Authors

Discussion

The paper examines how the Enlightenment was understood as a period in the history of ideas in the writings of the intellectuals associated with the Techenie (the Current), a critical movement of the 1930s that emerged in the struggle against the so-called “vulgar sociology” in Soviet criticism. As Katerina Clark has shown, the rapprochement between Soviet Russia and France in the 1930s, under the banner of the anti-fascist movement, brought renewed attention to the French Enlightenment thinkers (already central to the Bolshevik canon) as forerunners of dialectical materialism. The members of the Techenie, however, developed their dialectical arguments in opposition to the schematic and linear models they associated with the utilitarian materialism of many Enlightenment figures. In the works of Vladimir Grib, Izrail Vertsman, and the group’s founder, Mikhail Lifshitz, we find an attempt to rethink the eighteenth-century canon within the terms of their conception of literary history and Marxist aesthetics. The paper draws on both published texts and unpublished materials, including lecture notes and private letters.