Authors

Discussion

Recent years have witnessed a rise of interest in the ‘Enlightenment’ understood not as a neutral designation of a particular historical epoch, but as a powerful, evocative, and evolving concept with its own complex history of uses and interpretations in major European languages (Lumières, Aufklärung, etc.) and beyond. A substantial body of research has already emerged analysing the various ways in which the intellectual and cultural history of the eighteenth century has been described, categorised, and conceptualised in subsequent centuries by different groups of thinkers in accordance with presuppositions and aims shaped by their own time. Drawing on these studies, the present paper seeks to reconstruct the emergence and expansion of the concept of the ‘Russian Enlightenment’ in Soviet scholarship on eighteenth-century Russian literary, intellectual, and social history. Previous studies by David M. Griffiths, Max J. Okenfuss, Simon Dixon, and Andrew Kahn have already investigated the multiple meanings attached at different historical moments to the Russian word prosveshchenie, the development of an awareness of the Enlightenment as a phenomenon of eighteenth-century history among Russian intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as the attempts of Soviet and GDR scholars to introduce the notion of the Russian Enlightenment as a counterpart to parallel Western European currents of thought. However, this latter story remains to be told in full, as many important episodes and connections, including the very origins of the concept, are overlooked in existing accounts. This paper examines the very different meanings associated with the concepts of ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Enlighteners’ in the writings of Georgii Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin; demonstrates how these foundational texts were interpreted and, in the case of Lenin, often blatantly misread by Soviet authors; and argues that the concept of the ‘Russian Enlightenment’, which did not figure in Marxist-Leninist models of intellectual or literary history in the first decades of the Soviet era, suddenly rose to prominence during the late Stalin period, offering a striking example of the repurposing of the past in the interests of the present.