Authors

Peter Budrin ¹;  ¹ Queen Mary University of London, UK

Discussion

Established in 1931, the Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (IFLI) in Moscow had grown to become a prestigious college where students of different backgrounds were taught by top Soviet intellectuals. This flourishing intellectualism coincided with Komsomol meetings and public denunciations, which also flourished within the institution. Nevertheless, many students and lecturers perceived IFLI as a zone of intellectual autonomy formed around their passion for world literature and culture. At IFLI, young intellectuals such as Mikhail Lifshitz and Leonid Pinsky, who sought to move away from the dogmas of Marxist sociology of the 1920, taught alongside previously marginalized pre-revolutionary intellectuals. In this paper, I will explore the self-representations of, and interpersonal dynamics within, an informal group of young IFLI-based intellectuals known as the ‘The Lake School’ (the title of the group is a tribute to the English Romantics), and reveal how these intellectuals formed their own personas through their interaction with literary worlds of the past.