Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky (russian: Алекса́ндр Константи́нович Воро́нский) ( – 13 August 1937) was a prominent
humanist
Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.
The meaning of the term "humani ...
Marxist
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
literary critic, theorist and editor of the 1920s, disfavored and purged in 1937 for his work with the
Left Opposition
The Left Opposition was a faction within the Russian Communist Party (b) from 1923 to 1927 headed ''de facto'' by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet fou ...
and
Leon Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian ...
during and after the
October Revolution
The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key moment ...
.
Voronsky's writings were hidden away in the Soviet Union, until his autobiography, ''Waters of Life and Death'', and anthology, ''Art as the Cognition of Life'' were translated and published in English.
Early life
Voronsky was born in the village of Khoroshavka in
Tambov Governorate
Tambov Governorate was an administrative unit of the Russian Empire, Russian Republic, and later the Russian SFSR, centred around the city of Tambov. The governorate was located between 51°14' and 55°6' north and between 38°9' and 43°38' east ...
; his father was the village priest, Konstantin Osipovich Voronsky, who died when Aleksandr was a few years old. After attending a Tambov religious school, in 1900 he enrolled in the Tambov Seminary, where he helped organize an illegal library for the seminary students. In 1904 he joined the
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks (russian: Большевики́, from большинство́ ''bol'shinstvó'', 'majority'),; derived from ''bol'shinstvó'' (большинство́), "majority", literally meaning "one of the majority". also known in English ...
faction of the
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP; in , ''Rossiyskaya sotsial-demokraticheskaya rabochaya partiya (RSDRP)''), also known as the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party or the Russian Social Democratic Party, was a socialist pol ...
, and the following year he was expelled from the seminary for "political unreliability".
He moved to
St. Petersburg
Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...
, where he carried out party assignments and met
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 19 ...
; in September 1906 he was arrested and sentenced to a year of solitary confinement. Soon after his release he was arrested again in
Vladimir
Vladimir may refer to:
Names
* Vladimir (name) for the Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak and Slovenian spellings of a Slavic name
* Uladzimir for the Belarusian version of the name
* Volodymyr for the Ukr ...
and sentenced to two years of exile; on his way to Yarensk in
Vologda
Vologda ( rus, Вологда, p=ˈvoləɡdə) is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, city and the administrative center of Vologda Oblast, Russia, located on the river Vologda (river), Vologda within the watershed of the Northern Dvina. ...
guberniya he met his future wife, Serafima Solomonovna Pesina, another young Bolshevik. After finishing his exile in 1910 he moved to
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
and then
Saratov
Saratov (, ; rus, Сара́тов, a=Ru-Saratov.ogg, p=sɐˈratəf) is the largest city and administrative center of Saratov Oblast, Russia, and a major port on the Volga River upstream (north) of Volgograd. Saratov had a population of 901,36 ...
, where he helped form a provincial group of Bolsheviks and organize a number of major strikes. In January 1912 he was one of 18 delegates to the
Prague Party Conference, at which he took the minutes of the conference and spoke strongly for a mass daily workers' newspaper.
[A. K. Voronsky website](_blank)
/ref> On his return to Russia he continued underground work and was rearrested on May 8; his exile ended in September 1914, when he returned to Tambov with his wife and newborn daughter, Galina, moving to Ekaterinoslav
Dnipro, previously called Dnipropetrovsk from 1926 until May 2016, is Ukraine's fourth-largest city, with about one million inhabitants. It is located in the eastern part of Ukraine, southeast of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on the Dnieper Rive ...
the following year.
Participation in the Bolshevik Revolution
When the February Revolution
The February Revolution ( rus, Февра́льская револю́ция, r=Fevral'skaya revolyutsiya, p=fʲɪvˈralʲskəjə rʲɪvɐˈlʲutsɨjə), known in Soviet historiography as the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution and somet ...
came, he became a member of the Odessa
Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...
Executive Committee of the Council of Workers' Deputies and edited the local Bolshevik newspaper, ''Golos proletariya'' (Voice of the Proletariat). After the October Revolution
The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key moment ...
, he helped the Bolsheviks take power in Odessa and in early 1918 moved to Saratov
Saratov (, ; rus, Сара́тов, a=Ru-Saratov.ogg, p=sɐˈratəf) is the largest city and administrative center of Saratov Oblast, Russia, and a major port on the Volga River upstream (north) of Volgograd. Saratov had a population of 901,36 ...
, Moscow, and then Ivanovo
Ivanovo ( rus, Иваново, p=ɪˈvanəvə) is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, city in Russia. It is the administrative center and largest city of Ivanovo Oblast, located northeast of Moscow and approximately from Yaroslavl, Vlad ...
, where he assisted his friend Mikhail Frunze
Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze (russian: Михаил Васильевич Фрунзе; ro, Mihail Frunză; 2 February 1885 – 31 October 1925) was a Bolshevik leader during and just prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Born in the modern-day ...
, edited the newspaper ''Rabochii krai'' (Workers' Land), and headed the provincial Party Committee.
Literary and political career
In January 1921 Voronsky left for Moscow, where he met with Lenin and Gorky to discuss plans for a new " thick journal" (the traditional Russian combination of literary magazine
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry, and essays, along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letter ...
and political journal), which was called ''Krasnaya Nov
''Krasnaya Nov'' (russian: Красная новь, lit='Red Virgin Soil') was a Soviet monthly literary magazine.
History
''Krasnaya Nov'', the first Soviet "thick" literary magazine, was established in June 1921. In its first 7 years, under e ...
'' (Red Virgin Soil) when the first issue was published in June. In 1923 he organized a new publishing house, Krug (Circle). In the increasingly fractured cultural-political scene of the early 1920s, Voronsky aligned himself with Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian M ...
and Anatoly Lunacharsky
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (russian: Анато́лий Васи́льевич Лунача́рский) (born Anatoly Aleksandrovich Antonov, – 26 December 1933) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Bolshevik Soviet People's ...
and opposed the growing power of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secreta ...
, which led to his downfall in 1927, when he was attacked by the Party and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers
The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, also known under its transliterated abbreviation RAPP (russian: Российская ассоциация пролетарских писателей, РАПП) was an official creative union in the ...
and in October relieved of his duties as editor of the journal. In February 1928 he was expelled from the Party, and in January 1929 his arrest was announced. However, he silenced his opposition and was readmitted to the Party and permitted to return to Moscow, where he continued to write and edit for Gosizdat
State Publishing House of the RSFSR (Russian: Госуда́рственное изда́тельство РСФСР), also known as Gosizdat (Госиздат), was the State Publishing House founded in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Repu ...
but was no longer prominent as a critic.
Voronsky expounded the idea of aesthetic evaluation, an exercise in dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of science, history, and nature developed in Europe and based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxist dialectics, as a materialist philosophy, emphasizes the importance of real-world con ...
that combined the search for objective truth with the complexity of human emotion and feeling. Voronsky's criticism of art lay in opposition to the artificial representation of life presented in Stalin's school of socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of idealized realistic art that was developed in the Soviet Union and was the official style in that country between 1932 and 1988, as well as in other socialist countries after World War II. Socialist realism is ch ...
. Voronsky, in agreement with Trotsky, viewed art as an exercise between the subjective and the objective world of the artist to facilitate a deeper understanding of humanity. Aesthetic evaluation, he wrote, requires a strong correlation to the nature of the object portrayed.
Expulsion and death
American Max Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969) was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet and a prominent political activist. Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with radical ...
describes Voronsky's increasingly untenable position in a chapter called "Voronsky's Fight For Truth" in his 1934 book ''Artists in Uniform''. In 1935 Voronsky was again expelled from the Party, and on February 1, 1937, was arrested by the NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
...
. On August 13 he was sentenced to be shot and probably executed immediately after the sentence.
Although Voronsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist, he was far from the ideological rigidity that was enforced after Stalin took control. Victor Ehrlich called him "flexible and humane" and wrote:
He combined political orthodoxy with a strong personal commitment to literature, a commitment underpinned by an aesthetic which, though not incompatible with Marxism, could be easily construed within the Soviet Marxist framework as a "bourgeois-idealistic" heresy. To Voronsky, art was not primarily a matter of mobilizing or manipulating group emotions on behalf of a class-determined world view. It was a distinctive form of cognition, a largely intuitive mode of apprehending reality ... a true artist, armed by intuition and creative integrity, cannot help seeing and embodying in his work certain truths that run counter to his conscious bias and to the interests of his class.
He therefore supported such "ideologically confused" writers as Boris Pilnyak
Boris Andreyevich Pilnyak (''né'' Vogau russian: Бори́с Андре́евич Пильня́к; – April 21, 1938) was a Russian and Soviet writer who was executed by the Soviet Union on false claims of plotting to kill Joseph Stalin and ...
, Konstantin Fedin
Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin ( rus, Константи́н Алекса́ндрович Фе́дин, p=kənstɐnʲˈtʲin ɐlʲɪkˈsandrəvʲɪtɕ ˈfʲedʲɪn, a=Konstantin Alyeksandrovich Fyedin.ru.vorb.oga; – 15 July 1977) was a So ...
, Vsevolod Ivanov
Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov (russian: Все́волод Вячесла́вович Ива́нов, ; , Lebyazhye, Semipalatinsk Oblast – 15 August 1963, Moscow) was a Soviet and Russian writer, dramatist, journalist and war correspondent.
B ...
, and Leonid Leonov
Leonid Maximovich Leonov (russian: Леони́д Макси́мович Лео́нов; — 8 August 1994) was a Soviet novelist and playwright of socialist realism. His works have been compared with Dostoyevsky's deep psychological torment.
...
and was one of the few Party critics to recognize the gifts of Isaac Babel
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (russian: Исаак Эммануилович Бабель, p=ˈbabʲɪlʲ; – 27 January 1940) was a Russian writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of ''Red Cavalry'' ...
: "No wonder ''Red Virgin Soil'' ... became one of the most vital and readable Russian periodicals in the 1920s."
He wrote ''Za zhivoi i mertvoi vodoi''
Russian text
(1927, 1929; tr. as ''Waters of Life and Death'', 1936), "two fine volumes of memoirs."
Rehabilitation
Twenty years after his execution, in 1957, Voronsky received official state rehabilitation in the U.S.S.R. However, his work remained heavily censored and devoid of the criticism of socialist realism as well as of the growing Stalinist bureaucracy from his time with the Left Opposition.
Voronsky's essays were translated by researcher Frederick Choate and published in the book ''Art as the Cognition of Life'' in 1998 after four years of extensive research inside Moscow libraries between 1991 and 1995. These writings were finally accessible as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union and the change in political climate.
References
External links
A. K. Voronsky Archive
at Marxists.org
{{DEFAULTSORT:Voronsky, Aleksandr
1884 births
1937 deaths
People from Inzhavinsky District
People from Kirsanovsky Uyezd
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party members
Old Bolsheviks
Left Opposition
Russian Trotskyists
All-Russian Central Executive Committee members
Russian literary critics
Russian male essayists
Russian avant-garde
Soviet journalists
Soviet literary critics
Soviet literary historians
Soviet male writers
20th-century male writers
20th-century essayists
Great Purge victims from Russia
Russian people executed by the Soviet Union
Soviet rehabilitations