Dialectic and Dystopia:
A Century Before and After the Russian Revolution
Through Literature

By Ralph Dumain


Studies in a Dying Culture” radio series:
14th installment, 18 November 2017.
Listen here.

DESCRIPTION: November 7 marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. I commemorate this crucial historical event in an oblique manner by examining the works of key creative writers and other thinkers from the 19th century up through the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution who confronted modernity’s essential philosophical and existential issues. Writers discussed include Mary Shelley, Charles Fourier, Friedrich Engels, George Eliot, Herman Melville, Imre Madách, Jules Verne, Fyodor Dostoevsky, György Lukács, Leon Trotsky, and Yevgeny Zamyatin, with mentions of others and with Theodor Adorno and Richard Wright as a coda. All of this is to illustrate the historical failure to render irrational society rational and, with respect to world views, the unresolved dialectic of reason and unreason in the modern world.


INTRODUCTION TO “STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE” SERIES

[14th installment of SIDC, named after essay collection by Christopher Caudwell.

See autodidactproject.org and reasonsociety.blogspot.com.]

Much of this program was written in a hurry from memory, so please forgive any inaccuracies, especially with dates.

INTRODUCTION TO THIS PODCAST

I began this radio series in 2010. Among other episodes, since 2012 I have recorded podcasts on the philosopher Adorno, the literary topics of utopia and science fiction, and the Hungarian authors Frigyes Karinthy, Sándor Szathmári, and Robert Zend.

November 7 marked the centennial of the October Revolution (old calendar)—the Russian Revolution—an upheaval determining the course of the 20th century, undoubtedly distorted now in both the American and the neofascist Russian press. Analyses of this phenomenon and its outcome from anti-Stalinist Marxists alone (where the most insightful analysis can be found) could fill libraries comprising city blocks. I am going to approach this not from an institutional or causal vantage point, but from a more abstract one, not to explain it, but to highlight the unsolved problem of instituting reason in an irrational world. I will discuss this further later, but first I want to approach the topic indirectly by picking out various authors and other thinkers from the century preceding and succeeding 1917, illustrating my theme of the dialectic of reason and unreason.

This will not be a comprehensive or even a systematic review. Rather I will highlight selected authors I have been reading in recent years, with a few philosophers thrown in. The literary writers fit into the lineages of utopian or avant-garde literatures. (Just in the past few months I have engaged James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Italo Calvino.)

[@ 4:55 min.]

TWO CENTURIES AGO: FRANKENSTEIN AND LEMONADE OCEANS

1818 saw the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, seen by many as the birth of science fiction. As I stated in my podcast on science fiction and utopia, the 19th century saw the birth of science fiction and the birth of the future. While life remained an enigma from a scientific perspective in the epoch of mechanistic science and Romantic biology, the possibilities and ethical dilemmas of creating intelligent life through purely naturalistic, technological means were given iconic literary form in Frankenstein

The 19th century also brought us utopian socialism. 1808 saw the publication of Charles Fourier’s The Theory of the Four Movements, in which his eccentric utopian reshaping of the natural environment included his famous, oft-quoted (and ridiculed prediction) that oceans in the future will have the flavor of lemonade. Fourier’s technocratic utopia also included a communal organization dubbed a phalanstery, which plays a role in later authors’ literary works.

[@ 6:05 min.]

THE MID-19TH CENTURY TURNING POINT

As we move toward the middle of the 19th century, we see, with the advance of scientific, technological and industrial civilization, the experience of both religious and social crisis. The implications of a naturalistic understanding of the universe and the traumas of modernization differentially affecting the various social strata echo not only in social transformation but in the very conception of human nature and destiny.

1844 sees Marx’s Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts and Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England, but also Engels’ critique of Thomas Carlyle, who had bewailed the evils of modern industrial civilization. Engels rejects a Romantic return to the past and looks forward to the emancipation of the working class.

As we shall see, the implications of a naturalistic world view are sinking in at this time. The novelist George Eliot translates Ludwig Feuerbach’s [1841] The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach saw religion as the alienated projection of the human essence, establishing an upside-down view of reality to correspond to an upside-down alienated existence. This provided inspiration for Marx’s revolutionary view of philosophy and eventually political economy as ideology.

1851 sees the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Here we find Melville wrestling with all the tensions of his age. For C.L.R. James, the hero is the crew, and the key crewmen are the harpooners, a South Sea Islander, an African, and an American Indian. There is the complex interplay of opposing world views: the superstitious crew, the conventional Christian and servant of capitalism Starbuck, the ambivalent narrator Ishmael, and the enigmatic Captain Ahab, the post-Christian, post-secular rebel, who both commands a naturalistic view of reality but who cannot accept an impersonal view of the universe and strikes out in a transcendental vendetta against the white whale, which he views as the pasteboard-mask of a malevolent cosmic force. And what is the meaning of the whale? As I concluded in an essay I wrote, inspired by C.L.R. James, the whale may mean anything, or it is just a whale, but the decisive question is: what do men live by?

The Hungarian Imre Madách's verse drama The Tragedy of Man appears in 1861. Madách’s drama, much translated but little-known in the English-speaking world, is a landmark work of the 19th century. Madách initiates a futuristic, dystopian trend in Hungarian literature, influencing Karinthy, Madách, and Zend. Madách marks a transition from religion and Romanticism to naturalism. Madách’s tragedy begins with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. In a dream, Lucifer, the spirit of negation, guides the human couple incarnated as historical figures at key stages in human history from ancient Egypt to the future extinction of life of Earth. At each juncture the idealistic Adam’s dreams are dashed. In Egypt Adam dreams of democracy, which is thwarted in ancient Greece by demagoguery. Rome becomes decadent, and Christianity arises. The Catholic Church becomes corrupt, and Adam as Kepler turns to science. Later comes the French Revolution, and then the high moment of English capitalism. Madách, writing in the bitter aftermath of the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, imagines the future. The futuristic socialist society is set in Fourier’s phalanstery, a soulless technocracy. From there Adam attempts to escape into outer space, but the Spirit of the Earth calls him back, for man, however his spirit wishes to escape, is inescapably tied to Earth. Finally, Adam reappears in the far future in the last days of human life on Earth. But this is a projection of the course of human history. As the dream ends, God reappears, and tells Adam to have faith. Debates have ensued ever since as to whether the drama is in the end pessimistic or optimistic.

In 1989 an unpublished manuscript of a novel by Jules Verne was discovered in a vault and eventually published and translated. Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863, is a dystopia of sorts. In the mid-20th century there is only science, technology, and business. All the humanities have disappeared—poetry, music, everything. The protagonist, a devotee of the now-proscribed humanities, excavates the lost treasures of the arts and seeks out now-rare like-minded souls.

[@ 11:45 min.]

DOSTOEVSKY’S NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Another landmark novel is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, published in 1864. This work is a riposte to the utopian socialist vision of the Russian Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is To Be Done?, which would inspire a generation of Russian radicals, including Vladimir Lenin, whose key treatise on the vanguard revolutionary party would bear the same title. Dostoevsky attacks the Fourier-inspired utopian image of the Crystal Palace. Dostoevsky radically disrupts the prospective of social progress and the triumph of a rational (utopian) social order via the (underground) recognition of man’s irrational drives and stubborn will that at every juncture violates the submission to natural laws—including a postulated natural law that could engender a rational social order—and even the tyranny of mathematical truth—2 + 2 = 4. The first person narrator lays out these ideas in Part 1.

In Part 1 the Underground Man is up against a stone wall.

What stone wall? Why of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact.

And this goes on. Then ....

Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

From a schema of unbridgeable dualism the Underground Man deduces the cussedness of human nature, though we cannot be sure if his orientation towards human nature is at this point positive or negative. It seems that a mechanistic, logical, or dare I say positivistic interpretation of reality bars any role for self-propelled human volition.

Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation.

Man could not tolerate the tedium of a rationally ordered utopia, the abhorrence one will find also in Madách and Szathmári!

There is more than one way to interpret this rebellion against ‘2 x 2 = 4’, but given the Underground Man’s hostility to putatively facile conceptions of rational progress, he lays down the reactionary basis of Dostoevsky's philosophy.

Part 2 is in its own way noteworthy, perhaps scandalous for the 19th century, and perhaps also something new for Russia, which had only just freed its serfs. Perhaps it was also something new for the modern world, as this has been called the first existentialist novel. The Underground Man is passive-aggressive, deeply resentful of others, both challenging them and seeking acceptance of them, constantly humiliating himself with his impotent gestures, loathing himself as much as others, alternately hostile and ingratiating. He does this with a circle of acquaintances on which he imposes himself (old school chums and their leading light Zverkov, all of whom he loathes), then with the prostitute Liza, then with his servant, then with Liza again, then he recognizes what a spiteful worm he is; finally, the narrative breaks off unresolved with a comment from the fictional editor of the text.

When the Underground Man first wakes up with Liza in a brothel, he delivers a speech, projecting all sorts of feelings onto her, then acting like her savior. She tells him he sounds bookish, but she is finally convinced by the horrible future he lays out for her, and she is shaken into taking him seriously and accepting his invitation to his home, for which he hates her and pours scorn upon her when she shows up.

When he comes to the moment of self-realization at the end, he admits he is totally out of touch with real life, but because he is acutely self-conscious of this, he might be more in tune with reality since everyone else—that is, the Russian intelligentsia en toto—is just as “bookish,” in the sense of being removed from real life. His final words, before the “editor” steps in where the the narrative breaks off, are:

Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of us—excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that “all of us.” As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don’t want to write more from “Underground.”

The Underground Man cannot be equated with Dostoevsky himself. The relationship between the two, as well as the relationship between the stated philosophy and lived reality in the novel, is more complex. As Part 2 drives home, the Underground Man’s rebellion against rationalism is a failure, though some self-awareness is achieved where his narrative is broken off, and the entire Russian intelligentsia stands accused along with his self-accusation. Dostoevsky himself has an agenda for attacking rationalism and the intelligentsia. Where does it lead? His alienation leads to authoritarianism, reaction, and Christian apologetics, his torment to the justification of torment. This novel seems to be entirely swallowed up by the decaying feudal society that it represents, but without actual historical consciousness, for which loathing of the modernizing future is substituted. Dostoevsky had started out keeping company with revolutionaries, and after the torment of arrest and exile in Siberia, he turned ultra-conservative. This novel solidifies a recurrent pattern, though it has inspired other writers of various stripes.

I am going to end these vignettes from the 19th century with Dostoevsky. All the authors I have cited responded to a cultural/ideological crisis perceptible in the mid-19th century, fueled by the social changes coupled with the rising dominance of the scientific, naturalistic world view and the displacement of the supernatural conception of man’s place in the cosmos. In Dostoevsky one can see the mushrooming of reactionary irrationalism that one finds in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: this irrationalism is positivism’s antagonist, complement, blood brother, and black sheep of the family.

But as Russell Jacoby noted in his 1981 book Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism, without mentioning Dostoevsky, the ‘defeated’ perspectives of dissident Marxists and reactionary thinkers who highlighted modernity’s underbelly, obscured by the scientistic orientation of the orthodox Marxism that was institutionalized by the German social democracy. [Jacoby’s thesis is concisely presented in the Introduction.] All of this fits into the historical puzzle of the interlocking struggle and inseparability of the contradictions of the modern world—the capitalist world (which would include Stalinism), abstractly characterizable by the struggle of positivism vs. irrationalism, or scientism vs. Romanticism. Here we have the pattern of my big project: the dialectic of reason and unreason in the modern world.

[@ 22:10]

The recognition of unconscious drives, of existential displacement, of the diremption of the conscious individual and the social collective, pinpoints a problem that is ineliminable regardless of where one stands on the ideological spectrum. The pre-Marxist György Lukács, having passed through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, at one point saw Dostoevsky as the most advanced proponent of this sensibility and orientation to society, and as a Marxist even in the darkest days of Stalinism would not relinquish Dostoevsky as he relinquished the other two. Lukács inherited this problematic as the 20th century began, made a leap to revolutionary Marxism in 1918, and spearheaded so-called Western Marxism with his epochal work History and Class Consciousness published in 1923.

[@ 23:10]

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: LEON TROTSKY SPEAKS

Returning now to the topic of the Russian Revolution, whatever we may make of the Bolsheviks’ behavior following the desperate struggle ensuing upon the seizure of state power in 1917, the theoretical perspectives as well as the intentions of its greatest intellectuals must be given credence. Among the top leadership were also the most brilliant intellectuals: Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin. In the pre-revolutionary period it was possible to be more measured if still severe in one’s judgments as the ruthlessness sparked by the civil war following the seizure of power had not yet come to pass. Trotsky expressed his view of Dostoevsky in some speeches and writings before and after 1917. Here is what he says in his essay “Concerning the Intelligentsia,” written in 1912:

In the novel A Raw Youth Dostoyevsky’s Versilov looks at Europe, as Herzen did, with an anguish not unmixed with contempt. “There,” he says, “the conservative is only struggling to protect his living, and the store-clerk pours out his kerosene only to earn his daily morsel of bread. Russia alone lives not for itself but for the sake of an idea . . . . It is now nearly a century since Russia has been living without any thought for itself but for Europe alone.” The same Versilov says, “Europe created the noble images of the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the German; but it still knows almost nothing of the nature of the future man. It would seem, however, that Europe still does not care to know. This is understandable, as they are not free, whereas we are free. In all of Europe, I, with my Russian anguish, was the only free man. . . .” Versilov cannot see that, unlike the European conservative or the clerk in the kerosene-store, he had freed himself not only from the fetters of his class traditions but also from the possibility of social creativity. The same faceless environment which had given him his subjective freedom also loomed before him as an objective barrier.

Trotsky had a keen sense for the ideological underpinnings of philosophy and literature as well as a capable sensibility far beyond the limitations of other leading Bolsheviks. Here Trotsky excoriates the vain self-aggrandizement of the Russian intelligentsia that found itself uprooted from the past but had nothing to go on but its inflated sense of destiny. Trotsky finds the history of Russia a culturally impoverished one, not even being able to boast the glories of other feudal regimes. Whether Slavophiles, populists, or even partisans of modern ideas, the intelligentsia was compelled to fasten onto one or another grand ideology and to absorb hastily and superficially the products of centuries of cultural evolution that had transpired in the West, as an alternative to their own backward station and severance from their roots. Hence their illusions of being free spirits and sacrificing themselves for the people, encapsulated in the quote from Dostoevsky. Four paragraphs on, Trotsky travesties some lines from a poem just quoted: “Versilov’s version of  ‘freedom’ could have no other meaning than this freedom of our thought to wander without any work to do.”

Then Trotsky ridicules Russian intellectual accomplishments. Trotsky is less than impressed even by Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Alexander Herzen, Pyotr Lavrov, and Nikolay Mikhaylovsky. Bakunin gets grudging acknowledgment. Even Tolstoy yields political sterility. Belinski is found to be weak. Six more paragraphs and Trotsky has washed his hands of the Russian intelligentsia.

In 1922 Trotsky comments acidly on Dostoevsky’s rejection of socialism and atheism, which Dostoevsky had judged interdependent, yet Trotsky credits Dostoevsky as a keen psychologist, as he would in his 1924 book Literature and Revolution. He would also find Dostoevsky’s Christian fictional characters unconvincing, being totally antithetical to Dostoevsky’s own temperament.

[@ 28:05 min.]

AFTERMATH OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND ZAMYATIN’S DYSTOPIA

The history has been re-hashed a thousand times, and even the quantity of analysis generated by the anti-Stalinist left would fill city blocks full of material. I remember a debate from years ago over whether the Bolsheviks resorted to dictatorial measures only out of desperation or whether it was or became a permanent disposition beyond what was necessary for survival at the time. There is a point at which such distinctions dissolve, as whatever our initial motives, we become habituated to what we have done and are caught within that framework. I am not going to recapitulate the history or the analyses of the development and degeneration of the Soviet system. I only wish to add a more abstract dimension, which is not causal analysis, but which highlights a pattern. How is it possible to inject rationality into an irrational society?

I have studied the history of Soviet philosophy and Soviet literary policy, but I won’t comment on that now. I will just mention some of the known parameters to consider: the best intentions viz. dictatorial tendencies viz. the different social layers of society: the top Bolshevik leader-intellectuals (Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin), the other intellectually mediocre leaders (authoritarian mediocrities like Zinoviev and Radek), the middle layers of bureaucrats and intellectuals, the political police, the peasantry and creation of a Soviet proletariat, and the pressures on all these layers and well as the perversions inherited from the past.

Instead of laying all this out, I will mention two books that I am currently reading:

Lesley Chamberlain, Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007.

Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

In both of these books, which utilize the Soviet archives opened following the dissolution of the USSR, we see a grim portrait of the state of the country and the behavior of the Bolsheviks. Even if we adopt a more favorable disposition toward them, we see a desperation and ruthlessness that belies any pretensions to a unity of theory and practice. As Victor Serge noted, the revolutionary government contained the seeds of Stalinism, but it harbored tendencies in the other direction as well. But here we can see, whatever the intentions, that the structures of totalitarianism were established early, and the treatment of the pre-revolution Russian intelligentsia is symptomatic. Judging the situation is complicated by the opposition of much of this intelligentsia to the new regime, with some even allying with reactionary forces. But all in all, the arrests and deportation of many of these people, to the end of solidifying the basis for a new social order, bore long-term negative consequences. Religious thinkers and others were deported, one shipload on the infamous Philosophy Steamer. The heavy-handed gesture of institutionalizing reason did not result in a rational society.

[@ 32:55 min.]

Among those arrested, but later released was Yevgeny Zamyatin. (He was not allowed to emigrate until 1931.) Zamyatin was the author of the novel We, written in 1921 but banned and not published in the Soviet Union until its final years. We was the prototype for Orwell’s 1984, i.e. the futuristic, technologically advanced dystopia.

World War I was the turning point that yielded a perception that advanced technology could destroy the human race. In 1916, Karinthy published Voyage to Faremido, featuring a race of intelligent robots superior to self-destructive humanity. In 1920, Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) appeared, as did the word ‘robot’. And then came Zamyatin’s We, which would be published in the West. Newly modernizing societies of Eastern Europe yielded the most far-seeing futuristic visions.

[@ 34:30 min.]

THE 1940s

The pseudo-rationalism of Stalinism and the irrationalism of fascism would cast a shadow over the entire 20th century. In the 1940s Adorno and Horkheimer would write Dialectic of Enlightenment, attempting to account abstractly for this disaster.

In the 1940s, the African-American author Richard Wright, heavily influenced by Dostoevsky, would write his short story masterpiece “The Man Who Lived Underground.” He would use Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and other existentialist influences quite differently and for opposite purposes from these sources and from his contemporary white counterparts. His aim was not to promote irrationalism or reaction, but to break taboos and bring into public awareness what the sociologist Alvin Gouldner would term decades later the dark side of the dialectic—the recognition of the irrational underbelly of human behavior that reason could not ignore. This transcended the purview of the American Communist Party to which Wright belonged but was in the process of abandoning.

[@ 36:15 min.]

CONCLUSION

This time I will not follow up on other numerous literary figures and developments following the Russian Revolution.  Some are known mainly for their innovative literary techniques or approaches to knowledge, in some cases only obliquely tied to politics or dystopia or the future, such as James Joyce (Irish), Witold Gombrowitz (Polish), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentine), and Italo Calvino (Italian). There are the post-World-War-II dystopias, for examples the fiction of Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Philip K. Dick. I would add the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem, the first major African-American science fiction author Samuel R. Delany, and the Hungarian-Canadian multimedia writer Robert Zend. These are some of my favorites worthy of discussion.

But here is where I must wind up this sketch of a number of authors who illuminate the treacherous path trod over the past two centuries—the century preceding and the century following 1917. And the dialectic of reason and unreason remains unresolved as the world is being driven toward theocratic fascism and the total destruction of humanity.

[39: 40 min.]


WRITERS MENTIONED

19th century:
Mary Shelley
Charles Fourier
Karl Marx
Friedrich Engels
George Eliot
Herman Melville
Imre Madách
Jules Verne
Fyodor Dostoevsky

20th century – 1940:
György [Georg] Lukács
Leon Trotsky
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Frigyes Karinthy
Karel Čapek
Sándor Szathmári

 

1940s:
Richard Wright
Max Horkheimer
Theodor W. Adorno

Post-World-War II:
Ray Bradbury
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Philip K. Dick
Samuel R. Delany
Robert Zend
Stanislaw Lem
Italo Calvino

Other 20th century authors:
James Joyce
Jorge Luis Borges
Witold Gombrowicz
C. L. R. James
Russell Jacoby



NOTE

Following a week’s worth of thinker’s block, the original draft of this podcast was written between 4 am and 3 pm EST, Saturday, 18 November 2017. The podcast was recorded later that day, in the evening. The text is an approximation of the actual podcast and has been slightly revised and edited for this web page. The timing indicators [minutes:seconds] may not be exact and the actual times of the segments may very slightly, depending on whether you listen to the recording online or downloaded on your computing device.

There is an implied logic behind this presentation, but I did not quite connect all the dots. I mentioned the dialectic of reason and unreason, of positivism and irrationalism, but considering the likely unfamiliarity of my audience with this conceptual schema, I should have been more explicit about it and how all these authors fit into it.

The case of Dostoevsky is more complex than what I presented here. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is eye-opening in this regard. I fear that the implications of the contretemps presented between Trotsky and Dostoevsky were not made sufficiently explicit. Though Dostoevsky is not mentioned in the book, see also the Introduction to Russell Jacoby’s Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism.


Podcast listings (on this site):Studies in a Dying Culture” (May 10, 2010 - )

Some additional links on this site:

A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900 by Carlton J. H. Hayes

Charles Fourier’s oceans of lemonade

Jules Verne’s Lost Novel reviewed by R. Dumain

Yevgeny Zamyatin on Revolution, Entropy, Dogma and Heresy

Witold Gombrowicz confronts (Polish) provincialism

Witold Gombrowicz: Philosophy in 6 1/4 hours (1)

Witold Gombrowicz on Existentialism

Richard Wright's “The Man Who Lived Underground”: Notes for Discussion by R. Dumain

100 Years of C.L.R. James by R. Dumain

Bibliograhies & web guides on this site:

Ludwig Feuerbach: A Bibliography

Dostoevsky’s Underground, Ideology, Reception: A Very Select Bibliography

Frigyes & Ferenc Karinthy in English

Sándor Szathmári (1897-1974): Bibliografio & Retgvidilo / Bibliography & Web Guide

Robert Zend (Hungarian-Canadian writer, 1929-1985): Dedications, Works, Links

Karel Čapek: Selected Bibliography & Web Links

James Joyce, Politics, & the Jews: Select Bibliography

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Study Materials on the Web

Italo Calvino: A Select Bibliography

Gary Saul Morson: Genre, Utopia, Sideshadowing, Tempics, Prosaics, Parody, Misanthropology, Philosophy, Literary Theory, Borges: Select Bibliography

Futurology, Science Fiction, Utopia, and Alienation in the Work of Imre Madách, György Lukács, and Other Hungarian Writers: Select Bibliography

Science Fiction & Utopia Research Resources: A Selective Work in Progress

Theodor W. Adorno & Critical Theory Study Guide

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide

Marx and Marxism Web Guide


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