ABSTRACT
The Russian intelligentsia, which always laid claim to a particular destiny, suffered unimaginably from what happened to the country during the hard decades of Soviet rule; but intellectuals themselves bore a considerable share of responsibility for these events. Resistance to the regime became not only deadly, it became intellectually difficult. In that culture, undermined as it was by the efforts of several generations, there was no tradition, philosophy, or language of opposition. The resistance of Freud's Soviet readers was far more political than the resistance that Freud had detected and interpreted in his Viennese patients. Freudianism begins with an acknowledgment of the growing influence of psychoanalysis: "Anyone wishing to fathom the spiritual physiognomy of modern Europe can hardly bypass psychoanalysis." In Bakhtin, the religion of Dionysus took on a new cultural and historical form, at the same time preserving its main features, as befits an eternally self-renewing god.
