Rereading the ‘Signposts’

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 92, 4, 2014 REVIEW ESSAY Rereading the ‘Signposts’ AVRIL PYMAN Aizlewood, Robin and Coates, Ruth (eds). Landmarks Revisited: The ‘Vekhi’ Symposium 100 Years On. Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2013. 322 pp. Notes. Index. $85.00. These proceedings of the Vekhi centenary conference held in July 2009 at the University of Bristol add up to more than just another academic symposium. The various scholarly articles, some of which feature fresh research, others reassessments in the context of contemporary European political thought or of the Russian political, sociological and religious tradition past and present, and still others in-depth examinations of the polemics aroused by the 1909 publication, combine effectively to point up the compendium’s continued resonance for today’s readers. All these aspects are given due consideration in the Introduction by Robin Aizlewood, Ruth Coates and Evert van der Zweerde, which justifies their claim that ‘The republication of Vekhi at the end of the Soviet period, sanctioned at the highest level, can be considered the central event in relation to intellectual history at the time’ (p. 11). This is not an extravagant claim. The editors are aware that Vekhi ‘was much better at raising questions than at providing answers’; that, if we accept the translation ‘Landmarks’, these were ‘landmarks in an intellectual, not a political, landscape’ (p. 19); that the collection ‘reflects the confusion of the very group itself’ (p. 21): finally, however, despite the fact that, like many interventions by intellectuals, Vekhi ‘failed’ in the sense ‘of not achieving its intended and stated goals’ (p. 39), its relevance echoes on well beyond its own time. The conference contributions, it is claimed here, ‘offer the contextualization that is needed, paradoxically, Avril Pyman is Reader Emerita in Russian at the University of Durham. READING THE ‘SIGNPOSTS’ 735 to decontextualize the original publication and appreciate the extent to which it addresses issues that should interest the present-day reader as well’ (pp. 41–42). On the whole, the symposium accomplishes just this. It does, however, require to be read with attention. The introduction, being a combined effort by three authors, is scholarly and smoothly written — but neither striking nor pithy. This reviewer found it necessary to re-read it after the individual papers before fully appreciating the excellence of the over-all aperçu. The first article by Frances Nethercott establishes the literary context of the debate about the nature of the Russian ‘Intelligentsia’ and is enlightening on how attitudes were modelled on fictional characters, just as fictional characters, in their turn, arose like Turgenev’s Bazarov from the ground-soil of Russian nineteenth-century life. Nethercott differentiates clearly between the ethos of the radical Intelligentsia as such and that of the educated class and pays special attention to opinions expressed by Petr Struve. She also examines the preoccupation of the Intelligentsia with its own identity, the fact that Europe borrowed the term from the Russian — and to what extent the emergence of a socio-political group answering to its own far from homogeneous self-definitions could be seen as a crossborder product of modern industrialized society. Stuart Finkel considers one of the less famous authors’ contributions to Vekhi and Out of the Depths, those by A. S. Izgoev, and highlights his emphasis on the need for transformation from within: ‘Izgoev (and other Vekhi contributors) saw their task not as deposing the intelligentsia from its traditionally conceived role in guiding Russia’s development, but as sounding the alarm regarding its current unfitness to do so’ (p. 71). He concludes with a flourish: thus this great collective sinner, the intelligentsia, which had brought Russia to apocalyptic ruin, might now, with a miraculous transformation, throwing off its atheist bravado for Christ-like humility, be reborn and help Russia rise up again out of the depths. (p. 82) Fortunately, the introduction, in the section ‘Vekhi and Religion’ (pp. 32–39), has already made it clear that, with the notable exception of Bulgakov (and, occasionally, Berdiaev), the Vekhi group in fact refers to the Orthodox Church only ‘in terms of negatively valorized metaphors with which to condemn the intelligentsia’ (p. 36) and that...