important
rendition of Orpheus theme in the
Russian poetry, the esoteric Ballad.
Khodasevich didn't align himself with
any of the aesthetic movements of the
day, claiming Pushkin to be his only
model. He even penned several scholarly
articles exploring the master-stroke of
the great Russian poet.
In the mid-1920s, Khodasevich
switched his literary activities from
poetry to criticism. He joined Mark
Aldanov and Alexander Kerensky as the
co-editor of the Berlin periodical Days,
in which he would publish his
penetrating analyses of the contemporary
Soviet literature. He also indulged in a
prolonged controversy with the Parisian
emigre pundits, such as Georgy Adamovich
and Georgy Ivanov, on various issues of
literary theory. As an influential
critic, Khodasevich did his best to
encourage the career of Vladimir
Nabokov, who would always cherish his
memory.
Despite a physical infirmity that
gradually took hold of him, Khodasevich
worked relentlessly during the last
decade of his life. Most notably, he
wrote an important biography of Gavrila
Derzhavin (translated into English and
published by University of Wisconsin
Press in 2007) in 1931, which he
attempted to style in the language of
Pushkin's epoch. Several weeks before
Khodasevich's death his brilliant book
of memoirs, Necropolis, was published.
Although severely partisan, the book is
invaluable for its ingenious
characterizations of Maxim Gorky, Andrei
Bely, and Mikhail Gershenzon.
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Georgy Ivanov

From Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
Georgii Vladimirovich Ivanov
(Russian: Гео́ргий Влади́мирович Ива́нов
) (1894–1958) was a leading poet and
essayist of the Russian emigration
between the 1930s and 1950s.
As a banker's son, Ivanov spent his
young manhood in the elite circle of
Russian golden youth. He started writing
pretentious verses, imitative of
Baudelaire and the French Symbolists, at
a precocious age. Although his technique
of versification was impeccable, he had
no life experience to draw upon. The
favourite subjects of his early poetry
were Rococo mannerisms and gallant
festivals. Unsurprisingly, he named two
of his books "The Embarkment for
Cythera", alluding to Watteau's great
painting.
After dallying with a puerile variety
of Russian Futurism, as promoted by Igor
Severyanin, Ivanov came to associate
himself with the Acmeism movement.
Although not considered a major talent,
the 20-year-old was addressed or
mentioned in the poems by Osip
Mandelshtam and Anna Akhmatova. Georgii
Ivanov was also considered to be one of
the best pupils of the informal Guild of
Poets school organized by Nikolay
Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky.
Ivanov was the only prominent member
of this circle who emigrated to the
West. His natural arrogance and
peremptory judgements easily won him
respect and admiration from his younger
contemporaries. He self-consciously
promoted himself as the only remnant of
the highly sophisticated milieu of the
Russian Silver Age. To augment his
standing, he issued a book of memoirs,
entitled Petersburg Winters, which
contained a fictionalized or widely
exaggerated account of his experiences
with the Acmeists. The book alienated
Ivanov from his elder contemporaries but
won instant acclaim from his disciples.
Together with the fellow critic
Georgy Adamovich and his own wife Irina
Odoyevtseva, Ivanov became the principal
arbiter of taste of the emigrant
society, forging or destroying literary
reputations at will. However, their
literary taste was somewhat deficient:
they inadvertently dismissed
Tsvetayeva's genuine lyrics (when
anonymously submitted by her to a poetry
contest) as a crude imitation of
Tsvetayeva's manner. They
enthusiastically feuded with Berlinese
Russian litterateurs, with Vladimir
Nabokov becoming the favourite target of
their attacks. Nabokov revenged himself
by satirizing Ivanov in one of his best
known short stories, Spring in Fialta,
and by subjecting them to a clever
mystification, which resulted in
Adamovich's immoderate praise of
Nabokov's verses printed under an alias.
Afflicted with alcoholism and
suffering from despondency, Ivanov sank
ever lower. It was in conditions of
abject penury and total despair that
Ivanov's best poems were created. The
more he let himself go down as a person,
the more he rose as a poet. His art
culminated in his last cycle of poems,
written in the days preceding his death.
In one of his last pieces, Ivanov
prophetically promised "to return to
Russia as poems". Actually, his wife
returned to Leningrad during the
Perestroika and died there in 1990.
Following Ivanov's death, his
reputation has been steadily augmented.
His "poetry of brilliant despair", as
one critic put it, is taken by some to
presage the tenets of French
Existentialism.
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Marina Tsvetayeva
"Poems"

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetayeva, married
name Marina Ivanovna Efron (b. Sept. 26
[Oct. 8, New Style], 1892, Moscow,
Russia—d. Aug. 31, 1941, Yelabuga),
Russian poet whose verse is distinctive
for its staccato rhythms, originality,
and directness and who, though little
known outside Russia, is considered one
of the finest 20th-century poets in the
Russian language.
Tsvetayeva spent her youth
predominantly in Moscow, where her
father was a professor at the university
and director of a museum and her mother
was a talented pianist. The family
traveled abroad extensively, and at the
age of 16 she began studies at the
Sorbonne. Her first collection of
poetry, Vecherny albom (“Evening
Album”), appeared in 1910. Many of her
best and most typical poetical qualities
are displayed in the long verse fairy
tale Tsar-devitsa (1922; “Tsar-Maiden”).
Tsvetayeva met the Russian Revolution
with hostility (her husband, Sergei
Efron, was an officer in the White
counterrevolutionary army), and many of
her verses written at this time glorify
the anti-Bolshevik resistance. Among
these is the remarkable cycle Lebediny
stan (“The Swans’ Camp,” composed
1917–21, but not published until 1957 in
Munich), a moving lyrical chronicle of
the Civil War viewed through the eyes
and emotions of the wife of a White
officer.
Tsvetayeva left the Soviet Union in
1922, going to Berlin and Prague, and
finally, in 1925, settling in Paris.
There she published several volumes of
poetry, including Stikhi k Bloku (1922;
“Verses to Blok”) and Posle Rossii
(1928; “After Russia”), the last book of
her poetry to be published during her
lifetime. She also composed two poetical
tragedies on classical themes, Ariadne
(1924) and Phaedra (1927), several
essays on the creative process, and
works of literary criticism, including
the monograph Moy Pushkin (1937; “My
Pushkin”). Her last cycle of poems,
Stikhi k Chekhii (1938–39; “Verses to
the Czech Land”), was an impassioned
reaction to Nazi Germany’s occupation of
Czechoslovakia.
In the 1930s Tsvetayeva’s poetry
increasingly reflected alienation from
her émigré existence and a deepening
nostalgia for Russia, as in the poems
“Toska po rodine” (1935; “Homesick for
the Motherland”) and “Rodina” (1936;
“Motherland”). At the end of the ’30s
her husband—who had begun to cooperate
with the communists—returned to the
Soviet Union, taking their daughter with
him (both of them were later to become
victims of Joseph Stalin’s terror). In
1939 Tsvetayeva followed them, settling
in Moscow, where she worked on poetic
translations. The evacuation of Moscow
during World War II sent her to a remote
town where she had no friends or
support. She committed suicide in 1941.
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Vladimir Nabokov

in full Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
born April 22, 1899, St. Petersburg,
Russia
died July 2, 1977, Montreux, Switz.
Main
Russian-born American novelist and
critic, the foremost of the post-1917
émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian
and English, and his best works,
including Lolita (1955), feature
stylish, intricate literary effects.
Nabokov was born into an old
aristocratic family. His father, V.D.
Nabokov, was a leader of the
pre-Revolutionary liberal Constitutional
Democratic Party (Kadets) in Russia and
was the author of numerous books and
articles on criminal law and politics,
among them The Provisional Government
(1922), which was one of the primary
sources on the downfall of the Kerensky
regime. In 1922, after the family had
settled in Berlin, the elder Nabokov was
assassinated by a reactionary rightist
while shielding another man at a public
meeting; and although his novelist son
disclaimed any influence of this event
upon his art, the theme of assassination
by mistake has figured prominently in
Nabokov’s novels. Nabokov’s enormous
affection for his father and for the
milieu in which he was raised is evident
in his autobiography Speak, Memory
(revised version, 1967).
Nabokov published two collections of
verse, Poems (1916) and Two Paths
(1918), before leaving Russia in 1919.
He and his family made their way to
England, and he attended Trinity
College, Cambridge, on a scholarship
provided for the sons of prominent
Russians in exile. While at Cambridge he
first studied zoology but soon switched
to French and Russian literature; he
graduated with first-class honours in
1922 and subsequently wrote that his
almost effortless attainment of this
degree was “one of the very few
‘utilitarian’ sins on my conscience.”
While still in England he continued to
write poetry, mainly in Russian but also
in English, and two collections of his
Russian poetry, The Cluster and The
Empyrean Path, appeared in 1923. In
Nabokov’s mature opinion, these poems
were “polished and sterile.”
Between 1922 and 1940 Nabokov lived in
Germany and France, and, while
continuing to write poetry, he
experimented with drama and even
collaborated on several unproduced
motion-picture scenarios. By 1925 he
settled upon prose as his main genre.
His first short story had already been
published in Berlin in 1924. His first
novel, Mashenka (Mary), appeared in
1926; it was avowedly autobiographical
and contains descriptions of the young
Nabokov’s first serious romance as well
as of the Nabokov family estate, both of
which are also described in Speak,
Memory. Nabokov did not again draw so
heavily upon his personal experience as
he had in Mashenka until his episodic
novel about an émigré professor of
entomology in the United States, Pnin
(1957), which is to some extent based on
his experiences while teaching (1948–58)
Russian and European literature at
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
His second novel, King, Queen, Knave,
which appeared in 1928, marked his turn
to a highly stylized form that
characterized his art thereafter. His
chess novel, The Defense, followed two
years later and won him recognition as
the best of the younger Russian émigré
writers. In the next five years he
produced four novels and a novella. Of
these, Despair and Invitation to a
Beheading were his first works of
importance and foreshadowed his later
fame.
During his years of European emigration,
Nabokov lived in a state of happy and
continual semipenury. All of his Russian
novels were published in very small
editions in Berlin and Paris. His first
two novels had German translations, and
the money he obtained for them he used
for butterfly-hunting expeditions (he
eventually published 18 scientific
papers on entomology). But until his
best-seller Lolita, no book he wrote in
Russian or English produced more than a
few hundred dollars. During the period
in which he wrote his first eight
novels, he made his living in Berlin and
later in Paris by giving lessons in
tennis, Russian, and English and from
occasional walk-on parts in films (now
forgotten). His wife, the former Véra
Evseyevna Slonim, whom he married in
1925, worked as a translator. From the
time of the loss of his home in Russia,
Nabokov’s only attachment was to what he
termed the “unreal estate” of memory and
art. He never purchased a house,
preferring instead to live in houses
rented from other professors on
sabbatical leave. Even after great
wealth came to him with the success of
Lolita and the subsequent interest in
his previous work, Nabokov and his
family (he and his wife had one son,
Dmitri) chose to live (from 1959) in
genteelly shabby quarters in a Swiss
hotel.
The subject matter of Nabokov’s novels
is principally the problem of art itself
presented in various figurative
disguises. Thus, The Defense seemingly
is about chess, Despair about murder,
and Invitation to a Beheading a
political story, but all three works
make statements about art that are
central to understanding the book as a
whole. The same may be said of his
plays, Sobytiye (“The Event”), published
in 1938, and The Waltz Invention. The
problem of art again appears in
Nabokov’s best novel in Russian, The
Gift, the story of a young artist’s
development in the spectral world of
post-World War I Berlin. This novel,
with its reliance on literary parody,
was a turning point: serious use of
parody thereafter became a key device in
Nabokov’s art. His first novels in
English, The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947),
do not rank with his best Russian work.
Pale Fire (1962), however, a novel
consisting of a long poem and a
commentary on it by a mad literary
pedant, extends and completes Nabokov’s
mastery of unorthodox structure, first
shown in The Gift and present also in
Solus Rex, a Russian novel that began to
appear serially in 1940 but was never
completed. Lolita (1955), with its
antihero, Humbert Humbert, who is
possessed by an overpowering desire for
very young girls, is yet another of
Nabokov’s subtle allegories: love
examined in the light of its seeming
opposite, lechery. Ada (1969), Nabokov’s
17th and longest novel, is a parody of
the family chronicle form. All of his
earlier themes come into play in the
novel, and, because the work is a medley
of Russian, French, and English, it is
his most difficult work. (He also wrote
a number of short stories and novellas,
mostly written in Russian and translated
into English.)
Nabokov’s major critical works are an
irreverent book about Nikolay Gogol
(1944) and a monumental four-volume
translation of, and commentary on,
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1964). What he
called the “present, final version” of
the autobiographical Speak, Memory,
concerning his European years, was
published in 1967, after which he began
work on a sequel, Speak On, Memory,
concerning the American years.
As Nabokov’s reputation grew in the
1930s so did the ferocity of the attacks
made upon him. His idiosyncratic,
somewhat aloof style and unusual
novelistic concerns were interpreted as
snobbery by his detractors—although his
best Russian critic, Vladislav
Khodasevich, insisted that Nabokov’s
aristocratic view was appropriate to his
subject matters: problems of art masked
by allegory.
Nabokov’s reputation varies greatly from
country to country. Until 1986 he was
not published in the Soviet Union, not
only because he was a “White Russian
émigré” (he became a U.S. citizen in
1945) but also because he practiced
“literary snobbism.” Critics of strong
social convictions in the West also
generally hold him in low esteem. But
within the intellectual émigré community
in Paris and Berlin between 1919 and
1939, V. Sirin (the literary pseudonym
used by Nabokov in those years) was
credited with being “on a level with the
most significant artists in contemporary
European literature and occupying a
place held by no one else in Russian
literature.” His reputation after 1940,
when he changed from Russian to English
after emigrating to the United States,
mounted steadily until the 1970s, when
he was acclaimed by a leading literary
critic as “king over that battered mass
society called contemporary fiction.”
Andrew Field
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From the 1920s to c. 1985
Experiments in the 1920s
Within Russia the 1920s saw a wide diversity of
literary trends and works, including those by mere
“fellow travelers” (Leon Trotsky’s phrase) of the
Revolution. Isaak Babel wrote a brilliant
cycle of linked stories, collected as Konarmiya
(1926; Red Cavalry), about a Jewish commissar in a
Cossack regiment. Formally chiseled and morally
complex, these stories examine the seductive appeal
of violence for the intellectual. A modern literary
genre, the dystopia, was invented by Yevgeny
Zamyatin in his novel My (1924; We), which could
be published only abroad, Nikolay
Erdman’s Samoubiytsa (1928; The Suicide).
Like
Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World and
George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four, which are modeled on it, We
describes a future socialist society that has turned
out to be not perfect but inhuman.
Yury Olesha’s
Zavist (1927; Envy) is a satire in the tradition of
Notes from the Underground. Like
Chekhov,
Zoshchenko, was a master of the comic story
focusing on everyday life.
Daniil Kharms was an early
Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and
dramatist.
Pasternak,
who had been a Futurist poet before the Revolution,
published a cycle of poems, Sestra moya zhizn (1922;
My Sister—Life), and his story “Detstvo Lyuvers”
(1918; “Zhenya Luvers’s Childhood”).
Other important
novels include Boris Pilnyak’s “ornamental”
Goly god (1922; The Naked Year);
Andrey Platonov’s deeply pessimistic Kotlovan
(The Foundation Pit), which was written in the late
1920s and published in the West in 1973; Ilya Ilf
and
Yevgeny Petrov’s clever satire Dvenadtsat
stulyev (1928; The Twelve Chairs).
Isaak Babel

Russian author
born July
13 [July 1, Old Style], 1894,
Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire
died Jan. 27, 1940, Moscow,
Russia, U.S.S.R.
Soviet
short-story writer noted for his
war stories and Odessa tales. He
was considered an innovator in
the early Soviet period and
enjoyed a brilliant reputation
in the early 1930s.
Born into a Jewish family,
Babel grew up in an atmosphere
of persecution that is reflected
in the sensitivity, pessimism,
and morbidity of his stories.
His first works, later included
in his Odesskiye rasskazy
(“Odessa Tales”), were published
in 1916 in St. Petersburg in a
monthly edited by Maksim Gorky;
but the tsarist censors
considered them crude and
obscene. Gorky praised the young
author’s terse, naturalistic
style, at the same time advising
him to “see the world.” Babel
proceeded to do so, serving in
the Cossack First Cavalry Army
and in the political police
(Babel’s daughter denied this),
working for newspapers, and
holding a number of other jobs
over the next seven years.
Perhaps his most significant
experience was as a soldier in
the war with Poland. Out of that
campaign came the group of
stories known as Konarmiya
(1926; Red Cavalry). These
stories present different
aspects of war through the eyes
of an inexperienced,
intellectual young Jew who
reports everything graphically
and with naive precision. Though
senseless cruelty often pervades
the stories, they are lightened
by a belief that joy and
happiness must exist somewhere,
if only in the imagination.
The “Odessa Tales” were
published in book form in 1931.
This cycle of realistic and
humorous sketches of the
Moldavanka—the ghetto suburb of
Odessa—vividly portrays the
lifestyle and jargon of a group
of Jewish bandits and gangsters,
led by their “king,” the
legendary Benya Krik.
Babel wrote other short
stories, as well as two plays (Zakat,
1928; Mariya, 1935). In the
early 1930s his literary
reputation in the Soviet Union
was high, but, in the atmosphere
of increasing Stalinist cultural
regimentation, Communist critics
began to question whether his
works were compatible with
official literary doctrine.
After the mid-1930s Babel lived
in silence and obscurity. His
last published work in the
Soviet Union was a short tribute
to Gorky in 1938. His powerful
patron had died in 1936; in May
1939 Babel was arrested, and he
was executed some eight months
later. After Stalin’s death in
1953, Babel was rehabilitated,
and his stories were again
published in the Soviet Union.
Encyclopaedia
Britannyca
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Yevgeny
Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin by Boris Kustodiev
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (Russian:
Евге́ний Ива́нович Замя́тин) (February
20, 1884 – March 10, 1937) was a Russian
author, most famous for his 1921 novel
We, a story of dystopian future which
influenced George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four, Ayn Rand's Anthem, Ursula
K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and,
indirectly, Kurt Vonnegut's Player
Piano.
Early life
Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, 300
km south of Moscow. His father was a
Russian Orthodox priest and
schoolmaster, and his mother a musician.
He may have had synesthesia as he gave
letters and sounds qualities. For
example, he saw the letter "L" as having
pale, cold and light blue qualities. He
studied naval engineering in Saint
Petersburg from 1902 until 1908, during
which time he joined the Bolsheviks. He
was arrested during the Russian
Revolution of 1905 and exiled, but
returned to Saint Petersburg where he
lived illegally before moving to Finland
in 1906 to finish his studies. After
returning to Russia, he began to write
fiction as a hobby. He was arrested and
exiled a second time in 1911, but
amnestied in 1913. His Uyezdnoye (A
Provincial Tale) in 1913, which
satirized life in a small Russian town,
brought him a degree of fame. The next
year he was tried for maligning the
military in his story Na Kulichkakh (At
the world's end). He continued to
contribute articles to various socialist
newspapers. After graduating as a naval
engineer, he worked professionally at
home and abroad. In 1916 he was sent to
England to supervise the construction of
icebreakers at the shipyards in Walker
and Wallsend while living in Newcastle
upon Tyne.
Literary career
Zamyatin wrote The Islanders,
satirizing English life, and its pendant
A Fisher of Men, both published after
his return to Russia in late 1917.
Zamyatin supported the October
Revolution, but opposed the system of
censorship under the Bolsheviks. After
the Russian Revolution of 1917 he edited
several journals, lectured on writing,
and edited Russian translations of works
by Jack London, O. Henry, H. G. Wells,
and others.
His works became increasingly critical
of the regime. He stated boldly: "True
literature can only exist when it is
created, not by diligent and reliable
officials, but by madmen, hermits,
heretics, dreamers, rebels and
skeptics". This attitude caused his
position to become increasingly
difficult as the 1920s wore on.
Ultimately, his works were banned, and
he wasn't permitted to publish,
particularly after the publication of We
in a Russian émigré journal in 1927.
His novel We, while often discussed as
primarily a political satire on the
totalitarianism he perceived in the
Soviet Union, is significant in other
aspects as well. It may variously be
examined as (1) a polemic against the
optimistic scientific socialism of H. G.
Wells whose works Zamyatin had
previously published and with the heroic
verses of the (Russian) Proletarian
Poets, (2) as an example of
Expressionist theory and as an
illustration of the archetype theories
of Carl Jung as applied to literature.
George Orwell believed that Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World (1932) must be
partly derived from We. However, in a
1962 letter to Christopher Collins,
Huxley says that he wrote Brave New
World as a reaction to H.G. Wells'
utopias long before he had heard of We.
According to We translator Natasha
Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was
lying. Kurt Vonnegut said that in
writing Player Piano (1952) he
"cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave
New World, whose plot had been
cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny
Zamyatin's We."
In addition to We, Zamyatin also wrote a
number of short stories, in fairy tale
form, that constituted satirical
criticism of Bolshevik rule, such as in
a mocking story about a city where the
mayor decides that to make everyone
happy he should make everyone equal. He
starts by forcing everyone, himself
included, to live in a big barrack, then
to shave heads to be equal to the bald,
and then to become mentally disabled to
equate intelligence downward. This plot
is very similar to that of The New
Utopia (1891) by Jerome K. Jerome whose
collected works were published three
times in Russia before 1917. In its
turn, Kurt Vonnegut's short story
"Harrison Bergeron" (1961) bears
distinct resemblances to Zamyatin's
tale.
Exile and death
Zamyatin was eventually given
permission to leave the Soviet Union by
Joseph Stalin in 1931, after the
intercession of Maxim Gorky. He settled,
impoverished, in Paris with his wife,
where he died of a heart attack in 1937.
During his time in France, he notably
worked with Jean Renoir, co-writing the
script of his film Les Bas-fonds. He is
buried in Thiais, France, at a cemetery
on Rue de Stalingrad.
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Nikolay Erdman

Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, and Erdman
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Nikolay Robertovich Erdman (16 November
[O.S. 3 November] 1900 — 10 August 1970)
was a Soviet dramatist and screenwriter
primarily remembered for his work with
Vsevolod Meyerhold in the 1920s. His
plays, notably The Suicide (1928), form
a link in Russian literary history
between the satirical drama of Gogol and
the post-World War II Theatre of the
Absurd.
Early life
Born to parents of Baltic German
descent, Erdman was reared in Moscow.
His brother Boris Erdman (1899-1960) was
a stage designer who introduced him to
the literary and theatrical milieu of
Moscow. Young Erdman was particularly
impressed by the grotesquely satirical
poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, which
seemed to defy all poetical conventions.
At the outbreak of the Russian Civil
War, he volunteered with the Red Army.
Erdman's first short poem was published
in 1919. His longest and most original
poetical work was Self-Portrait (1922).
As a poet, Erdman aligned himself with
the Imaginists, a bohemian movement led
by Sergei Yesenin. In 1924, Erdman acted
as a "witness for the defense" in the
mock Imaginist Process. He also authored
a number of witty parodies which were
staged in the theatres of Moscow.
Work with Meyerhold
In 1924, Erdman submitted to
Meyerhold his first major play, The
Mandate. The young playwright cleverly
exploited the subject of the subverted
wedding to produce a work brimming with
tragic absurdity. In his adaptation of
the play, Meyerhold chose to emphasise
the mannequin-like behaviour of Erdman's
characters by introducing the tragic
finale which revealed "the total and
disastrous loss of identity" on the part
of his characters.
.Erdman's next collaboration with
Meyerhold was The Suicide (1928), "a
spectacular mixture of the ridiculous
and the sublime", universally recognized
as one of the finest plays written
during the Soviet period. The play draws
on the theme of the faked suicide, which
had been introduced into Russian
literature by Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin
in The Death of Tarelkin (1869) and was
explored by Leo Tolstoy in The Living
Corpse (1900).
Erdman's masterpiece had a tortuous
production history. Meyerhold's attempts
to stage the play were thwarted by
Soviet authorities. The Vakhtangov
Theatre also failed to overcome
censorship difficulties. At last
Konstantin Stanislavsky sent a letter to
Stalin, in which he compared Erdman to
Gogol and cited Gorky's enthusiasm for
the play. The permission to stage the
play was granted, only to be revoked by
Kaganovich's party commission on the
very eve of the premiere.
Repression
His career in the theatre
effectively stalled, Erdman turned his
attention to the cinema. He wrote
scripts for several silent films, the
most famous being Boris Barnet's The
House on Trubnaya. After Stanislavsky's
actor Kachalov thoughtlessly recited
Erdman's satirical fables to Stalin
during a night party in the Kremlin,
their author's fate was sealed. He was
arrested when filming his first attempt
at a musical, Jolly Fellows, and faced
deportation to the town of Yeniseysk in
Siberia (1933). The following year he
was permitted to move to Tomsk, where
was able to secure a job in a local
theatre.
Although he was not allowed to appear in
Moscow, Erdman would visit the city
illegally in the 1930s. During one of
such visits, he read to Mikhail Bulgakov
the first act of his new play The
Hypnotist (never completed). Bulgakov
was so impressed by his talent that he
petitioned Stalin to sanction Erdman's
return to the capital. The petition was
ignored, but Erdman's script for the
comedy Volga-Volga was awarded the
Stalin Prize for 1941.
At the outbreak of World War II, Erdman
was called up for military service with
the Red Army but, through Beria's
patronage, he had returned to civilian
life in Moscow by 1942. With no other
means of livelihood but the cinema, he
turned to the most apolitical activity
available, contributing scripts for
children's films, such as Morozko and It
Was I Who Drew the Little Man, until
some years after Stalin's death.
The Thaw
Erdman was living in obscurity when
in 1964 Yuri Lyubimov invited him to
join the newly-founded Taganka Theatre.
Although Lyubimov and Erdman
collaborated on several novel
productions, aspiring to revive
Meyerhold's traditions, it was not until
1990 that Lyubimov succeeded in
producing his stage version of The
Suicide.
Erdman's principal work was banned in
the Soviet Union until the Perestroika.
Even the comparatively orthodox Moscow
Satire Theatre (inaugurated in 1924 with
the production of Erdman's review Moscow
from the Point of View...) failed to
have their version of The Suicide
approved by the Soviet censors.
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Yury Olesha

From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Yuri K. OleshaYuri K. Olesha (Russian:
Юрий Карлович Олеша, March 3 [O.S.
February 19] 1899 – May 10, 1960) was a
Russian and Soviet novelist. He is
considered to have been one of the
greatest Russian novelists of the
20th-century, one of the few to have
succeeded in writing works of lasting
artistic value despite the stifling
censorship of the era. His works are
delicate balancing-acts that
superficially send pro-Communist
messages but reveal far greater subtlety
and richness upon a deeper reading.
Sometimes, he is grouped with his
friends Ilf and Petrov, Isaac Babel, and
Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky into the Odessa
School of Writers.
Olesha was born in Elizavetgrad (now
Kirovohrad, Ukraine). He was raised in
Odessa where he moved with his family in
1902, and he studied in the University
of Novorossiya in 1916-1918. Three
authors that influenced him most were H.
G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, and
Leo Tolstoy. In Russia, Olesha's name is
familiar for the fairy tale Three Fat
Men (1924), which Olesha turned into a
play in 1930 and Aleksey Batalov made
into a movie in 1967. In
English-speaking countries, he has been
known for two books of short-stories
that have appeared in English, Love and
Other Stories and The Cherrystone - both
concerned with dreams of adolescence.
But his artistic reputation rests
primarily upon his 1927 novel Envy,
which he turned into the play Zagovor
chuvstv (Conspiracy of feelings) in
1929.
As Soviet literary policy became more
and more rigid, the
ambiguity[clarification needed] in
Olesha's work became unacceptable. Less
than a decade after the publication of
Envy, he was condemned by the literary
establishment, and fearing arrest he
ceased writing anything of literary
value. Olesha died in 1960, too early to
benefit from the later loosening of
censorship. His remarkable diaries were
published posthumously under the title
No Day without a Line.
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Mikhail Zoshchenko

Mikhail Mikhaylovich Zoshchenko, (b.
Aug. 10 [July 29, Old Style], 1895,
Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire—d. July
22, 1958, Leningrad [now St.
Petersburg], Russian S.F.S.R.,
U.S.S.R.), Soviet satirist whose short
stories and sketches are among the best
comic literature of the Soviet period.
Zoshchenko studied law and then in 1915
joined the army. He served as an officer
during World War I, was wounded and
gassed, and was awarded four medals for
gallantry. Between 1917 and 1920 he
lived in many different cities and
worked at a variety of odd jobs and
trades. In 1921 in Petrograd (now St.
Petersburg) he joined the Serapion
Brothers literary group. His first works
to become famous were the stories in
Rasskazy Nazara Ilicha, gospodina
Sinebryukhova (1922; “The Tales of Nazar
Ilyich, Mr. Bluebelly”). Zoshchenko used
skaz, a first-person narrative form, in
these tales, which depict Russia during
the Russian Civil War (1918–20) from the
point of view and in the language of a
semiliterate soldier and former peasant
disoriented by the long years of war and
revolution. Zoshchenko’s later tales are
primarily satires on everyday Soviet
life. One of their main targets is
bureaucratic red tape and corruption,
which he attacked with a tongue-in-cheek
wit filtered through the naive language
of the semiliterate. The malapropisms
present throughout these works make them
difficult, though not impossible, to
translate (notable among translations
into English is Nervous People, and
Other Satires [1963], trans. by Maria
Gordon and Hugh McLean). Despite their
extraordinary humour, Zoshchenko’s
stories paint a horrifying picture of
life in Soviet Russia.
Beginning in the 1930s, Zoshchenko was
subjected to increasingly severe
criticism from Soviet officials. He
tried to conform to the requirements of
Socialist Realism—notably in Istoriya
odnoy zhizhni (1935; “The Story of One
Life”), dealing with the construction,
by forced labour, of the White
Sea–Baltic Waterway—but with little
success. In 1943 the magazine Oktyabr
began to serialize his
psychological-introspective series of
episodes, anecdotes, and reminiscences
entitled Pered voskhodom solntsa
(“Before Sunrise”) but suspended
publication after the second
installment. It was only in 1972 that
the series was published in full, as
Povest o razume (“A Tale About Reason”).
In 1946 Zoshchenko published in the
literary magazine Zvezda a short story,
“Priklyucheniya obezyany” (“The
Adventures of a Monkey”), which was
condemned by Communist critics as
malicious and insulting to the Soviet
people. He was expelled (with the poet
Anna Akhmatova) from the Union of Soviet
Writers, which meant the virtual end of
his literary career. In 1954, meeting
with English students in Russia,
Zoshchenko stated that he did not
consider himself guilty, after which he
was subjected to further persecution.
These pressures led to a psychological
crisis; as a result, Zoshchenko spent
his final years in ill health.
After his death, the Soviet press tended
to ignore him, but some of his works
were reissued, and their prompt sale
indicated his continuing popularity.
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Daniil Kharms

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Daniil
Kharms (Russian: Дании́л Ива́нович Хармс;
30 December [O.S. 17 December] 1905 – 2
February 1942) was an early Soviet-era
surrealist and absurdist poet, writer
and dramatist. He signed his name in
Latin alphabet as Daniel Charms.
Life
Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (Даниил
Иванович Ювачёв) was born in St.
Petersburg, into the family of Ivan
Yuvachev, a well known member of the
revolutionary group, The People's Will.
By this time the elder Yuvachev had
already been imprisoned for his
involvement in subversive acts against
the tsar Alexander III and had become a
religious philosopher, acquaintance of
Anton Chekhov during the latter's trip
to Sakhalin.
Daniil
invented the pseudonym Kharms while
attending high school at the prestigious
German "Peterschule". While at the
Peterschule, he learned the rudiments of
both English and German, and it may have
been the English "harm" and "charm" that
he incorporated into "Kharms".
Throughout his career Kharms used
variations on his name and the
pseudonyms DanDan, Khorms, Charms,
Shardam, and Kharms-Shardam, among
others. It is rumored that he scribbled
the name Kharms directly into his
passport.
In
1924, he entered the Leningrad
Electrotechnicum, from which he was
expelled for "lack of activity in social
activities". After his expulsion, he
gave himself over entirely to
literature. He joined the circle of
Aleksandr Tufanov, a sound-poet, and
follower of Velemir Khlebnikov's ideas
of zaum (or trans-sense) poetry. He met
the young poet Alexander Vvedensky at
this time, and the two became close
friends and inseparable collaborators.
In
1927, the Association of Writers of
Children's Literature was formed, and
Kharms was invited to be a member. From
1928 until 1941, Kharms continually
produced children's works and had a
great success.
In
1928, Daniil Kharms founded the
avant-garde collective OBERIU, or Union
of Real Art. He embraced the new
movements of Russian Futurism laid out
by his idols, Khlebnikov, Kazimir
Malevich, and Igor Terentiev, among
others. Their ideas served as a
springboard. His aesthetic centered
around a belief in the autonomy of art
from real world rules and logic, and the
intrinsic meaning to be found in objects
and words outside of their practical
function.
By the
late 1920s, his antirational verse,
nonlinear theatrical performances, and
public displays of decadent and
illogical behavior earned Kharms — who
always dressed like an English dandy
with a calabash pipe — the reputation of
being a talented but highly eccentric
“fool” or “crazy-man” in Leningrad
cultural circles.
Even
then, in the late 20s, despite rising
criticism of the OBERIU performances and
diatribes against the avant-garde in the
press, Kharms nurtured a fantasy of
uniting the progressive artists and
writers of the time (Malevich, Filonov,
Terentiev, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Kaverin,
Zamyatin) with leading Russian Formalist
critics (Tynianov, Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum,
Ginzburg, etc.,) and a younger
generation of writers (all from the
OBERIU crowd—Alexander Vvedensky,
Konstantin Vaginov, Nikolai Zabolotsky,
Igor Bakhterev), to form a cohesive
cultural movement of Left Art. Needless
to say it didn't happen that way.
Kharms
was arrested in 1931 together with
Vvedensky, Tufanov and some other
writers, and was in exile from his
hometown (forced to live in the city of
Kursk) for most of a year. He was
arrested as a member of "a group of
anti-Soviet children's writers", and
some of his works were used as an
evidence. Soviet authorities, having
become increasingly hostile toward the
avant-garde in general, deemed Kharms’
writing for children anti-Soviet because
of its absurd logic and its refusal to
instill materialist and social Soviet
values.
He
continued to write for children's
magazines when he returned from exile,
though his name would appear in the
credits less often. His plans for more
performances and plays were curtailed,
the OBERIU disbanded, and Kharms receded
into a very private writing life. He
wrote for the desk drawer, for his wife,
Marina Malich, and for a small group of
friends, the “Chinari”, who met
privately to discuss matters of
philosophy, music, mathematics, and
literature.
In the
1930s, as the mainstream Soviet
literature was becoming more and more
conservative under the guidelines of
Socialist Realism, Kharms found refuge
in children's literature. (He had worked
under Marshak at DetGiz, the state-owned
children's publishing house since the
mid-1920s, writing new material and
translating children literature from the
west, including Wilhelm Busch's Max and
Moritz). Many of his poems and short
stories for children, published in the
Chizh (Чиж), Yozh (Ëж), Sverchok (Сверчок)
and Oktyabryata (Октябрята) magazines,
are considered classics of the genre and
his roughly twenty children's books are
well known and loved by kids to this
day, - despite his personal deep disgust
for children, unknown to the public -
whereas his "adult" writing was not
published during his lifetime with the
sole exceptions of two early poems.
Still, these were lean times and his
honorariums didn't quite pay the bills,
plus the editors in the children's
publishing sector were suffering under
extreme pressure and censorship and some
were disposed of during Stalin's purges.
Thus,
Kharms lived in debt and hunger for
several years until his final arrest on
suspicion of treason in the summer of
1941 (most people with a previous arrest
were being picked up by the NKVD in
those times). He was imprisoned in the
psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No.
1. and died in his cell in February,
1942—most likely, from starvation, as
the Nazi blockade of Leningrad had
already begun. His work was saved from
the war by loyal friends and hidden
until the 1960s when his children’s
writing became widely published and
scholars began the job of recovering his
manuscripts and publishing them in the
west and in samizdat.
His
reputation in the 20th century in Russia
was largely based on his widely beloved
work for children. His other writings (a
vast assortment of stories, miniatures,
plays, poems, and pseudo-scientific,
philosophical investigations) were
virtually unknown until 1970's, and not
published officially in Russia until
"glasnost".
Works
Kharms' stories are typically brief
vignettes (see also short prose and
feuilleton) often only a few paragraphs
long, in which scenes of poverty and
deprivation alternate with fantastic,
dreamlike occurrences and acerbic
comedy. Occasionally they incorporate
incongruous appearances by famous
authors (e.g.: Pushkin and Gogol
tripping over each other; Count Leo
Tolstoy showing his chamber pot to the
world; Pushkin and his sons falling off
their chairs; etc.)
He was
married twice (to Esther Rusakova and
Marina Malich). His wives sometimes
appear in those of his poems that are
lyrical or erotic.
The
poet often professed his extreme
abhorrence of children and pets, as well
as old people; his career as a
children's writer notwithstanding.
Kharms'
world is unpredictable and disordered;
characters repeat the same actions many
times in succession or otherwise behave
irrationally; linear stories start to
develop but are interrupted in midstream
by inexplicable catastrophes that send
them in completely different directions.
His
manuscripts were preserved by his sister
and, most notably, by his friend Yakov
Druskin, a notable music theorist and
amateur theologist and philosopher, who
dragged a suitcase full of Kharms's and
Vvedensky's writings out of Kharms's
apartment during the blockade of
Leningrad and kept it hidden throughout
difficult times.
Kharms'
adult works were picked up by Russian
samizdat starting around the 1960s, and
thereby did have an influence on the
growing "unofficial" arts scene. (Moscow
Conceptualist artists and writers such
as Kabakov, Prigov, Rubinstein, were
influenced by this newly found
avant-garde predecessor).
A
complete collection of his works was
published in Bremen as four volumes, in
1978-1988. In Russia, Kharms works were
widely published only from the late
1980s. Now several editions of Kharms's
collected works and selected volumes
have been published in Russia, and
collections are now available in German,
French and Italian. In 2004 a selection
of his works appeared in Irish.
As for
English translations—oddly, many have
appeared of late in American literary
journals. In the 1970s George Gibbian at
Cornell published the first English
collection of OBERIU writing, which
included stories and a play by Daniil
Kharms and one play by Alexander
Vvedensky. Gibbian's translations
appeared in Annex Press magazine in
1978. In the early 1990s a slim selected
volume translated into British English
by Neil Cornwell came out in England.
New translations of all the members of
the OBERIU group (and their closely knit
group of friends, the Chinari) appeared
in Summer, 2006 in the USA (OBERIU: An
Anthology of Russian Absurdism,
containing poetry, drama and prose by
Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms,
Nikolai Zabolotsky, Nikolai Oleinikov,
Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin,
edited Eugene Ostashevsky and translated
by Matvei Yankelevich, Thomas Epstein,
Genya Turovskaya, Eugene Ostashevsky and
Ilya Bernstein.), including not only
prose, but plays, poetry, and
philosophical tracts and treatises, with
an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky
(not Susan Sontag, who is on some
websites advertised as the author of the
foreword). An English translation of a
collection of his works, translated by
Matvei Yankelevich, was published in
2007. Its title is Today I Wrote Nothing
and includes poems, plays, short prose
pieces, and his novella "The Old Woman".
Some poems were also translated by Roman
Turovsky.
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Boris Pilnyak

Boris Pilnyak
Boris Pilnyak (Russian: Бори́с Пильня́к) (October 11
[O.S. September 29] 1894–April 21, 1938) was a
Russian author. Born Boris Andreyevich Vogau
(Russian: Бори́с Андре́евич Вога́у) in Mozhaisk, he
was a major supporter of anti-urbanism and a critic
of mechanized society. These views often brought him
into disfavor with Communist critics. His most
famous works are The Naked Year, Mahogany, and The
Volga Falls into the Caspian Sea, all novels
concerning revolutionary and post-revolutionary
Russia. Another of his well-known works is OK, an
unflattering travelogue of his 1931 visit to the
United States.
On October 28, 1937, he was arrested on charges
of counter-revolutionary activies, spying and
terrorism. One report alleged that "he held secret
meetings with (Andre) Gide, and supplied him with
information about the situation in the USSR. There
is no doubt that Gide used this information in this
book attacking the USSR." Pilnyak was tried on April
21, 1938. In the proceeding that lasted 15 minutes,
he was condemned to death. A small yellow slip of
paper attached to his file read: "Sentence carried
out."
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Andrey Platonov

From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Andrei Platonov (Russian: Андре́й
Плато́нов) (August 28 [O.S. August 16]
1899 – January 5, 1951) was the pen name
of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov
(Russian: Андре́й Плато́нович Климе́нтов),
a Soviet author whose works anticipate
existentialism. Although Platonov was a
Communist, his works were banned in his
own lifetime for their skeptical
attitude toward collectivization and
other Stalinist policies. His famous
works include the novels The Foundation
Pit and Chevengur.
Life
Andrei Platonov (the name he began
to write under only in 1920, but by
which he is best known) was born in the
settlement of Yamskaia Sloboda on the
outskirts of Voronezh in the central
black earth region. His father was a
metal fitter (and an amateur inventor)
employed in the railroad workshops. His
mother was the daughter of a watchmaker.
Platonov attended a Church parish school
and completed his primary education at a
four-year city school. In 1914, at the
age of thirteen and a half, he began
work first as an office clerk at a local
insurance company, then as smelter at a
pipe factory, assistant machinist on a
private estate, worker in a plant making
artificial millstones, warehouseman, and
at other jobs, including on the
railroad. He began writing poems by the
time he turned thirteen, sending some
off to papers in Moscow and elsewhere,
though none were yet accepted.
In the wake of the 1917 revolutions,
Platonov became very active in a variety
of pursuits. He sought to advance his
technical education first with
preparatory courses and then at the
Voronezh Polytechnic Institute where he
studied electrical technology. When the
civil war broke out he assisted his
father on a train delivering troops and
supplies and clearing snow. At the same
time, he wrote prolifically for a
variety of local periodicals, especially
the paper of the local railway workers'
union, Zheleznyi put' (Railroad), the
official papers of the Voronezh
provincial committee of the Communist
Party, Krasnaia derevnia (Red
countryside) and Voronezhskaia kommuna
(Voronezh commune), the national journal
of the Smithy group of proletarian
writers, Kuznitsa, and many others.
The range of his writings in these years
was extraordinary. From 1918 through
1921, his most intensive as a writer, he
published dozens of poems (and a
collection of verses that appeared in
1922), several stories, and, most of
all, hundreds of articles and essays.
Platonov's productive energy and
intellectual precocity is most visible
in the remarkable range of topics he
confidently wrote about: literature,
art, cultural life, science, philosophy,
religion, education, politics, the civil
war, foreign relations, economics,
technology, famine, land reclamation,
and more. It was not unusually,
especially in 1920, to see two or three
pieces by him, on quite different
subjects, appear in the press every day
for several days running. He was also
involved with the local Proletcult
organization, joined the Union of
Communist Journalists in March 1920,
worked as an editor at Krasnaia derevnia,
was elected in August 1920 to the
provisional directing board of the newly
formed Voronezh Union of Proletarian
Writers, attended the First Congress of
Proletarian Writers in Moscow in October
1920, which was organized by the
Kuznitsa group, and regularly read his
poetry and gave critical talks at
various club meetings. He joined the
Communist Party in the spring of 1920,
and started attending the party school,
but left the party at the end of 1921,
for a "juvenile" reason, he later said.
He may have quit the party in dismay
over NEP, like a number of other worker
writers (many of whom he had become
acquainted with through Kuznitsa and at
the 1920 congress). But we also know
that Platonov was deeply troubled by the
terrible famine of 1921, and he openly
and controversially criticized the
behavior (and privileges) of local
communists at the time. There is also
some evidence that he was expelled from
the party when he refused to clean up
other people's trash during an
obligatory subbotnik (communist work
Saturday). He was readmitted as a
candidate member only in 1924.
In 1921 Platonov married Maria
Aleksandrova Kashintseva (1903-1983);
they had a son, Platon, in 1920, and a
daughter, Maria, in 1944.
In 1922, in the wake of the devastating
drought and famine of 1921 and after
quitting the party[citation needed],
Platonov abandoned journalistic and
literary work entirely to work on
electrification projects and conduct
land reclamation work for the Voronezh
Provincial Land Administration and later
for agencies of the central government.
"I could no longer be occupied with a
contemplative activity like literature,"
he recalled a few years later. For the
next few years, he worked as an engineer
and administrator, organizing the
digging of ponds and wells, the draining
of swamp land, and the building of a
hydroelectric plant.
In 1925 he published a book about the
Black Sea Revolt of 1905. This was the
same year that Sergei Eisenstein's film
The Battleship Potemkin was made.
Platonov's book was an official
publication of the Bolshevik Party.
When he did return to writing in 1926,
however, he began to create works that
indicated to a number of critics and
readers the appearance of a major and
original literary voice. Moving to
Moscow in 1927, he became, for the first
time, a professional writer. He mainly
wrote fiction but also worked in the
editorial departments of a number of
leading magazines. He produced his two
major works, the novels Chevengur and
The Foundation Pit, between 1926 and
1930, overlapping slightly with the
beginning of the first Five-Year Plan in
1928. These works, with their implicit
criticism of the system, drew much
official criticism, and although a
chapter of Chevengur appeared in a
magazine, neither were published in
full. Other short stories which did
appear contributed even more to the
decline of his reputation.
Stalin held deeply ambivalent views
regarding Platonov's worth. According to
archival evidence Stalin called Platonov
"fool, idiot, scoundrel", then later in
the same meeting said Platonov was "a
prophet, a genius." For his part
Platonov made hostile remarks about
Trotsky, Rykov, and Bukharin but not
about Stalin, to whom he wrote letters
on several occasions. By 1931, his work
came under sustained attack as anti-communist[citation
needed]. Nevertheless, Platonov
published no fewer than eight volumes of
fiction and essays from 1937 until his
death in 1951. In the Stalinist Great
Purge of the 1930s, Platonov's son was
arrested as a "terrorist" and "spy" at
the age of fifteen, and exiled to a
labor camp where he contracted
tuberculosis. When he was finally
returned, Platonov himself contracted
the disease while nursing him. During
the Great Patriotic War (World War II),
Platonov served as a war correspondent,
but his disease grew worse, and after
the war, he ceased to write fiction,
instead putting out two collections of
folklore. He died in 1951.
Although he was relatively unknown at
the time of his death, his influence on
later Russian writers has been
considerable. Some of his work was
published or reprinted during the 1960s'
Khrushchev Thaw. Because of his
political writings, perceived
anti-totalitarian stance, and early
death of tuberculosis, some
English-speaking commentators have
called him "the Russian George Orwell".
Writing
In journalism, stories, and poetry
written during the first
postrevolutionary years (1918–1922),
Platonov interwove ideas about human
mastery over nature with skepticism
about triumphant human consciousness and
will, and a sentimental and even erotic
love of physical things with a fear and
attendant abhorrence of matter. Platonov
viewed the world as embodying at the
same time the opposing principles of
spirit and matter, reason and emotion,
nature and machine. He wrote of
factories, machines, and technology as
both enticing and dreadful. In complex
way, Platonov's thinking was an
anti-machine machinism. His aim was to
turn industry over to machines, in order
to "transfer man from the realm of
material production to a higher sphere
of life." Thus, in Platonov's vision of
the coming "golden age" machines are
both enemy and savior. Modern
technologies, Platonov asserted
paradoxically (though echoing a paradox
characteristic of Marxism), would enable
humanity to be "freed from the
oppression of matter."
Platonov's writing, it has also been
argued, has strong ties to the works of
earlier Russian authors like Fyodor
Dostoevsky. He also uses much Christian
symbolism, including a prominent and
discernible influence from a wide range
of contemporary and ancient
philosophers, including the Russian
philosopher Nikolai Fedorov.
His 'Foundation Pit' uses a combination
of peasant language with ideological and
political terms to create a sense of
meaninglessness, aided by the abrupt and
sometimes fantastic events of the plot.
Joseph Brodsky considers the work deeply
suspicious of the meaning of language,
especially political language. This
exploration of meaninglessness is a
hallmark of existentialism and absurdism.
Although his works generally take a
materialist stance, denying the
importance or existence of the soul, he
is stylistically very distinct from
Socialist Realism, which focused on
simple language and straightforward
plots.
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Ilya Ilf and
Yevgeny Petrov

From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg
(Russian: Илья Арнольдович Файнзильберг,
Ukrainian: Ієхієл-Лейб Арно́льдович
Файнзільберг; 1897–1937) and Evgeny or
Yevgeni Petrov (Yevgeniy Petrovich
Kataev or Katayev (Russian: Евгений
Петрович Катаев, Ukrainian: Євген
Петрович Катаєв; 1903–1942) were two
Soviet prose authors of the 1920s and
1930s. They did much of their writing
together, and are almost always referred
to as "Ilf and Petrov". They became
extremely popular for their two
satirical novels: The Twelve Chairs and
its sequel, The Little Golden Calf. The
two texts are connected by their main
character, Ostap Bender, a con man in
pursuit of elusive riches.
Both books follow exploits of Bender and
his associates looking for treasure
amidst the contemporary Soviet reality.
They were written and are set in the
relatively liberal era in Soviet
history, the New Economic Policy of the
1920s. The main characters generally
avoid contact with the apparently lax
law enforcement. Their position outside
the organized, goal-driven, productive
Soviet society is emphasized. It also
gives the authors a convenient platform
from which to look at this society and
to make fun of its less attractive and
less Socialist aspects. These are among
the most widely read and quoted books in
Russian culture. The Twelve Chairs was
adapted for popular films both in the
USSR and in the U.S. (by Mel Brooks in
the latter).
The two writers also traveled across the
Depression-era USA. Ilf took many
pictures throughout the journey, and the
authors produced a photo essay entitled
"American Photographs," published in
Ogonyok magazine. Shortly after that
they published the book Одноэтажная
Америка; literally: "One-storeyed
America", translated as Little Golden
America (an allusion to The Little
Golden Calf). The first edition of the
book did not include Ilf's photographs.
Both the photo essay and the book
document their adventures with their
characteristic humor and playfulness.
Notably, Ilf and Petrov were not afraid
to praise many aspects of the American
lifestyle in these works. The title
comes from the following description.
America is primarily a one-and two-story
country. The majority of the American
population lives in small towns of three
thousand, maybe five, nine, or fifteen
thousand inhabitants.
Ilf died of tuberculosis shortly after
the trip to America; Petrov died in a
plane crash in 1942 while he was
covering the Eastern Front.
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The
Russian Formalists were a school of critics closely
tied to the Futurists. They developed a vibrant,
comprehensive theory of literature and culture that
inspired structuralism, an influential critical
movement in the West. Two of them, Viktor
Shklovsky and
Yury Tynyanov, wrote significant fiction
illustrating their theories: Shklovsky’s Zoo;
ili, pisma ne o lyubvi (1923; Zoo; or, Letters Not
About Love) and Tynyanov’s “Podporuchik
kizhe” (1927; “Second Lieutenant Likewise”). Their
respectful opponent, Mikhail Bakhtin, whom
some consider the most original, far-ranging, and
subtle theorist of literature in the 20th century,
wrote Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (1929, 2nd
ed., 1963; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics) and
essays about the relation of novelistic form to
time, language, psychology, and ethics.
Viktor
Shklovsky

From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (or
Shklovskii; Russian: Виктор Борисович
Шкловский; Saint Petersburg, 24 January
[O.S. 12 January] 1893; Moscow, 6
December 1984) was a Russian and Soviet
critic, writer, and pamphleteer.
Shklovsky was born in St. Petersburg,
Russia. His father was of Jewish and his
mother was of German/Russian origin. He
attended St. Petersburg University.
During the First World War, he
volunteered for the Russian Army and
eventually became a driving trainer in
an armoured car unit in St. Petersburg.
There in 1916 he founded the OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo
izucheniya POeticheskogo YAZyka—Society
for the Study of Poetic Language), one
of the two groups, with the Moscow
Linguistic Circle, which developed the
critical theories and techniques of
Russian Formalism.
Shklovsky participated in the February
Revolution of 1917. Then he was sent by
the Russian Provisional Government as an
assistant Commissar to Southwestern
Front where he was wounded and then got
an award for bravery. After that he was
an assistant Commissar of the Russian
Expeditionary Corps in Persia (see
Persian Campaign).
Shklovsky returned to St. Petersburg in
early 1918, after the October
Revolution. He opposed bolshevism and
took part in an anti-bolshevik
conspiracy of Socialist-Revolutionary
Party members. After the conspiracy was
revealed by Cheka Shklovsky went into
hiding traveling over Russia and the
Ukraine but was eventually pardoned in
1919 due to his connections with Maxim
Gorky and decided to abstain from
political activity. His two brothers
were executed by the Soviet regime (one
in 1918, the other in 1937) and his
sister died from hunger in St.
Petersburg in 1919.
Shklovsky integrated into the Soviet
society and even took part in the
Russian Civil War serving in the Red
Army; but in 1922 he had to go into
hiding again and to flee from Russia
escaping arrest for his previous
activities. In Berlin in 1923 he
published his memoirs about 1917-22
called Sentimental'noe puteshestvie,
vospominaniia (A Sentimental Journey)
after A Sentimental Journey Through
France and Italy by Laurence Sterne. In
the same year he was allowed to return
to the USSR.
In addition to literary criticism and
biographies about such authors as
Laurence Sterne, Maxim Gorky, Leo
Tolstoy, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, he
wrote a number of semi-autobiographical
works disguised as fiction, which also
served as experiments in his developing
theories of literature.
Shklovsky is perhaps best known for
developing the concept of ostranenie or
defamiliarization (also translated as
"estrangement") in literature. He
explained the concept in the important
essay "Art as Technique" (also
translated as "Art as Device") which
comprised the first chapter of his
seminal Theory of Prose, first published
in 1925:
"The purpose of art is to impart the
sensation of things as they are
perceived and not as they are known. The
technique of art is to make objects
‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult,
to increase the difficulty and length of
perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself
and must be prolonged. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an
object; the object is not important." (Shklovsky,
"Art as Technique", 12)
In other words, art presents things in a
new, unfamiliar light by way of formal
manipulation. This is what is artful
about art.
Shklovsky's work pushes Russian
Formalism towards understanding literary
activity as integral parts of social
practice, an idea that becomes important
in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and
Russian and Prague School scholars of
semiotics.
He died in Moscow in 1984.
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Yury Tynyanov

From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov (Russian:
Ю́рий Никола́евич Тыня́нов; October 18,
1894 - December 20, 1943) was a famous
Soviet/Russian writer, literary critic,
translator, scholar and screenwriter of
Jewish origin. He was an authority on
Pushkin and an important member of the
Russian Formalist school.
Yury Tynyanov was born in Rezhitsa,
present day Rēzekne, Latvia, Russian
Empire. His brother-in-law was Veniamin
Kaverin, another well-known Russian
author. While attending the Petrograd
University, Tynyanov frequented the
Pushkin seminar held by a venerable
literary academic, Semyon Vengerov. His
first works made their appearance in
print in 1921.
In 1928, together with the linguist
Roman Jakobson, he published a famous
work titled Theses on Language, a
predecessor to structuralism, which
could be summarised in the following
manner:
1. Literary science had to have a firm
theoretical basis and an accurate
terminology.
2. The structural laws of a specific
field of literature had to be
established before it was related to
other fields.
3. The evolution of literature must be
studied as a system. All evidence,
whether literary or non-literary must be
analysed functionally.
4. The distinction between synchrony and
diachrony was useful for the study of
literature as for language, uncovering
systems at each separate stage of
development. But the history of systems
is also a system; each synchronic system
has its own past and future as part of
its structure. Therefore the distinction
should not be preserved beyond its
usefulness.
5. A synchronic system is not a mere
agglomerate of contemporaneous phenomena
catalogued. 'Systems' mean hierarchical
organisation.
6. The distinction between langue and
parole, taken from linguistics, deserves
to be developed for literature in order
to reveal the principles underlying the
relationship between the individual
utterance and a prevailing complex of
norms.
7. The analysis of the structural laws
of literature should lead to the setting
up of a limited number of structural
types and evolutionary laws governing
those types.
8.The discovery of the 'immanent laws'
of a genre allows one to describe an
evolutionary step, but not to explain
why this step has been taken by
literature and not another. Here the
literary must be related to the relevant
non-literary facts to find further laws,
a 'system of systems'. But still the
immanent laws of the individual work had
to be enunciated first.
Tynyanov also wrote historical novels in
which he applied his theories. His other
works included popular biographies of
Alexander Pushkin and Wilhelm
Küchelbecker and notable translations of
Heinrich Heine and other authors.
He died of multiple sclerosis in Moscow.
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Mikhail Bakhtin

From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (Russian:
Михаил Михайлович Бахти́н, pronounced)
(November 17, 1895, Oryol – March 7,
1975) was a Russian philosopher,
literary critic, semiotician and scholar
who worked on literary theory, ethics,
and the philosophy of language. His
writings, on a variety of subjects,
inspired scholars working in a number of
different traditions (Marxism,
semiotics, structuralism, religious
criticism) and in disciplines as diverse
as literary criticism, history,
philosophy, anthropology and psychology.
Although Bakhtin was active in the
debates on aesthetics and literature
that took place in Soviet Russia in the
1920s, his distinctive position did not
become well known until he was
rediscovered by Russian scholars in the
1960s.
Introduction
Bakhtin had a difficult life and
career, and few of his works were
published in an authoritative form
during his lifetime. As a result, there
is substantial disagreement over matters
that are normally taken for granted:
what discipline he worked in (was he a
philosopher or literary critic?), how to
periodize his work, and even what texts
he wrote (see below). He is known for a
series of concepts that have been used
and adapted in a number of disciplines:
dialogism, the carnivalesque, the
chronotope, heteroglossia and "outsidedness"
(the English translation of a Russian
term vnenakhodimost, sometimes rendered
into English — from French rather than
from Russian — as "exotopy"). Together
these concepts outline a distinctive
philosophy of language and culture that
has at its center the claims that all
discourse is in essence a dialogical
exchange and that this endows all
language with a particular ethical or
ethico-political force.
As a literary theorist, Bakhtin is
associated with the Russian Formalists,
and his work is compared with that of
Yuri Lotman; in 1963 Roman Jakobson
mentioned him as one of the few
intelligent critics of Formalism. During
the 1920s, Bakhtin's work tended to
focus on ethics and aesthetics in
general. Early pieces such as Towards a
Philosophy of the Act and Author and
Hero in Aesthetic Activity are indebted
to the philosophical trends of the time
– particularly the Marburg School
Neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen,
including Ernst Cassirer, Max Scheler
and, to a lesser extent, Nicolai
Hartmann. Bakhtin began to be discovered
by scholars in 1963, but it was only
after his death in 1975 that authors
such as Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan
Todorov brought Bakhtin to the attention
of the Francophone world, and from there
his popularity in the United States, the
United Kingdom, and many other countries
continued to grow. In the late 1980s,
Bakhtin's work experienced a surge of
popularity in the West.
Bakhtin’s primary works include Toward a
Philosophy of the Act, an unfinished
portion of a philosophical essay;
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art, to which
Bakhtin later added a chapter on the
concept of carnival and published with
the title Problems of Dostoyevsky’s
Poetics; Rabelais and His World, which
explores the openness of the Rabelaisian
novel; The Dialogic Imagination, whereby
the four essays that comprise the work
introduce the concepts of dialogism,
heteroglossia, and chronotope; and
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, a
collection of essays in which Bakhtin
concerns himself with method and
culture.
In the 1920s there was a "Bakhtin
school" in Russia, in line with the
discourse analysis of Ferdinand de
Saussure and Roman Jakobson.
Biography
Bakhtin was born in Oryol, Russia, to an
old family of the nobility. His father
was the manager of a bank and worked in
several cities. For this reason Bakhtin
spent his early childhood years in Orel,
Vilnius, and then Odessa, where in 1913
he joined the historical and
philological faculty at the local
university. Katerina Clark and Michael
Holquist write: "Odessa..., like
Vilnius, was an appropriate setting for
a chapter in the life of a man who was
to become the philosopher of
heteroglossia and carnival. The same
sense of fun and irreverence that gave
birth to Babel's Rabelaisian gangster or
to the tricks and deceptions of Ostap
Bender, the picaro created by Ilf and
Petrov, left its mark on Bakhtin." He
later transferred to Petersburg
University to join his brother Nikolai.
It is here that Bakhtin was greatly
influenced by the classicist F. F.
Zelinsky, whose works contain the
beginnings of concepts elaborated by
Bakhtin.
Bakhtin completed his studies in 1918
and moved to a small city in western
Russia, Nevel (Pskov Oblast), where he
worked as a schoolteacher for two years.
It was at this time that the first "Bakhtin
Circle" formed. The group consisted of
intellectuals with varying interests,
but all shared a love for the discussion
of literary, religious, and political
topics. Included in this group were
Valentin Voloshinov and, eventually, P.
N. Medvedev, who joined the group later
in Vitebsk. German philosophy was the
topic talked about most frequently and,
from this point forward, Bakhtin
considered himself more a philosopher
than a literary scholar. It was in Nevel,
also, that Bakhtin worked tirelessly on
a large work concerning moral philosophy
that was never published in its
entirety. However, in 1919, a short
section of this work was published and
given the title "Art and
Responsibility." This piece constitutes
Bakhtin’s first published work. Bakhtin
relocated to Vitebsk in 1920. It was
here, in 1921, that Bakhtin married
Elena Aleksandrovna Okolovich. Later, in
1923, Bakhtin was diagnosed with
osteomyelitis, a bone disease that
ultimately led to the amputation of his
leg in 1938. This illness hampered his
productivity and rendered him an
invalid.
In 1924, Bakhtin moved to Leningrad,
where he assumed a position at the
Historical Institute and provided
consulting services for the State
Publishing House. It is at this time
that Bakhtin decided to share his work
with the public, but just before "On the
Question of the Methodology of
Aesthetics in Written Works" was to be
published, the journal in which it was
to appear stopped publication. This work
was eventually published fifty-one years
later. The repression and misplacement
of his manuscripts was something that
would plague Bakhtin throughout his
career. In 1929, "Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Art," Bakhtin’s first major
work, was published. It is here that
Bakhtin introduces the concept of
dialogism. However, just as this
revolutionary book was introduced,
Bakhtin was accused of participating in
the Russian Orthodox Church's
underground movement. The truthfulness
of this charge is not known, even today.
Consequently, during one of the many
purges of artists and intellectuals that
Stalin conducted during the early years
of his rule, Bakhtin was sentenced to
exile in Siberia but appealed on the
grounds that, in his weakened state, it
would kill him. Instead, he was
sentenced to six years of internal exile
in Kazakhstan.
Bakhtin spent these six years working as
a book keeper in the town of Kustanai,
during which time he wrote several
important essays, including "Discourse
in the Novel." In 1936 he taught courses
at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute
in Saransk. An obscure figure in a
provincial college, he dropped out of
view and taught only occasionally. In
1937, Bakhtin moved to Kimry, a town
located a couple of hundred kilometers
from Moscow. Here, Bakhtin completed
work on a book concerning the
18th-century German novel which was
subsequently accepted by the Sovetskii
Pisatel' Publishing House. However, the
only copy of the manuscript disappeared
during the upheaval caused by the German
invasion.
After the amputation of his leg in 1938,
Bakhtin’s health improved and he became
more prolific. In 1940, and until the
end of World War II, Bakhtin lived in
Moscow, where he submitted a
dissertation on Rabelais to the Gorky
Institute of World Literature to obtain
a postgraduate title, a dissertation
that could not be defended until the war
ended. In 1946 and 1949, the defense of
this dissertation divided the scholars
of Moscow into two groups: those
official opponents guiding the defense,
who accepted the original and unorthodox
manuscript, and those other professors
who were against the manuscript’s
acceptance. The book's earthy, anarchic
topic was the cause of many arguments
that ceased only when the government
intervened. Ultimately, Bakhtin was
denied a doctorate and granted a lesser
degree by the State Accrediting Bureau.
Later, Bakhtin was invited back to
Saransk, where he took on the position
of chair of the General Literature
Department at the Mordovian Pedagogical
Institute. When, in 1957, the Institute
changed from a teachers' college to a
university, Bakhtin became head of the
Department of Russian and World
Literature. In 1961, Bakhtin’s
deteriorating health forced him to
retire, and in 1969, in search of
medical attention, Bakhtin moved back to
Moscow, where he lived until his death
in 1975.
Bakhtin’s works and ideas gained
popularity after his death, and he
endured difficult conditions for much of
his professional life, a time in which
information was often seen as dangerous
and therefore often hidden. Therefore,
the details provided now are often of
uncertain accuracy. Also contributing to
the imprecision of these details is the
limited access to Russian archival
information during Bakhtin’s life. It is
only after the archives became public
that scholars realized that much of what
they thought they knew about the details
of Bakhtin’s life was false or skewed
largely by Bakhtin himself.
Works and ideas
Toward a Philosophy of the Act
Toward a Philosophy of the Act was first
published in Russia in 1986 with the
title K filosofii postupka. The
manuscript, written between
1919–1921,was found in bad condition
with pages missing and sections of text
that were illegible. It is for this
reason that this philosophical essay
appears today as a fragment of an
unfinished work. Toward a Philosophy of
the Act comprises only an introduction,
of which the first few pages are
missing, and part one of the full text.
However, Bakhtin’s intentions for the
work were not altogether lost, for he
provided an outline in the introduction
in which he stated that the essay was to
contain four parts. The first part of
the essay deals with the analysis of the
performed acts or deeds that comprise
the actual world; "the world actually
experienced, and not the merely
thinkable world." For the three
subsequent and unfinished parts of
Toward a Philosophy of the Act Bakhtin
states the topics he intends to discuss.
He outlines that the second part will
deal with aesthetic activity and the
ethics of artistic creation; the third
with the ethics of politics; and the
fourth with religion.
Toward a Philosophy of the Act reveals a
young Bakhtin who is in the process of
developing his moral philosophy by
decentralizing the work of Kant. This
text is one of Bakhtin’s early works
concerning ethics and aesthetics and it
is here that Bakhtin lays out three
claims regarding the acknowledgment of
the uniqueness of one’s participation in
Being:
1. I both actively and passively
participate in Being.
2. My uniqueness is given but it
simultaneously exists only to the degree
to which I actualize this uniqueness (in
other words, it is in the performed act
and deed that has yet to be achieved).
3. Because I am actual and irreplaceable
I must actualize my uniqueness.
Bakhtin further states: "It is in
relation to the whole actual unity that
my unique ought arises from my unique
place in Being." Bakhtin deals with the
concept of morality whereby he
attributes the predominating legalistic
notion of morality to human moral
action. According to Bakhtin, the I
cannot maintain neutrality toward moral
and ethical demands which manifest
themselves as one’s voice of
consciousness.
It is here also that Bakhtin introduces
an architectonic model of the human
psyche which consists of three
components: "I-for-myself,"
"I-for-the-other," and "other-for-me."
The I-for-myself is an unreliable source
of identity, and Bakhtin argues that it
is the I-for-the-other through which
human beings develop a sense of identity
because it serves as an amalgamation of
the way in which others view me.
Conversely, other-for-me describes the
way in which others incorporate my
perceptions of them into their own
identities. Identity, as Bakhtin
describes it here, does not belong
merely to the individual, rather it is
shared by all.
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art:
polyphony and unfinalizability
During his time in Leningrad,
Bakhtin shifted his focus away from the
philosophy characteristic of his early
works and towards the notion of
dialogue. It is at this time that he
began his engagement with the work of
Dostoevsky. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s
Art is considered to be Bakhtin’s
seminal work, and it is here that
Bakhtin introduces three important
concepts.
First, is the concept of the
unfinalizable self: individual people
cannot be finalized, completely
understood, known, or labeled. Though it
is possible to understand people and to
treat them as if they are completely
known, Bakhtin’s conception of
unfinalizability respects the
possibility that a person can change,
and that a person is never fully
revealed or fully known in the world.
Readers may find that this conception
reflects the idea of the soul; Bakhtin
had strong roots in Christianity and in
the Neo-Kantian school led by Hermann
Cohen, both of which emphasized the
importance of an individual's
potentially infinite capability, worth,
and the hidden soul.
Second, is the idea of the relationship
between the self and others, or other
groups. According to Bakhtin, every
person is influenced by others in an
inescapably intertwined way, and
consequently no voice can be said to be
isolated. In an interview, Bakhtin once
explained that,
In order to understand, it is immensely
important for the person who understands
to be located outside the object of his
or her creative understanding—in time,
in space, in culture. For one cannot
even really see one's own exterior and
comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors
or photographs can help; our real
exterior can be seen and understood only
by other people, because they are
located outside us in space, and because
they are others. ~New York Review of
Books, June 10, 1993.
As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly
respected the influences of others on
the self, not merely in terms of how a
person comes to be, but also in how a
person thinks and how a person sees him-
or herself truthfully.
Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky's
work a true representation of polyphony,
that is, many voices. Each character in
Dostoevsky's work represents a voice
that speaks for an individual self,
distinct from others. This idea of
polyphony is related to the concepts of
unfinalizability and self-and-others,
since it is the unfinalizability of
individuals that creates true polyphony.
Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic
concept of truth. He criticized the
assumption that, if two people disagree,
at least one of them must be in error.
He challenged philosophers for whom
plurality of minds is accidental and
superfluous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a
statement, a sentence or a phrase.
Instead, truth is a number of mutually
addressed, albeit contradictory and
logically inconsistent, statements.
Truth needs a multitude of carrying
voices. It cannot be held within a
single mind, it also cannot be expressed
by "a single mouth." The polyphonic
truth requires many simultaneous voices.
Bakhtin does not mean to say that many
voices carry partial truths that
complement each other. A number of
different voices do not make the truth
if simply "averaged" or "synthesized."
It is the fact of mutual addressivity,
of engagement, and of commitment to the
context of a real-life event, that
distinguishes truth from untruth.
When, in subsequent years, Problems of
Dostoyevsky’s Art was translated into
English and published in the West,
Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept
of carnival and the book was published
with the slightly different title,
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics.
According to Bakhtin, carnival is the
context in which distinct individual
voices are heard, flourish and interact
together. The carnival creates the
"threshold" situations where regular
conventions are broken or reversed and
genuine dialogue becomes possible. The
notion of a carnival was Bakhtin's way
of describing Dostoevsky's polyphonic
style: each individual character is
strongly defined, and at the same time
the reader witnesses the critical
influence of each character upon the
other. That is to say, the voices of
others are heard by each individual, and
each inescapably shapes the character of
the other.
Rabelais and His World: carnival and
grotesque
During World War II Bakhtin
submitted a dissertation on the French
Renaissance writer François Rabelais
which was not defended until some years
later. The controversial ideas discussed
within the work caused much
disagreement, and it was consequently
decided that Bakhtin be denied his
doctorate. Thus, due to its content,
Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle
Ages and Renaissance was not published
until 1965, at which time it was given
the title, Rabelais and His World.
A classic of Renaissance studies, in
Rabelais and His World Bakhtin explores
Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Bakhtin declares that, for centuries,
Rabelais’s book had been misunderstood,
and claimed that Rabelais and His World
clarified Rabelais’s intentions. In
Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin concerns
himself with the openness of Gargantua
and Pantagruel; however, the book itself
also serves as an example of such
openness. Throughout the text, Bakhtin
attempts two things: he seeks to recover
sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel
that, in the past, were either ignored
or suppressed, and conducts an analysis
of the Renaissance social system in
order to discover the balance between
language that was permitted and language
that was not. It is by means of this
analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two
important subtexts: the first is
carnival (carnivalesque) which Bakhtin
describes as a social institution, and
the second is grotesque realism which is
defined as a literary mode. Thus, in
Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies
the interaction between the social and
the literary, as well as the meaning of
the body.
The Dialogic Imagination: Chronotope,
Heteroglossia
The Dialogic Imagination (first
published as a whole in 1975) is a
compilation of four essays concerning
language and the novel: "Epic and Novel"
(1941), "From the Prehistory of
Novelistic Discourse," "Forms of Time
and of the Chronotope in the Novel," and
"Discourse in the Novel." It is through
the essays contained within The Dialogic
Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the
concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and
chronotope, making a significant
contribution to the realm of literary
scholarship. Bakhtin explains the
generation of meaning through the
"primacy of context over text" (heteroglossia),
the hybrid nature of language (polyglossia)
and the relation between utterances (intertextuality).
Heteroglossia is "the base condition
governing the operation of meaning in
any utterance." To make an utterance
means to "appropriate the words of
others and populate them with one's own
intention." Bakhtin's deep insights on
dialogicality represent a substantive
shift from views on the nature of
language and knowledge by major thinkers
as Ferdinand de Saussure and Kant.
In "Epic and Novel," Bakhtin
demonstrates the novel’s distinct nature
by contrasting it with the epic. By
doing so, Bakhtin shows that the novel
is well suited to the post-industrial
civilization in which we live because it
flourishes on diversity. It is this same
diversity that the epic attempts to
eliminate from the world. According to
Bakhtin, the novel as a genre is unique
in that it is able to embrace, ingest,
and devour other genres while still
maintaining its status as a novel. Other
genres, however, cannot emulate the
novel without damaging their own
distinct identity.
"From the Prehistory of Novelistic
Discourse" is a less traditional essay
in which Bakhtin reveals how various
different texts from the past have
ultimately come together to form the
modern novel.
"Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in
the Novel" introduces Bakhtin’s concept
of chronotope. This essay applies the
concept in order to further demonstrate
the distinctive quality of the novel.
The word chronotope literally means
"time space" and is defined by Bakhtin
as "the intrinsic connectedness of
temporal and spatial relationships that
are artistically expressed in
literature." For the purpose of his
writing, an author must create entire
worlds and, in doing so, is forced to
make use of the organizing categories of
the real world in which he lives. For
this reason chronotope is a concept that
engages reality.
The final essay, "Discourse in the
Novel," is one of Bakhtin’s most
complete statements concerning his
philosophy of language. It is here that
Bakhtin provides a model for a history
of discourse and introduces the concept
of heteroglossia. The term heteroglossia
refers to the qualities of a language
that are extralinguistic, but common to
all languages. These include qualities
such as perspective, evaluation, and
ideological positioning. In this way
most languages are incapable of
neutrality, for every word is
inextricably bound to the context in
which it exists.
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
In Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays Bakhtin moves away from the novel
and concerns himself with the problems
of method and the nature of culture.
There are six essays that comprise this
compilation: "Response to a Question
from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff," "The
Bildungsroman and Its Significance in
the History of Realism," "The Problem of
Speech Genres," "The Problem of the Text
in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human
Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical
Analysis," "From Notes Made in 1970-71,"
and "Toward a Methodology for the Human
Sciences."
". Response to a Question from the Novy
Mir Editorial Staff" is a transcript of
comments made by Bakhtin to a reporter
from a monthly journal called Novy Mir
that was widely read by Soviet
intellectuals. The transcript expresses
Bakhtin’s opinion of literary
scholarship whereby he highlights some
of its shortcomings and makes
suggestions for improvement.
"The Bildungsroman and Its Significance
in the History of Realism" is a fragment
from one of Bakhtin’s lost books. The
publishing house to which Bakhtin had
submitted the full manuscript was blown
up during the German invasion and
Bakhtin was in possession of only the
prospectus. However, due to a shortage
of paper, Bakhtin began using this
remaining section to roll cigarettes. So
only a portion of the opening section
remains. This remaining section deals
primarily with Goethe.
"The Problem of Speech Genres" deals
with the difference between Saussurean
linguistics and language as a living
dialogue (translinguistics). In a
relatively short space, this essay takes
up a topic about which Bakhtin had
planned to write a book, making the
essay a rather dense and complex read.
It is here that Bakhtin distinguishes
between literary and everyday language.
According to Bakhtin, genres exist not
merely in language, but rather in
communication. In dealing with genres,
Bakhtin indicates that they have been
studied only within the realm of
rhetoric and literature, but each
discipline draws largely on genres that
exist outside both rhetoric and
literature. These extraliterary genres
have remained largely unexplored.
Bakhtin makes the distinction between
primary genres and secondary genres,
whereby primary genres legislate those
words, phrases, and expressions that are
acceptable in everyday life, and
secondary genres are characterized by
various types of text such as legal,
scientific, etc.
"The Problem of the Text in Linguistics,
Philology, and the Human Sciences: An
Experiment in Philosophical Analysis" is
a compilation of the thoughts Bakhtin
recorded in his notebooks. These notes
focus mostly on the problems of the
text, but various other sections of the
paper discuss topics he has taken up
elsewhere, such as speech genres, the
status of the author, and the distinct
nature of the human sciences. However,
"The Problem of the Text" deals
primarily with dialogue and the way in
which a text relates to its context.
Speakers, Bakhtin claims, shape an
utterance according to three variables:
the object of discourse, the immediate
addressee, and a superaddressee. This is
what Bakhtin describes as the tertiary
nature of dialogue.
"From Notes Made in 1970-71" appears
also as a collection of fragments
extracted from notebooks Bakhtin kept
during the years of 1970 and 1971. It is
here that Bakhtin discusses
interpretation and its endless
possibilities. According to Bakhtin,
humans have a habit of making narrow
interpretations, but such limited
interpretations only serve to weaken the
richness of the pastt.
The final essay, "Toward a Methodology
for the Human Sciences," originates from
notes Bakhtin wrote during the
mid-seventies and is the last piece of
writing Bakhtin produced before he died.
In this essay he makes a distinction
between dialectic and dialogics and
comments on the difference between the
text and the aesthetic object. It is
here also, that Bakhtin differentiates
himself from the Formalists, who, he
felt, underestimated the importance of
content while oversimplifying change,
and the Structuralists, who too rigidly
adhered to the concept of "code."
Disputed texts
Some of the works which bear the
names of Bakhtin's close friends V. N.
Vološinov and P. N. Medvedev have been
attributed to Bakhtin – particularly The
Formal Method in Literary Scholarship
and Marxism and Philosophy of Language.
These claims originated in the early
1970s and received their earliest full
articulation in English in Clark and
Holquist's 1984 biography of Bakhtin. In
the years since then, however, most
scholars have come to agree that
Vološinov and Medvedev ought to be
considered the true authors of these
works. Although Bakhtin undoubtedly
influenced these scholars and may even
have had a hand in composing the works
attributed to them, it now seems clear
that if it was necessary to attribute
authorship of these works to one person,
Vološinov and Medvedev respectively
should receive credit.
Influence
He is known today for his interest
in a wide variety of subjects, ideas,
vocabularies, and periods, as well as
his use of authorial disguises, and for
his influence (alongside György Lukács)
on the growth of Western scholarship on
the novel as a premiere literary genre.
As a result of the breadth of topics
with which he dealt, Bakhtin has
influenced such Western schools of
theory as Neo-Marxism, Structuralism,
and Semiotics. However, his influence on
such groups has, somewhat paradoxically,
resulted in narrowing the scope of
Bakhtin’s work. According to Clark and
Holquist, rarely do those who
incorporate Bakhtin’s ideas into
theories of their own appreciate his
work in its entirety.
While Bakhtin is traditionally seen as a
literary critic, there can be no denying
his impact on the realm of rhetorical
theory. Among his many theories and
ideas Bakhtin indicates that style is a
developmental process, occurring both
within the user of language and language
itself. His work instills in the reader
an awareness of tone and expression that
arises from the careful formation of
verbal phrasing. By means of his
writing, Bakhtin has enriched the
experience of verbal and written
expression which ultimately aids the
formal teaching of writing.Some even
suggest that Bakhtin introduces a new
meaning to rhetoric because of his
tendency to reject the separation of
language and ideology.
Bakhtin has been compared to Derrida and
Michel Foucault.
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The 1920s also
produced novels that became classics of official
Soviet literature, including Mikhail Sholokhov
(1905–84) was clearly an official Soviet writer, Dmitry Furmanov’s
Chapayev (1923) and Aleksandr Serafimovich’s
Zhelezny potok (1924; The Iron Flood).
Konstantin
Fedin’s novel Goroda i gody (1924; Cities and
Years); and Leonid Leonov’s Vor (1927; The
Thief).
Fyodor Gladkov’s Tsement (1925; Cement) became a model for
the “industrial production” novel.
Also in this
period, Sholokhov began writing the best-known
official work, a four-part novel published as Tikhy
Don (1928–40; “The Quiet Don”; translated in two
parts as And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows
Home to the Sea).
The Stalin era
The decade beginning with Stalin’s ascendancy in the
late 1920s was one of unprecedented repression. The
“war in the countryside” to enforce the
collectivization of agriculture cost more than 10
million lives, about half of them by starvation.
Purges took the lives of millions more, among them
Babel,
Mandelshtam, Pilnyak, Daniil Kharms, the peasant
poet Nikolay Klyuyev (1887–1937), and the director
Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940),
Philosophers Pavel
Florensky. In 1932 all
independent literary groupings were dissolved and
replaced by an institution that had no counterpart
in the West, the Union of Soviet Writers. The union
became the state’s instrument of control over
literature, and expulsion from it meant literary
death. In 1934 Socialist Realism was proclaimed the
only acceptable form of writing. Henceforth,
literature was to be governed by a series of
official directives regarding details of style and
content in order to ensure that each work offered a
“truthful” depiction “of reality in its
revolutionary development.” Literature had to be
“party-minded” and “typical” (that is, avoiding
unpleasant, hence “atypical,” aspects of Soviet
reality), while showing the triumph of fully
“positive heroes.”
Some talented writers turned to the safer areas
of children’s literature and translation. Others,
such as Valentin Katayev in his production novel
Vremya, vperyod! (1932; Time, Forward!) and Fedin in
Pervyye radosti (1946; Early Joys), sought to infuse
official writing with some interest. Quite popular
was Nikolay Ostrovsky’s fictionalized autobiography
Kak zakalyalas stal (1932–34; How the Steel Was
Tempered). In his unfinished novel Pyotr Pervy
(1929–45; Peter the Great) and his play Ivan Grozny
(1941–43; “Ivan the Terrible”), Aleksey Tolstoy, an
émigré who returned to become one of Stalin’s favourite writers, praised tyrannical tsars admired
by Stalin. The moral nadir of Soviet literature was
reached in a collaborative volume,
Belomorsko-Baltiski kanal imeni Stalina: istoriya
stroitelstva (1934; Belomor: An Account of the
Construction of the New Canal Between the White Sea
and the Baltic Sea). With
Gorky as an editor and 34
contributors, including
Gorky, Katayev,
Shklovsky,
Aleksey Tolstoy, and Zoshchenko, the volume praised
a project (and the secret police who directed it)
using convict labour and costing tens of thousands
of lives.
During these dark years the work now
generally regarded as the finest post-Revolutionary
novel,
Mikhail Bulgakov’s
Master i Margarita (The
Master and Margarita), was written “for the drawer”
(1928–40); it appeared (expurgated) in Russia only
in 1966–67 and unexpurgated in 1973. It tells of the
Devil and his retinue visiting Soviet Russia, where
they play practical jokes of metaphysical and
political significance. A novel within the novel
gives the “true” version of Christ’s encounter with
Pilate. The result is a joyful philosophical comedy
of enormous profundity.
The need to rally support in World War II brought
a loosening of Communist Party control. The war
itself created the opportunity for a large “second
wave” of emigration, thus feeding émigré literature.
The period from 1946 until the death of Stalin in
1953 was one of severe repression known as the
zhdanovshchina, or Zhdanovism. During this campaign,
attacks on “rootless cosmopolitans” involved
anti-Semitism and the rejection of all foreign
influences on Russian literature. The Soviet
practice of samokritika (public denunciation of
one’s own work) was frequent.
Mikhail Bulgakov
"Master
i Margarita" ("The
Master and Margarita")

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (Russian: Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков, May
15 [O.S. May 3] 1891, Kiev – March 10, 1940, Moscow) was a Russian
novelist and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He
is best known for the novel The Master and Margarita, which The Times
has called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.
Biography
Mikhail Bulgakov was born to Russian parents on May 15, 1891 in
Kiev, Ukraine (which at the time was part of the Russian Empire). He was
the oldest son of Afanasiy Bulgakov, an assistant professor at the Kiev
Theological Academy. He was the grandson of priests on both sides of the
family. From 1901 to 1904, Mikhail attended the First Kiev Gymnasium,
where he developed an interest in Russian and European literature,
theatre, opera.
In 1913 Bulgakov married Tatiana Lappa. At the outbreak of the First
World War he volunteered with the Red Cross as a medical doctor. In
1916, he graduated from the Medical School of Kiev University and then
served in the White Army. He briefly served in the Ukrainian People's
Army. His brothers also served in the White Army. After the Civil War
and rise of the Soviets, they emigrated to exile in Paris. Mikhail, who
had enlisted in the White Army as a field doctor, ended up in the
Caucasus. There he began to work as a journalist. Bulgakov couldn't
follow his brothers because of typhus.
Though his first fiction efforts were made in Kiev, he only decided
to leave medicine to pursue his love of literature in 1919. In 1921, he
moved with Tatiana to Moscow where he began his career as a writer.
Three years later, divorced from his first wife, he married Lyubov'
Belozerskaya. He published a number of works through the early and mid
1920s, but by 1927 his career began to suffer from criticism that he was
too anti-Soviet. By 1929 his career was ruined, and government
censorship prevented publication of any of his work and staging of any
of his play.
In 1931, Bulgakov married for the third time, to Yelena Shilovskaya, who
would prove to be inspiration for the character Margarita in his most
famous novel. They settled at Patriarch's Ponds. During the last decade
of his life, Bulgakov continued to work on The Master and Margarita,
wrote plays, critical works, stories, and made several translations and
dramatisations of novels, librettos. Many of them were not published,
other ones were "torn to pieces" by critics.
Bulgakov never supported the Soviet regime, and mocked it in many of
his works. Therefore, most of his work stayed in his desk drawer for
several decades. In 1930 he wrote a letter to the Soviet government,
requesting permission to emigrate if the Soviet Union could not find use
for him as a writer. He spoke directly to Stalin on the phone asking to
leave the Soviet Union. Stalin replied that a Soviet writer cannot live
outside of his homeland, implying that if Bulgakov tried to leave, he
would be killed.
Stalin had enjoyed Bulgakov's work, The Days of the Turbins and found
work for him at a small Moscow theatre, and then the Moscow Art Theatre.
In Bulgakov's autobiography, he claimed that he wrote to Stalin out of
desperation and mental anguish, never intending to post the letter.
Bulgakov wrote letters to Stalin during the 1930s again requesting to
emigrate, to which Stalin did not reply.
The refusal of the authorities to let him work in the theatre and his
desire to see his family living abroad, whom he had not seen for many
years, led him to seek drastic measures. Despite his new work, the
projects he worked on at the theatre were often prohibited and he was
stressed and unhappy. He also worked briefly at the Bolshoi Theatre as a
librettist but left when his works were not produced.
Bulgakov died from nephrosclerosis (an inherited kidney disorder) on
March 10, 1940. He was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. His
father had died of the same disease, and from his youth Bulgakov guessed
of his future mortal diagnosis.
Early works
During his life, Bulgakov was best known for the plays he
contributed to Konstantin Stanislavsky's and Nemirovich-Danchenko's
Moscow Art Theatre. Stalin was known to be fond of the play Days of the
Turbins (Дни Турбиных) (1926), which was based on Bulgakov's novel The
White Guard. His dramatization of Molière's life in The Cabal of
Hypocrites (Кабала святош) is still performed by the Moscow Art Theatre.
Even after his plays were banned from the theatres, Bulgakov wrote a
comedy about Ivan the Terrible's visit into 1930s Moscow and a play
about the early years of Stalin (1939), which was prohibited by Stalin
himself.
Bulgakov began writing prose with The White Guard (Белая гвардия) (1924,
partly published in 1925, first full edition 1927—1929, Paris) - a novel
about a life of a White Army officer's family in Civil war Kiev. In the
mid-1920s, he came to admire the works of H. G. Wells and wrote several
stories with elements of science fiction, notably The Fatal Eggs
(Роковые яйца) (1924) and the Heart of a Dog (Собачье сердце) (1925). He
intended to compile his stories of the mid-twenties (published mostly in
medical journals) that were based on his work as a country doctor in
1916–1918 into a collection titled Notes of a Young Doctor (Записки
юного врача), but he died before he could publish it
The Fatal Eggs tells of the events of a Professor Persikov, who in
experimentation with eggs, discovers a red ray that accelerates growth
in living organisms. At the time, an illness passes through the chickens
of Moscow, killing most of them and, to remedy the situation, the Soviet
government puts the ray into use at a farm. Unfortunately there is a mix
up in egg shipments and the Professor ends up with chicken eggs, while
the government-run farm receives the shipment of ostrich, snake and
crocodile eggs that were meant to go to the Professor. The mistake is
not discovered until the eggs produce giant monstrosities that wreak
havoc in the suburbs of Moscow and kill most of the workers on the farm.
The propaganda machine then turns on Persikov, distorting his nature in
the same way his "innocent" tampering created the monsters. This tale of
a bungling government earned Bulgakov his label of a
counter-revolutionary.
Heart of a Dog features a professor who implants human testicles and
pituitary gland into a dog named Sharik (means "Little Balloon" or
"Little Ball" - popular Russian nickname for a male dog). The dog then
proceeds to become more and more human as time passes, resulting in all
manner of chaos. The tale can be read as a critical satire of the Soviet
Union; it contains few bold hints to communist leadership (e.g. the name
of donor drunkard of human implants is Chugunkin ("chugun" is a cast
iron) which can be seen as parody on the name of Stalin ("stal'" is
steel). It was turned into a comic opera called The Murder of Comrade
Sharik by William Bergsma in 1973. In 1988 an award-winning movie
version Sobachye Serdtse was produced by Lenfilm, starring Yevgeniy
Yevstigneyev, Roman Kartsev and Vladimir Tolokonnikov.
The Master and Margarita
The Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита), which Bulgakov began
writing in 1928, is a fantasy satirical novel published by his wife in
1966, twenty-six years after his death, that has led to an international
appreciation of his work. The book was available underground as samizdat
for many years in the Soviet Union, before the serialization of a
censored version in the journal Moskva. It contributed a number of
sayings to the Russian language, for example, "Manuscripts don't burn"
and "second-grade freshness". A destroyed manuscript of the Master is an
important element of the plot, and in fact Bulgakov had to rewrite the
novel from memory after he burned the draft manuscript of this novel.
The novel is not only a critique of Soviet society and its literary
establishment. This work is appreciated for its philosophical layer and
for its high artistic level thanks to its bright picturesque
descriptions (especially of old Yershalaim), lyrical fragments and
perfect author's style. It is a frame narrative involving two
characteristically related time periods and/or plot lines; the retelling
of the gospels, and describing contemporary Moscow.
The novel begins with Satan's visiting Moscow in the 1920s or 30s,
joining a conversation of a critic and a poet, busily debating the
existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil. It then evolves into an
all-embracing indictment of the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness,
and widespread paranoia of Soviet Russia. Published more than 25 years
after Bulgakov's death, and more than ten years after Stalin's, the
novel firmly secured Bulgakov's place among the pantheon of great
Russian writers.
There is a story-within-the-story: A short historical fiction
narrative about the interrogation of Yeshua by Pontius Pilate and the
Crucifixion.
Anatoliy Smelyanskiy, a Russian doctor of art, called "The Master and
Margarita" arrival of The Bible from an unexpected side
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Political
repression in the Soviet Union
Great Purge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the 1920s and 1930s, two thousand writers, intellectuals,
and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and
concentration camps.
Russian poet
Nikolai Gumilev
was executed on 24th August, 1921.

Hikolai
Gumilyov.
Foto
Petrograd Cheka, August 24, 1921
After sunspot development research was judged un-Marxist,
twenty-seven astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938. The
Meteorological Office was violently purged as early as 1933 for
failing to predict weather harmful to the crops. But the toll
was especially high among writers. Those who perished during the
Great Purge include:
The great poet
Osip Mandelshtam
was
arrested for reciting his famous anti-Stalin poem Stalin Epigram
to his circle of friends in 1934. After intervention by Nikolai
Bukharin and
Boris Pasternak (Stalin jotted down in Bukharin's
letter with feigned indignation: “Who gave them the right to
arrest Mandelstam?”), Stalin instructed NKVD to "isolate but
preserve" him, and Mandelstam was "merely" exiled to Cherdyn for
three years. But this proved to be a temporary reprieve. In May
1938, he was promptly arrested again for "counter-revolutionary
activities". On August 2, 1938, Mandelstam was sentenced to five
years in correction camps and died on December 27, 1938 at a
transit camp near Vladivostok.
Boris Pasternak himself was
nearly purged, but Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak's
name off the list, saying "Don't touch this cloud dweller."

NKVD
photo after the second arrest, 1938
Writer Isaac Babel was arrested in May 1939, and
according to his confession paper (which contained a blood
stain) he "confessed" to being a member of Trotskyist
organization and being recruited by French writer Andre Malraux
to spy for France. In the final interrogation, he retracted his
confession and wrote letters to prosecutor's office stating that
he had implicated innocent people, but to no avail. Babel was
tried before an NKVD troika and convicted of simultaneously
spying for the French, Austrians, and Leon Trotsky, as well as
"membership in a terrorist organization." On January 27, 1940,
he was shot in Butyrka prison.

The NKVD photo of Babel made
after his arres
Writer Boris Pilnyak was arrested on October 28, 1937 for
counter-revolutionary activities, spying and terrorism. One
report alleged that "he held secret meetings with (Andre) Gide,
and supplied him with information about the situation in the
USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in his
book attacking the USSR." Pilnyak was tried on April 21, 1938.
In the proceeding that lasted 15 minutes, he was condemned to
death and executed shortly afterward.

Boris Pilnyak
Theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested in 1939
and shot in February 1940 for "spying" for Japanese and British
intelligence. In a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov dated January
13, 1940, he wrote: "The investigators began to use force on me,
a sick 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and beaten
on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap... For
the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with
extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the
red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so
intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on
these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. I
incriminated myself in the hope that by telling them lies I
could end the ordeal. When I lay down on the cot and fell
asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in
an hour's time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and
because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of
typhoid fever." His wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was
murdered in her apartment by NKVD agents She was stabbed 17
times, two of them through the eyes.

Vsevolod
Meyerhold and Zinaida Raikh
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Vsevolod
Meyerhold's mugshot, taken at
the time of his arrest
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Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze
was arrested on October 10, 1937 on a charge
of treason and was tortured in prison. In a
bitter humor, he named only the 18th-century
Georgian poet Besiki as his accomplice in
anti-Soviet activities. He was
executed on December 16, 1937. His friend and poet Paolo
Iashvili, having earlier been forced to denounce several of
his associates as the enemies of the people, shot himself with a
hunting gun in the building of the Writers' Union. (He
witnessed and even had to participate in public trials that
ousted many of his associates from the Writers' Union,
effectively condemning them to death. When Lavrenty Beria
further pressured him with alternative of denouncing his
life-long friend Tabidze or being arrested and tortured by the
NKVD, he killed himself.)
In early 1937, poet Pavel Vasiliev is said to have
defended Bukharin as "a man of the highest nobility and the
conscience of peasant Russia" at the time of his denunciation at
the Pyatakov Trial (Second Moscow Trial) and damned other
writers then signing the routine condemnations as "pornographic
scrawls on the margins of Russian literature." He was promptly
shot on July 16, 1937.

Titsian Tabidze
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Paolo Iashvili
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Pavel Vasiliev
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Jan Sten, philosopher and deputy head of the Marx-Engels
Institute was Stalin's private tutor when Stalin was trying hard
to study Hegel's dialectic. (Stalin received lessons twice a
week from 1925 to 1928, but he found it difficult to master even
some of the basic ideas. Stalin developed enduring hostility
toward German idealistic philosophy, which he called "the
aristocratic reaction to the French Revolution".) In 1937, Sten
was seized on the direct order of Stalin, who declared him one
of the chiefs of Menshevizing idealists. On June 19, 1937, Sten
was put to death in Lefortovo prison.
Daniil Kharms was arrested in
1931 together with Vvedensky, Tufanov and
some other writers, and was in exile from
his hometown (forced to live in the city of
Kursk) for most of a year. He was arrested
as a member of "a group of anti-Soviet
children's writers", and some of his works
were used as an evidence. Soviet
authorities, having become increasingly
hostile toward the avant-garde in general,
deemed Kharms’ writing for children
anti-Soviet because of its absurd logic and
its refusal to instill materialist and
social Soviet values.

Daniil Kharms
He continued to write for children's
magazines when he returned from exile,
though his name would appear in the credits
less often. His plans for more performances
and plays were curtailed, the OBERIU
disbanded, and Kharms receded into a very
private writing life. He wrote for the desk
drawer, for his wife, Marina Malich, and for
a small group of friends, the “Chinari”, who
met privately to discuss matters of
philosophy, music, mathematics, and
literature.
In the 1930s, as the mainstream Soviet
literature was becoming more and more
conservative under the guidelines of
Socialist Realism, Kharms found refuge in
children's literature. (He had worked under
Marshak at DetGiz, the state-owned
children's publishing house since the
mid-1920s, writing new material and
translating children literature from the
west, including Wilhelm Busch's Max and
Moritz). Many of his poems and short stories
for children, published in the Chizh (Чиж),
Yozh (Ëж), Sverchok (Сверчок) and
Oktyabryata (Октябрята) magazines, are
considered classics of the genre and his
roughly twenty children's books are well
known and loved by kids to this day, -
despite his personal deep disgust for
children, unknown to the public - whereas
his "adult" writing was not published during
his lifetime with the sole exceptions of two
early poems. Still, these were lean times
and his honorariums didn't quite pay the
bills, plus the editors in the children's
publishing sector were suffering under
extreme pressure and censorship and some
were disposed of during Stalin's purges.
Thus, Kharms lived in debt and hunger for
several years until his final arrest on
suspicion of treason in the summer of 1941
(most people with a previous arrest were
being picked up by the NKVD in those times).
He was imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at
Leningrad Prison No. 1. and died in his cell
in February, 1942—most likely, from
starvation, as the Nazi blockade of
Leningrad had already begun.
Nikolai Alekseevich Klyuev
(occasionally transliterated from the
Cyrillic alphabet as Kliuev, Kluev, Klyuyev,
or Kluyev) (October 10, 1884 - between
October 23 and 25, 1937), was a notable
Russian poet. He was influenced by the
symbolist movement, intense nationalism, and
a love of Russian folklore.

Nikolai Klyuev
Born in a small village near the town of
Vytegra, Kluyev rose to prominence in the
early twentieth century as the leader of the
so-called "peasant poets". Kluyev was a
close friend and mentor of Sergei Yesenin.
Arrested in 1933 for contradicting Soviet
ideology, he was shot in 1937 and
rehabilitated posthumously in 1957.
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Pavel
Florensky

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (also P.A.
Florenskiĭ, Florenskii, Florenskij, Russian:
Па́вел Алекса́ндрович Флоре́нский ) (January 21
[O.S. January 9] 1882 - December 1937) was a
Russian Orthodox theologian, philosopher,
mathematician, electrical engineer, inventor and
Neomartyr sometimes compared by his followers to
Leonardo da Vinci.
Early life
Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was born on
January 21, 1882, into a family of a railroad
engineer (Aleksandr Florensky) in the town of
Yevlakh in western Azerbaijan. His father came
from a family of Russian Orthodox priests while
his mother Olga (Salomia) Saparova (Saparashvili)
was of the Armenian nobility.
After
graduating from Tbilisi gymnasium in 1899
Florensky entered the department of mathematics
of Moscow State University and simultaneously
studied philosophy. During this period the young
Florensky, who had no religious upbringing,
began taking an interest studies beyond, "the
limitations of physical knowledge..." In 1904 he
graduated from Moscow State University and
refused to accept a teaching position at the
University: instead, he proceeded to study
theology at the Ecclesiastical Academy in
Sergiyev Posad. During his theological study he
first came into contact with who would become
his spiritual father and mentor, Elder Isidore
on a visit to Gethsemane Hermitage. Together
with his fellow students Ern, Svenitsky and
Brikhnichev he founded a society, the Christian
Struggle Union (Союз Христиaнской Борьбы), with
the revolutionary aim of rebuilding Russian
society according to the principles of Vladimir
Solovyov. Subsequently he was arrested for
membership in this society in 1906: however, he
later lost his interest in the Radical
Christianity movement.

Philosophers Pavel Florensky and Sergei
Bulgakov, a painting by Mikhail Nesterov (1917)
Intellectual interests
During his studies at the Ecclesiastical
Academy, Florensky's interests included
philosophy, religion, art and folklore. He
became a prominent member of the Russian
Symbolism movement, started his friendship with
Andrei Bely and published works in the magazines
New Way (Новый Путь) and Libra (Весы). He also
started his main philosophical work, The Pillar
and Ground of the Truth: an Essay in Orthodox
Theodicy in Twelve Letters. The complete book
was published only in 1924 but most of it was
finished at the time of his graduation from the
academy in 1908.
According to
Princeton University Press: "The book is a
series of twelve letters to a "brother" or
"friend," who may be understood symbolically as
Christ. Central to Florensky's work is an
exploration of the various meanings of Christian
love, which is viewed as a combination of philia
(friendship) and agape (universal love). He
describes the ancient Christian rites of the
adelphopoiesis (brother making), joining male
friends in chaste bonds of love. In addition,
Florensky is one of the first thinkers in the
twentieth century to develop the idea of the
Divine Sophia, who has become one of the central
concerns of feminist theologians."
After
graduating from the academy, he taught
philosophy there and lived at Troitse-Sergiyeva
Lavra until 1919. In 1911 he was ordained into
the priesthood. In 1914 he wrote his
dissertation, About Spiritual Truth. He
published works on philosophy, theology, art
theory, mathematics and electrodynamics. Between
1911 and 1917 he was the chief editor of the
most authoritative Orthodox theological
publication of that time, Bogoslovskiy Vestnik.
He was also a spiritual teacher of the
controversial Russian writer Vasily Rozanov,
urging him to reconcile with the Orthodox
Church.
Period of
Communist rule in Russia
After the October Revolution he formulated
his position as: I am of a Philosophical and
scientific world outlook developed by me, which
contradicts the vulgar interpretation of
communism... but that does not prevent me to
honestly work for the state service. After the
closing down, by the Bolsheviks, of the
Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra (1918) and the
Sergievo-Posad Church (1921), where he was the
priest, he moved to Moscow to work on the State
Plan for Electrification of Russia. (ГОЭЛРО)
Under the recommendation of Leon Trotsky who
strongly believed in Florensky's ability to help
the government to electrify rural Russia.
According to contemporaries, Florensky in his
priest's cassock, working alongside other
leaders of a Government department, was a
remarkable sight.
In 1924, he
published a large monograph on dielectrics, as
well as his The Pillar and Ground of the Truth:
an Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters.
He also worked simultaneously as the Scientific
Secretary of the Historical Commission on
Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra and published his works
on ancient Russian art. He was also rumoured to
be the main organizer of the plot to save the
relics of St. Sergii Radonezhsky whose
destruction had been ordered by the government.
In the second
half of the 1920s, he mostly worked on physics
and electrodynamics, publishing his main hard
science work Imaginary numbers in Geometry («Мнимости
в геометрии. Расширение области двухмерных
образов геометрии») devoted to the geometrical
interpretation of Albert Einstein's theory of
relativity. Among other things, he proclaimed
that the geometry of imaginary numbers predicted
by the theory of relativity for a body moving
faster than light is the geometry of the kingdom
of God.
1928-1937:
Exile, imprisonment, death
In 1928, Florensky was exiled to Nizhny
Novgorod. After the intercession of Ekaterina
Peshkova (wife of Maxim Gorky), Florensky was
allowed to return to Moscow. In 1933 he was
arrested again and sentenced to ten years in the
Labor Camps by the infamous Article 58 of
Stalin's criminal code (clauses ten and eleven:
"agitation against the Soviet system" and
"publishing agitation materials against the
Soviet system"). The published agitation
materials were the monograph about the theory of
relativity.
He served at
the Baikal Amur Mainline camp, until 1934 when
he was moved to Solovki, there he conducted
research into producing iodine and agar out of
the local seaweed. In 1937 he was transferred to
Saint Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) where
he was sentenced by an extrajudicial NKVD troika
to execution. According to a legend he was
sentenced for the refusal to disclose the
location of the head of St. Sergii Radonezhsky
that the communists wanted to destroy. The
Saint's head was indeed saved and in 1946, the
Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra was opened again. The
relics of St. Sergii became fashionable once
more. The Saint's relics were returned to Lavra
by Pavel Golubtsov, later known as archbishop
Sergiy.
Official Soviet
information stated that Florensky died December
8, 1943 somewhere in Siberia, but a study of the
NKVD archives after the dissolution of the
Soviet Union have shown that information to be
false. Florensky was shot immediately after the
NKVD troika session in December 1937. Most
probably he was executed at the Rzhevsky
Artillery Range, near Toksovo, which is located
about twenty kilometers northeast of Saint
Petersburg and was buried in a secret grave in
Koirangakangas near Toksovo together with 30,000
others who were executed by NKVD at the same
time.
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Philosophers' ships
Philosophers' ships is the collective name of several boats
that carried Soviet expellees abroad.
The main load was handled by two German boats, the
Oberbürgermeister Haken and the Preussen, which transported
more than 160 expelled Russian intellectuals in September
and November 1922 from Petrograd to Stettin, Germany. Three
detention lists included 228 people, 32 of them students.
Other intellectuals were transported in 1923 by train to
Riga, Latvia or by boat from Odessa to Constantinople.
Nikolai Berdyaev

Nikolai Berdyaev.Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev
(Russian: Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Бердя́ев)
(March 18 [O.S. March 6] 1874 – March 24, 1948)
was a Russian religious and political
philosopher.
Early life and education
Berdyaev was born in Kiev into an
aristocratic military family. He spent a
solitary childhood at home, where his father's
library allowed him to read widely. He read
Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kant when only fourteen
years old and excelled at languages.
Revolutionary activities
Berdyaev decided on an intellectual career
and entered the Kiev University in 1894. This
was a time of revolutionary fervor among the
students and the intelligentsia. Berdyaev became
a Marxist and in 1898 was arrested in a student
demonstration and expelled from the University.
Later his involvement in illegal activities led
to three years of internal exile in central
Russia—a mild sentence compared to that faced by
many other revolutionaries.
In 1904 Berdyaev married Lydia Trusheff and
the couple moved to Saint Petersburg, the
Russian capital and center of intellectual and
revolutionary activity. Berdyaev participated
fully in intellectual and spiritual debate,
eventually departing from radical Marxism to
focus his attention on philosophy and
spirituality. Berdyaev and Trusheff remained
deeply committed to each other until the
latter's death in 1945.
Berdyaev was a believer in orthodox
Christianity, but was often critical of the
institutional church. A fiery 1913 article
criticising the Holy Synod of the Russian
Orthodox Church caused him to be charged with
the crime of blasphemy, the punishment for which
was exile to Siberia for life. The World War and
the Bolshevik Revolution prevented the matter
coming to trial.
He was a Christian universalist. Berdyaev
writes with approval that
The greater part of Eastern teachers of the
Church, from Clement of Alexandria to Maximus
the Confessor, were supporters of Apokatastasis,
of universal salvation and resurrection. ...
Orthodox thought has never been suppressed by
the idea of Divine justice and it never forgot
the idea of Divine love. Chiefly — it did not
define man from the point of view of Divine
justice but from the idea of transfiguration and
Deification of man and cosmos.
Expulsion from Russia
Berdyaev could not accept the Bolshevik
regime, because of its authoritarianism and the
domination of the state over the freedom of the
individual. Yet, he accepted the hardships of
the revolutionary period, as he was permitted
for the time being to continue to lecture and
write.
His philosophy has been characterized as
Christian existentialist. He was preoccupied
with creativity and in particular freedom from
anything that inhibited said creativity, whence
his opposition against a "collectivized and
mechanized society".
In September 1922, Berdyaev was among a
carefully selected group of some 160 prominent
writers, scholars, and intellectuals whose ideas
the Bolshevik government found objectionable,
who were sent into exile on the so-called
"philosophers' ship". Overall, they were
supporters neither of the Czarist regime nor of
the Bolsheviks, preferring less autocratic forms
of government. They included those who argued
for personal liberty, spiritual development,
Christian ethics, and a pathway informed by
reason and guided by faith.
Exile in France
At first Berdyaev and other émigrés went to
Berlin, but economic and political conditions in
Weimar Germany caused him and his wife to move
to Paris in 1923. There he founded an Academy,
taught, lectured, and wrote, working for an
exchange of ideas with the French intellectual
community.
During the German occupation of France,
Berdyaev continued to write books that were
published after the war—some of them after his
death. In the years that he spent in France,
Berdyaev wrote fifteen books, including most of
his most important works. He died at his writing
desk in his home in Clamart, near Paris, in
March 1948.
Legacy
Berdyaev influenced many thinkers, but his
work was also very often the subject of
controversial discussions. His work has been
read mostly in the circles of existential
philosophy and orthodox theology. Out of
Berdyaev's understanding of freedom and
creativity, Davor Dzalto has developed his
understanding of contemporary art production and
its importance for the human being. He is
credited with developing an influential school
of thought, sometimes called Mystical realism,
with influence inside and outside of Russia, but
especially reflecting aspects of Russian
philosophic thought not usually seen in the
West.
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Nikolai Lossky

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky (Russian:
Никола́й Ону́фриевич Ло́сский) (December 6 [O.S.
November 24] 1870 – January 24, 1965) was a
Russian philosopher, representative of Russian
idealism, intuitionism, personalism,
libertarianism, ethics, Axiology (Value theory),
and his philosophy he called intuitive-personalism.
He was born in the village of Kreslavka,
Daugavpils uyezd (region), Vitebsk gubernia
(province) of Russian Empire (now Krāslava in
Latvia) and died from natural causes at a
nursing home near Paris. Lossky had a daughter
who died as a child and three sons, the most
famous of which was the Eastern Orthodox
Theologian Vladimir Lossky.
Life
Lossky's father, Onufry Losski was Orthodox
Russian with Polish roots; his mother Adelajda
Przylenicka was Polish Catholic. Lossky
undertook post-graduate studies in Germany under
Wilhelm Windelband, Wilhelm Wundt and G. E.
Müller, receiving a Master's degree in 1903 and
a Doctorate in 1907. Returning to Russia, he
became Lecturer and subsequently Assistant
Professor of philosophy at St Petersburg. Lossky
called for a Russian religious and spiritual
reawakening while pointing out post-revolution
excesses. At the same time, Lossky survived an
elevator accident that nearly killed him, which
caused him to convert back to the Russian
Orthodox Church under the direction of Father
Pavel Florensky. These criticisms and conversion
cost Lossky his professorship of philosophy and
led to his exile abroad, on the famed
Philosophers' ship (in 1922) from the Soviet
Union as a counter-revolutionary.
Lossky was invited to Prague by Tomáš Masaryk
and became Professor at the Russian University
of Prague at Bratislava, in Czechoslovakia.
Being part of a group of ex-Marxists, including
Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Gershenzon,
Peter Berngardovich Struve, Semen L. Frank.
Lossky, though a Fabian socialist, contributed
to the group's symposium named Vekhi or
Signposts. He also helped the Harvard
sociologist Pitirim Sorokin with his Social and
Cultural Dynamics
In 1947 N.O. Lossky took a position teaching
Eastern Orthodox theology at Saint Vladimir's
Orthodox Theological Seminary, a Russian
Orthodox seminary in New York. In 1961, after
the death of his famous Orthodox theologian son
Vladimir Lossky, N. O. Lossky went to France.
The last four years of his life were spent in
illness there.
Intuitivism and Slavophilism
Lossky was one of the preeminent Russian
neo-idealists of his day. Lossky's Гносеология
or gnosiology is called Intuitivist-Personalism
and had in part adapted the Hegelian dialectical
approach of first addressing a problem in
thought in terms of its expression as a duality
or dichotomy. Once the problem is expressed as a
dichotomy the two opposing ideas are fused in
order to transcend the dichotomy. This
transition is expressed in the concept of
sobornost, integrality or mystical communal
union. Lossky also followed and developed his
ontological and gnosiological interpretation of
objective reality from Christian neoplatonism
based on the Patristic Fathers. This along with
Origen and the works of Russian mystics
Kireevsky and Khomyakov and the later works of
V. Solovyov among many others. Understanding and
comprehension coming from addressing an object,
as though part of the external world, something
that joins the consciousness of the perceiving
subject directly (noesis, insight), then
becoming memory, intuitionism as the foundation
of all noema or processes of consciousness. In
that human consciousness comprehends the essence
or noumena of an object and the object's
external phenomenon which are then assembled
into a complete organic whole called experience.
Much of an object's defining and understanding
in consciousness is not derived discursively but
rather intuitively or instinctively as an object
has no meaning outside of the whole of
existence. Lossky summed up this concept in the
term "all is imminent in all". As such much of
reality as uncreated or uncaused is irrational,
or random (see libertarianism below) and can not
be validated rationally (i.e. freedom and love
as energy are uncaused, uncreated). Therefore
consciousness in its interaction with reality
operates not strictly as rational (only
partially) much of consciousness operates
intuitively. This is intuitively done by the
nous. The nous, consciousness or the focal point
of the psyche as the "organic connection" to the
object and therefore the material world as a
whole. The psyche here is the sensory input from
the physical body to the inner being, mind or
consciousness. This interaction causing
different levels of maturing consciousness over
time (reinterpretation). As a dynamic retention,
experience constitutes the process of learning
i.e. reflective differentiation.
Phenomenology and Axiology
Consequently the existence of objects can
not be completely expressed with logic or words,
nor validated with knowledge, due to objects
having a supernatural essence or substance as
their composition (supernatural in a Greek
philosophy or Eastern Orthodox understanding of
supernatural as uncreated or uncaused).
Following Orthodox Christian substance theory
(see Gregory Palamas) energy and potential do
not have ontology without an sentient agent
(i.e. idealism), Lossky coined the term "substative
agent" to validate that matter as well as energy
are uncreated in substance, essence. This
validation as part of gnosiology or Christian
mysticism (Orthodoxy) as opposed to the Russian
Materialist and nihilist position that states
that objects have no "thing in itself" or no
essence, substance behind their phenomenon (as
in Positivism). Lossky based his intuitivism on
gnosiology in that he taught first principles as
uncreated or uncaused. Lossky's Axiology was the
teaching of first principles dialectically.
Russian philosophy based on Soloviev is
expressed metaphysically in that the essence of
an object can be akin to Noumenon (opposed to
its appearance or phenomenon), but it can have
random characteristics to its being or essence,
characteristically sumbebekos. This is the basis
of V Soloviev's arguments against Positivism
which are the corner stone of Russian philosophy
contained in Soloviev's "Against the
Positivists". The validation (immediate
apprehension) of truth, value and existence all
being intuitive as expressed by Aristotle's
Noesis. Each event having value or existence
because of substantive agents being engaged in
the event, (via Neo-idealism) giving the event
value and existence.
Sobornost and the world as an
organic whole
One of the main points of Lossky's онтология
or ontology is, the world is an organic whole as
understood by human consciousness. Intuition,
insight (noesis in Greek) is the direct
contemplation of objects, and furthermore the
assembling of the entire set of cognition from
sensory perception into a complete and undivided
organic whole, i.e. experience. This expression
of consciousness as without thought, raw and
uninterpreted by the rational faculty in the
mind. Thus the mind's dianoia (rational or
logical faculty) in its deficiency, finiteness
or inconclusiveness (due to logic's
incompleteness) causes the perceived conflict
between the objectivism (materialism, external
world) and idealism (spiritual, inner
experience) forms of philosophy. Where intuitive
or instinctual re-action is without rational
processing of the rational faculty of the mind.
It is outside of comprehension via the dianoia
faculty of the mind, consciousness (Nous).
Intuition being analogous with instinctual
consciousness. Intuition functions without
rational or logical thought. Rational or logical
thought via the dianoia component of the nous,
which then works in reflection as hindsight to
organize experience into a comprehensible order
i.e. ontology. The memory, knowledge derived
from the rationalizing faculty of the mind is
called epistemological knowledge. Intuitive
knowledge or Gnosis (preprocessed knowledge or
uninterpreted) then being made into history or
memory. Rather than a rational determining
factor it manifests as an integral factor of or
during an actual conscious experience. Lossky's
ontology being consistent with Leibniz's
optimism expressed as the Best of all possible
worlds in contrast to the pessimism and nihilism
of more Pro-Western Russian philosophers.
Lossky's work is also opposed to the pagan
elements of the pagan philosophers that were an
influence on his work. In that the logical
faculty of the mind was only finite in a
temporal sense and will eventually become
infinite (by theosis), as such it seeks the
infinite rather than opposes it. Lossky believed
that philosophy would transcend its rational
limits and manifest a mystical understanding of
experience. This would include an understanding
that encompasses the intuitive, irrational,
philosophically (as done in stochastics) rather
than the strictly pagan approach of a good
deterministic force opposed to an irrational
indeterminate force. This of course being the
teaching of Christian faith as a philosophical
principle (called free will) and intrinsic
component to conscious existence, one that
manifests sobornost in the transcending of the
pagan dichotomy of reason versus superstition or
determinism versus indeterminism.
Knowledge and Memory
Once knowledge is abstracted from conscious
experience it becomes epistemological knowledge
and is then stored in an ontological format in
the mind (the format itself a priori). The
manipulation of memory and or reapplication of
memory as knowledge as post-processed knowledge
i.e. Epistemology. Lossky's Ontology as an
agent's Сущность (the "essence") expressed as
being and or becoming is possible as both the
person transcends time and space while being
closely connected with the whole world, while in
this world. Much of Lossky's working out of an
ontological theory of knowledge was done in
collaboration with his close friend Semen L.
Frank.
Metaphysical libertarianism
Lossky as a metaphysical libertarian taught
that all people have uncreated energy
(Aristotle) or potential (Plotinus). This being
very much inline with the vitalism of his day.
Though Lossky did not strictly adhere to
vitalism but rather to its predecessor
Monadology and its living forces (dynamis)
theory. This is to contrast Leibniz's theory of
Monadology against Cartesian mind-body dualism.
This as a rejection of vitalism in its dualism
of mind and body being of different substances.
For Lossky's Substantive Agents have potential (dynamis)
and they can act (beings have energy) upon, from
this potential. All power or potential comes
from the individual. That spontaneous or organic
reality structures or orders itself to reconcile
opposing forces (sobornost), doing so while
maintaining order and freewill. Each pole of
existence (the created and uncreated of
gnosiology) or opposing ideologies, reaching
compromise through value and existence and
manifesting in a complete organic whole (sobornost).
“ Second Section: That selection is the
agent's free act. Consequently, the temporal
order of events is not uniform even in the
inorganic nature. It is quite possible that
although some two electrons have millions of
time repulsed each other, they will not do so
the next time. But functional connections
between ideal forms conditioning the existence
of the world as a system-e.g. mathematical
principles and the laws of the hierarchy of
values and their significance for conduct
conditioning the presence of meaning in the
world-are independent of the agents' will.
Violation of these laws is unthinkable, but they
do not destroy the agent's freedom: they merely
create the possibility of activity as such and
of its value. Those laws condition the cosmic
structure within the frame work of which there
is freedom for an infinite variety of
activities. The system of spatiotemporal and
numerical forms provides room for activities
that are opposed to one another in direction,
value, and significance for the world. The
absence of rigidly uniform connection between
events does not make science impossible. It is
sufficient for science that there should be more
or less regular connection between events in
time. The lower the agent's stage of
development, the more uniform are their
manifestations. In those cases there may be
statistical laws. Many misunderstandings of the
doctrine of free will are disposed of by
distinguishing between formal and material
freedom. Formal freedom means that in each given
case an agent may refrain from some particular
manifestation and replace it by another. That
freedom is absolute and cannot be lost under any
circumstance. Material freedom means the degree
of creative power possessed by an agent, and
finds expression in what he is capable of
creating. It is unlimited in the Kingdom of God,
the members of which unanimously combine their
forces for communal creativeness and even derive
help from God's omnipotence. But agents outside
the Kingdom of God are in a state of spiritual
deterioration and have very little material
freedom, though their formal freedom is
unimpaired. Life outside the Kingdom of God is
the result of the wrong use of free will. ”
—From History of Russian Philosophy
section on "N O Lossky the Intuitivists" pg 260
Lossky's argument that determinism can not
account for the cause of energy in the Universe.
Energy being a substance that can not be created
or destroyed (see the law of conservation of
energy).
Each agent accounting for their existence as
their own dynamistic manifestation. Dynamistic
manifestation as being that of act or energy
derived from a Neoplatonic interpretation.
“ First section: Determinists deny freedom
of the will on the ground that every event has a
cause. They mean by causality the order of
temporal sequence of one event after other
events and the uniformity of that sequence.
Causation, generation, creation and all other
dynamic aspects of causality are ruled out.
Lossky proves that the will is free, taking as
his starting point the law of causality but
defending a dynamistic interpretation of it.
Every event arises not out of itself, but is
created by someone: it cannot be created by
other events: having a temporal form events fall
away every instant into the realm of the past
and have no creative power to generate the
future. Only supertemporal substantival agents-i.e.,
actual and potential personalities- are bearers
of creative power: they create events as their
own vital manifestations. According to the
dynamistic interpretation of causality it is
necessary to distinguish among the conditions
under which an event takes place the cause from
the occasion of its happening. The cause is
always the substantival agent himself as the
bearer of creative power, and the other
circumstances are merely occasions for its
manifestations, which are neither forced nor
predetermined by them. The agents' creative
power is superqualitative and does not therefore
predetermine which particular values an agent
will select as his final end.From History of
Russian Philosophy section on "
N O Lossky the Intuitivists" pg 260 ”
Theology and Neoplatonism
Much of the theology that Lossky covers (as
his own) in the book History of Russian
Philosophy is inline with the idealism of
Origen. Lossky's idealism is based on Origen's.
In that the relationship between the mystic,
religious understanding of God and a
philosophical one there have been various stages
of development in the history of the Roman East.
The nous as mind (rational and intuitive
understanding) in Byzantine philosophy is given
the central role of understanding only when it
is placed or reconciled with the heart or soul
of the person. Earlier versions of Christian and
Greek philosophical syncretism are in modern
times referred to as Neoplatonic. An example of
this can be seen in the works of Origen and his
teaching on the nous as to Origen, all souls
pre-existed with their Creator in a perfect,
spiritual (non-material) state as "nous," that
these minds then fell away so to pursue an
individual and independent existence apart from
God. Because all beings were created with
absolute freedom and free will, God, not being a
tyrant, would not force his creations to return
to Him. According to Origen, God's infinite love
and respect for His creatures allowed for this.
Instead, God created the material world,
universe or cosmos. God then initiated the aeons
or history. God did this for the purpose of,
through love and compassion, guiding his
creations back to contemplation of His infinite,
limitless mind. This was according to Origen,
the perfect state. Though the specifics of this
are not necessarily what Lossky taught in his
theology courses, since dogma in a general
sense, is what is taught as theology. N.O.
Lossky also was inline with the common
distinctions of Eastern theology. Like the
Essence-Energies distinction for example. Though
Lossky did pursue a position of reconciliation
based on mutual cooperation between East and
West. Lossky taught this co-operation as organic
and or spontaneous order, integrality, and unity
called sobornost. Sobornost can also be
translated to mean catholic.
Influence
In biographical reminiscences recorded by
Barbara Branden in the early 1960s, Ayn Rand
named Lossky as her primary philosophy teacher
at the University of Petrograd or University of
St. Petersburg until he was removed from his
teaching post by the Soviet regime. However,
some of Rand's statements have been called into
question.
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Sergei Bulgakov

Fr. Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (Russian:
Серге́й Никола́евич Булга́ков) (28 June [O.S. 16
June] 1871 - July 12, 1944) was a Russian
Orthodox theologian, philosopher and economist.
Early life
Sergei Bulgakov was born to the family of an
Orthodox priest (Nikolai Bulgakov) in the town
of Livny, Oryol guberniya on June 16, 1871 O.S.
He studied at Orel seminary, then at Yelets
gimnasium. In 1894 he graduated from the Law
School of Moscow University, where he had also
undertaken a serious study of political economy.
During his study at the seminary Bulgakov
became interested in Marxism and took part in
the Legal Marxism movement. Studying Marxism,
Bulgakov eventually became convinced of the
impotence of this theory. Under the influence of
works of Russian religious thinkers (Leo
Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovyov,
etc.), in the course of his meetings and
arguments with Leo Tolstoy he found his
religious beliefs again. He wrote a book about
his evolution (Sergey Bulgakov, From Marxism to
Idealism, 1903).
Such an evolution was common for the Russian
intelligentsia of the time, and he soon became
one of their recognised ideologists. A primary
contributor to the books Problems of Idealism
(1902), Vekhi, Problems of Religion, About
Vladimir Solovyev, About the Religion of Leo
Tolstoy, The Religion of Solovyov's
Philosophical Society, he participated in the
journals New Way (Новый Путь) and Questions of
Life (Вопросы Жизни). He was a leader of the
publisher Way (Путь, 1911–1917), where he
printed many important works of contemporary
Orthodox theology.
From 1906 to 1922
In 1906 he was elected as an independent
Christian Socialist to the Second Duma. He
published the important original monographs
Philosophy of Economy («Философия хозяйства»
1912) and Unfading Light («Свет Невечерний»
1917), in which he first offered his own
teaching based on the combination of sophiology
of Vladimir Solovyov and Pavel Florensky, the
later works of Schelling, and his own
intuition-based ideas about the Orthodox faith.
When he returned to the Russian Orthodox
Church, he was ordained into the priesthood
(1918), and rose to prominence in church
circles. He took part in the All-Russia Sobor of
the Orthodox Church that elected patriarch
Tikhon of Moscow. Bulgakov rejected the October
revolution and responded with On the Feast of
the Gods ("На пиру богов", 1918), a book similar
to the Three talks of Vladimir Solovyov.
During the Russian Civil War he was in
Crimea, where he worked in the field of
philosophy. He wrote books Philosophy of the
Name ( "Философия имени", 1920) and Tragedy of
Philosophy ("Трагедия философии", 1920) in which
he revised his views about the relation of
Philosophy to Dogmatism. He concluded that the
Christian views can be expressed only by
dogmatic theology. Thereafter his works were
devoted to dogmatic theology.
On December 30, 1922, the Bolshevik
government expelled some 160 prominent
intellectuals on the so-called Philosophers'
ship, Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Ivan Ilyin
among them.
Bulgakov in Paris
In May 1923 he became professor of Church Law
and Theology at the school of law of the Russian
Research Institute in Prague. In 1925 he helped
found St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute
(l'Institut de Théologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge),
in Paris, France. He was the head of this
institute and Professor of Dogmatic Theology
until his death from throat cancer on July 12,
1944. His last work was devoted to the
Apocalypse.
Controversy
Bulgakov’s teaching on sophiology is highly
controversial. The attempt to understand it
properly is hindered by the highly political
controversy surrounding it in the 1930s.
Ecclesiastical situation in Russian
Orthodoxy
It should be noted that by 1931 there
existed three separate Russian Orthodox
jurisdictions in Europe: the Russian Church
Abroad/Sremski Karlovtsy Synod (ROCA or ROCOR)
under Met. Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev; the
‘Patriarchal’ Church answering ultimately to
Met. Sergius (Stragorodsky) of Moscow (of which
the young Vladimir Lossky was a member); and the
Russian Church in Western Europe (Bulgakov’s own
jurisdiction as well as the church of Georges
Florovsky) under Met. Evlogy (Georgievsky) that
was under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of
Constantinople -- though in 1934, Met. Evlogy
was privately reconciled to Met. Antony, and in
1935 he went to Karlovtsy for a special reunion
conference, at which time the schism between him
and ROCOR was healed In 1936, Met. Evlogy again
cut his ties with ROCOR, quite possibly because
of the controversy over "Sophianism".
Reaction to Bulgakov's writings
.Decree_of_the_Moscow_Patriarchate an ukaz
of 24 August 1935 of Met. Sergius, Bulgakov’s
teaching on ‘Sophia’ was described as ‘alien’ to
the Orthodox faith. This ukaz was largely based
on the epistolary reports of Alexis Stavrovsky.
He was also the president of the Brotherhood of
St Photius (Alexis Stavrovskii was president;
Vladimir Lossky, the vice-president, and Evgraf
Kovalevskii <later "Jean-Nectaire
(Kovalevsky)".Jean-Nectaire_(Kovalevsky)_of_Saint-Denis.
of Saint-Denis) were also among the 12-15 young
laymen who made up its numbers> whose members
had left the jurisdiction of Met. Evlogy for
that of Met. Elevthery of Lithuania. This exodus
was in reaction to Met. Sergius having removed,
on 10 June 1930, Met. Evlogy as the head of the
Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe (since
Met. Evlogy had continually refused to agree to
the 30 June 1927 Declaration of Loyalty to the
Soviet government) and named Elevthery as his
replacement. In late 1935, Met. Evlogy appointed
a commission to look into the charges of heresy
levelled against Bulgakov.
The commission quickly broke into factions.
In June 1936 the majority report (prepared by
Vasilii Zenkovskii, Anton Kartashev and others)
rejected the charge of heresy but had serious
objections about Sophiology. The minority report
of 6 July 1936 was prepared by Fr Sergei
Chetverikov and signed by Fr Georges Florovsky,
who despite his personal respect for Fr. Sergius,
remained an ardent critic of Sophianism for the
remainder of his life. Meanwhile, the Church
Abroad formally accused Bulgakov of heresy in
1935.
"The 1935 decision of the Church Abroad"
Decree_of_ROCOR. was based on Archbishop
Seraphim (Sobolev) of Boguchar’s Novoe uchenie o
Sofii (Sofia, 1935), as well as on the arguments
of St. John (Maximovitch). St. John, in his book
The Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God,
discusses at length why the sophianism of
Sergius Bulgakov is heresy, specifically one as
destructive as Nestorianism. Speaking of those
who attempt to deify the Theotokos, he wrote:
In the words [of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov], when
the Holy Spirit came to dwell in the Virgin
Mary, she acquired "a dyadic life, human and
divine; that is, She was completely deified,
because in Her hypostatic being was manifest the
living, creative revelation of the Holy Spirit"
(Archpriest Sergei Bulgakov, The Unburnt Bush,
1927, p. 154). "She is a perfect manifestation
of the Third Hypostasis" (Ibid., p. 175), "a
creature, but also no longer a creature" (P. 19
1)....But we can say with the words of St.
Epiphanius of Cyprus: "There is an equal harm in
both these heresies, both when men demean the
Virgin and when, on the contrary, they glorify
Her beyond what is proper" (Panarion, Against
the Collyridians). This Holy Father accuses
those who give Her an almost divine worship:
"Let Mary be in honor, but let worship be given
to the Lord" (same source). "Although Mary is a
chosen vessel, still she was a woman by nature,
not to be distinguished at all from others.
Although the history of Mary and Tradition
relate that it was said to Her father Joachim in
the desert, 'Thy wife hath conceived,' still
this was done not without marital union and not
without the seed of man" (same source). "One
should not revere the saints above what is
proper, but should revere their Master. Mary is
not God, and did not receive a body from heaven,
but from the joining of man and woman; and
according to the promise, like Isaac, She was
prepared to take part in the Divine Economy.
But, on the other hand, let none dare foolishly
to offend the Holy Virgin" (St. Epiphanius,
"Against the Antidikomarionites"). The Orthodox
Church, highly exalting the Mother of God in its
hymns of praise, does not dare to ascribe to Her
that which has not been communicated about Her
by Sacred Scripture or Tradition. "Truth is
foreign to all overstatements as well as to all
understatements. It gives to everything a
fitting measure and fitting place" (Bishop
Ignatius Brianchaninov)."
Fr. Sergei's reply and the episcopal
conference, 1937
Bulgakov responded to the heresy accusation
in his Dokladnaia zapiska Mitropolitu Evlogiiu
prof. prot. Sergiia Bulgakova (Paris, 1936).
Archbishop Seraphim then rebutted Bulgakov in
his Zashchita sofianskoi eresi (Sofia, 1937). No
final report was prepared on the sophiology
controversy by the commission set up by
Bulgakov’s own jurisdiction. However, Met.
Evlogy convoked a bishop’s conference on 26–29
November 1937 to bring closure to the matter.
The bishops in their statement were working from
reports by Archimandrite Cassian (Bezobrazov)
and Chetverikov and they concluded that the
accusations of heresy against Bulgakov were
unfounded but that his theological opinions
showed serious flaws and needed correction.
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Ivan Ilyin

Portrait of Ivan Ilyin by Mikhail Nesterov
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ivan IlyinIvan Alexandrovich Ilyin (Russian:
Ива́н Алекса́ндрович Ильи́н) (March 28, 1883 -
December 21, 1954) was a Russian religious and
political philosopher, and White emigre
publicist and an ideologue of the Russian
All-Military Union.
Young years
Ivan Ilyin was born in Moscow in an
aristocratic family of Rurikid descent. His
father Alexander Ivanovich Ilyin was born and
spent his childhood in the Grand Kremlin Palace
since Ilyin's grandfather served as the
commandant of the Palace. Alexander Ilyin's
godfather was tsar Alexander III. Ilyin was born
and brought up also in the centre of Moscow not
far from Kremlin in Naryshkin Lane. In 1901 he
entered the Law faculty of the Moscow State
University. Ilyin generally disapproved of the
Russian Revolution of 1905 and did not
participate actively in student riots. While a
student Ilyin became interested in philosophy
under influence of Professor Pavel Novgorodtsev.
In 1906 he graduated with a law degree and began
working there as a scholar from 1909 on.
Before the revolution
In 1911 Ilyin moved for a year to Western
Europe in order to work on his thesis "Crisis of
rationalistic philosophy in Germany in the XIXth
century". After his return he returned to work
in the University. He delivered a series of
lectures called "Introduction to the Philosophy
of Law". Later on Novgorodtsev offered Ilyin to
lecture on theory of general law at Moscow
Commerce Institute. In total, he lectured at
various schools for 17 hours a week. At that
time Ilyin studied the philosophy of Hegel,
namely Hegel's philosophy of state and law. He
regarded this work not only as a study of Hegel,
but also as preparation for his own work on
theory of law. His thesis on Hegel was finished
in 1916 and published in 1918.
In 1914 after the breakout of World War I
Professor Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy arranged a
series of public lectures devoted to the
"ideology of the war". Ilyin contributed to this
with several lectures, the first of which was
called "The Spiritual Sense of the War". He was
an utter opponent of any war in general, but
believed that since Russia had already been
involved in the war the duty of every Russian
was to support his country. Ilyin's position was
different from that of many Russian jurists, who
equally disliked Germany and Tsarist Russia.
Revolution and exile
At first Ilyin perceived the February
Revolution as the liberation of the people.
Along with many other intellectuals he generally
approved of it. However, with the October
Revolution complete disappointment followed. On
the Second Moscow Conference of Public Figures
he said that "The revolution turned into
self-interested plundering of the state". Later
he assessed the revolution as the most terrible
catastrophe in the history of Russia, the
collapse of the whole state. However, unlike
many adherents of the old regime Ilyin did not
emigrate. In 1918 Ilyin became a professor of
law in Moscow University; his scholarly thesis
on Hegel was published.
After April 1918 Ilyin was imprisoned several
times for alleged anti-communist activity. His
teacher Novgorodtsev was also briefly
imprisoned. In 1922, he was sentenced to death
but was eventually expelled among some 160
prominent intellectuals, on the so-called
"philosophers' ship" the same year.
Emigration
Between 1923 and 1934 Ilyin worked as a
professor of the Russian Scientific Institute in
Berlin. He was offered the professorship in the
Russian faculty of law in Prague under his
teacher Novgorodtsev but he refused. He became
the main ideologue of the Russian White movement
in emigration and between 1927 and 1930 was a
publisher and editor of the Russian-language
journal Kolokol (Bell). He lectured in Germany
and other European countries. In 1934 the German
Nazis fired Ilyin and put him under police
surveillance. In 1938 with financial help from
Sergei Rachmaninoff he was able to leave Germany
and continue his work in Geneva, Switzerland. He
died in Zollikon near Zürich on December 21,
1953.
Doctrine
Ilyin's works about Russia
Ivan Ilyin was a conservative Russian
monarchist in the Slavophile tradition. Starting
from his 1918 thesis on Hegel's philosophy, he
authored many books on political, social and
spiritual topics pertaining to the historical
mission of Russia. One of the problems he worked
on was the question: what has eventually led
Russia to the tragedy of the revolution? He
answered that the reason was "the weak, damaged
self-respect" of Russians. As a result, mutual
distrust and suspicion between the state and the
people emerged. The authorities and nobility
constantly misused their power, subverting the
unity of the people. Ilyin thought that any
state must be established as a corporation in
which a citizen is a member with certain rights
and certain duties. Therefore Ilyin recognized
inequality of people as a necessary state of
affairs in any country. But that meant that
educated upper classes had a special duty of
spiritual guidance towards uneducated lower
classes. This did not happen in Russia.
The other point was the wrong attitude
towards private property among common people in
Russia. Ilyin wrote that many Russians believed
that private property and large estates are
gained not through hard labour but through power
and maladministration of officials. Therefore
property becomes associated with dishonest
behaviour.
The concept of conscience of law
The two above mentioned factors led to
striving for egalitarianism and to revolution.
The alternative way of Russia according to Ilyin
was to develop due conscience of law (правосознание)
of an individual based on morality and
religiousness. Ilyin developed his concept of
the conscience of law for more that twenty years
until his death. He understood it as a proper
understanding of law by an individual and
ensuing obedience to the law. During his life he
refused to publish his major work About the
Essence of Conscience of Law (О сущности
правосознания) and continued to rewrite it. He
considered the conscience of law essential for
the very existence of law. Without proper
understanding of law and justice the law would
not be able to exist.
Attitude towards monarchy
Another major work of Ilyin, "On Monarchy",
was not finished. He planned to write a book
concerning the essence of monarchy in the modern
world and its differences from the republic
consisting of twelve chapters, but he died
having written the introduction and seven
chapters. Ilyin argued that the main difference
lay not in legal matters but in the conscience
of law of common people. According to Ilyin the
main distinctions were the following:
in monarchy the conscience of law tends to
unite the people within the state while in a
republic the conscience of law tends to
disregard the role of the state for the society;
monarchical conscience of law tends to perceive
the state as a family and the monarch as a pater
familias while the republican conscience of law
denies this notion. Since the republican
conscience of law praises individual freedom in
the republican state people do not recognize the
people of the state as a family;
monarchical conscience of law is very
conservative and prone to keeping traditions
while republican conscience of law is always
eager to rapid changes.
As is said before Ilyin was a monarchist. He
believed that monarchical conscience of law
corresponds to such values as religious piety
and family. His ideal was the monarch who would
serve for the good of the country, would not
belong to any party and would embody the union
of all people whatever they beliefs are. However
he was critical about the monarchy in Russia. He
believed that Nicholas II was to a large degree
the one responsible for the collapse of Imperial
Russia in 1917. His abdication and the
subsequent abdication of his brother Mikhail
Alexandrovich were a crucial mistake which led
to the abolition of monarchy and consequent
troubles. He was also critical of many figures
of the emigration including the Grand Prince
Cyril Vladimirovich who had proclaimed himself
the new tsar in exile.
Attitude towards fascism
A number of Ilyin's works (including those
written after the German defeat in 1945) treated
the subject of fascism. However, Ilyin was
staunchly opposed to Nazism in his writings,
particularly its xenophobic character.
Antisemitism
Although Ilyin was related by marriage to
several notable Jewish families he was accused
of antisemitism by Roman Gul, a fellow émigré
writer. According to a letter by Gul to Ilyin
the former expressed extreme umbrage at Ilyin's
suspicions that all those who disagreed with him
were Jews.
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APPENDIX
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Vladimir Ilich Lenin

prime minister of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
original name Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov
born April 10 [April 22, New Style], 1870, Simbirsk,
Russia
died Jan. 21, 1924, Gorki [later Gorki Leninskiye], near
Moscow
Overview
Founder of the Russian Communist Party, leader of the
Russian Revolution of 1917, and architect and builder of the
Soviet state.
Born to a middle-class family, he was strongly influenced
by his eldest brother, Aleksandr, who was hanged in 1887 for
conspiring to assassinate the tsar. He studied law and
became a Marxist in 1889 while practicing law. He was
arrested as a subversive in 1895 and exiled to Siberia,
where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. They lived in western
Europe after 1900. At the 1903 meeting in London of the
Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, he emerged as the
leader of the Bolshevik faction. In several revolutionary
newspapers that he founded and edited, he put forth his
theory of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat, a
centralized body organized around a core of professional
revolutionaries; his ideas, later known as Leninism, would
be joined with Karl Marx’s theories to form
Marxism-Leninism, which became the communist worldview. With
the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905, he returned
to Russia, but he resumed his exile in 1907 and continued
his energetic agitation for the next 10 years. He saw World
War I as an opportunity to turn a war of nations into a war
of classes, and he returned to Russia with the Russian
Revolution of 1917 to lead the Bolshevik coup that overthrew
the provisional government of Aleksandr Kerensky. As
revolutionary leader of the Soviet state, he signed the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany (1918) and repulsed
counterrevolutionary threats in the Russian Civil War. He
founded the Comintern in 1919. His policy of War Communism
prevailed until 1921, and to forestall economic disaster he
launched the New Economic Policy. In ill health from 1922,
he died of a stroke in 1924.
Main
founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks),
inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and
the architect, builder, and first head (1917–24) of the
Soviet state. He was the founder of the organization known
as Comintern (Communist International) and the posthumous
source of “Leninism,” the doctrine codified and conjoined
with Marx’s works by Lenin’s successors to form
Marxism-Leninism, which became the Communist worldview.
If the Bolshevik Revolution is—as some people have called
it—the most significant political event of the 20th century,
then Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century’s
most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly
circles of the former Soviet Union but even among many
non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the
greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in
history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since
Marx.
Early life » The making of a revolutionary
It is difficult to identify any particular events in his
childhood that might prefigure his turn onto the path of a
professional revolutionary. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born
in Simbirsk, which was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour. (He
adopted the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 during his clandestine
party work after exile in Siberia.) He was the third of six
children born into a close-knit, happy family of highly
educated and cultured parents. His mother was the daughter
of a physician, while his father, though the son of a serf,
became a schoolteacher and rose to the position of inspector
of schools. Lenin, intellectually gifted, physically strong,
and reared in a warm, loving home, early displayed a
voracious passion for learning. He was graduated from high
school ranking first in his class. He distinguished himself
in Latin and Greek and seemed destined for the life of a
classical scholar. When he was 16, nothing in Lenin
indicated a future rebel, still less a professional
revolutionary—except, perhaps, his turn to atheism. But,
despite the comfortable circumstances of their upbringing,
all five of the Ulyanov children who reached maturity joined
the revolutionary movement. This was not an uncommon
phenomenon in tsarist Russia, where even the highly educated
and cultured intelligentsia were denied elementary civil and
political rights.
As an adolescent Lenin suffered two blows that
unquestionably influenced his subsequent decision to take
the path of revolution. First, his father was threatened
shortly before his untimely death with premature retirement
by a reactionary government that had grown fearful of the
spread of public education. Second, in 1887 his beloved
eldest brother, Aleksandr, a student at the University of
St. Petersburg (later renamed Leningrad State University),
was hanged for conspiring with a revolutionary terrorist
group that plotted to assassinate Emperor Alexander III.
Suddenly, at age 17, Lenin became the male head of the
family, which was now stigmatized as having reared a “state
criminal.”
Fortunately the income from his mother’s pension and
inheritance kept the family in comfortable circumstances,
although it could not prevent the frequent imprisonment or
exile of her children. Moreover, Lenin’s high school
principal (the father of Aleksandr Kerensky, who was later
to lead the Provisional government deposed by Lenin’s
Bolsheviks in November [October, O.S.] 1917) did not turn
his back on the “criminal’s” family. He courageously wrote a
character reference that smoothed Lenin’s admission to a
university.
In autumn 1887 Lenin enrolled in the faculty of law of
the imperial Kazan University (later renamed Kazan [V.I.
Lenin] State University), but within three months he was
expelled from the school, having been accused of
participating in an illegal student assembly. He was
arrested and banished from Kazan to his grandfather’s estate
in the village of Kokushkino, where his older sister Anna
had already been ordered by the police to reside. In the
autumn of 1888, the authorities permitted him to return to
Kazan but denied him readmission to the university. During
this period of enforced idleness, he met exiled
revolutionaries of the older generation and avidly read
revolutionary political literature, especially Marx’s Das
Kapital. He became a Marxist in January 1889.
Early life » Formation of a revolutionary party
In May 1889 the Ulyanov family moved to Samara (known as
Kuybyshev from 1935 to 1991). After much petitioning, Lenin
was granted permission to take his law examinations. In
November 1891 he passed his examinations, taking a first in
all subjects, and was graduated with a first-class degree.
After the police finally waived their political objections,
Lenin was admitted to the bar and practiced law in Samara in
1892–93, his clients being mainly poor peasants and
artisans. In his experience practicing law, he acquired an
intense loathing for the class bias of the legal system and
a lifelong revulsion for lawyers, even those who claimed to
be Social-Democrats.
Law proved to be an extremely useful cover for a
revolutionary activist. He moved to St. Petersburg (from
1914 to 1924 known as Petrograd; from 1924 to 1991 known as
Leningrad) in August 1893 and, while working as a public
defender, associated with revolutionary Marxist circles. In
1895 his comrades sent him abroad to make contact with
Russian exiles in western Europe, especially with Russia’s
most commanding Marxist thinker, Georgy Plekhanov. Upon his
return to Russia in 1895, Lenin and other Marxists,
including L. Martov, the future leader of the Mensheviks,
succeeded in unifying the Marxist groups of the capital in
an organization known as the Union for the Struggle for the
Liberation of the Working Class. The Union issued leaflets
and proclamations on the workers’ behalf, supported workers’
strikes, and infiltrated workers’ education classes to
impart to them the rudiments of Marxism. In December 1895,
the leaders of the Union were arrested. Lenin was jailed for
15 months and thereafter was sent into exile to
Shushenskoye, in Siberia, for a term of three years. He was
joined there in exile by his fiancée, Nadezhda Krupskaya, a
Union member, whom he had met in the capital. They were
married in Siberia, and she became Lenin’s indispensable
secretary and comrade. In exile they conducted clandestine
party correspondence and collaborated (legally) on a Russian
translation of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Industrial
Democracy.
Upon completing his term of Siberian exile in January
1900, Lenin left the country and was joined later by
Krupskaya in Munich. His first major task abroad was to join
Plekhanov, Martov, and three other editors in bringing out
the newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), which they hoped would
unify the Russian Marxist groups that were scattered
throughout Russia and western Europe into a cohesive
Social-Democratic party.
Up to the point at which Lenin began working on Iskra,
his writings had taken as their focus three problems: first,
he had written a number of leaflets that aimed to shake the
workers’ traditional veneration of the tsar by showing them
that their harsh life was caused, in part, by the support
tsarism rendered the capitalists; second, he attacked those
self-styled Marxists who urged Social-Democrats and workers
to concentrate on wage and hour issues, leaving the
political struggle for the present to the bourgeoisie;
third, and ultimately most important, he addressed himself
to the peasant question.
The principal obstacle to the acceptance of Marxism by
many of the Russian intelligentsia was their adherence to
the widespread belief of the Populists (Russian pre-Marxist
radicals) that Marxism was inapplicable to peasant Russia,
in which a proletariat (an industrial working class) was
almost nonexistent. Russia, they believed, was immune to
capitalism, owing to the circumstances of joint ownership of
peasant land by the village commune. This view had been
first attacked by Plekhanov in the 1880s. Plekhanov had
argued that Russia had already entered the capitalist stage,
looking for evidence to the rapid growth of industry.
Despite the denials of the Populists, he claimed, the man of
the future in Russia was indeed the proletarian, not the
peasant. While attempting to apply the Marxist scheme of
social development to Russia, Plekhanov had come to the
conclusion that the revolution in Russia would have to pass
through two discrete stages: first, a bourgeois revolution
that would establish a democratic republic and full-blown
capitalism; and second, a proletarian revolution after
mature capitalism had generated a numerous proletariat that
had attained a high level of political organization,
socialist consciousness, and culture, enabling them to usher
in full Socialism.
It was this set of principles that Lenin adhered to after
he read Plekhanov’s work in the late 1880s. But, almost
immediately, Lenin went a step beyond his former mentor,
especially with regard to the peasant question. In an attack
on the Populists published in 1894, Lenin charged that, even
if they realized their fondest dream and divided all the
land among the peasant communes, the result would not be
Socialism but rather capitalism spawned by a free market in
agricultural produce. The “Socialism” put forth by the
Populists would in practice favour the development of
small-scale capitalism; hence the Populists were not
Socialists but “petty bourgeois democrats.” Lenin came to
the conclusion that outside of Marxism, which aimed
ultimately to abolish the market system as well as the
private ownership of the means of production, there could be
no Socialism.
Even while in exile in Siberia, Lenin had begun research
on his investigation of the peasant question, which
culminated in his magisterial Development of Capitalism in
Russia (published legally in 1899). In this work, a study of
Russian economics, he argued that capitalism was rapidly
destroying the peasant commune. The peasantry constituted
for the Populists a homogeneous social class, but Lenin
claimed that the peasantry was in actuality rapidly
stratifying into a well-off rural bourgeoisie, a middling
peasantry, and an impoverished rural “proletariat and
semi-proletariat.” In this last group, which comprised half
the peasant population, Lenin found an ally for the
extremely small industrial proletariat in Russia.
Iskra’s success in recruiting Russian intellectuals to
Marxism led Lenin and his comrades to believe that the time
was ripe to found a revolutionary Marxist party that would
weld together all the disparate Marxist groups at home and
abroad. An abortive First Congress, held in 1898 in Minsk,
had failed to achieve this objective, for most of the
delegates were arrested shortly after the congress. The
organizing committee of the Second Congress decided to
convene the congress in Brussels in 1903, but police
pressure forced it to transfer to London.
The congressional sessions wore on for nearly three
weeks, for no point appeared too trivial to debate. The main
issues, nevertheless, quickly became plain: eligibility for
membership and the character of party discipline; but, above
all, the key questions centred around the relation between
the party and the proletariat, for whom the party claimed to
speak.
In his What Is To Be Done? (1902), Lenin totally rejected
the standpoint that the proletariat was being driven
spontaneously to revolutionary Socialism by capitalism and
that the party’s role should be to merely coordinate the
struggle of the proletariat’s diverse sections on a national
and international scale. Capitalism, he contended,
predisposed the workers to the acceptance of Socialism but
did not spontaneously make them conscious Socialists. The
proletariat by its own efforts in the everyday struggle
against the capitalist could go so far as to achieve
“trade-union consciousness.” But the proletariat could not
by its own efforts grasp that it would be possible to win
complete emancipation only by overthrowing capitalism and
building Socialism, unless the party from without infused it
with Socialist consciousness.
In his What Is To Be Done? and in his other works dealing
with party organization, Lenin articulated one of his most
momentous political innovations, his theory of the party as
the “vanguard of the proletariat.” He conceived of the
vanguard as a highly disciplined, centralized party that
would work unremittingly to suffuse the proletariat with
Socialist consciousness and serve as mentor, leader, and
guide, constantly showing the proletariat where its true
class interests lie.
At the Second Congress the Iskra group split, and Lenin
found himself in a minority of opinion on this very issue.
Nevertheless, he continued to develop his view of “the party
of a new type,” which was to be guided by “democratic
centralism,” or absolute party discipline. According to
Lenin the party had to be a highly centralized body
organized around a small, ideologically homogeneous,
hardened core of experienced professional revolutionaries,
who would be elected to the central committee by the party
congress and who would lead a ramified hierarchy of lower
party organizations that would enjoy the support and
sympathy of the proletariat and all groups opposed to
tsarism. “Give us an organization of revolutionaries,” Lenin
exclaimed, “and we will overturn Russia!”
Lenin spared no effort to build just this kind of party
over the next 20 years, despite fierce attacks on his
position by some of his closest comrades of the Iskra days,
Plekhanov, Martov, and Leon Trotsky. They charged that his
scheme of party organization and discipline tended toward
“Jacobinism,” suppression of free intraparty discussion, a
dictatorship over the proletariat, not of the proletariat,
and, finally, establishment of a one-man dictatorship.
Lenin found himself in the minority in the early sessions
of the Second Congress of what was then proclaimed to be the
Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP). But a
walkout by a disgruntled group of Jewish Social-Democrats,
the Bund, left Lenin with a slight majority. Consequently,
the members of Lenin’s adventitious majority were called
Bolsheviks (majoritarians), and Martov’s group were dubbed
Mensheviks (minoritarians). The two groups fought each other
ceaselessly within the same RSDWP and professed the same
program until 1912, when Lenin made the split final at the
Prague Conference of the Bolshevik Party.
Challenges of the Revolution of 1905 and World War I
The differences between Lenin and the Mensheviks became
sharper in the Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath, when
Lenin moved to a distinctly original view on two issues:
class alignments in the revolution and the character of the
post-revolutionary regime.
The outbreak of the revolution, in January 1905, found
Lenin abroad in Switzerland, and he did not return to Russia
until November. Immediately Lenin set down a novel strategy.
Both wings of the RSDWP, Bolshevik and Menshevik, adhered to
Plekhanov’s view of the revolution in two stages: first, a
bourgeois revolution; second, a proletarian revolution (see
above). But the Mensheviks argued that the bourgeois
revolution must be led by the bourgeoisie, with whom the
proletariat must ally itself in order to make the democratic
revolution. This would bring the liberal bourgeoisie to full
power, whereupon the RSDWP would act as the party of
opposition. Lenin defiantly rejected this kind of alliance
and post-revolutionary regime. Hitherto he had spoken of the
need for the proletariat to win “hegemony” in the democratic
revolution. Now he flatly declared that the proletariat was
the driving force of the revolution and that its only
reliable ally was the peasantry. The bourgeoisie he branded
as hopelessly counterrevolutionary and too cowardly to make
its own revolution. Thus, unlike the Mensheviks, Lenin
henceforth banked on an alliance that would establish a
“revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat
and the peasantry.”
Nor would the revolution necessarily stop at the first
stage, the bourgeois revolution. If the Russian revolution
should inspire the western European proletariat to make the
Socialist revolution, for which industrial Europe was ripe,
the Russian revolution might well pass over directly to the
second stage, the Socialist revolution. Then, the Russian
proletariat, supported by the rural proletariat and
semi-proletariat at home and assisted by the triumphant
industrial proletariat of the West, which had established
its “dictatorship of the proletariat,” could cut short the
life-span of Russian capitalism.
After the defeat of the Revolution of 1905, the issue
between Lenin and the Mensheviks was more clearly drawn than
ever, despite efforts at reunion. But, forced again into
exile from 1907 to 1917, Lenin found serious challenges to
his policies not only from the Mensheviks but within his own
faction as well. The combination of repression and modest
reform effected by the tsarist regime led to a decline of
party membership. Disillusionment and despair in the chances
of successful revolution swept the dwindled party ranks,
rent by controversies over tactics and philosophy. Attempts
to unite the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions came to
naught, all breaking on Lenin’s intransigent insistence that
his conditions for reunification be adopted. As one
Menshevik opponent described Lenin: “There is no other man
who is absorbed by the revolution twenty-four hours a day,
who has no other thoughts but the thought of revolution, and
who even when he sleeps, dreams of nothing but revolution.”
Placing revolution above party unity, Lenin would accept no
unity compromise if he thought it might delay, not
accelerate, revolution.
Desperately fighting to maintain the cohesion of the
Bolsheviks against internal differences and the Mensheviks’
growing strength at home, Lenin convened the Bolshevik Party
Conference at Prague, in 1912, which split the Rsdwp
forever. Lenin proclaimed that the Bolsheviks were the RSDWP
and that the Mensheviks were schismatics. Thereafter, each
faction maintained its separate central committee, party
apparatus, and press.
When war broke out, in August 1914, Socialist parties
throughout Europe rallied behind their governments despite
the resolutions of prewar congresses of the Second
International obliging them to resist or even overthrow
their respective governments if they plunged their countries
into an imperialist war.
After Lenin recovered from his initial disbelief in this
“betrayal” of the International, he proclaimed a policy
whose audacity stunned his own Bolshevik comrades. He
denounced the pro-war Socialists as “social-chauvinists” who
had betrayed the international working-class cause by
support of a war that was imperialist on both sides. He
pronounced the Second International as dead and appealed for
the creation of a new, Third International composed of
genuinely revolutionary Socialist parties. More immediately,
revolutionary Socialists must work to “transform the
imperialist war into civil war.” The real enemy of the
worker was not the worker in the opposite trench but the
capitalist at home. Workers and soldiers should therefore
turn their guns on their rulers and destroy the system that
had plunged them into imperialist carnage.
Lenin’s policy found few advocates in Russia or elsewhere
in the first months of the war. Indeed, in the first flush
of patriotic fervour, not a few Bolsheviks supported the war
effort. Lenin and his closest comrades were left an isolated
band swimming against the current.
Lenin succeeded in reaching neutral Switzerland in
September 1914, there joining a small group of anti-war
Bolshevik and Menshevik émigrés. The war virtually cut them
off from all contact with Russia and with like-minded
Socialists in other countries. Nevertheless, in 1915 and
1916, anti-war Socialists in various countries managed to
hold two anti-war conferences in Zimmerwald and Kienthal,
Switzerland. Lenin failed at both meetings to persuade his
comrades to adopt his slogan: “transform the imperialist war
into civil war!” They adopted instead the more moderate
formula: “An immediate peace without annexations or
indemnities and the right of the peoples to
self-determination.” Lenin consequently found his party a
minority within the group of anti-war Socialists, who, in
turn, constituted a small minority of the international
Socialist movement compared with the pro-war Socialists.
Undaunted, Lenin continued to hammer home his views on
the war, confident that eventually he would win decisive
support. In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
(1917), he set out to explain, first, the real causes of the
war; second, why Socialists had abandoned internationalism
for patriotism and supported the war; and third, why
revolution alone could bring about a just, democratic peace.
War erupted, he wrote, because of the insatiable,
expansionist character of imperialism, itself a product of
monopoly finance capitalism. At the end of the 19th century,
a handful of banks had come to dominate the advanced
countries, which, by 1914, had in their respective empires
brought the rest of the world under their direct or indirect
controls. Amassing vast quantities of “surplus” capital, the
giant banks found they could garner superprofits on
investments in colonies and semi-colonies, and this
intensified the race for empire among the great powers. By
1914, dissatisfied with the way the world had been shared
out, rival coalitions of imperialists launched the war to
bring about a redivision of the world at the expense of the
other coalition. The war was therefore imperialist in its
origins and aims and deserved the condemnation of genuine
Socialists.
Socialist Party and trade-union leaders had rallied to
support their respective imperialist governments because
they represented the “labour aristocracy,” the better paid
workers who received a small share of the colonial
“superprofits” the imperialists proffered them. “Bribed” by
the imperialists, the “labour aristocracy” took the side of
their paymasters in the imperialist war and betrayed the
most exploited workers at home and the super-exploited in
the colonies. The imperialists, Lenin contended, driven by
an annexationist dynamic, could not conclude a just, lasting
peace. Future wars were inevitable so long as imperialism
existed; imperialism was inevitable so long as capitalism
existed; only the overthrow of capitalism everywhere could
end the imperialist war and prevent such wars in the future.
First published in Russia in 1917, Imperialism to this day
provides the instrument that Communists everywhere employ to
evaluate major trends in the non-Communist world.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution
By 1917 it seemed to Lenin that the war would never end and
that the prospect of revolution was rapidly receding. But in
the week of March 8–15, the starving, freezing, war-weary
workers and soldiers of Petrograd (until 1914, St.
Petersburg) succeeded in deposing the Tsar. Lenin and his
closest lieutenants hastened home after the German
authorities agreed to permit their passage through Germany
to neutral Sweden. Berlin hoped that the return of anti-war
Socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war effort.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » First return to
Petrograd
Lenin arrived in Petrograd on April 16, 1917, one month
after the Tsar had been forced to abdicate. Out of the
revolution was born the Provisional Government, formed by a
group of leaders of the bourgeois liberal parties. This
government’s accession to power was made possible only by
the assent of the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers’
deputies elected in the factories of the capital. Similar
soviets of workers’ deputies sprang up in all the major
cities and towns throughout the country, as did soviets of
soldiers’ deputies and of peasants’ deputies. Although the
Petrograd Soviet had been the sole political power
recognized by the revolutionary workers and soldiers in
March 1917, its leaders had hastily turned full power over
to the Provisional Government. The Petrograd Soviet was
headed by a majority composed of Menshevik and Socialist
Revolutionary (SR), or peasant party, leaders who regarded
the March (February, O.S.) Revolution as bourgeois; hence,
they believed that the new regime should be headed by
leaders of the bourgeois parties.
On his return to Russia, Lenin electrified his own
comrades, most of whom accepted the authority of the
Provisional Government. Lenin called this government,
despite its democratic pretensions, thoroughly imperialist
and undeserving of support by Socialists. It was incapable
of satisfying the most profound desires of the workers,
soldiers, and peasants for immediate peace and division of
landed estates among the peasants.
Only a soviet government—that is, direct rule by workers,
soldiers, and peasants—could fulfill these demands.
Therefore, he raised the battle cry, “All power to the
Soviets!”—although the Bolsheviks still constituted a
minority within the soviets and despite the manifest
unwillingness of the Menshevik–SR majority to exercise such
power. This introduced what Lenin called the period of “dual
power.” Under the leadership of “opportunist” Socialists,
the soviets, the real power, had relinquished power to the
Provisional Government, the nominal power in the land. The
Bolsheviks, Lenin exhorted, must persuade the workers,
peasants, and soldiers, temporarily deceived by the
“opportunists,” to retrieve state power for the soviets from
the Provisional Government. This would constitute a second
revolution. But, so long as the government did not suppress
the revolutionary parties, this revolution could be achieved
peacefully, since the Provisional Government existed only by
the sufferance of the soviets.
Initially, Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks thought that he was
temporarily disoriented by the complexity of the situation;
moderate Socialists thought him mad. It required several
weeks of sedulous persuasion by Lenin before he won the
Bolshevik Party Central Committee to his view. The April
Party Conference endorsed his program: the party must
withhold support from the Provisional Government and win a
majority in the soviets in favour of soviet power. A soviet
government, once established, should begin immediate
negotiations for a general peace on all fronts. The soviets
should forthwith confiscate landlords’ estates without
compensation, nationalize all land, and divide it among the
peasants. And the government should establish tight controls
over privately owned industry to the benefit of labour.
From March to September 1917, the Bolsheviks remained a
minority in the soviets. By autumn, however, the Provisional
Government (since July headed by the moderate Socialist
Aleksandr Kerensky, who was supported by the moderate
Socialist leadership of the soviets) had lost popular
support. Increasing war-weariness and the breakdown of the
economy overtaxed the patience of the workers, peasants, and
soldiers, who demanded immediate and fundamental change.
Lenin capitalized on the growing disillusionment of the
people with Kerensky’s ability and willingness to complete
the revolution. Kerensky, in turn, claimed that only a
freely elected constituent assembly would have the power to
decide Russia’s political future—but that must await the
return of order. Meanwhile, Lenin and the party demanded
peace, land, and bread—immediately, without further delay.
The Bolshevik line won increasing support among the workers,
soldiers, and peasants. By September they voted in a
Bolshevik majority in the Petrograd Soviet and in the
soviets of the major cities and towns throughout the
country.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Decision to seize
power
Lenin, who had gone underground in July after he had been
accused as a “German agent” by Kerensky’s government, now
decided that the time was ripe to seize power. The party
must immediately begin preparations for an armed uprising to
depose the Provisional Government and transfer state power
to the soviets, now headed by a Bolshevik majority.
Lenin’s decision to establish soviet power derived from
his belief that the proletarian revolution must smash the
existing state machinery and introduce a “dictatorship of
the proletariat”; that is, direct rule by the armed workers
and peasants which would eventually “wither away” into a
non-coercive, classless, stateless, Communist society. He
expounded this view most trenchantly in his brochure The
State and Revolution, written while he was still in hiding.
The brochure, though never completed and often dismissed as
Lenin’s most “Utopian” work, nevertheless served as Lenin’s
doctrinal springboard to power.
Until 1917 all revolutionary Socialists rightly believed,
Lenin wrote, that a parliamentary republic could serve a
Socialist system as well as a capitalist. But the Russian
Revolution had brought forth something new, the soviets.
Created by workers, soldiers, and peasants and excluding the
propertied classes, the soviets infinitely surpassed the
most democratic of parliaments in democracy, because
parliaments everywhere virtually excluded workers and
peasants. The choice before Russia in early September 1917,
as Lenin saw it, was either a soviet republic—a dictatorship
of the propertyless majority—or a parliamentary republic—as
he saw it, a dictatorship of the propertied minority.
Lenin therefore raised the slogan, “All power to the
Soviets!”, even though he had willingly conceded in the
spring of 1917 that revolutionary Russia was the “freest of
all the belligerent countries.” To Lenin, however, the
Provisional Government was merely a “dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie” that kept Russia in the imperialist war. What
is more, it had turned openly counterrevolutionary in the
month of July when it accused the Bolshevik leaders of
treason.
From late September, Lenin, a fugitive in Finland, sent a
stream of articles and letters to Petrograd feverishly
exhorting the Party Central Committee to organize an armed
uprising without delay. The opportune moment might be lost.
But for nearly a month Lenin’s forceful urgings from afar
were unsuccessful. As in April, Lenin again found himself in
the party minority. He resorted to a desperate stratagem.
Around October 20, Lenin, in disguise and at considerable
personal risk, slipped into Petrograd and attended a secret
meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee held on the
evening of October 23. Not until after a heated 10-hour
debate did he finally win a majority in favour of preparing
an armed takeover. Now steps to enlist the support of
soldiers and sailors and to train the Red Guards, the
Bolshevik-led workers’ militia, for an armed takeover
proceeded openly under the guise of self-defense of the
Petrograd Soviet. But preparations moved haltingly, because
serious opposition to the fateful decision persisted in the
Central Committee. Enthusiastically in accord with Lenin on
the timeliness of an armed uprising, Trotsky led its
preparation from his strategic position as newly elected
chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin, now hiding in
Petrograd and fearful of further procrastination,
desperately pressed the Central Committee to fix an early
date for the uprising. On the evening of November 6, he
wrote a letter to the members of the Central Committee
exhorting them to proceed that very evening to arrest the
members of the Provisional Government. To delay would be
“fatal.” The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets,
scheduled to convene the next evening, should be placed
before a fait accompli.
On November 7 and 8, the Bolshevik-led Red Guards and
revolutionary soldiers and sailors, meeting only slight
resistance, deposed the Provisional Government and
proclaimed that state power had passed into the hands of the
Soviets. By this time the Bolsheviks, with their allies
among the Left SR’s (dissidents who broke with the
pro-Kerensky SR leaders), constituted an absolute majority
of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The delegates
therefore voted overwhelmingly to accept full power and
elected Lenin as chairman of the Council of People’s
Commissars, the new Soviet Government, and approved his
Peace Decree and Land Decree. Overnight, Lenin had vaulted
from his hideout as a fugitive to head the Revolutionary
government of the largest country in the world. Since his
youth he had spent his life building a party that would win
such a victory, and now at the age of 47 he and his party
had triumphed. “It makes one’s head spin,” he confessed. But
power neither intoxicated nor frightened Lenin; it cleared
his head. Soberly, he steered the Soviet government toward
the consolidation of its power and negotiations for peace.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Saving the Revolution
In both spheres, Lenin was plagued by breaks within the
ranks of Bolshevik leaders. He reluctantly agreed with the
right-wingers that it would be desirable to include the
Menshevik and Right SR parties in a coalition government—but
on Lenin’s terms. They must above all accept the soviet form
of government, not a parliamentary one; they refused. Only
the Left SR’s agreed, and several were included in the
Soviet government. Likewise, when the freely elected
Constituent Assembly met in January 1918, the Mensheviks and
Right SR majority flatly rejected sovietism. Lenin without
hesitation ordered the dispersal of the Constituent
Assembly.
The Allies refused to recognize the Soviet government;
consequently it entered alone into peace negotiations with
the Central Powers (Germany and her allies Austro-Hungary
and Turkey) at the town of Brest-Litovsk. They imposed
ruinous conditions that would strip away from Soviet Russia
the western tier of non-Russian nations of the old Russian
Empire. Left Communists fanatically opposed acceptance and
preached a revolutionary war, even if it imperilled the
Soviet government. Lenin insisted that the terms, however
ruinous and humiliating, must be accepted or he would resign
from the government. He sensed that peace was the deepest
yearning of the people; in any case, the shattered army
could not raise effective resistance to the invader.
Finally, in March 1918, after a still larger part had been
carved out of old Russia by the enemy, Lenin succeeded in
winning the Central Committee’s acceptance of the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk. At last Russia was at peace.
But Brest-Litovsk only intensified the determination of
counterrevolutionary forces and the Allies who supported
them to bring about the overthrow of the Soviet government.
That determination hardened when, in 1918, Lenin’s
government repudiated repayments of all foreign loans
obtained by the tsarist and Provisional governments and
nationalized foreign properties in Russia without
compensation. From 1918 to 1920 Russia was torn by a Civil
War, which cost millions of lives and untold destruction.
One of the earliest victims was Lenin himself. In August
1918 an assassin fired two bullets into Lenin as he left a
factory in which he had just delivered a speech. Because of
his robust constitution, he recovered rapidly.
The Soviet government faced tremendous odds. The
anti-Soviet forces, or Whites, headed mainly by former
tsarist generals and admirals, fought desperately to
overthrow the Red regime. Moreover, the Whites were lavishly
supplied by the Allies with materiel, money, and support
troops that secured White bases. Yet, the Whites failed.
It was largely because of Lenin’s inspired leadership
that the Soviet government managed to survive against such
military odds. He caused the formation and guided the
strategy of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, commanded
by Trotsky. Although the economy had collapsed, he managed
to mobilize sufficient resources to sustain the Red Army and
the industrial workers. But above all it was his political
leadership that saved the day for the Soviets. By
proclaiming the right of the peoples to self-determination,
including the right to secession, he won the active
sympathy, or at least the benevolent neutrality, of the
non-Russian nationalities within Russia, because the Whites
did not recognize that right. Indeed, his perceptive,
skillful policy on the national question enabled Soviet
Russia to avoid total disintegration and to remain a huge
multinational state. By making the industrial workers the
new privileged class, favoured in the distribution of
rations, housing, and political power, he retained the
loyalty of the proletariat. His championing of the peasants’
demand that they take all the land from the gentry, church,
and crown without compensation won over the peasants,
without whose support the government could not survive.
Because of the breakdown of the economy, however, Lenin
adopted a policy toward the peasant that threatened to
destroy the Soviet government. Lacking funds or goods to
exchange against grain needed to feed the Red Army and the
towns, Lenin instituted a system of requisitioning grain
surpluses without compensation. Many peasants resisted—at
least until they experienced White “liberation.” On the
territories that the Whites won, they restored landed
property to the previous owners and savagely punished the
peasants who had dared seize the land. Despite the peasants’
detestation of the Soviet’s grain requisitioning, the
peasants, when forced to choose between Reds and Whites,
chose the Reds.
After the defeat of the Whites, the peasants no longer
had to make that choice. They now totally refused to
surrender their grain to the government. Threatened by mass
peasant rebellion, Lenin called a retreat. In March 1921 the
government introduced the New Economic Policy, which ended
the system of grain requisitioning and permitted the peasant
to sell his harvest on an open market. This constituted a
partial retreat to capitalism.
From the moment Lenin came to power, his abiding aims in
international relations were twofold: to prevent the
formation of an imperialist united front against Soviet
Russia; but, even more important, to stimulate proletarian
revolutions abroad.
In his first aim he largely succeeded. In 1924, shortly
after his death, Soviet Russia had won de jure recognition
of all the major world powers except the United States. But
his greater hope of the formation of a world republic of
soviets failed to materialize, and Soviet Russia was left
isolated in hostile capitalist encirclement.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Formation of the
Third International
To break this encirclement, he had called on revolutionaries
to form Communist parties that would emulate the example of
the Bolshevik Revolution in all countries. Dramatizing his
break with the reformist Second International, in 1918 he
had changed the name of the RSDWP to the Russian Communist
Party (Bolsheviks), and in March 1919 he founded the
Communist, or Third, International. This International
accepted the affiliation only of parties that accepted its
decisions as binding, imposed iron discipline, and made a
clean break with the Second International. In sum, Lenin now
held up the Russian Communist Party, the only party that had
made a successful revolution, as the model for Communist
parties in all countries. One result of this policy was to
engender a split in the world labour movement between the
adherents of the two internationals.
The Communist International scored its greatest success
in the colonial world. By championing the rights of the
peoples in the colonies and semi-colonies to
self-determination and independence, the International won
considerable sympathy for Communism. Lenin’s policy in this
question still reverberates through the world today. And it
offers another example of Lenin’s unique ability to find
allies where revolutionaries had not found them before. By
taking the side of the national liberation movements, Lenin
could claim that the overwhelming majority of the world’s
population, then living under imperialist rule, as well as
the European proletariat, were the natural allies of the
Bolshevik Revolution.
Thus Lenin’s revolutionary genius was not confined to his
ability to divide his enemies; more important was his skill
in finding allies and friends for the exiguous proletariat
of Russia. First, he won the Russian peasants to the side of
the proletariat. Second, while he did not win the workers to
make successful Communist revolutions in the West, they did
compel their governments to curtail armed intervention
against the Bolshevik Revolution. Third, while the Asian
revolutions barely stirred in his lifetime, they did
strengthen the Soviet Communists in the belief that they
were not alone in a hostile world.
By 1921 Lenin’s government had crushed all opposition
parties on the grounds that they had opposed or failed to
support sufficiently the Soviet cause in the Civil War. Now
that peace had come, Lenin believed that their opposition
was more dangerous than ever, since the peasantry and even a
large section of the working class had become disaffected
with the Soviet regime. To repress opponents of Bolshevism,
Lenin demanded the harshest measures, including “show”
trials and frequent resort to the death penalty. Moreover,
he insisted on even tighter control over dissent within the
party. Lenin’s insistence on merciless destruction of the
opposition to the Bolshevik dictatorship subsequently led
many observers to conclude that Lenin, though personally
opposed to one-man rule, nevertheless unwittingly cleared
the way for the rise of Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship.
By 1922 Lenin had become keenly aware that degeneration
of the Soviet system and party was the greatest danger to
the cause of Socialism in Russia. He found the party and
Soviet state apparatus hopelessly entangled in red tape and
incompetence. Even the agency headed by Stalin that was
responsible for streamlining administration was, in fact,
less efficient than the rest of the government. The Soviets
of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies had been drained of all
power, which had flowed to the centre. Most disturbing was
the Great Russian chauvinism that leading Bolsheviks
manifested toward the non-Russian nationalities in the
reorganization of the state in which Stalin was playing a
key role. Moreover, in April 1922 Stalin won appointment as
general secretary of the party, in which post he was rapidly
concentrating immense power in his hands. Soviet Russia in
Lenin’s last years could not have been more remote from the
picture of Socialism he had portrayed in State and
Revolution. Lenin strained every nerve to reverse these
trends, which he regarded as antithetical to Socialism, and
to replace Stalin.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Illness and death
In the spring of 1922, however, Lenin fell seriously ill. In
April his doctors extracted from his neck one of the bullets
he had received from the assassin’s gun in August 1918. He
recovered rapidly from the operation, but a month later he
fell ill, partially paralyzed and unable to speak. In June
he made a partial recovery and threw himself into the
formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the
federal system of reorganization he favoured against
Stalin’s unitary scheme. However, in December he was again
incapacitated by semiparalysis. Although no longer the
active leader of the state and party, he did muster the
strength to dictate several prescient articles and what is
called his political “Testament,” dictated to his secretary
between Dec. 23, 1922, and Jan. 4, 1923, in which he
expressed a great fear for the stability of the party under
the leadership of disparate, forceful personalities such as
Stalin and Trotsky. On March 10, 1923, another stroke
deprived him of speech. His political activity came to an
end. He suffered yet another stroke on the morning of Jan.
21, 1924, and died that evening in the village of Gorki (now
known as Gorki Leninskiye).
The last year of Lenin’s political life, when he fought
to eradicate abuses of his Socialist ideals and the
corruption of power, may well have been his greatest.
Whether the history of the Soviet Union would have been
fundamentally different had he survived beyond his 54th
birthday, no one can say with certainty.
Albert Resis
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