Comrade Pushkin Battles on Two Fronts: The Stalinist Thermidor and the Aesthetic Historical Imaginary of Mikhail Lifshitz and his ‘Current’ 

• In Event: Radical Politics, Radical Selves II: The Dialectics of Revolutionary Commitment in Early Soviet Russia

Abstract

In the 1930s, when Stalinist repressions were turning the hopes of many early Soviet thinkers into bitter disappointment, the Soviet Marxist philosopher Mikhail Lifshitz formulated a position of cultural criticism he called a “battle on two fronts.” On the one hand, Lifshitz and his allies at the journal Literaturnyi kritik (who included Georg Lukács and Andrei Platonov) would, in spite of everything, retain loyalty to the event of the October Revolution and continue to argue against the liberal critiques of the Soviet experiment; on the other hand, they would attack various forms of ‘vulgarization’ of Marxist principles, which they saw as the key problem of the Stalinist cultural system. By focusing on the interpretations of Pushkin’s oeuvre that were published in Literaturnyi kritik on the occasion of the poet’s 1937 nationwide jubilee, I show how Lifshitz’s philosophical ‘current’ developed a perspective on the history of art that allowed them to articulate their difficult and dangerous intellectual position.

Author

• Pavel Khazanov, U of Pennsylvania