Information from the event’s website: Alexander Bogdanov was one of the most creative and inspiring figures of the 20th Century. His utopian novel, Red Star, started the genre of Bolshevik science fiction, and he was the founder of the world’s first haematology institute. He was a leader of the Russian Bolsheviks, working with Lenin, at the […]
If anyone is interested in looking at these two editions side by side, here is a comparison of ToCs. The book is reorganized rather significantly even though Bogdanov himself downplayed the changes. All parts (two in the first edition, three in the second) are combined into one ToC. Note the change of the title as […]
Abstract During 1910 Lenin and Plekhanov entered into a relationship that both were at pains to avoid describing as a “fractional”, preferring instead to speak of a “rapprochement” (“sblizhenie”). Alexander Bogdanov would later allege that Lenin had been “hypnotized” by the success of Petr Arkadievich Stolypin, Chair of the Council of Ministers, who had made […]
Studies in East European Thought (2021) Abstract: Alexander Bogdanov’s first work of philosophy, Basic Elements of the Historical View of Nature, was fundamentally influenced by Friedrich Engels. As a Marxist philosopher seeking to elaborate a comprehensive, systematic, and scientific worldview appropriate for worker–students, Bogdanov found inspiration in Engels’s Anti-Dühring, which provided him with his monist conception of being […]
Abstract The Copenhagen Congress of the Socialist International of 28 August—3 September 1910 was the last Congress of the International in which the RSDRP participated as a formally united party. Though a truce had been negotiated between the warring factions at the Plenum of the Central Committee of 15 January—5 February 1910, a study of […]
Posting these last two issues of Vpered‘s Geneva-based newspaper here without much commentary since I meant to share these before but over a year passed and I haven’t had a chance to prepare these. Issue №5 contains only two signed articles (Polyansky and Manuil’sky), the rest are reports and statements. Issue №6 has an interesting […]
Studies in East European Thought (2020) ABSTRACT: Between 1899 and 1906, Alexander Bogdanov developed a scientific philosophy intended to substantiate the basic principle of historical materialism—the idea that existence determines consciousness—in terms of the most advanced science and empiricist epistemology/ontology of his day. At the same time, however, he strove ‘to answer the broad needs of […]
I have been reading about Bogdanov’s Red Star recently and wanted to put together a quick informational post on its editions and translations. The original novel (or a novella as it’s fairly short) appeared in 1908 in Saint-Petersburg, I’ve seen some writers describe it as ‘self-published’ – I’m not sure what that means in 1908 […]
This essay – which is hard to find unless you look at the actual newspaper in which it appeared – was young Deborin’s contribution to the Menshevik critique of so-called ‘Machism’ (here it meant mostly Bogdanov’s philosophy but also Bazarov, Lunacharsky, Suvorov, Yushkevich, and some other figures + some left Bolshevik syndicalist tendencies). This essay […]
The politics of Alexander Bogdanov in 1917 This paper was first delivered to the conference Economics and Revolution: Economists on the Russian Revolutions of 1917 held on 30 November 2017 in the School of Public Policy, Presidential Academy of the National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow. It will be published in Russian in A.A. […]
