Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925

by Mark D. Steinberg

In fin-de-siècle and early revolutionary Russia, a group of self-educated workers produced a large body of poetry and prose in which they attempted to comprehend their rapidly changing world. Witnesses to wars and revolution, these men and women grappled on paper with the nature of civilization and the imperatives of ethical truth. In a strikingly original approach to Russian culture, Mark D. Steinberg listens to their words, which are little known today. The results of their literary creativity, he finds, were frequently not what the new Soviet order was expecting from its workers, despite its celebration of the notion of a proletarian art. Through insightful readings of a vast fund of lower-class writings, Steinberg shows that the authors focused above all on the uncertain nature and place of the self, the promise and dangers of modernity, and the qualities of the sacred in both their lives and their imaginations. Like their counterparts in the intelligentsia, these worker writers were ambivalent about Marxist ideology's celebration of the city and the factory and even about modern progress itself. Drawing on vast research, Steinberg demonstrates the texts' significance for an understanding of Russian popular mentalities, indeed for the very meaning, philosophically and morally, of these years of crisis and possibility at the end of the old order and the early years of the Soviet regime.

Genres: Religion, Labor, Russia

352 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

A specialist on the cultural, intellectual, and social history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mark D. Steinberg is professor of history at the University of Illinois.

Reviews

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Классическая работа, не просто описывающая труды и дни пролетарских писателей, но и связывающая материал с другими слоями историографии (субъективности, например). С тщанием переведено - обратный перевод цитат из источников, например, мог бы превратить текст в труху, но это предотвращено, хотя в паре мест всё-таки compositor становится композитором.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with some published reviews of this book, I would have appreciated the inclusion of original russian language quotations to aid me in my research, given I don't have access to some of this archival material, but it an interesting and useful book; the first half of its content was particularly relevant to my own work. Given it was a rare academic book I actually read cover to cover I thought I would log it on goodreads

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Original monograph on how some Russian workers tried to grapple with the vertiginous modernism inherent in the revolutionary project.