Read more
Zusatztext 'Richard Stites' book is a lively! charismatic catalogue of the many manifestations of Russian 'pre-figurative behaviour' ... Stites profitably indulges the historian's love for accreted details and anecdotes! which add up to a cultural mosaic and suggest a scholarly proof.'Spencer Golub! Brown University! Theatre Research International! 1992 Klappentext The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse. Analyzing the inevitable clash between the authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic state centralism and a theology of Stalinism. Zusammenfassung The study takes a wide view of Russia's social, intellectual, and cultural history, examining party programmes, economic policy, and moral practices to recreate the spirit of idealism and experimentation before, during and after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
