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Aleksei Gastev and the Metallization of the Revolutionary Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Rolf Hellebust
Rolf Hellebust*
Affiliation:
Department of Germanic, Slavic, and East Asian Studies, University of Caigary
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Abstract

Since Marx was strong on criticizing capitalism, not so strong on the practical mechanics of revolution, and rather wobbly on the communist future itself, we cannot blame his Soviet followers if their ultimate goal always remained a religious mystery, veiled by the pseudoscience of political dogma. The veil enhances the mystery; it obscures the fact that there is a mystery—that the real transformation of society into Utopia and the individual into unfettered homo laborans cannot be described in scientific language at all but can only be symbolized.

This becomes clear when we move from politics to art, to the sphere of culture dominated by symbolic language. Despite its debt to the explicit Utopian tradition of Chernyshevskii and the nineteenthcentury radicals, Soviet literature limits itself to an exclusively symbolic depiction of the flowering of communism. In Christianity, a transformation of analogous importance is symbolized by the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , Fall 1997 , pp. 500 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1997

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References

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