cultural sphere, a proletarian culture totally emancipated from the bourgeois past. Bogdanov, for his part, in a suppressed pamphlet of 1919, had already expressed the fear that the new rulers were merely a parasitic class of managerial organizers.61 Proletkult was soon abolished altogether; he and his followers, the so-called Workers' Truth group, denounced; and his prestige undercut by the time Tectology was completed in 1922. Bogdanov spent his last days in the relatively obscure but appropriately visionary post of director of an institute for 'the Struggle for Vital Capacity' (Zhiznesposobnost'). He died in 1928, apparently from a dangerous experiment involving transfusions of his own blood-a front-line casualty, as it were, in his undaunted efforts to take harmony and immortality away from imaginary gods and put them into the real life of men. The most extreme Prometheanism of the age was found in the so-called Cosmist movement, an offshoot of the God-building movement that flourished in St. Petersburg during the Civil War years of 1918-21. The Cosmists and the closely related Blacksmith {Kuznitsa) group of Moscow poets spoke with a kind of frenzied hyperbole about the imminent transformation of the entire cosmos. Under the leadership of Alexis Kuz'min, who took the appropriate pen name Extreme (Kraisky) and entitled his first fantastic book of poems The Smiles of the Sun,62 the Cosmists burst forth with expletives: 'We shall arrange the stars in rows and put reins on the moon' and 'We shall erect upon the canals of Mars the palace of World Freedom.'63
One important feature of Revolutionary Prometheanism was its attractiveness to long-submerged minority groups of the Russian Empire. At a time when a groping and desperate Tsar was increasingly relying on repression and Russification, minority peoples looked increasingly to the new worlds being opened up in the cosmopolitan culture of the silver age. Jewish painters like Marc Chagall and Lazar Lissitzky played a key role in the experimental painting of the day; and the Lithuanian painter-musician-writer, Michael Chiurlionis, anticipated much of the most revolutionary art of the day and exerted a shadowy influence over much of the Russian avant-garde. Among the Revolutionaries the role of minority people was no less conspicuous; and it seems appropriate to conclude with two of the most visionary, brilliant, and universal-minded of all Russian Revolutionaries: the
Pole, Waclaw Machajski, and the Jew, Leon Trotsky. The silencing of their voices in the course of the twenties was a measure of the retreat of the new regime from the great expectations of the earlier period.
Machajski, who wrote under the pseudonym A. Vol'sky, believed even more passionately than Bogdanov in the need for a totally new type of culture. One must move beyond the culture not only of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie but also of the newest and most insidiously oppressive social class, the intellectuals. Beginning with his Evolution of Social Democracy in 1898, the illegally published first part of his magnum opus, The Intellectual Worker, Machajski warned that articulate intellectuals will inevitably find their way to the head of the revolutionary movement and become the controlling oligarchy within any future revolutionary regime. In order to protect the interests of the inarticulate manual workers he called for a world-wide 'workers' conspiracy' dedicated to gaining enough economic improvement to permit the workers to raise their level of literacy and culture. Only in this manner could the advantage that the intellectual enjoyed over the worker be neutralized, and the working class assured that a genuine proletarian culture rather than a mythic culture of the intellectuals be built after the revolutionary attainment of power.
Machajski's position resembles the revolutionary syndicalism of Sorel, with its belief in 'direct action' in the economic sphere and the development prior to any bid for power of an autonomous, anti-authoritarian working class culture. His form of social analysis is also reminiscent of Pareto's theory of the 'circulation of elites,' Michels' 'iron law of oligarchy,' and Burnham's subsequent theory of a purely 'managerial revolution.' But unlike all these figures Machajski remained an unreconstructed optimist, confident that the workers' conspiracy could save the Revolution and develop fully the Promethean possibilities of the proletariat. Machajski's ideas, which were particularly popular in Siberia, were anathemized by the Bolshevik leadership with particular venom long before his death in I926.64
Even more dramatic was the gradual fall from grace in thy 1920's of Leib Bronstein, known as Trotsky, the passionate and prophetic co-author of the Bolshevik coup. From his early days as a populist and a renegade Jew, Trotsky had seen in the coming revolution the possibilities for a total reshaping of human life. Change was to come about not so much through the staged, dialectical progressions that Marx had outlined as through an uninterrupted or 'permanent' revolution, through a 'growing over' (pererastanie) of the bourgeois into the proletarian revolution, of the Rusj sian Revolution into an international revolution, and of a social revolution into a cultural transformation of mankind.
Thus, although Trotsky professed dissatisfaction with the mysticism of the God-builders and Cosmists, he leaves no doubt in his abundant writings on cultural matters about his own 'limitless creative faith in the future.' In the last lines of his famous collection, Literature and Revolution, written in 1925, when his own authority was already on the wane, he expresses confidence in man's ability
to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biological type, or, if you please, a superman.
. . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.65
Even above these peaks rose the sky-borne hope of transforming the cosmos expressed in 'The Chains of Blue,' the longest poem ever written by Khlebnikov in his 'alphabet of stars.' But at the end of a long 'blue chain' of images, the poet gives us a prophetic glimpse into a future that was to devour its futurists. He suddenly introduces the familiar figure of Prometheus. But it is a distorted image in which we see only his liver being devoured by eagles.66
Sensualism
Along with the effort to storm the heavens went a simultaneous impulse to plunge into the depths. Cosmic Prometheanism was accompanied by a counter-current of personal sensualism; boundless public optimism, by morbid private pessimism. Indeed, the early years of the twentieth century brought about a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.
In part, the new sensualism was a reaction against the long-dominant moralism and ascetic puritanism of the radical tradition which had been carried to extremes in the late Tolstoy. The new generation of writers delighted in the knowledge that their main source of inspiration, Vladimir Solov'ev, had used the sage of Yasnaya Polyana as the model for his portrayal of the Antichrist. They longed to rediscover the delights of sex and artistic indulgence which Tolstoy had denied himself no less systematically than had Pobedonostsev.
Exaltation of the flesh was to some extent caused by the rapid advent of a mass, urban culture. The lonely, atomized man of the city found in sex
one of his few surviving links with the vital, natural world dimly remembered from his rural boyhood. The provincial, rural elements that increasingly flooded the ranks of art and literature also tended to bring with them elements of earthy folklore, of a popular culture previously suppressed by the official, Orthodox culture of the Empire. The novels of bleak realism that had previously concentrated on characteristic sufferings of the countryside-¦ starvation and exploitation-now turned in the first decade of the new century to the peculiar shame of the cities-sexual degradation. From Leonid Andreev's picture of syphilis and suicide in The Abyss and In the Fog to Alexander Kuprin's panorama of urban prostitution in The Pit, the Russian reading public was subjected to vivid portrayals of sordid sexuality. To a large extent, however, the increasing preoccupation with sexual matters was a logical development of the romantic preoccupation with the will that had become characteristic of the emancipated aristocratic intelligentsia. Having tried to discover the will of the historical process in the early nineteenth century
