World History as Revolution: Boris Porshnev and the Experience of Dialectical Defeat
Keywords:
Porshnev, Russian revolution, world history, philosophy of history, historical materialism
Abstract
This article provides a comprehensive presentation of the most remarkable engagement with the intellectual genre of world history in the Soviet era — the hitherto unknown project Critique of Human History by the famous Soviet Marxist thinker Boris Porshnev. Porshnev’s synthesis of negative dialectics and historical materialism transposed the negativity of revolutionary defeat in Stalinist Russia into a radical teleological perspective, which conceived of world history as a single, cognitive and political, revolution. The article presents multiple institutional, cultural, and ideological contexts from the Soviet period that pertained to Porshnev’s experience of revolutionary defeat, argues for the crucial importance of the historical approach in appropriating the intellectual legacy of the Revolution, all the while highlighting the relevance of Porshnev’s thought for present-day discussions in philosophy, anthropology, and history.
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Bergenthum, Hartmut (2004). Weltgeschichten im Zeitalter der Weltpolitik: Zur populaeren Geschichtsschreibung im wilhelminischen Deutschland. Munich: M-Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
David-Fox, Michael (2015). Crossing Borders. Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Debray, Régis (2007) “Socialism: A Life Cycle,” New Left Review, 46, (July-August): 5–28.
Feldner, Heiko (2003). “The New Scientificity in Historical Writing around 1800.” In Writing History: Theory and Practice, eds. Heiko Feldner, Kevin Passmore, and Stefan Berger, 3–22. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Halfin, Igal (2000). From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Harbsmeier, Michael (1989). “World Histories Before Domestication: Writing Universal Histories, Histories of Mankind and World Histories in 18th Century Germany.” Culture and History 5: 93–131.
Hill, Christopher, Rodney Hilton, and Eric Hobsbawm (1983). “Past and Present: Origins and Early Years.” Past and Present 100: 3–14.
Joravsky, David (1961). Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kassof, Brian (2005). “A Book of Socialism: Stalinist Culture and the First Edition of the Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 6.1: 55–95.
Kennedy, Michael (2015). Globalizing Knowledge. Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Keucheyan, Razmig (2013). Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today. Trans. Gre-
gory Elliott. London: Verso.
Kondratieva, Tamara (2012). “B. F. Porshnev chitaet Bakunina” [B. F. Porshnev reads Bakunin]. Vestnik Tiumenskogo Universiteta. Seriia Istoria [Tyumen University bulletin. History series] 2: 210–14.
Lukin, Nikolai (1937). “Osnovnye problemy postroeniia vsemirnoi istorii,” [The major problems of constructing world history] Istorik-marksist [Historian-Marxist] 3: 3–23.
Magun, Artemy (2017). “Boris Porshnev’s Dialectic of History.” Stasis 5.2: 218–46.
NIOR RGB — Nauchno-issledovatel’skii Otdel Rukopisei Rossiiskoii GosudarstvennoiBiblioteki [The Manuscript Division of the Russian State Library].
Porshnev, Boris (1926). Gorsovety i rabotnitsa [City councils and female workers]. Moscow: Leningrad.
Porchnev, Boris (1963). Les soulèvements populaires en France de 1623 à 1648. Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N.
Porshnev, Boris (1964). Feodalizm i narodnye massy [Feudalism and popular masses]. Moscow: Nauka.
Porshnev, Boris (1968). “Bor’ba za trogloditov” [A struggle for troglodytes]. Prostor 4: 98–112.
Porshnev, Boris (1969). “Myslima li istoriia odnoi strany?” [Is a history of a single country possible?]. In Istoricheskaiia nauka i nekotorye problemy sovremennosti [Historical science and some problems of modernity], 301–17. Moscow: Nauka.
Porshnev, Boris (1970). Frantsia, Angliiskaia revoliutsiia i Evropeiskaia politika v seredine XVII veka [France, the English Revolution, and European politics in the mid-se-venteenth century] Moscow: Nauka.
Porshnev, Boris (1974). O nachale chelovecheskoy istorii [On the origin of human history] Moscow: Mysl.
Porshnev, Boris (1995). Muscovy and Sweden in the Thirty Years’ War, 1630–1635. Ed.
Paul Dukes, trans. Brian Pearce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porshnev, Boris (2007). O nachale chelovecheskoy istorii [On the origin of human history]. Moscow: Aletheia.
Ryzhkovskyi, Vladimir (2009). “Sovetskaia medievistika and beyond (k istorii odnoii diskussii)” [Soviet medieval studies and beyond (A history of a discussion)]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie [New Literary Review] 97: 58–89.
Ryzhkovskyi, Vladimir (2017). “Byl li u russkoi revoliutsii svoi Gegel?” [Did the Russian
Revolution have its Hegel?]. Gefter. http://gefter.ru/archive/22681
Sziklai, László (1992) After the Proletarian Revolution. Georg Lukács’s Marxist Development, 1930–1945. Trans. Ivan Sellei. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado.
Woolf, Daniel (2011). A Global History of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zhukov, Evgeny (1955–1965). Vsemirnaia Istoriia v 10 tomakh [World History in 10 volumes]. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo Politicheskoi Literatury.
Published
2018-12-28
How to Cite
Ryzhkovskyi, V. (2018). World History as Revolution: Boris Porshnev and the Experience of Dialectical Defeat. Stasis, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-2018-6-2-176-197
Section
Thematic Articles
