Arising from a conference held in 2019, Nikolai Krementsov and Yvonne Howell's edited collection offers a refreshingly interdisciplinary investigation of the seemingly ubiquitous “new man” (novyi chelovek) of the early twentieth century, exploring what this ideal meant to various authors, scientists, thinkers, and state officials in the years following the 1917 revolutions. Covering topics ranging from children's dolls to ethnographic museum displays, taken as a whole this series of essays provides a wide-ranging, and oftentimes provocative, exploration of the multifarious imaginings, representations, and manifestations of the new man, in both its distinctly Soviet and international context.
Starting with the theme of “nurturing the new man,” the first chapters revolve around the question of how practices of knowledge production and dissemination were challenged by the post-revolutionary desire to create and sustain “new people.” Michael Coates explores the efforts of Aleksandr Bogdanov in particular to create a “socialist” encyclopedia, which was envisaged as a series of volumes not simply dedicated to capturing the world as it existed on its pages but building a new world by helping to develop a “proletarian system of cognition” (42). Lyubov Bugaeva hones in on the problematic demographic of the besprizorniki and state attempts to transform these youths through labor, health, and hygiene, how this came to be represented in contemporary culture, and how these Soviet approaches were influenced by American pedagologists such as John Dewey. Staying with this focus on Soviet children, Olga Ilyukha's chapter explores the place of dolls as a proxy for the new person, shaping play and reinforcing social ideals, from gendered behaviors to physical appearance. The author traces the evolution of these ideals from the pre-revolutionary period to the “year of the toy,” 1937 (75), compellingly demonstrating how something as seemingly simple as a children's toy can be mapped onto the vicissitudes of the period.
The second section explores the “imagining” of the new man, with a heavy focus on literary representations, particularly those coming from science fiction. Krementsov's opening chapter is by far the most expansive of the whole collection, both in its chronological coverage and its discussion of non-Russian writers, trends, and ideas that then found resonance in the post-revolutionary Bolshevik state. Here analysis ranges across texts from Charles Darwin and Aldous Huxley to Andrei Platanov and the more obscure Fedor Il΄in, emphasizing the memetic qualities of the “new man” that bridged ideological and cultural divides. The chapters by Matthias Schwartz and Irina Golovacheva that follow offer the reader two complementary visions of the interplay between science and the new man. Schwartz focusses on the competing representation of the new man in popular scientific and scientific fantasy publications, which oscillated between stressing the enlightenment of man on one hand and the “fears and nightmares” of humanity transformed on the other (119). Golovacheva takes these monstrous visions of the new man transformed by science further in her comparative analysis of Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog and James Whale's cinematic interpretation of Frankenstein, situating both cultural products in the wider debate concerning the “criminal brain” and divergent beliefs in the power of heredity and environment across the two societies at the time.
Finally, the last part of the collection focuses on the display of the new man as the chapters here investigate how museum and exhibition spaces were used to both create and represent the new man of the early Soviet period. Olga Elina examines the transformation of the peasant through a detailed discussion of the All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Industrial Exhibition of 1923, in which she argues that this exhibition was a site for transforming the peasant citizen, a place where the ideal could be made real through the educational activities offered as part of this experience. Likewise, Pat Simpson offers a detailed examination of this process of revolutionary transformation through the representation of human evolution and orangutans as found in the sculptures of Vasilii Vatagin situated in the State Darwin Museum in Moscow. Finally, in contrast to the preceding chapters, Stanislav Petriashin explores the museum space as a site for showcasing the completed evolution of the new man, with a particular focus on the representation of the ideal Stakhanovite worker in the State Museum of Ethnography and the tensions between the national and the socialist that this focus brought to light. Here, in this space, by the mid-1930s, the new man had ceased to be simply an ideal and was something made flesh, as the successful transformation of humanity was illustrated through the actual biographies of these celebrated individuals.
Drawing on the volume's overarching themes, the conclusion by Howell offers a meditation on what this ideal of the new man might mean for us today, especially as we experience the ongoing challenges of climate change, the rise of artificial intelligence, and we might add the new crises caused by the pandemic and war that have occurred since the original conference was held. How might these upheavals and difficulties give “rise to the search for new definitions of who we are and what we can or should ideally become?” (194); only time will tell.
However, as stimulating as many of the essays are, the book as a whole does fall short in providing the coverage of the first four decades of the twentieth century as it claims (3); all the chapters here focus on the Soviet period, with the vast majority focusing on the decade following the creation of the USSR, and while many offer contextualization with other earlier developments, both foreign and domestic, the years prior to the Revolution are never the focus in their own right and no chapter really puts the issue of continuity or change over the revolutionary divide at the heart of its analysis. To be sure though, while perhaps more chronologically limited than the title would imply, it is the interdisciplinary nature of the collection, its focus on some of the more understudied dimensions of Soviet society and culture, and its consistently comparative analysis that will draw readers to this thought-provoking volume.
