Authors

Egor Sokolov¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

In this paper, I will discuss late Soviet ‘cultural turn,’ that is, research approaches, which emerged in the 1960-1980s and more or less explicitly broke with the official Marxism offering intellectual alternative. This process took place in different disciplines: philosophy, philology, history as well as in interdisciplinary research, such as semiotics, poetics or aesthetics studies. To a large extent, it became an intellectual foundation for humanities in post-Soviet Russia. My central argument is that this theoretical work reflected the social position of academic intelligentsia and served for it as a means of self-description. I will present several cases from late Soviet intellectual history, focusing on the use of the concept of ‘culture’ in works of philosophers Aleksei Losev and Merab Mamardashvili, philologists Yuri Lotman and Sergei Averintsev, historians Aron Gurevich and Leonid Batkin. On these examples, I will show how different academic positions and corresponding intellectual strategies determined theoretical and moral implications of this concept.