The Art and Science of Making the New Man in Early 20th-Century Russia

Yvonne Howell, Nikolai Krementsov

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350232860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The idea that morally, mentally, and physically superior 'new men' might replace the currently existing mankind has periodically seized the imagination of intellectuals, leaders, and reformers throughout history. This volume offers a multidisciplinary investigation into how the 'new man' was made in Russia and the early Soviet Union in the first third of the 20th century. The traditional narrative of the Soviet 'new man' as a creature forged by propaganda is challenged by the strikingly new and varied case studies presented here. The book focuses on the interplay between the rapidly developing experimental life sciences, such as biology, medicine, and psychology, and countless cultural products, ranging from film and fiction, dolls and museum exhibits to pedagogical projects, sculptures, and exemplary agricultural fairs. With contributions from scholars based in the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany and Russia, the picture that emerges is emphatically more complex, contradictory, and suggestive of strong parallels with other 'new man' visions in Europe and elsewhere. In contrast to previous interpretations that focused largely on the apparent disconnect between utopian 'new man' rhetoric and the harsh realities of everyday life in the Soviet Union, this volume brings to light the surprising historical trajectories of 'new man' visions, their often obscure origins, acclaimed and forgotten champions, unexpected and complicated results, and mutual interrelations. In short, the volume is a timely examination of a recurring theme in modern history, when dramatic advancements in science and technology conjoin with anxieties about the future to fuel dreams of a new and improved mankind.

Part I

Nurturing the New Man

Across societies and continents, the turn of the twentieth century was marked by acute interest in the prospects of creating a “new kind of person” for what seemed to be, for better or for worse, the advent of a new kind of world. In Russia, ideas about how to create the men, women, and children of the future acquired momentum well before the Bolshevik revolution, and continued to evolve under the new Soviet regime. As the chapters in this section show, creating “new men” in the postrevolutionary era invoked fundamental questions about the nature of cognition, development, and the social order. How would the production and dissemination of knowledge have to change, in order to change the way “new people” think? How could American experiments in “progressive education” be adapted in reeducation schemes favored by the Soviet secret police? If a child’s imagination is shaped by its toys, what would the new toys look like? Nurturing the “new man” was a task that occupied a wide range of innovative thinkers in the 1920s, but became more and more constrained by strict ideological considerations in the 1930s.

1

Encyclopedic Worldbuilding

Alexander Bogdanov and the Cognitive Creation of the New Man

Michael Coates

The new man, like the new world of communism he would inhabit, was not merely something to be imagined—he was something to be built. But what if these processes—imagination and construction—were fundamentally the same? What if imagining the new world could bring both it and the new men who would inhabit it into existence? Science-fiction writers have long seen the potential for their works to help bring about the utopias—or avert the dystopias—they describe. But there is another genre of writing that, perhaps more surreptitiously, has also fulfilled this function. That is the encyclopedia.

Encyclopedias have long been seen as tools for the transformation of human knowledge. One could trace the history of the idea back to the likes of Francis Bacon and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (if not to ancient times), through Diderot and d’Alembert, and into the nineteenth century. Even if one limits oneself to those who sought to use an encyclopedia to build socialism, the list is extensive: Henri de Saint-Simon, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Friedrich Engels, Georgii Plekhanov, Jean Jaurès, H. G. Wells, Otto Neurath, and many others planned to incorporate the writing of encyclopedic works into their political and philosophical programs.¹

Encyclopedias are a particularly powerful tool because they, characteristically, claim to describe the entire world as it is. Yet the greatest encyclopedias have rarely been oriented toward the present. Rather, they look toward the future. Diderot himself understood this: an encyclopedia must not only “know the spirit of its nation” but also get ahead of it, working “only for the following generations.” For Diderot this was, in part, a practical matter: encyclopedias frequently take many years to write, and any encyclopedia that is not forward-looking may be outdated before it has even been completed.² But it also suggests an imaginative role for the encyclopedia. Predicting the future means imagining the future, and writing for the next generation requires the imagining of both a future reader and a future world—the world that would be depicted on its pages.

In the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, there was no greater advocate for the necessity of a socialist encyclopedia than Alexander Bogdanov, the psychiatrist, philosopher, systems theorist, and Bolshevik revolutionary. There were also few who wrote as prolifically about the new man as Bogdanov did, and essentially none who worked toward his creation in so many ways, from philosophizing to teaching to writing fiction to conducting biological experiments. But out of all of Bogdanov’s efforts, the encyclopedia stood as the most central to the new man’s emergence. This is because the new man was, above all, new in his cognition—he would think in ways that were different from those of the previous generations, and all of his knowledge would be structured differently. He would hold a worldview that, while unified, was also adapted to the diverse components of modern society and conducive toward making scientific and technological progress in all areas. The creation of the new man meant the creation and propagation of this new form of cognition. The encyclopedia was to be the primary means by which both tasks would be accomplished.

Bogdanov made two efforts to produce a workers’ encyclopedia: one in conjunction with a school held on the island of Capri in 1909, and the other as a part of the postrevolutionary Proletarian Culture (Proletkul’t) movement. Neither was ultimately written, though their intellectual legacies persisted, in certain ways, into the Soviet era. The history of these projects has been examined in an article by Daniela Steila, who has reconstructed many of the discussions surrounding the Capri project in particular.³ I am largely in agreement with her reconstruction of the events on Capri. The novelty of my approach to this topic comes from its integration of Bogdanov’s ideas about encyclopedias with his cognitive theories. In particular, this chapter seeks to explain exactly why it was that Bogdanov thought that an encyclopedia was essential for achieving a cognitive, and consequently a cultural, revolution, and how his cognitive theories of the new man affected his conception of the encyclopedia. Encyclopedias had long been a structuring metaphor in his theories: I argue that, several years before Bogdanov had ever indicated a desire to produce an actual, written encyclopedia, he had already come to view being “encyclopedic” as an essential quality for any proletarian worldview or system of thought. I also emphasize the dissimilarities between the Capri encyclopedia and the later Proletkul’t project. These were, I argue, fundamentally different projects, particularly in that the first was intended to be written by intellectuals for the proletariat (with some assistance from workers), whereas the second was to be written by the proletariat for itself (with some assistance from intellectuals). The difference is indicative of a major shift in Bogdanov’s thought on the role of intellectuals in revolution and knowledge or cultural production that might be characterized as a general loss of confidence in their ability to lead such movements.

In Bogdanov’s theory, the creation of the new man’s proletarian form of cognition was in effect the construction of a new mental world. In English the term “worldbuilding” is one that is frequently used in relation to science-fiction and fantasy literature to describe the process by which imagined alternative worlds are created, with their own laws of nature, history, culture, and so on.⁴ In using the word “worldbuilding” here I want to invoke not only that usage, but also (and more directly) the Russian version of this term, mirostroitel’stvo, which was employed by Bogdanov in his work The Philosophy of Living Experience to describe the process by which the members of a particular class or other group develop their own method for organizing their experience to form a single, coherent world-picture (kartina mira). In Bogdanov’s case, the term, which he claims to have derived from the writings of the worker-philosopher Nikifor Vilonov, is in part an allusion to the god-building or bogostroitel’stvo advocated by Anatolii Luncharskii, Maxim Gorky, and others, which in basic terms sought to adapt elements of religion—particularly rituals and myths—to help imbue socialism with emotion, make it more understandable, and foster belief in it.⁵ Bogdanov’s worldbuilding, I would argue, also takes a key element from religion—the importance of a central, all-encompassing text that embodies a particular worldview and can answer more or less any essential question one might put to it. Bogdanov writes in Tektology that the Bible is the encyclopedia of the Judeo-Christian worldview; he also argues that the bourgeoisie had developed and crystallized its own worldview in the process of producing the Encyclopédie. Bogdanov accordingly believed that the creation of a new proletarian mental world, and thus a new man, could be realized only through a proletarian encyclopedia.⁶

Bogdanov’s conception of the new man of socialist society included, especially in his later years, mixed biological and psychological components. This is perhaps best reflected in his famous blood transfusion experiments, which aimed at achieving “physiological collectivism.”⁷ While Bogdanov, in his early career, was not especially concerned with the creation of a man who would be new from a physiological perspective, he had recognized the significance of physiology to his goals, advancing a biologically rooted theory of cognition.⁸ This theory, in turn, served as the basis for his theories of culture and cultural revolution, which were essential to his conception of the new man. I will argue that Bogdanov’s ideas for an encyclopedia grew, to a significant degree, from these early theories of his, and that the idea of the need for an encyclopedia likewise had a reciprocal influence on the development of his thought by serving as a kind of metaphor that structured key components of his thinking on what proletarian forms of cognition were to be. Accordingly, I will begin with an exposition of some of Bogdanov’s early theories, showing how they helped lead him to the idea of the necessity of the encyclopedia.

Bogdanov’s Early Ideas on Cognition and the Making of the New Man

In order to explain the origins of Bogdanov’s belief in the necessity of producing a socialist encyclopedia, I want to highlight a few aspects of Bogdanov’s early philosophical works, which introduced ideas that remained core to his philosophy for the remainder of his life. Chief among these were the Fundamental Elements of the Historical View on Nature of 1898 and 1901’s Cognition from a Historical Point of View. As Nikolai Krementsov has shown, these works (which grew out of Bogdanov’s medical studies in Khar’kov) can be understood as an attempt to synthesize several different philosophical tendencies, placing at the center of these viewpoints a Darwin-derived evolutionary perspective (the title “historical view”), which he considered to be characteristic of the new way of thinking.⁹ These works represent the beginnings of Bogdanov’s social-constructionist epistemology, which rooted all knowledge claims in social interaction and viewed them as having a class character. He argues that every era has its own istina (truth), which is defined by the mental content of cognition (poznanie) existing in that era. Poznanie is developed through human activity—humans, in the course of their labor, develop mental content which is adapted to the tasks that they perform and the world that they live in—this mental content includes everything that we would think of as constituting knowledge, but also things like how cause-and-effect works in our minds and other laws of thought. The measure of the value of any particular version of istina is thus how well it enables humans to navigate and act in the world in which they live. Key to this process is the function of language and words themselves, which Bogdanov discusses extensively in the Fundamental Elements. Beginning to denote mental concepts with words both stabilizes them (making them less variable) and enables them to be socialized, spreading beyond the individual in which they arose to the society at large. However, the gap between the malleability of mental concepts and the relative permanence of words still poses a number of problems for Bogdanov: “people never, in essence, speak in exactly one and the same language. Two representatives of one nation, one tribe, estate [soslovie], class, even two members of the same family never attach entirely the same meaning to the same words. It is possible, finally, to say that about a single individual taken in different periods of their life.” In daily life this does not present much of a problem, since, generally speaking, the differences in understanding are not so great that people are left talking past one another. But in the realm of science Bogdanov finds that the concepts associated with words vary sharply among individuals. What Bogdanov proposes as a solution is to redefine more specialized concepts in terms of more basic or general ones as a means for bridging understanding.¹⁰

The precise mechanism through which the mental adaptation that constitutes cognition takes place is what Bogdanov terms “psychological reactions,” which are essentially energy-saving mental processes based on the plasticity of the brain, an idea that had been introduced only in 1890 by William James.¹¹ Bogdanov classifies the reactions into three categories based on how conservative they are: there are those that are highly plastic and are specific to individuals, having been developed in the course of their life; there are those that are highly conservative, being shared across the entire human species; and there is an intermediate level that Bogdanov associates with culture, and therefore with particular classes or other groups. Adaptations of the first, highly plastic category that arise in an individual can become socialized and shared across the cultural group if they prove to be useful to anyone other than the individual in which they developed; this is done through the process of communication.¹² They thus become a part of the intermediate, or cultural, level. One consequence of this theory is that any attempt to have a cultural revolution or otherwise transform culture will necessarily be an attempt to alter this intermediate level of psychological reaction. As I will argue, the production of the encyclopedia was to be the key venue for performing this task (just as blood exchanges were his method for altering the fundamental, biological level).

Bogdanov’s theory of the reflexes or reactions and their implications represented the major intellectual development of Cognition from a Historical Point of View. In the few years following its publication Bogdanov became increasingly inv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Names, Transliterations, and Translations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: On Words and Meanings
• Part I Nurturing the New Man
• Part II Imagining the New Man
• Part III Displaying the New Man
• Conclusion: The New Man: One Hundred Years Later
• Notes
• Further Reading
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright