For five years following the Bolshevik victory in 1917, the Russian revolution inspired a brilliant outburst of theory and criticism among Russian intellectuals struggling to comprehend their country's vast social upheaval. Much of their intense speculation focused on issues that are still hotly debated: Was this socialism? Why had the revolution happened in Russia? What did Bolshevik power mean for Russia and the Western world? This compelling study recovers these early responses, and analyzes the specific ideological context out of which they emerged. Jane Burbank explores the ideas and experiences of diverse prominent intellectuals, ranging from the monarchists on the right to the Mensheviks, Socialist revolutionaries, and Anarchists on the left. Following these thinkers through the turbulent years of civil war and the rebuilding of state power, she shows how revolution both revitalized their political culture, and exposed the fragile basis of its existence.

Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism 1917-1922.

The coast of utopia di tom stoppard: la costa di nessuna terra

In Russia, the very idea of a Communist revolution – from 1905 onwards – meant both hope and dread. This attitude is quite clearly shown in a very significant part of the Russian literary process, from 1908 to the beginning of the Stalin era. An obvious thread, in fact, connects Aleksandr Bogdanov ( Red Star , 1908), Evgeny Zamyatin ( We , 1921) and Vladimir Mayakovsky ( The Bedbug , 1929): the growing awareness that the Communist revolution, as Lenin had conceived it, was little more than a model and that a model could not describe – much less forecast – a complex reality (a complex system) like a social and political one. As a result of this awareness, hope and a dark prophecy (Bogdanov) slowly turn into despair (Mayakovsky). The model is subsumed by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s dystopian satire of  The Bedbug  and  The Bathhouse  which propose a new paradigm of dystopia: a bottleneck in the flow of the information produced by blind adherence to a preconceived project that prevents the discovery and the implementation of la  volonte generale  in so complex a system as  human society .

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Giovanni Maniscalco Basile

Papers

Mayakovsky’s Bedbug: Revolution, Time, and Utopia