Bolshevik Utopia and Its Instinctive Superhero

• In Event: The Radical Utopianism of the Soviet Twenties I: Words

Abstract

This paper proposes to take a deep dive into the Soviet Union’s Bolshevik origins and their proletariat-based utopian imaginaries of the new society and the New Man. By offering a reading of Gladkov’s Cement that questions the novel’s belonging to the Socialist Realist canon, the paper disentangles the early 1920s proletarian literature from the long-established academic trope that insists on the paramount supremacy, in the Bolshevik utopian imagination, of “proletarian consciousness” over proletariat’s instinctive and spontaneous identification with the revolutionary modernity.

Author

• Anna Yu. Krylova, Duke U