Stalin Era Intellectuals

Vesa Oittinen is a professor emeritus of Russian philosophy and intellectual history at the Aleksanteri Institute (University of Helsinki). His publications focus on the history of philosophy, especially Spinoza, German classical philosophy and Marxism, and on Russian and Soviet philosophy. Elina Viljanen is a post-doctoral scholar at the Aleksanteri Institute (University of Helsinki). Holding a PhD in musicology, she specialises in Russian intellectual history of music and Soviet culture.

1 Introduction: On Soviet Intellectual Culture during the Stalin Era 2 Fighting Avant-Garde with Phenomenology: Gustav Shpet’s ‘New Realism’ 3 Stalin and Philosophy in Soviet Russia 4 ‘Menshevising Idealism’ and Stalinisation of Philosophy 5 The Naked Truth of Fact: Andrey Platonov on the Margins of Factography 6 Everyday Symphonism: Boris Asafiev’s Soviet Theory of Popular Music 7 Confronting Modernism in the Stalin Era: Mikhail Lifshits as Critic and Philosopher of Culture 8 Maxim Gorky as Spokesman for Proletarian Humanism 9 Sofya Yanovskaya in Defence of Abstractions: Between Soviet Ideology and Bourgeois Idealism 10 The Anti-Fascist Cultural Theory of Nikolai Bukharin and the Concept of Socialist Humanism 11 Nikolay Marr’s Theory of Language and Konstantin Megrelidze’s Historical Science of Thought 12 Between Critique and Conformism: The Languages and Cultures of Caste and Nation in Stalin-Era Indology 13 Stalinism, War, and Artistic Representation of Reality: Konstantin Simonov’s Critique of the ‘System of Silence’ in 1956