Authors

Discussion

The paper demonstrates how models of early-modern erudition and self-presentation—embodied by Rabelais, Thomas More, Erasmus, and Montaigne, whose reception counterintuitively flourished in the totalitarian atmosphere of the 1930s—influenced a group of intellectuals known as techenie. This group centered around the magazine Literaturnyi Kritik and was led by influential philosophers Georg Lukács and Mikhail Lifshitz. It was also associated with Moscow’s renowned Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (IFLI), which served as an intellectual home for an older generation of scholars interested in the Renaissance, including art and literary historian Aleksei Dzhivelegov. For the two thinkers discussed in this paper, Lifshitz and Leonid Pinsky, Renaissance intellectuals offered not only rhetorical models but also models of intellectual independence, serving as a means to interpret their own turbulent era. While many connections within this group were severed after the war, and some key members found themselves on opposing sides of the political spectrum, the Renaissance models that permeated their Stalin-era writings continued to underpin their postwar work with even more force. In his internal review of Pinsky's study of Shakespeare (1971), Bakhtin described this ideal as the capacity of "Renaissance men" to "see directly into the cosmos, penetrating through human ideology."