ABSTRACT
A. Bogdanov, Anatoly Vasilevich Lunacharsky, V. A. Bazarov, and their left Bolshevik comrades found them facing not simply an abstract historical-social concept but the imminent realization of a new world. The concrete popular upheaval of the 1905 Revolution not only added to the optimism of their politics, it gave greater immediacy to their theoretical speculations. They looked forward to entirely new relationships between human beings and to humanity's unlimited capacity to create a perfect world. In fact, they produced a form of Marxist millenialism. Lunacharsky had outlined a natural basis for ethics in "The Foundations of a Positive Esthetics", and he had written a history of working class idealism in Religion and Socialism. It was in the late 1890s that Maksim Gorky first began to associate with Social-Democratic revolutionaries. Gorky' religious creation is not limited to the last God-building section of The Confession.
