symposium of 1909, Landmarks (Vekhi), which offered an impressive philosophic challenge to the positivist and Marxist categories which had long dominated the philosophic thinking of the urban intelligentsia. A musical landmark in this return to religious mysticism was the primarily choral opera The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh, which was finished amidst the revolutionary turmoil of 1905-6 and first produced early in 1907 by the last survivor of the 'mighty handful,' Rimsky-Korsakov.
God-building developed somewhat later than God-seeking, and sought to harness the religious anguish of the intellectuals not to traditional faith but to the coming revolution. During the dark days of reaction that followed the failure of the Revolution of 1905, a group of intellectuals sought to supplement Marx with a more inclusive and inspiring vision of the coming revolution. Led by Maxim Gorky, the rough-hewn writer and future high priest of Soviet literature, and Anatol Lunacharsky, the widely traveled critic who became the first commissar of education in the new Soviet state, the God-builders considered themselves to be merely elaborating the famous Marxist statement that philosophers should change rather than merely explain the world. Traditional religion was always linked with intellectual confusion and social conservatism, and the 'God-seekers' were only rebuilding the tower of Babel rather than moving on to the New Jerusalem.60 Nevertheless, religious conviction had been the greatest force for change in history, Lunacharsky contended, and Marxists should, therefore, conceive of physical labor as their form of devotion, the proletariat as their congregation of true believers, and the spirit of the collective as God. Gorky concluded his long Confession of 1908 with a prayer to 'the almighty, immortal people!'
Thou art my God and the creator of all gods, which thou hast fashioned from the beauties of the spirit in the toil and struggle of thy search-
ings!
And there shall be no other gods in the world but thee, for thou art the one God that creates miracles!
Thus do I believe and confess!51
Some contemporary critics referred to Gorky's position as 'demotheism' or 'people-worship,'52 and there are many resemblances to the more extreme forms of populism. But Gorky spoke in the more universal language of the silver age. He referred to all men, not merely Russians; to the conquest of death, not merely of hunger. In the final sentence of the Confession, Gorky holds out the image of 'the fusion of all peoples for the sake of the great task of universal God-creation.'53
An anonymous Marxist pamphlet published in 1906 and subsequently reissued by the Soviet regime bluntly declared that man is destined to 'take possession of the universe and extend his species into distant cosmic regions, taking over the whole solar system. Human beings will be immortal.'54
Death is only a temporary setback, Lunacharsky affirmed as early as 1903:
Man moves toward the radiant sun; he stumbles and falls into the grave. But … in the ringing clatter of the grave-diggers' spades he hears creative labor, the great technology of man whose beginning and symbol is fire. Mankind will carry out his plans . . . realize his desired ideal.55
His Faust and the City declares that the idea of an immortal God is only an anticipatory 'vision of what the might of men shall be,'56 and ends ecstatically with the people crying over the dead body of Faust 'he lives in us!. .. Our sovereign city roused in might.'57
After the Revolution, Lunacharsky turned to an undertaking that had attracted many past Russian artists: the composition of a trilogy which would provide a new redemptive message for mankind. Like Gogol's Dead Souls, Dostoevsky's Brothers, and Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, Luna-charsky's trilogy was never finished. In keeping with the spirit of the silver age, the first part, Vasilisa the Wise, was fantastic in form and cosmic in pretensions. The second part, 'a dramatic poem,' Mitra the Saviour, was never published, and the final part, The Last Hero, was apparently never written. The last lines we have of the trilogy is the paean at the end of the mythological Vasilisa to the coming of 'man's divinity on earth.'58 Such talk was clearly dangerous in a society bent on camouflaging its own myths and absolutes with scientific terminology.
The figure who best portrayed the Promethean vision of the early God-builders was Alexander Malinovsky, a brilliant theorist who has suffered the relative oblivion of those who neither joined the emigration nor rose to high authority in the new Soviet state. Shortly after taking his first regular position as a journalistic critic in 1895 at the age of twenty-two, Malinovsky assumed a new name which remained with him and accurately conveys the image he had of his own high calling: Bogdanov, or 'God-gifted.' He
soon became active in the Social Democratic movement, siding immediately with the Bolsheviks after the split of 1903, and helping edit their theoretical journal New Life, where he began his friendship with Gorky.
Bogdanov believed that the ultimate key to the future lay not in the economic relationships and class struggles that were characteristic of past history, but in the technological and ideological culture of the future that was already being created by the proletariat. Marx's fascination with dialectical struggle was an unfortunate holdover from his youthful Hegelianism. In the manner of Saint-Simon rather than Marx, Bogdanov argued that the destructive conflicts of the past would never be resolved without a positive new religion: that the unifying role once played in society by a central temple of worship and religious faith must now be played by the living temple of the proletariat and a pragmatic, socially oriented philosophy of 'empiriomonism.'
In a long series of studies, beginning with his Basic Elements of a Historical View of Nature in 1899, Bogdanov developed the idea that the revolutionary movement would lift man beyond the level of economics, and nature beyond all previous laws of material determinism. The key to this program of cultural regeneration within the revolutionary movement was presented in a long work published in installments throughout the decade 1913-22 under the title The Universal Organizational Science {Tectology). This new super-science of 'tectology' was designed to provide a harmonious unity between the spiritual culture and the physical experience of the 'working collective,' in whose interest all science and activity were to be organized and all past culture reworked.59
Bogdanov felt that the creation of a new proletarian culture should precede the political annexation of power by the Bolsheviks. His concept of God-building through tectology was designed-like Sorel's concurrent call for a new heroic myth-to kindle enthusiasm and assure the revolutionary movement of success not only in gaining power but also in transforming society. Like Sorel, Bogdanov was enthusiastic over the initial Bolshevik annexation of power; and he rushed into print with a series of writings designed to spell out the God-building possibilities of the new society: the second part of his Tectology (1917) and two Utopian novels, Red Star (1918) and Engineer Menni (1919). Though originally published in 1908, Red Star produced its greatest impact when it appeared in the second, 1918 edition.60 Its image of an earth dweller suddenly transported to another planet which was in a feverish ecstasy of socialist construction seemed to many the image of a new socialist society into which Russia might suddenly leap. The novel was reprinted several times; and Bogdanov's organization for the creation of Proletarian Culture (JProletkuli) enjoyed nationwide
popularity throughout the period of Civil War and 'war communism'- publishing about twenty journals throughout Russia during those difficult days.
Late in 1920 Lenin forced the subordination of the hitherto freewheeling Proletkult to the Commissariat for Education. Bogdanov's organization was censured for its claim to have brought about 'immediate socialism' in the
