Trying to remember a bit by Trotsky
June 13, 2015 12:53 AM   Subscribe

At least I'm almost certain it was Trotsky. This was near the end of a book he wrote, in which, after the revolution, men not only gain control of the world, but somehow, the end result of Communism was men gaining actual control over their bodies and (I think) becoming something close to immortal. They'd be able to cure disease with their minds or something.

I'm remembering this from a Russian thought in the 19th century course I took ages ago (I think we looked a little at pre-revolutionary writing as well). I'm pretty sure it's Trotsky, and I remember that it was about men, not women.

For publication date, all I can say is that it came after Chernechevsky's What is to be done?, a book I remember for the pain it caused and the delight I felt in realizing that Notes from the Underground was a takedown of it.
posted by Hactar to Writing & Language (7 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
If the source is indeed Trotsky, I think you may have embellished the strength of the passage. He makes some strong claims about the quality of life in a fully-formed post-Capitalist society, but he never gets that mystical. There's speculation in Literature and Revolution that art in this society, should it exist, will be unrecognizable to us:
...there will be no "useless mouths" in which the liberated egotism of man-- a mighty force-- will be directed wholly towards the understanding, the transformation and the betterment of the universe-- in such a society the dynamic development of culture will be incomparable with anything that went on in the past!
But that vague passage is the closest thing I can think of to this. There are also passages in the book specifically saying that mysticism will have no place in the enlightened future. Seeing as how Trotsky was a generally grounded, nuts-and-bolts sort of thinker and not given to blatant sexism, I suspect you're misattributing.
posted by Mayor Curley at 5:41 AM on June 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


That does not sound at all like the notoriously hard-headed Trotsky. It sounds very much like Nikolai Fyodorov, whose kooky ideas were inexplicably influential among early-twentieth-century Russians, both communist and otherwise.
posted by languagehat at 7:29 AM on June 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


Are you perhaps thinking of J. Posadas?? Founder of the very weird Fourth International Posadist?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:02 AM on June 13, 2015


Response by poster: It wasn't Posadas. The writer was definitely Russian. Might have been Fyodorov, I'll take a look. If anyone else has other suggestions, I'd be happy to keep reading them. (This idea came about reading a critique of certain sigularitarians, saying that their arc of progress ended with people becoming gods, something that not even Marx had posited. I half remembered this bit, and thought that there was at least one proto-communist who had a similar belief though.)
posted by Hactar at 9:33 AM on June 13, 2015


Best answer: Is it Trotsky's Literature and Revolution?
Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 9:52 AM on June 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


There's also Alexander Bogdanov, the "God-builder," who was important for a while in the early Bolshevik movement and who thought mankind would be unified via “tectology,” which I've never tried very hard to understand, and the great writer Andrei Platonov, who was strongly influenced by Fyodorov (a heavily marked-up copy of The Philosophy of the Common Good was one of his favorite books) and for whom resurrection was a major theme. But as I say, such ideas were popular at the time and a lot of people were influenced by them.
posted by languagehat at 12:27 PM on June 13, 2015


Response by poster: Noisy Pink Bubbles, that's it. I was remembering more into it than there was, but that' s the quote. Thank you!
posted by Hactar at 3:26 PM on June 13, 2015


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