Abstract
In opposition to the memory politics that seeks to frame the historical narrative of Communism and the Revolution, this article discusses the possibility of a different memory of the Russian Revolution. Taking as its starting point Derrida’s notion of “politics of memory” in Spectres of Marx and Nancy’s existentialist reconfiguration of communality in The Inoperative Community, I propose an understanding of the Russian Revolution as also guided by the idea that it could retrieve a memory of the common as being-in-common. Although this idea was not prominent in official Bolshevik propaganda, I show in close readings how this idea can be found in the literary works of the Russian Soviet writer, Andrey Platonov.
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Notes
- 1.
In The Seeds of Time (1994), Fredric Jameson offered one of the most interesting readings of Platonov’s great 1927–1928 novel Chevengur, through Heidegger’s concept of the forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit), arguing that, after the alleged demise of Western metaphysics, Platonov explored the Russian Revolution not only in terms of its political promises but also in terms of its potential as an existential opening to the world. I have developed this thought further in Andrey Platonov: The Forgotten Dream of the Revolution (Lane 2018).
- 2.
A similar idea of the people as living in a closer proximity to death is a guiding theme in The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. As Ivan Ilyich becomes deathly ill, the servant, a man of the people, is in the end the only one to whom he feels any belonging, precisely because of his ability to accept death.
- 3.
Cf. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback on sleep in the works of Platonov (2017).
References
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Lane, T. (2020). Memory Politics and the “Politics of Memory”. In: Telios, T., Thomä, D., Schmid, U. (eds) The Russian Revolution as Ideal and Practice. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14237-7_11
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