ABSTRACT
The idea of modernity was a compelling, but also conflicted and unstable presence in revolutionary Russia’s political culture: an ideological model with pretensions to hegemony, but also a marker of difference, ambivalence and even resistance. The revolutionary project of making a new world and new serves provided powerful metaphors and trajectories, shaping understanding and action. But this rhetoric was riven and volatile, producing-as frustrated Bolshevik cultural leaders of the time complained-misusages, ambiguities and subversions. These departures were signs of difference and deviation behind the facade of a discourse that claimed to be the ‘proletarian’ point of view. They were also signs of encounters with the recalcitrantly material world of modern structures and relationships of which discourses had to make plausible sense. Not least, they were signs of deep subjectivities: of the specific gravities of sentiment, emotion and imagination.
