Information about the author:
Aleksey A. Kholikov
Alexey A. Kholikov, DSc in Philology, Professor, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, No 1, International University Park Road, Dayun New Town, Longgang District, 518172 Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, PRC; Professor, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie gory, GSP-1, 119991 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8462-0738
E-mail:
Abstract:
This article presents a problematic review of M.V. Mikhailova’s monograph “Marxists Without a Future: Marxism and Russian Literary Criticism (1890s – 1910s)” (2017). The book is based on the scholar’s many years of research, including her doctoral dissertation, which remains the most comprehensive and objective work on the phenomenon existing on the border between aesthetics and politics. While during the Soviet era, those layers of Marxist criticism that did not coincide with Lenin’s position fell out of scholarly focus, after the collapse of the USSR, this entire field of criticism was effectively devalued. Mikhailova pays close attention to “forgotten” names (including female critics and without distinguishing between the “orthodox” and the “heretics”) and pays tribute to predecessors who went beyond the official framework in their study of Marxism. The book is discussed in three dimensions — methodological, thematic, and historical. According to the author’s conception, the dynamics of Marxist criticism teach us “tolerance toward facts, even if they seem completely unproductive”, and convinces us that “the collapse of Marxism contains a prototype of the fate of all those doctrines that claimed global validity”.
Keywords: Marxism, literary criticism, Silver Age, methodology, ideology, politics.
