2

From Positivism to Collectivism:
Lunacharsky and Proletarian Culture

Anatoly Vasilevich Lunacharsky anticipated a revolution that would bring about a victory over death. Not that he adhered to religious orthodoxy of any kind, or believed in immortality or resurrection in any literal sense. Publicly, he became and remained a confirmed atheist. But his positivist vision of a scientific utopia run by the proletariat contained within it a basic religious and even mystical urge which ran through all of his political and philosophical writings. Socialism for Lunacharsky was not a system of economic or political ideas alone, but a form of religion; his atheism was itself a kind of faith. He believed that immortality could come about through the heroic deeds and the collective memory of the revolutionary proletariat. The body of his political philosophy was a legacy from nineteenth- and early twentieth- century positivism: the “religion of humanity” of Auguste Comte, the socialist religion of Joseph Dietzgen, the “empiriocriticism” of the German philosopher Richard Avenarius and the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, and the “empiriomonism” of Lunacharsky’s brother-in-law, the far more original thinker A. A. Bogdanov. At its heart lay a modern sense of the power of myth, mind, and self contained in the writings of Walt Whitman, the Belgian playwrights Maurice Maeterlinck and Emile Verhaeren, and the French political philosopher Georges Sorel. Out of this mixture of European and American thought and literature, around 1909-1910, Lunacharsky created his own theory of a future “proletarian culture” that would fuse the political vision of the Bolsheviks with the artistic vision of the avant-garde. Divided between innovation and revolution, art and politics, Lunacharsky sought to unite them.

As People’s Commissar for Public Enlightenment in the 1920s, Lunacharsky was the most important figure linking Bolsheviks and artists in the early days of Soviet rule. In fact, he liked to describe himself as “an intellectual among Bolsheviks and a Bolshevik among intellectuals.” Subsidies for the arts, education, and publishing all flowed liberally from Lunacharsky’s commissariat (Narkompros), and many writers and artists turned their pens and brushes to the support of the new regime. Still, Lunacharsky’s life was beset by contradictions. Although he criticized the Russian avant-garde for being the “fruit of the unhealthy atmosphere of the boulevards of bourgeois Paris and the cafés of bourgeois Munich,” he had lived virtually all of his adult life before 1917 in Western Europe, and he knew the streets of Paris, Geneva, and Florence as well as those of Moscow and St. Petersburg.¹ Lunacharsky was, in addition, a Ukrainian among Russians and an author, journalist, and literary critic among revolutionaries. Lenin found him to be a man of “French brilliance,” useful to the Bolsheviks but not quite one of them; Gorky considered him “lyrically minded but muddle-headed.”² Finally, Lunacharsky was a Marxist atheist who could never dispose of religious seeking.

Lunacharsky came of age at a time when the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein had thrown Marxism as a philosophical doctrine into theoretical disarray. After the failure of the Dutch general strike of 1903 and the Russian Revolution of 1905, a left wing of European socialism began to emphasize the myth-making, ideological, and even religious dimensions of Marxism as a belief-system capable of inspiring mass action, even if the doctrine had proven unreliable as a description of historical reality or inevitable revolution. The leaders of this left-wing dissension were mainly Dutch—the poets Hermann Gorter and Henri- ette Roland-Holst and the astronomer Anton Pannekoek, who had been expelled from the Dutch socialist party in 1909 and had subsequently united around the journal Tribune. But the dissension was European in scope, and it was partly inspired by the rediscovery of the nineteenth- century philosopher and friend of Marx, Joseph Dietzgen.

“Dietzgenism”—the view that socialism was not unlike a religion and constituted, like any other epistemology, only a relatively true description of reality—became very popular as a doctrine of direct mass action in Europe after 1905 and again during the postwar revolutionary turmoil of 1919-1920. Lenin vilified the doctrine, both in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism of 1909, where he condemned the “god-builders” among the Bolshevik left, and in his “Left-Wing Communism”: An In fantile Disorder of 1920, where he attacked the European (and especially Dutch) left for their extra-parliamentary enthusiasms for mass action and independence from Moscow. But when Lunacharsky discovered such views after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, they had considerable appeal as a remedy for past mistakes and an exhortation for future revolution. Dietzgen’s views also gave Marxism a new religious dimension. As one socialist wrote in 1907, “Dietzgenism, in solving the problems of the present life where religion is a self-confessed failure, merits greater confidence than religion in questions of the future life, of which religion makes a specialty.”³ Dietzgen’s views, rediscovered around 1906 by European socialists, appear to have been a central factor in Lunacharsky’s own thinking when he articulated his theory of a proletarian culture. In order to understand Lunacharsky’s revolutionary vision of a proletarian culture, then, we must examine the intellectual world of Europe on the eve of the First World War.

I

There is general agreement that an intellectual revolution occurred in Europe between about 1890 and 1914.⁴ There is less agreement as to the nature of that revolution. Certainly there was a rebellion against the great philosophical systems of the nineteenth century. In physics, the ether theory collapsed in the face of the results of the Michelson- Morley experiment of 1887, which detected no apparent drift of any ether with respect to the earth. Attempts to explain the negative results of that experiment led to confusion, ended only in 1905 when Albert Einstein overthrew the Newtonian synthesis of classical mechanics with the theory of special relativity. In philosophy, at Cambridge, England, the systematic metaphysics of Hegel fell victim to the reduction of ethics to language by G. E. Moore and the reduction of mathematics to logic by Bertrand Russell. On the continent the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl claimed to provide a means whereby all experience could be reduced to its “essences” by “bracketing” everything inessential, including the unverifiable assumptions of metaphysics. Liberalism no longer sufficed as a systematic doctrine of progress centered on the protection of the individual from the powers of the state, attacked on the left by socialism and anarchism and on the right by racism and antiSemitism. This aspect of the intellectual revolution was largely negative, a demolition of old systems and a reduction of knowledge to its supposed hard essentials, such as the postulates of special relativity and Principia Mathematica, and a refusal to accept a priori assumptions about the universe.

By the turn of the century science in general no longer claimed to possess a true knowledge of an absolute universe. Instead, there was a new emphasis on the power of the human mind to reorder the universe once the ground was cleared of metaphysical debris. Einstein himself in his great Gedanken-experiment did not derive special relativity theory from the negative empirical results of any experiment; rather, he simply postulated the constancy of the speed of light and the principle of relativity, which together provided more consistent explanations of both past and future experimental results. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré described scientific laws simply as useful conventions in his Science and Hypothesis (1902); the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach dismissed the “conceptual monstrosity of absolute space” in any Newtonian sense. This questioning of old axioms and postulating of new ones was not entirely novel. In the nineteenth century, mathematicians such as Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and Riemann had created entire geometries by ignoring or negating one or more of Euclid’s postulates. But now physics was describing in mathematical terms a universe which appeared nonsensical to most laymen. Einstein’s mathematics teacher, Hermann Minkowski, for example, gave a lecture in Cologne in September 1908 entitled “Space and Time,” where he reduced the concept of time to a mathematical variable, the fourth dimension in four-dimensional space. In an Alice-in-Wonderland sense, words such as “space” and “time” had come to mean precisely what their user said they meant. Like the velocity of a particle approaching the speed of light, their meaning varied with the position of the observer.

The crisis in science and philosophy was matched by a crisis of faith. Darwin’s biology and Nietzsche’s philosophy picked up where the earlier biblical criticism of the Left Hegelians had left off, attacking the claims of Christianity to truths relevant to the modern world. Many found religion no more satisfying than science in offering a meaningful explanation of the world. Other doctrines such as Christian Science and theosophy became enormously popular as replacements for the church. If mind took on new meaning to scientists and philosophers, then the irrational became equally important to the bewildered. The most popular philosopher in prewar France, Henri Bergson, had himself undergone a rather typical conversion from the scientific positivism of Herbert Spencer to a discovery that time was lived duration, a stream of experience, rather than a mere dimension described in geometric and spatial metaphors. Truth was not revealed by intellect, but by intuition; the driving force behind all human endeavor was not mind but the more visceral élan vital. In his poetic summation of his views, Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson reached an almost feverish optimism regarding the power of man:

The whole of humanity, in space and time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.⁵

Although he did not employ the term “unconscious” used by Eduard Hartmann and Sigmund Freud, Bergson was equally concerned with the deeper and more irrational level of the human psyche. But unlike Freud the scientist, he transformed it into a weapon against the mind of man.

Bergson revitalized belief and made it intellectually legitimate. In the social sciences too there was a new perception of the importance of mind, religion, and myth in motivating people; truth was what people believed in and acted upon. Max Weber and Emile Durkheim as sociologists discovered that religious beliefs could be more significant than rational economic interests in determining the growth of capitalism or the prevention of suicide. Marxism too underwent a process of “revision” in the 1890s, not only in terms of an accommodation with capitalist society through reform rather than revolution, but also in its philosophical structure. Men like Weber and Benedetto Croce no longer considered Marxism a scientific formulation of laws regarding economic and political society, but a useful hypothesis to be tested against the data of social science. For Georges Sorel in his Reflections on Violence (1906), Marxism and the myth of the “general strike” were simply surrogate religious doctrines appealing intuitively to the unconscious of the proletariat. If they believed, they might well act in such a manner as to confirm that belief by making the myth a reality.

Art, too, reflected the crises of science and of faith. In painting and music after 1905 form and color no longer imitated reality, and notes no longer obeyed the rules of harmony. Rather, they became the essential elements to be manipulated and reassembled in an “abstract” or “atonal” manner by the mind of the painter or composer. The visual world dematerialized on canvas as surely as ether and matter in the face of the Bohr atom and the x-ray. The purpose of art was no longer to represent any supposed absolute reality, but to communicate the vision of the artist to the viewer or listener through a new language. The essence of art was expression, not imitation. For the artist, too, truth was relative to his own position and view of the world.

The intellectual revolution, then, was perhaps less of a shift from positivism to idealism, from science to religion, than a creative tension between them. Philosophies such as Bergson’s vitalism and William James’s pragmatism, with their “will to believe,” expressed a continuing struggle between religious questions and scientific answers. Few could still believe in the absolute truth of either science or religion. But it was equally difficult to do without them. The beliefs might not be true, but the will to believe was unmistakable. And that will to believe could certainly be studied and even manipulated by others. In pre-1914 Europe both positivism and symbolism reflected this will to believe.

Positivism as a nineteenth-century philosophical system had flourished as a religion of science since its creation by Auguste Comte in the 1830s. Like other systems, it was greatly changed by the intellectual revolution at the turn of the century. Comte’s positivism, or positive philosophy, argued that things exist only in our experience and that there are no universais behind them. The world is simply a collection of observable facts ordered by science, and science provides our only means of knowing reality. All value judgments—such as the naming of things “good” or “evil”—are beyond our experience, and therefore not scientifically knowable. On these assumptions Comte fused the experimental method of Francis Bacon, the search for simplicity and economy of William of Ockham, and the skepticism of David Hume into a single philosophy which proclaimed science the only basis for a good society. Men, individually and in society, had outgrown their earlier adherence to theology and metaphysics; now they would turn to science, the “religion of humanity.”⁶

At the turn of the century positivism existed primarily as the philosophy of “empiriocriticism.” Empiriocriticism defined the world as pure experience but went even further than positivism by eliminating the self from any role in the perception of that experience. One of the leading exponents of empiriocriticism was Richard Avenarius (1843-1896), who taught at the University of Zurich in the 1880s and 1890s. In his Critique of Pure Experience (1888-1890), Avenarius taught that all knowledge is a product of the central nervous system; it is a biological fact. There is no dualism between mind and matter; experience is all-encompassing, and no distinction may be made between self and environment, subject and object. From “Ockham’s razor”—the admonition that “entities are not to be multiplied unnecessarily”—Avenarius proceeded to define a “principle of economy” whereby the mind tends to economize and simplify in order to remember and transmit experience; science is therefore a kind of mental shorthand for describing experience. Like Husserl’s phenomenology, empiriocriticism sought to eliminate or “bracket” the subject or self in order to arrive at knowledge of a more essential and primitive world of concrete experiential data. For Avenarius, therefore, truth was not a set of laws revealed by science but merely a form of biological cognition of pure experience.

The second major exponent of empiriocriticism at the turn of the century was the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (18381916). Initially, in the 1860s, Mach came under the influence of Gustav Theodor Fechner and his book The Elements of Psychophysics (1860). Fechner’s new science purported to measure precisely the relations between physical and mental phenomena, for example, S = K log R, or “the magnitude of a sensation is proportional to the logarithm of its stimulus.”⁷ Later, Mach rejected Fechner in favor of a doctrine that the world consists only of our sensations and criticized the Newtonian spacetime universe in terms not unlike those used by George Berkeley. Like Avenarius, Mach also adopted the notion of “economy,” that science consists of the simplest possible descriptions of our experience. But we know that experience only through our sensations, bundles of which constitute what we call our “self.” For Mach there was in fact no “I” or soul; yet in the pantheistic world of experience, one’s ideas, at least, can live on in the consciousness of others, providing a certain kind of immortality. Mach himself remained an atheist and after 1905 flirted with socialism, which undoubtedly made him attractive to some Bolshevik intellectuals. But he retained a sense of immortality in the persistence of experience of which we are all a part.

The most succinct statement of Mach’s views was probably his Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations (1886). In this work he argued that the self is simply a “complex of memories, moods, and feelings, joined to a particular body,” and is no more permanent than that body. In fact, he declared, “the world consists only of our sensations.” We must give up the notion of immortality in any religious sense; yet what we call our self “remains preserved in others even after the death of the individual” through their memory of us. In life we are constantly changing. Therefore “that which we so much dread in death, the annihilation of our permanency, actually occurs in life in abundant measure.”⁸ Though opposed to organized religion, Mach was often concerned with religious questions. He had rejected Fechner’s pantheistic universe of interconnected forms where plants and planets had souls in a common universal consciousness reminiscent of the Swedish engineer-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. But he had been influenced by Fechner’s belief that “death is only a second birth into a freer existence,” and that the dead live on in our memory.⁹ Mach’s scientific positivism was tinged with both the relativism of modern science and a strong undercurrent of religious seeking.

The same fusion of science and religion existed among Mach’s many followers at the turn of the century. He was most popular on the continent, especially in Zurich because of the teachings of Avenarius. But his views were also popularized in England by the mathematician Karl Pearson (1857-1936) in his Grammar of Science ( 1892). Pearson agreed with Mach that “space and time are not realities of the phenomenal world, but the modes under which we perceive things apart.”¹⁰ But Pearson the scientist was also fascinated by the question of death, which he pursued using probability theory to show that it was not a random occurrence but struck with varying frequency during different phases of a person’s life. In America, too, Mach’s views were popular at the turn of the century through the work of William James and the support of Paul Cams (1852-1919), editor of the journal Monist. In Russia his influence dated from 1875 when a Russian student, G. V. Osnobchin, had worked in Mach’s Prague laboratory. By the 1890s Mach’s writings were widely used in Russian schools, and he had at least one regular correspondent and translator in P. K. Engelmeyer, a Moscow factory owner and automobile inventor. In 1906 Engelmeyer wrote Mach that “the intellectual situation in Russia is very favorable for the acceptance of your views,” and in 1910 he helped found the Moscow Society for Positivism.¹¹ Thus by the time Lenin launched his own attack against Mach and his Russian followers in 1909, Mach had been well known in Russia for more than a decade.

The positivism or empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius was therefore quite different from the original vision of Comte. Science no longer dealt in absolutes but in relative definitions and hypotheses; “space” and “time” were shorthand economical conventions to describe our experience. The crisis in physics helped give Mach a sense of truth as contingent hypothesis, rather than absolute natural law. The crisis of faith had given him a thrust toward secular immortality, a view that the self lives on in the consciousness of others even as death ends the life of the body. And it was through Mach that the European intellectual revolution involving both science and the irrational reached Russia and entered Russian Marxism. Here his effect was ambivalent. For while Mach’s views subverted any Marxist claims to the possession of absolute truth, they also suggested the power of Marxism as a hypothetical myth driving men to action. Lenin feared the first implication; Lunacharsky welcomed the second.

Symbolism, like positivism, fused the religious and the scientific, or at least the modern. Symbolist poetry and drama were intensely concerned with the problem of death, and some of the symbolists also welcomed the city and revolution as signs of modernity. Unlike positivism, symbolism perceived the world on two distinct levels: the surface, material level apparent to most people and the deeper, more spiritual level, accessible to the few and represented through the symbolic. In symbolism the sense of the religious, the occult, and the spiritual was far more powerful than in positivism, a dominant rather than a subdominant theme. Both movements were highly influential in Russia before 1914, sometimes with the very same individuals.

The most popular prewar symbolist dramatist, the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), was fascinated throughout his life with the problem of death. In his plays death assumes a role akin to fate in general, a sensed presence which dominates man’s life, as in his Pelléas et Mélisande (1892). In Maeterlinck’s later plays, however, love begins to triumph over death and despair, and the tone becomes more optimistic. In The Death of Tintagiles (1894), Tintagiles’s sister Ygraine actually defies death, and the other characters become active personages rather than passive toys of fate. In 1905 Maeterlinck reached the peak of his new optimism with The Blue Bird, a tale not unlike James Barrie’s Peter Pan, where children are engaged in a dreamlike search for the bluebird of happiness. In The Blue Bird death is still the great riddle of the universe. But man has infinite power over nature: “Man is God!” the dog reminds the children Mytyl and Tytyl. Communication with the dead is possible. “How can they be dead,” the fairy asks the children regarding their grandparents, “when they live in your memory? The dead who are remembered live as happily as though they were not dead.” “We are always here,” the dead grandmother reminds the children, “waiting for a visit from those who are alive. . . . They come so seldom.” Lunacharsky later argued that the Moscow Art Theater had misinterpreted The Blue Bird by ignoring Maeterlinck’s optimistic attitude toward death and fate. The expectation in the play is that the King of the Three Planets will soon arrive to bring happiness to Earth, Mars, and the Moon for thirty-five years. “Where are the dead?” asks Mytyl at the end of the play, and Tytyl answers: “There are no dead.”¹²

Maeterlinck was drawn to both spiritualism and socialism before 1914. In Paris he read the works of Eduard Schuré, the occultist, and investigated sorcery, theosophy, and animal intelligence. In 1913 he wrote a book on death entitled La Mort. But he also considered himself a socialist, and his ultimate world of God in man was a kind of socialist utopia. In Russia his works were enormously popular. The Blue Bird premiered in Moscow in September 1908 and was translated into Russian; so were The Death of Tintagiles, Monna Vanna, and Sister Beatrice, all of which were performed on the Soviet stage in the 1920s. Maeterlinck was, in short, a modem mystic whose symbolism alluded to the world beyond, and who offered a sense of hope for both the religious and the secular worlds.

Another Belgian, the lyric poet Emile Verhaeren, was equally popular in Europe before 1914. Like Maeterlinck, he shared the symbolist sense of two levels of reality, but he also articulated a less typical enthusiasm for urban society, the machine, and an imminent revolution. His most influential work was probably his play Les Aubes (The Dawn, 1898). In this drama he intertwined Christian and revolutionary metaphors to provide an ecstatic anticipation of the future. “Of what use is ancient wisdom, prudent, systematic, buried in books?” asks the revolutionary, Hérénien; “It forms part of the humanity of yesterday; mine dates from today.” The revolution itself occurs on Easter, but Hérénien is killed. “Is it true Hérénien is dead?” asks a beggar. “He!” replies a gypsy, “He is master and king now. People don’t die when they are so great as that.” For Hérénien has achieved his own kind of revolutionary immortality. Because the revolution has succeeded, “the country will be reborn.” In addition, he has achieved deathless fame. “Jacques Hérénien lives still,” declares another character, LeBreux, “in his words, in his acts, in his thoughts, in his books; he is the force which now exalts us; he wills, thinks, hopes, acts in us. This is not his burial, it is his last victory.”¹³

Symbolism began as a movement in French poetry during the 1870s and 1880s. At times it moved toward solipsism, mysticism, the cult of the Rosy Cross, and other mysteries which webbed the individual within the confines of fate. On the surface, therefore, it appears to be an unlikely doctrine for an activist to embrace. But in its later phase, on the eve of 1914, symbolism acquired a more revolutionary dimension, epitomized by the optimism of Maeterlinck and the revolutionary urbanism of Verhaeren. Symbolism could mean action in this life, as well as brooding over the infinite mystery of the next one. The elite of seers might some day not simply transcend bourgeois society but also transform it.

Both positivism and symbolism were greatly altered by the intellectual revolution in Europe after 1890. To a Marxist like Lunacharsky, they provided a certain intellectual sophistication and modernist appeal lacking in the writings of Marx and Engels. Mach, Maeterlinck, and Verhaeren all flirted with socialism after 1905, which made their philosophies that much more acceptable in Marxist circles. Together, they provided a new emphasis on the role of belief in motivating individuals to act. Each was crucial to Lunacharsky in building a religion of revolution which would transcend the death of the self by immortalizing the collective.

II

Visions of a new revolutionary culture distinct from that of bourgeois society had been common in Europe since the revolutions of 1848. Comte himself wrote that “when a stable and homogeneous, and at the same time progressive state of society shall have been established under the positive philosophy, the fine arts will flourish more than they ever did under polytheism, finding new scope and prerogatives under the new intellectual regime.”¹⁴ The idea that the artist belonged to his own revolutionary elite, the avant-garde, which was artistically ahead of and politically antagonistic to bourgeois society, was a commonplace in Paris by the 1830s. But the world of art, sex, morphine, and absinthe characterized on the Parisian stage as “bohemia” represented an escape from bourgeois society that was hardly suited to a socialist revolution.

Richard Wagner provided a more appropriate vision of cultural revolution in 1848. Wagner envisioned the artist not only transcending society but transforming it. The art of the future would be a mass art, a popular culture reflecting social values and letting each citizen see himself or herself in the cathartic mirror of art, as in ancient Greek tragedy. Centering on music, it would also be a synthesis of all the arts. In his essay “Art and Revolution,” written in 1849 and translated into Russian in 1906, Wagner criticized art whose aim was “the gaining of gold” at the box office; rather, he idealized the “free Greek” who could “procreate art from the very joy of manhood.” Like Marx, Wagner praised the worker with his “mechanic’s pride in the moral consciousness of his labor” and abhorred the “criminal passivity or immoral activity of the rich.” The future culture that Wagner described in 1849 would be created by workers for workers; later Wagner’s own festivals at Bayreuth would idealize ancient Germans, catering to the well-to-do. But in the wake of the upheavals of 1848 his vision of cultural revolution was apocalyptic:

In godlike ecstasy they leap from the ground; the poor, the hungering, the bowed by misery, are they no longer; proudly they raise themselves erect, inspiration shines from their ennobled faces, a radiant light streams from their eyes, and with the heaven-shaking cry, I am a Man! the millions, the embodied Revolution, the God become Man, rush down to the valleys and plains, and proclaim to all the world the new gospel of happiness.¹⁵

By the end of the century Wagner’s vision had been neither realized, nor entirely forgotten. The dominant cultural vision was the “imminent rebirth of Greek antiquity” predicted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the elitism of the superman-poet as acted out by the dandy and the aesthete and danced by Isadora Duncan. But the vision of a mass workers’ culture persisted.

The term “proletarian culture” probably made its first appearance in 1909, when used by Bogdanov. But the idea had existed long before. In the 1870s the self-taught Rhenish tanner Joseph Dietzgen (18281898) had proposed a “religion of social democracy” and earned from Marx the label “our philosopher.” Dietzgen predicted a “coming great revolution” of industrial socialism in the tradition of Greek civilization, Christianity, the Reformation, and the French Revolution:

The new faith, the faith of the proletariat, revolutionizes everything, and transforms after the manner of science, the old faiths. In opposition to the olden times, we say, Sun, stand thou still, and Earth, move and transform! In the old religion man served the gospel, in the new religion the gospel is to serve man.

Dietzgen’s cultural vision was heavy with religious overtones. Marxism itself would someday become a kind of popular religion. “Conscious, systematic organization of social labor,” he wrote, “is the redeemer of modern times.”¹⁶ But Dietzgen’s ideas remained little known until Ernst Mach and others rediscovered them after 1905. While Dietzgen’s sense of Marxism as cultural myth now took on new meaning, it provided no precise guidelines as to what a workers’ culture would be.

Only after the turn of the century did the idea of a proletarian culture begin to catch on among European socialists. Karl Kautsky and Emile Vandervelde both began to speak about the need for a new art and culture in a new socialist society. Klara Zetkin, speaking on “Art and the Proletariat” at a conference in Stuttgart in 1910, observed that “the working class wants not only to enjoy art but to create it.”¹⁷ Socialist schools for workers were established at Ruskin College at Oxford in 1899 and at the Rand School of Social Science in New York in 1906. But Marxism as a doctrine had always placed art and culture in the derivative “superstructure” of society, not in its economic “substructure.” While theoreticians such as George Plekhanov considered the arts a class-bound product of bourgeois society, they provided no specific guidelines as to what should constitute an art by and of the proletariat.

Some European artists were also interested in a workers’ art. In England, William Morris propounded a guild socialism which would return the arts to their medieval status as handicrafts; for Morris, the crucial arts were not decorative but functional: furniture design, book printing, and tapestry, for example. The act of creation would become an act of production, the artist a worker, and the worker an artist. On the continent, Art Nouveau or Jugendstil produced a flourishing arts- and-crafts movement, exemplified by the colony at Darmstadt where artists worked on interior design, furniture, and other applied arts, which were to be both ornamental and inexpensive. In 1907 a group of artists organized the Werkbund in Germany, a forerunner of the Bauhaus, which produced silverware, streetlamps, factories, sewing machines, and book jackets; two members of the Werkbund, Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius, also began to design factories, notably the AEG Turbine Plant in Berlin (1908) and the Fagus Shoe Factory in Alfeld (1911-1913).¹⁸ The artists of this movement thought their work should be functional rather than decorative, providing objects for living and working.

In the years before World War I there was also a fascination with the motion and rhythm of work, a theme that later found its way into early Soviet culture. In part, this interest was manifest in the revival of sports and dancing through the Olympic Games, in the free-flowing movements of Isadora Duncan, and in the eurhythmies movement of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze. But in the factory, too, workers’ movements were studied by the American efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose dme-and-motion analyses included the use of stop watches and film. In 1912 another American, F. B. Gilbreth, took movies of bricklayers with lightbulbs fastened to their arms and legs in order to record the geometry of their motions. Lenin and A. K. Gastev, one of Lunacharsky’s proletarian-culture students in Paris, would become enamored of such methods in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, for labor itself was an integral part of a workers’ culture.

These developments reflected a growing concern with the role of culture and art in a mass industrial society. But what exactly constituted a workers culture? Several definitions were offered. First, workers’ culture might be the workers’ immediate environment: the system of movement, organization, decoration, and sound enclosed in the walls of a factory. Second, it might be the entertainment provided to workers after working hours—a culture for workers but created very possibly by artists who were not workers themselves and embodying those elements in Western culture which would appeal to them. Third, it might be a culture actually created by workers through their poetry, songs, or paintings, a culture by the proletariat, rather than simply for the proletariat. None of these definitions were mutually exclusive; often they were all lumped together in the term “proletarian art” or “proletarian culture.”

In Russia an interest in mass culture existed long before the 1917 Revolution. The Populists of the 1870s collected workers’ poems and folksongs and taught in workers’ Sunday schools. The writer Maxim Gorky sponsored a popular publishing program, Znanie, before World War I. Workers’ clubs were founded, offering lectures, music lessons, plays, and choral groups. But these activities were overshadowed by the cultural brilliance of the Silver Age, an elitist and westernized movement that featured the music of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, the singing of Chaliapin, and the ballets of Diaghilev. It is not surprising, therefore, that Lunacharsky drew his vision of proletarian culture from Western intellectual sources and not from the Russian proletariat. ^Ill

III

Lunacharsky belonged to the generation of 1905, the aesthetes.¹⁹ But unlike most artists of that generation, he was permanently converted to Marxism in the 1890s, as a student. If he moved from positivism to idealism, it was within the intellectual context of a doctrine he never relinquished. The center of the aesthetes was St. Petersburg, but Lunacharsky was born in the provincial town of Poltava in the Ukraine in 1875. Many factors impelled him toward a revolutionary career. His family was broken from his birth; his mother left his father and married A. I. Antonov, a state auditor who worked in Nizhnyi Novgorod and later Kursk. Although a government employee, Antonov held radical views and often criticized the Imperial regime and the church, encouraging Lunacharsky in his atheism from an early age. His mother, Aleksandra Yakovlevna, was a cultured and educated woman who, according to Lunacharsky, found to her horror that her child had become a “little Antichrist” in his religious outlook. When Lunacharsky was nine years old, his stepfather died and his mother moved to Kiev. In adolescence, therefore, Lunacharsky lacked both a religion and a father. He found a home, instead, in the revolutionary movement.

Kiev had been a traditional point of entry for Western ideas, and in the 1890s the dominant Western novelty was Marxism. In Kiev Lunacharsky spent his adolescence in the harsh and arbitrary environment of the First Gymnasium, where he studied foreign languages, literature, and music, while immersing himself outside of school in Marxism. He later claimed that by the time he was fifteen he had read Das Kapital, joined a socialist group from the university, and organized his own circle of some two hundred gymnasium students. He also debated Marxism with some exiled Polish students, held secret meetings at night across the Dnieper River, and lived under the watchful eye of the police. By age eighteen, Lunacharsky’s revolutionary activity had deepened to include propaganda work among railway workers and artisans in the suburb of Solomenka and his first published articles on Marxism for a local hectographed student journal.

In the mid-1890s Lunacharsky experienced his first direct contact with Europe. In 1895, at the age of twenty, he left for Switzerland to study at a university. His record at the gymnasium had not been impressive; Lunacharsky later claimed that his poor grades in conduct, inflicted because of his political activity, had kept him from entering a Russian university. But there was a positive attraction to studying in Europe as well. The center of Russian Marxism was then George Plekhanov’s Group for the Emancipation of Labor, and Plekhanov and Paul Akselrod were generally considered to be Russia’s leading Marxist theoreticians. In addition, another Kiev student just back from Switzerland had told Lunacharsky about the modish philosophy of the day, the empiriocriticism of Avenarius, then lecturing at the University of Zurich. Both Marxism and positivist philosophy helped pull Lunacharsky abroad. Promising his mother that he would return regularly, Lunacharsky left for the West bearing a letter of recommendation to Akselrod.

Lunacharsky found his brief stay in Zurich (he was there only a few months) enormously stimulating. Just being away from home made him feel “completely independent.”²⁰ At the university in Zurich he found a rich library, interesting classes, and a welcome colony of other young Russian radical students. From Paul Akselrod—“my real spiritual father”—he received further lessons in the finer points of Marxist doctrine. When Plekhanov visited Akselrod for a few days, the brash Lunacharsky took him on in a debate over the relative merits of Hegel and Avenarius; the next day he returned his volumes of Schopenhauer to the library and emerged with an armload of Feuerbach, Helvetius, Diderot, and Marx. In addition to the Marxist tradition, Lunacharsky had his first direct contact with one of the major figures of European positivism and empiriocriticism, Richard Avenarius. From his lectures and writings Lunacharsky quickly acquired a view of the world as pure experience, where the self existed only as a part of a larger unity of mind and matter, psychology was a branch of physiology, and only science provided an accurate description of reality. Plekhanov’s views on art as a product of social class were important to Lunacharsky, but the legacy of positivism was to be deeper and more profound.

A series of personal tragedies soon forced Lunacharsky to leave Zurich. In 1895 his older brother, Platon Vasilevich, had fallen seriously ill in Nice and was believed near death. For nearly a year Lunacharsky remained by his side at Nice and Rheims during his slow convalescence. At the end of 1896 he was able to resume a more normal existence, moving on to Paris. Here he attended the lectures of the eminent Russian legal historian M. M. Kovalevsky, lectured on Marxism to Russian student groups, read voraciously, and visited museums. By 1897 his brother had sufficiently recovered (although still partially paralyzed and walking with the aid of a cane) that Lunacharsky was able to move him back to Russia. Lunacharsky discovered that, despite his political interests, it was safe for him to remain there, because his near-sightedness made him draft exempt. But the whole affair was extremely trying and foreshadowed more personal tragedy to come—the deaths of Lunacharsky’s own children.

At twenty-two Lunacharsky had returned from Europe with a wide reading knowledge of philosophy, art, and religion, and a continued commitment to Marxism as a revolutionary ideology. He now entered the risky world of clandestine revolutionary work in Moscow, joining the circle of A. I. Elizarova, Lenin’s sister. The Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party had not yet been formed (its first congress was held in Minsk in 1898), and the very existence of Bolshevism lay five years in the future. But Lunacharsky was soon in contact with the future Bolshevik fraction in Moscow. After a year or two of revolutionary activity, the Moscow circle was exposed by one of its members, a police agent named A. E. Serebriakova, in April 1899. Lunacharsky was arrested for the first time and released to the care of his family by a lenient gendarme, initially to the home of his natural father near Poltava, then to join his mother again in Kiev.

But arrest and exile only intensified Lunacharsky’s Marxist activities. In Kiev he contacted his old socialist friends and rejoined their circles. Although his main activity now was writing articles for legal Marxist journals in Kiev, he was under constant police surveillance. Arrested for a second time, he spent most of the summer and early autumn of 1899 in a Kievan jail. Released in October, he received his first sentence to exile at the town of Kaluga on the Oka River. Exile, like study in Zurich, put him in contact with new revolutionary friends, among them a medical student and the future controversial philosopher of Bolshevism, A. A. Bogdanov, and an erudite economist, I. I. Skvortsev (Stepanov). The group was soon spreading Marxist propaganda among the Kaluga railway workers and school teachers, lecturing to employees of the self-styled Owenite factory owner, D. D. Goncharov, and making illegal trips to Moscow. But leniency had its limits, and the local governor-general soon disbanded the group, sending Lunacharsky to Viatka and Bogdanov to Vologda.

Exile also revived Lunacharsky’s considerable interest in literature and philosophy. After spending most of 1901 at Viatka reading and translating the works of the German poet Richard Dehmel, Lunacharsky received a letter from Bogdanov suggesting that the group of exiles at Vologda was intellectually more stimulating. Lunacharsky requested and, remarkably, was granted a transfer there. In February 1902 he arrived at Vologda, a rail center north of Moscow and east of St. Petersburg. Here he found that the dominant figure was another Marxist from Kiev, Nikolai Berdyaev; Berdyaev was then undergoing his own conversion “from Marxism to idealism” and Lunacharsky soon entered into sharp conflict with him. Berdyaev’s new philosophical idealism stressed the dualist separation of spirit and matter, religion and science, and sought a renewal of both ethical philosophy and Christianity. Such a philosophy was anathema to a positivist and a Marxist. In criticizing Berdyaev, Lunacharsky employed not only what he understood to be the positivist empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius, which he had absorbed in Switzerland, but also some ideas he had acquired from Bogdanov. An explication of these ideas is essential for an understanding of Lunacharsky’s later career.²¹

IV

Berdyaev’s philosophy of 1902 and his gradual conversion from Marxism to idealism were part of a general movement within the Russian intelligentsia that was called “god-seeking,” or bogoiskatel’stvo, by critical outsiders. Under the repressive regime of Alexander III and his Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, many intellectuals considered religion in any orthodox sense as simply an arm of the hated Imperial government. At the same time, in the 1880s and 1890s, some Russan writers who rejected the earlier realism and materialism of the “men of the sixties” sought to reinterpret religion, philosophy, and ethics and make them philosophically respectable once again. The prophets of this movement were Dostoevsky, whose Grand Inquisitor had turned Christianity into mockery and deception; Tolstoi, who separated the teachings of Christ and the spiritual light within all men from the practice of the Orthodox Church, which excommunicated him; and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, who predicted an imminent Third Kingdom of Christian redemption, which would come to earth only after the rule of Antichrist. At the turn of the century the leading exponents of the new religious sensibility were Berdyaev, another Kiev Marxist-turned-philosopher, Sergei Bulgakov, and the literary critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky. Tolstoi’s acid criticism of organized Christianity as an arm of the state had recently appeared in his novel Resurrection (1899); a year later the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev died, leaving a number of disciples among the young symbolist poets. Religious seeking was in the air.

Bogdanov and Lunacharsky, by contrast, were atheists and Marxists who saw the turn to religion as a threat to the new Marxist labor movement emerging in Russia. Bogdanov was by far the more original thinker. Bogdanov, trained in medicine and psychology, but practiced in neither, combined a confusing mixture of European positivism and science into a philosophy in which man (through his power to organize his world) became God, and society moved toward a utopian collectivist future.²² Bogdanov’s scheme of things owed more to Darwin than to Marx. For the key to Bogdanov’s historical process was not class struggle, but the evolution of man to a higher type of individual, defined variously as communist, socialist, or collectivist. From empiriocriticism Bogdanov derived the view that all life is pure experience, empirically and scientifically knowable; he called his own philosophy “empiriomonist,” “empiriocritical,” or “tectological” as his fancy allowed. His sources were primarily European: the positivism of Mach and Avenarius; the language theories of Max Muller; the fashionable “monism” of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel; and the materialism of the Mainz gymnasium teacher Ludwig Noire. Bogdanov’s resultant philosophy was to play an important role in generating conflict among the Bolsheviks and in leading Lunacharsky to envisage a proletarian culture.

According to Bogdanov, all human society was evolving toward “collectivism,” or the “collecting of man” (sobiranie cheloveka). Work was not simply labor for economic gain or subsistence, as Marx had written, but a physical human activity like speech or thought, both of which Bogdanov defined “empiriocritically” as biological and physiological functions. Work was therefore subject to both physiological and psychological variation; a man’s body and mind affected the nature of his labor. Bogdanov felt that one could scientifically bring about a collective and cooperative society only by “organizing” a collective environ ment and a higher type of collective individual. One would not have to wait for changes in the mode of production in order to do this, however; one could consciously organize the entire process. The human body was an organism whose reflexes and movements could be altered “biomechanically” for greater productive efficiency or harmony, as Taylor’s time-and-motion studies were to show. More than this, Bogdanov hoped for the organization of a new elite; the present types of men—“dreamers,” “Utopians,” and “activists”—would give way to a higher type of creative, active “realists” whose collective consciousness would enable them to build a new world. Like Goethe’s Faust, Bogdanov’s collective man would sell his (nonexistent) soul for earthly power.

Although Bogdanov considered himself a Marxist, he was, more accurately, a social and psychological engineer. From his medical readings he knew of the work of Pavlov and his teacher, I. M. Sechenov, on the theory of “conditioned reflexes.” According to Bogdanov, the driving forces in life were biological and psychological, not economic, and ideology was not merely a class-bound reflection of economic interests but an independent entity capable of molding human beings and their work. In his emphasis on the organizing power of ideas and beliefs, Bogdanov was in tune with the work of James, Weber, and Sorel. But he also shared the positivist belief in a single all-encompassing physical and psychological reality of “pure experience,” rather than the dualist distinction between the conscious and the unconscious characteristic of psychoanalysis.

Bogdanov seems to have been a monomanie about his theories, a man with an idée fixe, a “rigorist” in his own terms, who, like Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? organized his entire life around a single idea. A lapsed Populist, Bogdanov had injected into his Marxism the medical and scientific terminology he had absorbed in a wide variety of books and schools. According to Berdyaev, Bogdanov was “a very fine person, extremely sincere and absolutely devoted to his idea, but rather narrow-minded and constantly engaged in hair splitting and sophistry.”²³ On the other hand, Berdyaev found Lunacharsky, “despite his many talents, a relatively superior culture, and literary interests” to be “something of a provincial schoolmaster with a dash of a journalist in him.”²⁴ In Vologda Lunacharsky married Bogdanov’s nineteen-year- old sister and also came under the powerful influence of Bogdanov’s philosophy.

Bogdanov’s optimistic model of a new type of man, a “Russian Faust,” as he called him, was especially important to Lunacharsky in anticipating a socialist world run by a scientific elite. In the spring of 1902 Lunacharsky wrote an essay entitled “A Russian Faust,” in which he attacked Bulgakov for praising Dostoevsky, whom Lunacharsky considered a “decadent.” Dostoevsky was “the Russian moralist” whose nationalism, religiosity, and anti-Semitism were hardly acceptable; Nietzsche, in contrast, was “the German moralist” whose vision of man’s Dionysian liberation from herd morality was far more appealing. Goethe’s Faust was the true model for revolutionaries, since he exchanged life and youth for knowledge, and (in Part Two) was able to “begin a new life.”²⁵

In another article written in 1902 Lunacharsky argued that the idealism and “god-seeking” of Berdyaev and Bulgakov were essentially negative. This kind of thinking denied the sole reality of this world and hoped for happiness in the world beyond. On the contrary, argued Lunacharsky, man’s power to organize nature is unlimited. For a true positivist, man’s scientific control of his environment is (following Bogdanov) “an organizing principle in life’s struggle.” In fact, one day man might even be able to conquer death. Mach too, after all, had admitted that without believing in God, one could still believe in immortality as the collective memory of an individual who “continues to exist in other persons even after [his] death.” “The fear of death,” Lunacharsky declared, “does not exist for an active positivist.”²⁶

Personal unhappiness and political exile in 1902-1903 deepened Lunacharsky’s revolutionary commitment. His first son died in infancy at Vologda. Then Russia’s first Marxist party split into warring Bolshevik and Menshevik factions at the second party congress in London. He now chose to follow his mentor Bogdanov and join the faction of Lenin, whose recently published What Is to Be Done? stressed the role of will, belief, and activism through the revolutionary party. In the autumn of 1904 Bogdanov asked Lunacharsky to travel to Europe, make contact with Lenin, and help edit a new Bolshevik journal. Released from exile that spring, Lunacharsky now joined Lenin’s circle in Paris.

V

Lunacharsky’s degree of commitment to Bolshevism at this time is not clear. We know that in October 1904 he arrived in Paris with his wife at Bogdanov’s request to help create a new Bolshevik newspaper to counter Iskra (The Spark), the newspaper founded by Lenin but now controlled by Martov and the Mensheviks. He probably knew little about émigré politics and the nature of the party fissures that had surfaced in London. In his 1907 autobiography Lunacharsky himself admitted that as recently as 1904 “I was not yet convinced of the correctness of the Bolshevik line.”²⁷ Yet the personality of Lenin soon overcame most of his doubts. In December 1904 Lunacharsky met him in Paris and promptly agreed to move to Geneva to work on the new party journal Vpered (Forward). Until the autumn of 1905 Lunacharsky lent his writing skills to the enterprise, and also toured the Russian émigré colonies speaking out against the Mensheviks. Lunacharsky may have had his doubts about the Bolsheviks when he left Russia, but by the end of 1905 he had become a leading journalist of the Bolshevik fraction in exile.

But what was Bolshevism in 1905? Hardly a real political party at the time, it was rather a group of conspiratorial socialists divided between Russia and European exile, a “fraction” by no means subservient even to Lenin. Its leaders were men and women of Lunacharsky’s generation, born in the 1870s and involved in the student strikes and labor movement of the 1890s. After the third congress of the RSDLP, held in London in late April and early May 1905, an “Organizational Bureau of Majority Committees” was set up inside Russia, headed by Bogdanov; the bureau hoped to channel the revolutionary violence of Bloody Sunday, January 9, 1905, when Imperial troops fired on innocent petitioners to the Tsar, an event which had caught the Bolsheviks unprepared. In addition, there was the editorial board of Vpered in Geneva, dominated by Lenin, and another group of Bolsheviks inside Russia around the engineer Leonid Krasin. The latter group, known as the praktiki, were technical specialists concerned with smuggling, gunrunning, bombs, and bank robberies, activities of the revolutionary lower depths. As the events of early 1905 deepened into widespread urban and rural violence, Bolshevism as an organized movement emerged from these three groups headed by Bogdanov, Lenin, and Krasin.

By the summer of 1905 Lunacharsky had become exhausted by his lectures throughout Europe and his editing work. For a time he moved to Florence to rest and recuperate. From there he continued to help with the editing of the new Paris Bolshevik journal Proletarii. He also began to study Italian art and literature in his leisure time. His convalescence was cut short by events in Russia, where a national general strike was called in October 1905. On Lenin’s instructions, Lunacharsky left for St. Petersburg immediately. Here in the winter of 1905-1906 he helped organize and edit two legal Bolshevik journals established under the lenient censorship which followed the October Manifesto: Maxim Gorky’s Novaia zhizn’ (New Life) and its successor in 1906-1907, Vestnik zhizni (Messenger of Life). Novaia zhizn did not survive for long; it was closed by the censor in December 1905. Lunacharsky himself was arrested and spent the next two months in jail. Nevertheless, the journal provided Lunacharsky with his first real opportunity to bridge the gap between Bolsheviks and intellectuals, the politically revolutionary and the artistically creative.

Gorky also attempted to bridge that gap. In 1905 the great writer was an enormously popular figure whose moral stature as a critic of the autocracy was probably second only to that of Tolstoi.²⁸ Arrested in connection with Bloody Sunday, Gorky inspired a storm of international protest that soon forced his release from jail. Since the spring of 1903 Gorky had actively contributed money to the Bolsheviks, often through his friend Krasin, and in 1904 he read Lunacharsky’s essays on positivism and the “Russian Faust.” By 1905 he had become a kind of Bolshevik “fellow traveler,” an established writer who lent the party both money and prestige, but who was politically independent. His money was crucial. In December 1904 he sent Bogdanov a check for 700 rubles to help finance Vpered in Geneva; at Lenin’s request, he also planned a popular series of books for workers to be put out by the Znanie publishing house. In October 1905 Gorky met with Bogdanov and Krasin in Moscow to discuss the undertaking, but instead agreed to publish (with Gorky’s money) the journal Novaia zhizn’. Initially the editor was the symbolist poet N. M. Minsky, and the stories and articles were creatively satirical rather than ideologically consistent with Bolshevism, or even Marxism. Only when Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg from Geneva in late November 1905 did the journal launched by intellectuals become a journal firmly controlled by Bolsheviks.²⁹

Plans for cultural propaganda among workers and intellectuals never really materialized in 1905. Lenin distrusted the autonomy of Lunacharsky’s friends among writers and artists, and Gorky’s idea of a “cheap library” for workers bore fruit only later, on Capri. The Bolsheviks were essentially unprepared for the events of 1905 and were able to take advantage of Gorky’s largesse only subsequently. When Gorky returned from his trip to America in November 1906 and settled on the island of Capri, he quickly reestablished his contacts with Lunacharsky and Bogdanov, who followed him there. The idea of a “proletarian culture” was created in exile after 1905 by a tiny circle of Bolsheviks and intellectuals around Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and Gorky. For them it was a utopian and even religious vision of a revoluntary future culture. But for Lenin it constituted a severe threat to his moral, political, and financial hegemony over the scattered groups and individuals that made up Bolshevism. Gorky in particular had exhibited some disturbing ideas in his novel Ispoved (Confession), which Lenin refused to publish in Proletarii. In the novel Gorky portrayed socialism as a surrogate religion. The hero, Matvei, realizes that God is dead when men disagree among one another; when they are united, they can resurrect God from among themselves, as Christ was once resurrected. Was Bolshevism, too, a new religion?

VI

When Lunacharsky rejoined his wife in Florence in February 1907 he had good reason to be despondent. The Revolution of 1905 had produced only a “bourgeois-liberal” regime of limited legal political activity. Parliamentary democracy in the new Duma, political campaigns, parties, and trade unions all existed but were severely circumscribed by emergency powers granted the Tsar and his appointed Prime Minister, P. A. Stolypin. The revolutionary tide had ebbed. After participating in the Duma elections of 1906 Lunacharsky, faced with the threat of a five- or six-year jail sentence, had emigrated once more. The Bolsheviks were now virtually bankrupt. In Vologda Lunacharsky had written essays and criticism for a variety of journals. Now his articles were published only in Bolshevik journals, and Gorky had rejected one of his plays for publication. At the age of thirty-two Lunacharsky was tom between art and politics and successful at neither. He was married but had no surviving children. Like many other intellectuals who had endured the turmoil of 1905, Lunacharsky now turned to religion.

In the 1920s the Bolsheviks provided key subsidies for writers and artists. But in 1905 and afterwards it was often the intelligentsia who supported the Bolsheviks, then badly in need of money. Gorky had gone to America in the spring and summer of 1906 on a trip arranged by Krasin to raise funds for the Bolsheviks. But the trip netted only $10,000 and Americans were scandalized that Gorky was living with the actress Maria Andreeva, who was not his wife. The fifth congress of the RSDLP in London in the spring of 1907 further revealed the party’s financial crisis. Many of the three hundred voting delegates had no money to travel in England. When Gorky arrived at the congress, held at Ramsay MacDonald’s church in Islington, in mid May, he found a scene of indigence and antagonism. The party leadership, represented by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Plekhanov, and Martov, and Rosa Luxemburg from the SPD, was deeply divided over questions of revolutionary strategy in the wake of 1905. Did financial need justify a policy of bank robbery, extortion, and terrorism? Some thought so. Only a loan of 1700 pounds from Joseph Fels, the Philadelphia soap manufacturer and follower of Henry George, made it possible for the congress to continue at all. In the midst of this depressing scene the more solvent Gorky invited Lenin to his home on Capri for a rest.³⁰

In the winter of 1907-1908 Lunacharsky and his wife joined Gorky and Andreeva on Capri, where they became good friends. Gorky provided the Lunacharskys with badly needed funds for medical expenses, since Lunacharskaia was ill in connection with a recent pregnancy. The writer was impressed with Lunacharsky’s wide range of knowledge, praised him as a “very talented” man with a “brilliant future,” and compared him to the great Populist theoretician N. K. Mikhailovsky. Lunacharsky, for his part, found Gorky congenial and persuaded Lenin to let him edit the literary section of Proletarii for a while. Together they once again discussed plans for a popular series of books for workers on Russian history and literature, a project toward which Gorky gave Lunacharsky an advance of two thousand lire in the autumn of 1908. In public disputes, too, Lunacharsky defended Gorky’s novel Mother and his other writings as “serious works of a socialist type.”³¹ The relations between Lunacharsky and Gorky were clearly symbiotic.

Gorky and Lunacharsky were not the only intellectuals close to the Bolsheviks who were interested in religious and philosophical questions after 1905. In 1906 Bogdanov, writing in jail, completed the third volume of his Empiriomonism, in which he argued that truth was relative, that the matter-spirit dualism did not exist in a world of pure experience, and that knowledge, religion, and ideology were all simply forms for organizing that experience. Even death was no absolute, since “future generations” might some day “find some other means to resolve life beside that which we now see in the crude [grubyi] crisis of death.” New translations of Dietzgen’s writings in 1906-1907 also touched off a lively debate in Russian Marxist circles. Even the twenty-nine-year-old Joseph Stalin, in jail in Baku in 1908, found “good sides” in the ideas of Mach and Bogdanov and proposed that Marxist philosophy should be developed “in the spirit of J. Dietzgen, recognizing the good sides of ‘Machism.’ ” To counter such trends, Lenin immersed himself in Dietzgen’s writings in the spring and summer of 1908; in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909), he argued that Dietzgen was not a monist but a “dialectical materialist,” even if he was often “not free from confusion.” Lenin thus faced a major threat within his own faction from those who hoped a religion of the proletariat might help keep alive the radicalism of 1905.³²

In 1907-1909 Lunacharsky developed his theory of a “proletarian culture” which would someday transform socialism into a religion for the Russian proletariat. These were years he would later come to regret. In his autobiography of 1932 he recalled them with a tone of recantation and repentance. “In the period after the defeat of the 1905 revolutionary movement, I, like many others, was subject to religious moods and seeking”; it was at this time, he remembered, that he had engaged in the heresy, in Lenin’s mind, of “god-construction,” or bogostroitel’ stvo, whereby he regarded Marxism not as scientific truth but as the “highest form of religion,” a theology without God.³³ In so doing, his moment of innovation—the articulation of “proletarian culture” in 1909—was well prepared by the ideas of Avenarius, Mach, Dietzgen, and Bogdanov.

VII

Lunacharsky’s vision of a proletarian culture began to emerge in 1907. In an article that year he wrote that “social democracy is not simply a party but a great cultural movement” out of which would come a “proletarian art.” Such an art would be realistic in style and would be created by “proletarian artists.” Bourgeois culture, he added, consists of ever novel forms and innovations and expresses its class decline in symbols of death and the fantastic. Proletarian art should be positive, optimistic, and comprehensible to the masses. Gorky epitomized the proletarian artist, a man born into the working class whose writings expressed the feelings of that class; artists like Gorky would soon produce a true “social democratic literature, and then painting and sculpture as well.”³⁴ European socialists like Kautsky and Vandervelde were writing in Vorw?rts that the proletariat should help create a new culture, and Lunacharsky was undoubtedly familiar with their ideas. But he felt that in cultural matters Russia, not Germany, would lead the way. “The social-democratic intelligentsia of Russia should develop the thesis indicated by Vorw?rts on its own.”³⁵

Such a culture would be religious in nature, or at least it would help replace organized religion in the new society. Like Nietzsche, Lunacharsky felt that art in general expressed the tragic in life. Echoing Comte, he also wrote that “socialism, as a doctrine, is the true religion of humanity.” “Socialism needs art. Any kind of agitation is a form of art. Any kind of art is agitation.” The future socialist society would need a religious cult, a public theater of tragedy, outdoor festivals, dramas, processions, and ceremonies. With the help of modern technology, Lunacharsky felt, the individual citizen could see such public festivals even while sitting at home watching his movie-phonograph (kinemo-fonograf). The symbolist theater of the young director Meyer- hold appealed to Lunacharsky in this respect. Through a drama which reflected human psychological needs, the culture of the future socialist society would achieve nothing less than “a new victory over death.”³⁶

In 1908 Lunacharsky contributed to a remarkable collection of essays whose revision of Marxism in Russia anticipated the work of Lukács and Gramsci by a decade or more. Like them, the essayists of 1908 stressed the role of consciousness, and hence of intellectuals, in the historical process, including revolution. They accused Plekhanov of being a neo-Kantian, or a mystic, or both. V. A. Bazarov noted that Engels, like Mach and Avenarius, began with the reality of directly perceived experience. “The materialism of Marx and Engels,” he concluded, “is a living method of scientific investigation—the materialism of Plekhanov is dead scholasticism.” The essayists were all enthusiasts of Mach’s empiriocriticism in varying degrees and agreed that Mach and Avenarius were better Marxists than Plekhanov.³⁷

In his own essay, entitled “Atheists,” Lunacharsky argued the merits of a positivist philosophy without God. Atheism need not imply pes simism. The American poet Walt Whitman was a good example of “optimistic atheism.” Lunacharsky called for a “proletarian monism,” an optimistic view of life that would destroy the “artificial boundary between spirit and matter” created by Kantian dualism and idealism. Monism—the belief that there is only one fundamental reality in the universe—was enormously popular in Germany at the time through the writings of Mach, Dietzgen, and the biologist Ernst Haeckel. For Lunacharsky, monism, like positivism, was not just a cult of science but a religion of the future suitable for the proletariat. “The proletariat thinks realistically and monistically,” he wrote; “it naturally reveals the unity of spirit and matter, the laboring and struggling character of history, life, and nature, and feels its growing spontaneity (stikhiia); despite the hardships of life, it says its joyful ‘Yes.’ ” Lunacharsky did not yet use the term “proletarian culture”; rather, he referred to “religious atheism” as a future myth for the proletariat. But he placed a clear emphasis on “religious atheism” as the “felt essence of socialism,” as opposed to the class struggle. Citing Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, recently translated into Russian, Lunacharsky concluded that any future revolution would need not be simply a proletarian victory in political or economic terms, but a “new religious consciousness.” In terms that sharply antagonized Lenin, Lunacharsky had defined Marxism as a form of religion, or at least of religious myth.³⁸

The recent (1906-1907) translations of Dietzgen and Sorel no doubt facilitated the view of Russian followers of Mach that Marxism, like relativity theory, was simply a useful hypothesis about reality, a social Gedanken-experiment. Plekhanov’s materialism was inadequate because it accepted the neo-Kantian and idealist division of the world into the real and the ideal, even while arguing the primacy of the material world. Positivism, as articulated by Bogdanov and Lunacharsky in 1908, was much more than this; it was a radical union of the world into a single universe of pure experience that included both subject and object, self and society. Much of this anticipated Gyorgy Lukacs’s Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein ( 1923). For subject and object were now one, consciousness was as real a force for revolution and class struggle as the means of production and material possessions, and intellectuals were therefore a preeminent elite in the creation of a revolutionary society. Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and other Russian Machists had pushed to its logical conclusion the triumph of consciousness over spontaneity, and of elite over the proletariat, that had been spelled out in Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? Mind could triumph over matter.

Lunacharsky’s theories at this time were best summarized in his two-volume work Religion and Socialism, which appeared in St. Petersburg in 1908 and 1911. Here he argued that the future dictatorship of the proletariat envisaged by Marx would be prepared by its ideological hegemony over the bourgeoisie. Art and propaganda would precede control over the economy and would win over allies from among the bourgeois intelligentsia. For Lunacharsky, world religions were all basically myths bound to the cultures of particular societies at particular times. Thus Christianity itself was a kind of proletarian culture, an “ideology of the tormented poor of Jerusalem and the Jews in general.” Christianity was therefore revolutionary, and even communist, a revolt of the propertyless. Like other ideologies, Christianity moved masses of people by its emotional appeal to their beliefs. Socialism should do the same. “The dissemination and clarification of the ideal-realist, religious principles of proletarian socialism should facilitate the development of powerful seeds of psychological collectivism in the proletariat.”³⁹

None of this was entirely original. Lunacharsky had borrowed liberally from Bogdanov’s scientistic elitism and a wide variety of European sources : Comte’s vision of a “religion of humanity”; Karl Kautsky’s writings on Christianity as a form of early communism; Ernst Renan’s histories of various religions; Dietzgen’s articles on the “Religion of Social Democracy,” republished in 1906; Sorel’s Reflections; and of course the empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius. Lunacharsky credited Bogdanov with being “the only Marxist philosopher continuing the pure philosophical tradition of Marx”; the ideas of Dietzgen on socialism as a form of religion, he admitted, “coincide completely with our own.” Religion and Socialism was thus a work of synthesis more than of true originality.

Lunacharsky’s moment of innovation was certainly well prepared. Since the 1890s he had gradually worked out a reconciliation between science and faith, Marxism and religion, through the positivism of Avenarius and Mach. Central to his theory was the vision of a future socialist culture that would memorialize the heroics of the revolution and therefore provide a kind of victory over death, an eternalizing of the transient. But in 1908 in Religion and Socialism he brought his ideas together in a single work for the first time. He was also able with Gorky’s help to launch the first attempt at proletarian culture, a workers’ school on Capri. Finally, death was personally on his mind, since in June 1908 another baby had died in infancy. In his play Faust and the City, written that year, Faust appears as the popular leader of a Free City who treats his citizens as his children; when told that Faust has died, Gabriel replies that this cannot be true: “Faust is alive in all things! He lives in us! He lives forever!”⁴⁰ The proletarian revolution, too, would provide for the resurrection of the laboring classes of society, “the people reborn (novorozhdennyi) in the factory.”⁴¹ At a moment of personal tragedy and political exile and inactivity, Lunacharsky proclaimed that the socialist revolution would be nothing less than a victory over death.

VIII

The “god-construction” of Lunacharsky and Gorky threw Lenin into a rage and nearly destroyed the Bolshevik fraction of the RSDLP. In the spring of 1908 Lenin arrived on Capri at Gorky’s invitation and argued with them endlessly. A year later he persuaded the editorial board of Proletarii in Paris to read them out of the party. It was this philosophical and political crisis which helped Lunacharsky formulate a role he was to play for several decades, that of conciliator between two seemingly irreconcilable forces: Bolshevik revolutionaries and free- thinking intellectuals.

Lenin had been pleased with Lunacharsky’s work in St. Petersburg in 1905-1906 and again at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International in 1907. He was one of the party’s leading journalists, with considerable experience in illegal operations, and an important link with the intelligentsia. The first sign of conflict came in a letter from Lenin to Lunacharsky in January 1908, after Lunacharsky had moved to Capri, in which Lenin criticized the “empiriomonists” and “empirio- critics” within the party.⁴² Lenin was obviously worried about the Bolshevik circle forming around Bogdanov, who also arrived on Capri in April 1908. That circle now included not only Gorky, Lunacharsky and Bogdanov, but also two more Vologda exiles: 1.1. Skvortsev (Stepanov) and V. A. Bazarov (Rudnev), who, respectively, would later become the editor of Izvestiia and a leading economist in Gosplan. The group represented both an ideological and economic threat to Lenin’s control over the fraction.

In April 1908 Lenin came to Capri and confronted his rivals. Precisely what happened is difficult to determine, but there was a week of constant argument and debate over the future of Bolshevism and the merits of empiriocriticism, punctuated by long games of chess, to which both Bogdanov and Lenin were addicted. At the end of the week Lenin returned to Paris and began to prepare his own theoretical work attacking the followers of Mach and Avenarius within the party—Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Lenin’s treatise stressed the epistemological weaknesses of a doctrine he claimed, not completely wrongly, went back to the skepticism of Bishop Berkeley. But it was the political threat that most concerned him.

Lunacharsky had his initial opportunity to practice his theory on the island of Capri in 1908. There Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and Gorky began their first experiments in proletarian culture by organizing a school to educate and train workers for propaganda inside Russia. The “First Higher Social Democratic Propagandist and Agitator School,” as it was finally called, actually began operating in the summer of 1909. Its financial angel was Gorky, who obtained considerable funds from his own royalties, as well as from Krasin, Andreeva, the singer Feodor Chaliapin, and a Nizhnyi Novgorod steamship owner named Kamensky. Lenin obviously had in mind better uses for the two hundred thousand rubles raised by Krasin than the five-hundred-ruble stipends provided for workers who left Russia to study on Capri. In Gorky’s eyes, the purpose of the school was to “strengthen the intellectual energy of the party” and to “create abroad courses for training organizers and propagandists.” This suggested not only the great importance of ideology in the revolution, but also a broad-based concept of party membership with an unhealthy resemblance to the Mensheviks. By April 1909 even the Paris branch of the Russian political police, the Okhrana, was well informed about the school through its agent on Capri, Andrei Romanov.⁴³

The leading organizer of the Capri school was N. E. Vilonov, a worker from the Urals who came to Capri on party funds originally to cure his tuberculosis. Gorky, Bogdanov, and Lunacharsky were delighted to find a real worker among the ranks of the émigré intelligentsia. With Vilonov, they worked out a plan to bring workers to Capri, establish a party school or “university,” and institute a four-month series of lectures. By the summer of 1909 Vilonov had returned to Russia and recruited twenty workers for the school. Once on Capri they encountered an impressive faculty—Bogdanov, Gorky, Lunacharsky, the Moscow historian M. N. Pokrovsky, the lone Bolshevik Duma delegate G. A. Aleksinsky, among others—and courses ranging from the history of Russian literature and European socialism to political theory and the practice of agitation. Vilonov, however, found the religious and philosophical dimension of the “god-builders” distasteful. In the end he supported Lenin, was expelled from the school in November 1909, and left for Paris.⁴⁴

Lenin was furious at the Capri school. In December 1908 he wrote his sister Elizarova, charging Lunacharsky and Bogdanov with “creating a new religion.” “But there is no ‘socialist’ religion,” Lenin railed. “It is just an attempt to unite’ what cannot be united—religion and socialism.”⁴⁵ In June 1909 he called a meeting of the Proletarii editorial board in Paris and passed a sharp resolution condemning “god-construction” within the Bolshevik Party. But by December 1909 the Capri circle had established its own rival journal Vpered in Geneva.

Lunacharsky was an unhappy man. His second son died, and his wife had quarreled increasingly with Andreeva. In the autumn of 1909 the Lunacharskys left Capri and settled for a time in Naples. Keeping apart the Proletarii and Vpered groups, Lunacharsky, with Aleksinsky, established his own party school at Bologna in 1910. The twenty students at Bologna were again recruited mainly from among young workers from the Urals area. The Bologna school opened in November 1910 with seventeen students and a small faculty headed by Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and Gorky. Since only Lunacharsky could speak Italian fluently, he served as director. Nominally, the Vpered circle still controlled the school and was to provide funds for it from party coffers. But that circle, too, was disintegrating. Krasin had withdrawn his support and was working as an engineer for Siemens and Schukert in Berlin. In February 1911, Bogdanov announced that he was leaving the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky, Martov, and Kollontai refused to lecture at Bologna, and Lunacharsky and Aleksinsky disagreed over policy and curriculum.⁴⁶ At this low point, Lunacharsky decided to move to Paris.

Anatoly Lunacharsky and his son in Paris, 1911. From Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow, 1971).

Lunacharsky’s move to Paris in November 1911 marked a new beginning. As the second volume of Religion and Socialism appeared in St. Petersburg, Lunacharsky initiated a slow process of recantation and reconciliation with Lenin. He moved away from “god-construction” to a more modest but crucial role as intermediary between Bolsheviks and artists. Both Capri and Bologna had failed as experiments in proletarian culture; Paris offered new opportunities. Finally, Lunacharsky had at last become the proud father of a healthy baby boy. At thirty- six he had generated his major theoretical work on Marxism as a form of religion as well as a more personal contribution to his own immortality through the next generation.

IX

In the autumn of 1911 Paris was in ferment. For two years there had been mounting labor unrest, first among striking postal and railway workers and then among the vineyard laborers of Champagne. Nervous diplomats confronted another war scare in the second Moroccan crisis. An itinerant Belgian, Gery Pieret, had stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in August, and Guillaume Apollinaire—the art critic for Le Mercure de France, whose labels turned artists into movements—had been arrested for suspected complicity. The Belgian writers Maeterlinck and Verhaeren were living in Paris, and Maeterlinck had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The Russian ballet master Sergei Diaghilev was in his third season at the Théâtre Châtelet, where he was staging the ballet Petroushka by the young Petersburg composer Igor Stravinsky. Cubists and futurists vied for the public eye. For many, Paris in 1911 meant art, and art conjured visions of revolution.

Russian art in Paris generally meant Diaghilev, whose Ballet Russe with its lavish sets, the dancing of Nijinsky, and the music of Stravinsky seemed revolutionary to Parisian audiences. Initially successful as editor of Mir iskusstva (The World of Art), Diaghilev was frustrated in his attempt to become director of the Imperial Theaters in Russia in 1904. In 1906 he brought Russian culture to Paris instead. Diaghilev was concerned with politics as well as with entertainment; in 1905 he collaborated with Gorky and Meyerhold in plans for a new theater of satire, and he expressed the hope of becoming the artistic dictator of any new Russia that might emerge. “We are doomed to die,” Diaghilev said at a banquet in Petersburg that year, “to pave the way for the resurrection of a new culture, which will take from us what remains of our weary wisdom.”⁴⁷ In art, as Lunacharsky’s wife once remarked, Diaghilev was more revolutionary than Lunacharsky. Paris between 1911 and 1914 provided Lunacharsky with ample opportunity to observe a revolution in art, and to envision a new dimension for proletarian culture.

Although Lenin was then in Paris, living on the Rue Marie-Rose, Lunacharsky avoided politics, devoting his attention to art. As a critic for the Kiev journal Kievskaia mysl’ (Kievan Thought), he visited art museums, galleries, and exhibitions, and wrote reviews. “Beside my literary work,” he later recalled, “I founded a circle for proletarian culture.”⁴⁸ The circle consisted mainly of a few Russian workers Lunacharsky found living in Paris: P. K. Bessalko, a railway worker and former Menshevik from Ekaterinoslav; A. K. Gastev, a metalworker and trade union leader who later established a Central Institute for Labor in Soviet Russia; M. P. Gerasimov, a teacher; and F. I. Kalinin, who had helped organize both the Capri and Bologna schools. They organized a new journal named Vpered, which Lunacharsky billed as a “popular workers’ journal.” Lunacharsky contributed notes on party and international developments and on the “deep crisis” within the RSDLP. He also wrote rather vaguely about his vision of a future proletarian culture, a “culture of social revolution, but not of socialism,” which would produce a “proletarian art, proletarian science, proletarian philosophy.”⁴⁹

In Paris Lunacharsky came into contact with artists and writers whose work might well be described as “proletarian.” The writings of Maeterlinck and Verhaeren combined mysticism and socialism in a manner that appealed to Lunacharsky. In addition, Lunacharsky discovered the Estonian musician, Eduard Syrmus, a Bolshevik who had led street demonstrations in 1905 with his violin, had met Gorky on Capri and Lenin in Paris, and now played for émigré socialist fundraising concerts. He pronounced Syrmus a “proletarian violinist,” apparently more for his Bolshevik enthusiasm than his class origin.⁵⁰ He had high praise in his journalism for the French worker-poet Jehan Richtus (Gabrielle Randon), who edited ballads, songs, chants, and poems of the poor. In addition, Lunacharsky attended trade union festivals and concerts, such as the syndicalist festival in Wagram Hall on May 3, 1913, which, he found, exemplified “what great progress Parisian proletarian culture has made in recent years.”⁵¹ May Day parades, Isadora Duncan’s dancing, and workers’ choral concerts at the Trocadero Museum all seemed to Lunacharsky to embody the kind of proletarian culture by and for workers that would someday emerge in Russia.

In Paris Lunacharsky also discovered bohemia, although his tastes in art were far from avant-garde. He preferred the wall murals and frescoes of Puvis de Chavannes with their groups of happy youth to the newer abstract and geometrically deformed work of cubists, orphists, and futurists. In the painting of the young Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall, he found only “pretentious posing and a kind of sick taste.” The Italian futurist exhibit of February 1912 in Paris was “purely subjective chaos,” and Boccioni’s painting and sculpture was “nine-tenths artistic hooliganism.”⁵² Insofar as Lunacharsky’s own tastes were to be embodied in proletarian culture, it would be realistic and not abstract, appealing less to critics than to workers. In Paris, Lunacharsky made it clear that the mystic realism of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or the urbanism and socialism of Verhaeren were much preferable to the antics of Marinetti or the collages of Braque. For Lunacharsky in 1912, proletarian culture would not be avant-garde, by any definition.

Despite his antipathy to artistic modernism, Lunacharsky spent considerable time among the art colony of La Ruche (The Beehive) on the Rue Danzig. La Ruche, an area near Montparnasse developed by the architect Alfred Boucher for the Universal Exposition of 1900, consisted of a series of barracks around a central octagonal structure known as La Rotonde, where dozens of artists had studios. By 1913 it was known as “Babylon Number Two” because of the massive influx of foreign artists: the Italian painter Modigliani, the Mexican Diego Rivera, and an entire ghetto of Russian Jews from the Pale cf Settlement—Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, Pinchus Kremegne, Osip Zadkin, Moise Kisling, and Mikhail Koukine, among others. Most of these artists came from artisan families in Lithuania, Belorussia, and Poiand and sought in Paris an art education they could not obtain in 1. ussia. In 1914 they were generally in their early twenties. When not painting, or drinking at the café “La Rotonde,” they were at another Russian émigré center, the Russian Academy of Painting and Sculpture on the Impasse Avenue de Maine. Here the painter Maria Vasileva, a dwarfish version of Gertrude Stein, gave art classes, ran a canteen, and arranged Saturday night concerts and charity balls for needy émigrés.⁵³ In his “proletarian culture” circle Lunacharsky had surrounded himself with young workers; in La Ruche he enjoyed the company of young artists.

La Ruche introduced a colorful side of life to Lunacharsky, accustomed to more serious matters of revolutionary politics, Zadkin wore proletarian-style overalls and went about accompanied by an enormous Great Dane. Kisling fought a duel. Modigliani drank and smoked hashish. “The whole world seemed to be intoxicated with art,” recalled one La Ruche visitor. To the Paris police, La Ruche was a “menace to public order”; to the young Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, it was “not a place of debauchery, but a seismographic station where men recorded impulses not perceptible to others.”⁵⁴ In describing the young painters of La Ruche to his Kiev audience, Lunacharsky referred to the colony as “young Russia in Paris.”⁵⁵ Artistically, Lunacharsky was most impressed with David Shterenberg, a young Jewish painter whose realistic style contrasted sharply with the cubist and futurist deformation around him. In later years Shterenberg would head the painting section of Narkompros (Commissariat for Public Enlightenment) and would help Lunacharsky protect and subsidize the artistic revolutionaries he had first encountered in the back streets of Paris before World War I.

By 1914 Lunacharsky, at age thirty-nine, had worked out a theory of proletarian culture. His vision was not simply a reworking of the positivist philosophies of Bogdanov, Avenarius, or Mach, or even a transformation of Marxism into a religious myth along the lines suggested by Dietzgen or Sorel. In Paris he had found workers and artists who provided him with a model for that culture, which would join educated workers from the bench with those artists of the avant-garde who were more radical in their politics than in their art.

The central sources of Lunacharsky’s vision of proletarian culture, as we have seen, were not Russian. His geographic origin was Ukrainian, and his Marxism originated in the classrooms and railway yards of Kiev. As a student in Zurich he had discovered the European positivist tradition later reinforced by the powerful philosophy of his brother-in-law Bogdanov. On Capri after 1905 he found Gorky receptive to the fusion of religion and socialism that Lunacharsky sought in the writings of Dietzgen, Kautsky, and other Marxists. Later in Bologna and Paris he discovered circles of like-minded workers and intellectuals who shared his interest in a revolution that would be as much cultural and ideological as ecokomic and political. But that vision would only be realized in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. For the moment it was confined to Lunacharsky’s writings and a few younger followers in Europe. Yet one can say that by around 1909 Lunacharsky’s moment of innovation—his articulation of a theory which combined religion and Marxism to anticipate a cultural revolution in the way workers would perceive and organize their experience—was at hand. At a time of political defeat and artistic failure, Lunacharsky proclaimed a future proletarian culture in which artists and workers would transform the experience of bourgeois society. In age and in his personal artistic taste Lunacharsky belonged to the generation of the aesthetes; but ultimately he became well known as the older leader of the constructivist generation of the 1920s, for whom pre-1914 European ideas had a renewed appeal.

X

Lunacharsky’s European vision of proletarian culture, in its rough outline, thus preceded the Russian reality by nearly a decade. Such a culture would be proletarian and collectivist, urban and socialist, atheist but appealing to religious needs and beliefs, joining workers and artists in a common revolutionary cause whose ultimate goal was nothing less than a victory over death. Proletarian man would ultimately survive the death of any individual. Yet all of this seemed unreachable in the summer of 1914. When war broke out, Lunacharsky left Paris for Brittany with his wife and son, and then moved on to Switzerland in 1915. Here he published attacks on the patriotic “defensists” among the Russian socialists and lived comfortably on his mother’s inheritance. In May 1917 after a decade of European exile, he returned to Russia to help edit Gorky’s new journal Novaia zhizn’ (New Life). When the Bolsheviks seized power five months later, Lunacharsky was named head of the Commissariat of Public Enlightenment.

During the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) the theory of proletarian culture was put into practice not so much by Lunacharsky as by Bogdanov. His mass cultural organization Proletkult held its first national conference on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power; its leadership consisted mainly of veterans of Capri, Bologna, and Paris. Lunacharsky and Bogdanov were the original organizers, but they were soon joined by Kalinin, Gastev, Bessalko, and other exiles who streamed back to Russia after the February Revolution. By the spring of 1919 Proletkult claimed a membership in the tens of thousands, possibly even greater than the ranks of the Bolsheviks. Most members were not artists but ordinary workers. They edited a dozen separate journals, performed plays, wrote poetry, gave concerts, and organized revolutionary festivals.

Bogdanov considered Proletkult a harbinger of “collectivist” culture. For him the worker was most important, and the artist simply the “organizer of the great collective’s living forces.”⁵⁶ But the leadership of the movement was still dominated by prerevolutionary exiles and intellectuals. Lenin was as suspicious of the practices of Proletkult in 1919 as he had been of its theory in 1909. He publicly criticized the “abundance of escapees from the bourgeois intelligentsia, who often looked on the newly-created workers’ and peasants’ organizations as the most convenient field for their own personal fantasies in the sphere of philosophy or culture . . . and smuggled in something supernatural and foolish in the guise of pure proletarian culture.”⁵⁷ Such criticism boded no good. By 1921 Proletkult was subordinated to Lunacharsky’s Narkompros. In 1928 Bogdanov died performing medical experiments on himself, probably a suicide.

Once in power Lunacharsky supported even those avant-garde artists whose work he disliked. Many quickly sought protection, commissions, jobs, and subsidies from Narkompros, especially the Visual Arts Section headed by David Shterenberg. Other former inhabitants of La Ruche were also active, among them the painter Nathan Altman, who taught at the Petrograd Free Art Studios (SVOMAS) and directed the Petro- grad section of Narkompros concerned with monuments and festivals.⁵⁸ In September 1918 Lunacharsky named Marc Chagall Commissar of Art in his home town of Vitebsk and permitted him to open an art school there. As a result, the first anniversary of the revolution in October 1918 featured streetcars, walls, lamp posts, and buildings covered with cubist shapes and green cows and flying horses à la Chagall. A month or two later the graphic artist M. V. Dobuzhinsky arrived to help Chagall establish his Vitebsk Academy, where Chagall dreamed of “making ordinary houses into museums and the average citizen into a creator.”⁵⁹ In the summer of 1919, however, the suprematist followers of Kazimir Malevich ousted Chagall from his school, and three years later he was back in Paris.

The Bolshevik Revolution thus provided Lunacharsky with his long awaited opportunity to build a revolutionary culture that would join workers and artists in a common effort. In the 1920s he became the dominant figure in education and the arts in Russia, the head of a sprawling bureaucracy and one of the few men capable of bridging the gap between workers and artists, the proletariat and the avant-garde. He became the architect of proletarian culture, utilizing the schoolroom, the city square, the outdoor stage, and the monument to inculcate new values and to legitimize the revolution.⁶⁰ At forty-two he had found success through revolutionary commitment.

Lunacharsky’s vision of proletarian culture was more than the reconciliation of workers and artists. In his earlier play Faust and the City, Faust had become immortal in the good works he had provided for his people. When Verhaeren, whom Lunacharsky praised as a “true futurist” whose urbanist poetry reflected “contemporary metallic and electrical culture,” died beneath the wheels of a train in November 1916, Lunacharsky wrote that “Verhaeren’s spirit is immortal (bess- merten).” He found Maeterlinck’s best work to be his essay La Mort (1913) where Maeterlinck argued, in Lunacharsky’s words, that “the dead continue to live in us” through the “heroism of that death.” In February 1918 he traced the dream of an immortal communist society back to Walt Whitman: “Communism places man in his proper place. Man awakens and happily realizes his own destiny as the conscious and immortal fulfillment of the universe. Man as collectivist is immortal. Only the individual is mortal.”⁶¹ For Lunacharsky proletarian culture meant revolutionary immortality.

Lunacharsky did not arrive at his vision of proletarian culture overnight. Rather, it resulted from a gradual accumulation of intellectual influnces: European positivism, Russian “god-seeking,” Marxism, the experience of 1905, the workers’ schools of Capri and Bologna, and contact with the artists of La Ruche. His sense that a revolutionary culture would bring a victory over death with its own forms of immortality for the collective proletariat was most clearly articulated around 1909, and worked out in practice over the next several years in Europe. In 1925 he referred to a story told by Mach in Analysis of Sensations about the Eskimo who refused the gift of immortality because he would not be allowed to bring his seals and walruses with him to eternal life:⁶²

Personal immortality is something which a man wears like a set of blinders, and with which he can never really get anywhere; it defines a limit to his horizons. But when man frees himself of all private property, he then ceases to feel only himself as “I.” The center of his world view becomes the great, dazzling “we” with its real and painful past and its evolutionary climb from animal to ruler in the kingdom of justice we are now experiencing. Then he feels that his existence continues through his environment, his children, and his grand children, then he becomes a historical person, a human being, not just Paul Ivanovich or Maria Ivanovna. Then when he is asked about immortality, he inquires not about his own seals and walruses, that is, his own possessions, his so-called personality; instead he asks if that idea which he has served, that beauty which he has seen, and that justice which he has created will develop further to its outer limits, achieving new victories and establishing new harmonies. And in a deep sense, that he is eternal only in those contributions of his personality which he has made to the stream of human existence, that he fears neither sacrifice, nor suffering, nor death. For he knows that the spirit, if we may use that old word for a minute to describe the collective impulse of humanity, that spirit which he serves is truly eternal.

Thus would proletarian culture immortalize the individual worker.

Although more of a critic than an artist, Lunacharsky embodied the tension between innovation and revolution, artistic creativity and political participation, characteristic of the avant-garde. He was also a professional revolutionary, and his commitment to Bolshevism was lifelong. So was his fascination with the view of secular immortality by reputation, a view he articulated in his mid-thirties. In 1929 Lunacharsky left his post at Narkompros and retired to the south of France. In 1933, on the eve of his death, he wrote: “If I die, I shall die well, quietly, as I have lived. As a philosopher, as a materialist, as a Bolshevik.”⁶³ By then Stalin’s party controls over Soviet culture had swept away the remnants of Proletkult. Only a post-Stalinist generation would resurrect the long buried example of revolutionary art and artistic revolution that Lunacharsky’s experiments of the 1920s had tried to fuse.