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Alexander Bogdanov was a co-founder, with Lenin, of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1904. After 1905, Bogdanov criticized Lenin's adaption of Bolshevism to the requirements of Duma politics and his authoritarian style of leadership. Expelled from the Bolshevik fraction in 1909, he at first formed the Forward faction of the RSDRP and then turned increasingly to scholarly and publicistic work. In 1910 he published Faith and Science, replying to Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocritcism, which had been written to discredit him. His ideas on the sociology of culture led to the founding of the Proletkult in 1917 and during the 1920s these ideas were taken up, adapted...
Satire and the fantastic, vital literary genres in the 1920s, are often thought to have fallen victim to the official adoption of socialist realism. Eric Laursen contends that these subversive genres did not just vanish or move underground. Instead, key strategies of each survive to sustain the villain of socialist realism. Laursen argues that the judgment of satire and the hesitation associated with the fantastic produce a narrative obsession with controlling the villain’s influence. In identifying a crucial connection between the questioning, subversive literature of the 1920s and the socialist realists, Laursen produces an insightful revision of Soviet literary history.
Examines Bogdanov's roles as revolutionary, novelist, and scientist, presenting his protagonist as a coherent thinker who pursued his ideas in a wide range of venues. This title offers an analysis of the interactions between scientific ideas and societal values.
[The Russian and American contributors] share a very high level of expertise and an impressive command of their material, which ranges from film to billboards to currency. Everything in this book, including the introduction, is worth reading... consistently fascinating... -- Choice... a lightning rush of images and ideas that constitute inviting material for future speculation. -- Times Literary SupplementThis collection of essays is a fine, even an exhilarating piece of work. Her brilliant analysis surveys a kaleidoscope of breaks and continuities: betweeen literature and non-print media, high culture and popular culture, homo sovieticus and homo russicus. -- Slavic and East European Journa...
Brings a powerful toolkit to bear on engineering and scientific endeavors. This book describes the fundamental principles of systems science so engineers and other scholars can put them into practical use at work and in their personal lives. Systems science aims to determine systemic similarities among different disciplines and to develop applicable solutions in many fields of inquiry. Systems Science for Engineers and Scholars readers will discover: Ten systems science principles that open engineers’ and scholars’ horizons to practical insights related to their areas of interest A methodology for designing holistic systems that exhibit resilient behavior to overcome systems’ context u...
Despite the restrictions on their work and actions, the economists of the Soviet period produced a great deal of bold and important work. With the erosion of the old Stalinist controls, economists in the Soviet Union themselves became very interested in the history of their profession, not least in order to find authentic voices that might offer reinforcement or counterpoint to the policy analyses and recommendations with which policy makers in the transition countries are today being bombarded. This major new reference work pulls together many years of research in order to present a bio-bibliographic dictionary of Russian and Soviet economists, many of whom have previously had no coherent r...
Futurism was Russia's first avant-garde movement. Gatecrashing the Russian public sphere in the early twentieth century, the movement called for the destruction of everything old, so that the past could not hinder the creation of a new, modern society. Over the next two decades, the protagonists of Russian Futurism pursued their goal of modernizing human experience through radical art. The success of this mission has long been the subject of scholarly debate. Critics have often characterized Russian Futurism as an expression of utopian daydreaming by young artists who were unrealistic in their visions of Soviet society and naïve in their comprehension of the Bolshevik political agenda. By t...
The Philosophy of Living Experience is the single best introduction to the thought of Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), a Russian polymath who was co-founder, with Lenin, of the Bolshevik Party. His landmark achievements are Empiriomonism (1904–6), a philosophy of radical empiricism that he developed to replace what he considered to be the crude materialism of contemporary Marxists, and Tektology: Universal Organisational Science (1912–17), a precursor of cybernetics and systems theory. The Philosophy of Living Experience (1913) was written at a transitional point between the two; it is a final summing up of empiriomonism, an illustration of his theory of the social genesis of ideas, and an anticipation of Tektology.
This book offers an innovative examination of the interactions of science and technology, art, and literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars in the history of art, literature, architecture, computer science, and media studies focus on five historical themes in the transition from energy to information: thermodynamics, electromagnetism, inscription, information theory, and virtuality. Different disciplines are grouped around specific moments in the history of science and technology in order to sample the modes of representation invented or adapted by each field in response to newly developed scientific concepts and models. By placing literary fictions and the plastic arts...
“One of the finest, most gripping surveys of the history of Russian science in the twentieth century.” —Douglas Smith, author of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Stalin and the Scientists tells the story of the many gifted scientists who worked in Russia from the years leading up to the revolution through the death of the “Great Scientist” himself, Joseph Stalin. It weaves together the stories of scientists, politicians, and ideologues into an intimate and sometimes horrifying portrait of a state determined to remake the world. They often wreaked great harm. Stalin was himself an amateur botanist, and by falling under the sway of dangerous charlatans like Tr...