Western Marxism: A Fictionalist Deconstruction

Abstract

The visits which Wittgenstein made to the Soviet Union in the late thirties must be among the least researched episodes in his life. Most of his biographers mention the visit he made in 1935, and a few refer to a later visit in 1939. None tells us anything of substance about what he did there, and, in particular, none of them gives any clue as to how his experiences in the USSR might have influenced Wittgenstein's philosophical development. We learn that during his first visit Wittgenstein was offered a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Kazan (where Tolstoy had studied) and that for a while he considered seriously the possibility of settling in the Soviet Union. We learn nothing, or little, of Wittgenstein's intellectual contacts in the Soviet Union. It is only very recently, in fact, that we have come to know of the most formative of Wittgenstein's intellectual encounters in the Soviet Union, which occurred in his conversations in 1935 and 1939 with the neglected Hungarian Marxist thinker, L. Revai.1 Since Revai's life and work remain little known in the West, it is worth sketching their main outlines. Born in Budapest in 1881, the first son of a well-established banking family, Revai made a minor mark on Central European intellectual life in the first decade of this century as a literary theorist. His work at that time (now virtually unobtainable and nearly forgotten) was derivative and unoriginal, being an eclectic weaving together of a variety of currently fashionable themes. It reveals nothing of the intellectual radicalism which distinguishes his mature theorizing and amounts to a highly conventional application of Kantian and Schopenhauerian conceptions to familiar questions in the theory of culture. In the twenties Revai published hardly at all. He had joined the Communist Party shortly after its foundation in 1918, abandoning the romantic syndicalism of his youth for a Leninism he was never to renounce, and seems to have occupied himself for a decade or more in political and organizational work. Little is known, even now, of Revai's thought during this period. We know that in 1933 Revai left Hungary for the USSR, and stayed there until 1945. From the present volume