ABSTRACT

This book focuses on the extent to which Soviet scholars and cultural theoreticians were able to act autonomously during the Stalin era. The authors question how we should consider certain intellectual achievements which took place despite the pressure of Stalinism, and how best to recognise and describe such achievements. The chapters in this book offer suggestions for new interpretations on Soviet philosophy of science and humanities, linguistics, philosophy, musicology, literature and mathematics from the point of view of general cultural theory. In this way, they challenge the received image of the Stalin-era humanities which reduces them into mere propaganda. Intended for scholars of Russian and Soviet studies, this book will dispel many received views about the character of Stalinism and Soviet culture.

Chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, 10 and 13 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

chapter 1|21 pages

Introduction

On Soviet Intellectual Culture during the Stalin Era

chapter 2|14 pages

Fighting Avant-Garde with Phenomenology

Gustav Shpet's ‘New Realism'

chapter 5|16 pages

The Naked Truth of Fact

Andrey Platonov on the Margins of Factography

chapter 6|24 pages

Everyday Symphonism

Boris Asafiev's Soviet Theory of Popular Music

chapter 7|22 pages

Confronting Modernism in the Stalin Era

Mikhail Lifshits as Critic and Philosopher of Culture

chapter 9|19 pages

Sofya Yanovskaya in Defence of Abstractions

Between Soviet Ideology and Bourgeois Idealism

chapter 12|21 pages

Between Critique and Conformism

The Languages and Cultures of Caste and Nation in Stalin-Era Indology

chapter 13|24 pages

Stalinism, War, and Artistic Representation of Reality

Konstantin Simonov's Critique of the ‘System of Silence' in 1956