ABSTRACT
The Collected Works of Lenin fill some forty-five volumes. Commentators on Lenin's text fall into two categories. There are what may be called the historians, who offer critiques and explanations of a 'transcendent' type. The other approach is the 'political'; but here we stumble into the pitfalls of immanence. This chapter first considers assessments of the text offered by historians, that is, by those seeking to account for origins and features of the Soviet state and its development, and the relation of Lenin and his ideas to that process. The biblical hermeneutists attempted to provide such a valid interpretation of fragmentary texts by treating a text as a unity. The chapter examines two schools of interpretation and shows how the text does not enter into history, either due to its absurdity, or its innocence. Consequently the text is either meaningless – dead, historical, objective, a moment in one man's biography – or excessively meaningful, saturated with meaning, in fact sacred.
