Abstract
Lev Pumpyansky's turn at the end of the 1920s from criticism of Marxism to the full acceptance of Marxist sociology as the main working tool of the literary historian can be viewed as a capitulation, but it could also be a disclosure of the potential of previous criticism. I prove that the criticism of Marxism by Pumpyansky fully fit into the dispute of neo-Kantianism against Hegelianism, while his sociology of literature was based on neo-Kantian foundations and the acceptance of Hegel's dialectics, but not Hegelian philosophy. I reconstruct a common source for Pumpyansky and Bakhtin’s view from the outside to both the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian traditionsm, an episode from Plato's Phaedo. The difference in the understanding of the novel genre led Pumpyansky and Bakhtin to opposite conclusions. Pumpyansky's interpretation of the difference between the novel and the novella allowed him to accept Marxism as a metacritic of Neo-Hegelianism and Neo-Kantianism, preserving the position of the hero, which was unacceptable for Bakhtin. For Pumpyansky, Marxist sociology just realizes the intentions of neo-Kantianism as soon as it is applied not to the field of science, but to the field of literature and art. Disagreeing with the convergence of ethics and creativity, promoted by Bakhtin, Pumpyansky coined a consistent Marxist sociology of literature, claiming to be philosophical and relevant for today.
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