The Teacher: Charismatic Intellectuals in Academic and Literary Institutions in Soviet Russia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel focuses on charismatic figures within Soviet intelligentsia circles. Based on a close reading of personal documents, primarily memoirs and diaries, we intend to explore the social and symbolic dimensions of the figure of the Teacher, both as an intellectual authority and a moral leader, at the center of various informal networks in the Soviet educational system and academia.

We consider this role both as a focal point of personal relationships and mechanisms of mutual support in intelligentsia circles [kruzhki] and as an object of intellectual cults developed parallel to official Soviet hierarchies.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Nathan Merle Goldstone, Harvard U

Papers

• Stalin’s Attack on the Soviet Intelligentsia Kruzhki of the Early 1930s: The Case of the Mathematical Circle of Nikolai Luzin - Barbara Brigitte Walker, U of Nevada, Reno

• 'Both Teaching and No Preaching': Male Teachers in the Diaries of Soviet Teenage Boys, 1937–1941 - Ekaterina Zadirko, U of Cambridge (UK)

• The Circles of Leonid Pinsky: IFLI, the 'Current', and Beyond
 - Peter Budrin, Queen Mary, U of London (UK)

• Charismatic Intellectual at the Center of a Kruzhok: The Case of Alexey Losev - Egor Sokolov, U of Oxford (UK)

Discussant

• Carol J. Any, Trinity College