title: Lev Trotsky and the utopian imagination in the Russian revolution
metadata.name: dc.contributor.author
metadata.value: Steinberg, Mark D.
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.accessioned
metadata.value: 2018-01-22T09:47:30Z
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.available
metadata.value: 2018-01-22T09:47:30Z
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.issued
metadata.value: 2017-12
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.identifier.citation
metadata.value: Steinberg M. D. Lev Trotsky and the utopian imagination in the Russian revolution. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. History, 2017, vol. 62, issue 4, pp. 664–673.
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.identifier.other
metadata.value: 10.21638/11701/spbu02.2017.401
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.identifier.uri
metadata.value: http://hdl.handle.net/11701/8896
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.description.abstract
metadata.value: This article — the second part of a three-part series that reinterprets the “utopianism” of Russian
  revolutionaries, especially the Bolsheviks—focuses on the evolving views of Lev Trotsky. Part 1 described
  the basic theoretical approach: an alternative definition of the utopian imagination developed
  after 1917 in the work of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and others. In brief, this sees
  utopia as a critical analysis of conventional constructions of reality, time, and the possible: as a critical
  negation of that which merely is in the name of what should be, as a radical challenge to assumptions
  about what is possible and impossible in the present, as a vision of time and history as containing the
  possibility of an explosive “leap in the open air of history” (Benjamin). Utopian consciousness breaks
  into the normativized world of knowledge and expectations about reality and possibility in history to
  reveal the new and unexpected. This is utopia as radical epistemology, hermeneutics, and praxis. In
  this article, the focus is on Lev Trotsky (the previous article considered Alexandra Kollontai and the
  following concludes with Vladimir Mayakovsky), who, like all Marxists, denied he was a “utopian.”
  Although Trotsky’s ideological positions and political power evolved and shifted, we see a variety of
  expressions of a fundamental utopian imagination during the years from 1901 through 1921: his critique
  of pessimism, his optimism about the power of unleashed popular passions, his insistence that
  what was truly impossible was to imagine that the revolution could be “interrupted” (what he called
  “непрерывная революция” and later “перманентная революция”), his faith in the coming of world
  revolution, his conception of the historical place of violence for unleashing the possibilities of the
  new—for allowing an explosive “leap in the open air of history.” Refs 40.
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.language.iso
metadata.value: en
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.publisher
metadata.value: St Petersburg State University
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.relation.ispartofseries
metadata.value: Vestnik of St Petersburg University. History;Volume 62; Issue 4
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Lev Trotsky
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: the Russian revolution
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: utopianism
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Russian revolutionaries
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.title
metadata.value: Lev Trotsky and the utopian imagination in the Russian revolution
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.type
metadata.value: Article
metadata.lang: en_GB
resources.filename: 01-Steinberg.pdf
resources.url: https://dspace.spbu.ru/bitstream/11701/8896/1/01-Steinberg.pdf
resources.format: Adobe PDF
resources.size: 624,83 kB