The Thinking Reed

It is of major importance that from now on theoretical thinking is not only revealing afresh truths which had been ‘closed’ under Stalin but also creating something of its own, something new and original, carrying on scientific research in the full sense of the word. The preparatory period is past; philosophical science has reached maturity.

Batkin’s article ‘The Uncomfortableness of Culture’, published in the uncensored symposium Metropol', was a sort of manifesto of the philosophical ideas of the culturologists. It was written originally for the official journal Voprosy Filosofii and failed to be published there for quite accidental reasons. Nevertheless it was symbolic that this programmatic declaration of the culturological school should have appeared in an uncensored publication. Batkin insisted on regarding culture as a tragic process of self-negation and self-renewal, in constant conflict with the conservatism of official society and with itself: ‘Enclosure in itself as complete as possible, dialogue without limits, that is what is needed for culture: any mechanical reduction or exclusion from internal debate, that is what really emasculates culture. But how frightened we are to linger for a breath of air!’58 Culture constantly fights also against the ‘guardians’ of culture, who prove to be, in reality, prison warders protecting the official ideology, for culture is a challenge to dogmas, a revolt against tradition, against everything stagnant and immobile. ‘There is no way out except oblivion. Seriously to “rest” the whole weight of the present upon tradition means to refute it.’59

The culturologists struck a powerful blow at the dogmatic consciousness — not only at particular dogmas but at this type of thinking generally, at positivist or national-‘Christian’ dogmatism no less than at the ‘Marxist’ variety. From now on it was impossible to work in the old way. On the other hand the culturologists, especially A. Gurevich, did a great deal to reconstruct historical materialism, eradicating various outworn schemas and pseudo-determinist notions.

The role played by members of the culturological school in public life is quite important. They teach how to think, and on that plane their significance is not reducible to their contribution to science. It is hard to define the ideological position of the culturologists. This school is resolutely opposed to every sort of reactionary nationalist tendency and at the same time its ideas are closely linked to Marxism, even though this link is not, as a rule, given much emphasis. Without the contribution to science made by Marx and Gramsci the new culturology would have been as impossible as if Bakhtin had never existed. However, it is risky to talk openly about that in some circles.

Critical Marxism

The crisis of the oppositional ideology in the Khrushchev period left the word ‘Marxism’ extremely unpopular among a certain section of the intellectuals. Rakovski regrets that since 1968 not only are serious works on the development of Marxist thought difficult to find — ‘it is Marxists themselves who are now difficult to find in Eastern Europe’60. Nevertheless, in the sixties and seventies oppositional Marxist thought not only went on developing in the USSR, it achieved some great successes. Apart from anything else, it became more Marxist and acquired the opportunity to constitute a real alternative to the dead official ideology and the neo-dogmatism of the Right opposition.

It is possible to distinguish between legal and illegal Marxist thought in the USSR. Legal does not mean official: on the contrary, the legal Marxists carry on a systematic struggle against official dogmatism, but prefer to do this in censored publications which are available to the general public, although many of them also express themselves in samizdat. Thus P. Egides and M. Gefter moved in the seventies from censored publications into the uncensored Moscow journal Poiski.

I have already spoken here about the unity of the cultural-political process and the close link between censored literature and samizdat. It is easy to observe how legal and illegal literature supplement each other. In any case, Marxist samizdat owes a great deal to legal Marxism.