Lesley Chamberlain

Chamberlain here starts with Kant's aesthetic understanding of the human capacities for imagination and self-transformation. She traces the influence of these ideas on subsequent artistic visions of beauty. Such a self-understanding of inherent human creativity came to inspire thoughts of revolutionary political change. Her discussion traces this inspiration's philosophical evolution, and also follows its transplant from Germany to Russia during the long 19th century. From Schiller's plays and Hegel's dialectic it traveled to Herzen, from Fichte to Bakunin, and by various paths from Schelling, Heine, Feuerbach and Marx to Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Plekhanov. The eventual destination was the tragic Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and civil war that followed. After an initial release of creative energy, the unfortunate final result was not the "new kind of living" sought by some, but instead a "metaphysical disappointment", a "philosophical perversity" that led to a party dictatorship over a "harshly policed" industrial state. "The great revolutionary art of 1895-1922" terminated. The "whole utopian journey" became an "abject self parody". The "freedom and openness" of the imagination "was not allowed to last" in the Soviet Union. ==Select bibliography==