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communism (Ideology) - Columbia, United States

communism — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 07:48:26 -0600

Communism is a social structure and political ideology in which property is commonly controlled. Communism (written with a capital C) is a modern political movement that aims to overthrow capitalism via revolution to create a classless society where all goods are publicly owned. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human society, which would be achieved through a proletarian revolution and only becoming possible after a socialist stage develops the productive forces, leading to a superabundance of goods and services.

"Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life. In modern usage, communism is often used to refer to Bolshevism or Marxism-Leninism and the policies of the various communist states which had government ownership of all the means of production and centrally planned economies. Communist regimes have historically been authoritarian, repressive, and coercive governments concerned primarily with preserving their own power.

As a political ideology, communism is usually considered to be a branch of socialism; a broad group of economic and political philosophies that draw on the various political and intellectual movements with origins in the work of
theorists of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution."Socialism." Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Columbia University Press. 03 Feb. 2008. Communism attempts to offer an alternative to the problems with the Capitalist market economy and the legacy of imperialism and nationalism.

Marx states that the only way to solve these problems is for the working class (proletariat), who according to Marx are the main producers of wealth in society and are exploited by the Capitalist-class (bourgeoisie), to replace the bourgeoisie as the ruling class in order to establish a free society, without class or racial divisions. The dominant forms of communism, such as Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and Trotskyism are based on Marxism, but non-Marxist versions of communism (such as Christian communism and anarcho-communism) also exist.

Karl Marx never provided a detailed description as to how communism would function as an economic system, but it is understood that a communist economy would consist of common ownership of the means of production, culminating in the negation of the concept of private ownership of capital, which referred to the means of production in Marxian terminology.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Communism
Address: Columbia, United States
Contact: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Communism
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Viktor Shklovsky (Theorist) - Moscow, Russia

Viktor Shklovsky — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 06:08:14 -0500

Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet critic, writer, and pamphleteer. He was one of the founders of the Russian formalism school and wrote several insightful essays on the works of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Eisenshtein.

Shklovsky was born in 1893 in St. Petersburg. He studied philology in St. Petersburg university and was then serving in the army, aligning himself to different, often opposing sides. In 1922 he learned he'd be arrested, so he escaped from St. Petersburg to Finland over the ice and lived in Berlin several years, where he published several books. In the 1920s he came back to the Soviet Union and was involved with futurists as well as several other literary circles. Somehow he managed to continue working during Stalin and the WW2, managing to create very inspiring critical writing while not directly confronting the official literary policy of the state.

One of the famous Shklovsky's phrases was that "the Soviet power taught literary critics to distinguish between various shades of shit".

He was one of the first persons in Russia to propagate formalism and shift the emphasis in literary criticism from the social and political issues to the form and structure of the work itself. In this way formalism was closely related to structuralism, although the methods were different.

His work on Eisenshtein in 1979 got a State Literary Prize in the Soviet Union.

Shklovsky died in 1984 in Moscow.
Address: Moscow, Russia
Contact: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSshklovsky.htm
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Sergei Yesenin (Writer) - Moscow, Russia

Sergei Yesenin — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:08:48 -0600

Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (sometimes spelled as Esenin) was born in Konstantinovo in the Ryazan region of the Russian Empire to a peasant family. He spent most of his childhood in his grandparents' home. He began to write poetry at the age of nine.
In 1912, he moved to Moscow where he supported himself working as a proofreader in a printing company. The following year he enrolled in Moscow State University as an external student and studied there for a year and a half. His early poetry was inspired by Russian folklore. In 1915, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he became acquainted with fellow-poets Alexander Blok, Sergei Gorodetsky, Nikolai Klyuev and Andrey Bely. It was in St. Petersburg that he became well known in literature circles. Alexander Blok was especially helpful in promoting Yesenin's early career as a poet. Yesenin said that Bely gave him the meaning of form while Blok and Klyuev taught him lyricism.

In 1915, Yesenin published his first book of poems,
Radunitsa, soon followed by Ritual for the Dead (1916). Through his collections of poignant poetry about love and the simple life, he became one of the most popular poets of the day.
His first marriage was in 1913 to Anna Izryadnova, a co-worker from the publishing house, with whom he had a son, Yuri. (During the Stalinist purges, Yuri Yesenin was arrested and died in 1937 at a Gulag labor camp.)

In 1915 he came to St Petersburg, where he met Klyuev. "For the next two years, they were a team, living together most of the time. Collections of his poetry usually include his three love letters to Klyuev, without specifying to whom they were written.". From 1916 to 1917, Yesenin was drafted into military duty, but soon after the October Revolution of 1917, Russia exited World War I. Believing that the revolution would bring a better life, he briefly supported it, but soon became disillusioned and sometimes even criticized the Bolshevik rule in such poems as The Stern October Has Deceived Me.

In August 1917 Yesenin married for a second time to an actress, Zinaida Raikh (later wife of Vsevolod Meyerhold). They had two children, a daughter, Tatyana, and a son, Konstantin. Konstantin Yesenin would become a well-known soccer statistician.

In September 1918, he founded his own publishing house called "Трудовая Артель Художников Слова" (the "Moscow Labor Company of the Artists of Word.")
Yesenin and Duncan

In the fall of 1921, while visiting the studio of painter Alexei Yakovlev, he met the Paris-based American dancer Isadora Duncan, a woman 18 years his senior who knew only a dozen words in Russian, while he spoke no foreign languages. They married on May 2, 1922. Yesenin accompanied his new celebrity wife on a tour of Europe and the United States but at this point in his life, an addiction to alcohol had gotten out of control. Often drunk, his violent rages resulted in him destroying hotel rooms and causing disturbances in restaurants. This behavior received a great deal of publicity in the international press. His marriage to Duncan was brief and in May 1923 he returned to Moscow. He almost immediately became involved with actress Augusta Miklashevskaya and is rumoured to have married her in a civil ceremony, although he had not obtained a divorce from Isadora Duncan.

That same year he had a son by the poet Nadezhda Volpin. Sergei Yesenin never knew his son by Volpin, but Alexander Esenin-Volpin grew up to become a prominent poet and activist in the Soviet Union's dissident movement of the 1960s with Andrei Sakharov and others. After moving to the United States, Esenin-Volpin became a prominent mathematician.
Sergei Yesenin basrelief. House at Petrovsky Lane Moscow
The last two years of Yesenin's life were filled with constant erratic and drunken behavior, but he also created some of his most famous poems. In 1925 Yesenin met and married his fifth wife, Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya, a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy. She attempted to get him help but he suffered a complete mental breakdown and was hospitalized for a month. Two days after his release for Christmas, he allegedly cut his wrist and wrote a farewell poem in his own blood, then the following day hanged himself from the heating pipes on the ceiling of his room in the Hotel Angleterre. He was 30 years old.

After accidentally meeting Yesenin in 1925, Vladimir Mayakovsky noted:

... With the greatest difficulty I recognized Yesenin. With difficulty, too, I rejected his persistent demands that we go for a drink, demands accompanied by the waving of a fat bunch of banknotes. All day long I had his depressing image before me, and in the evening, of course, I discussed with my colleagues what could be done about Yesenin. Unfortunately, in such a situation everyone always limits oneself to talk.

According to Ilya Ehrenburg's memoirs "People, Years, Life" (1961),

Yesenin was always surrounded by satellites. The saddest thing of all was to see, next to Yesenin, a random group of men who had nothing to do with literature, but simply liked (as they still do) to drink somebody else's vodka, bask in someone else's fame, and hide behind someone else's authority. It was not through this black swarm, however, that he perished, he drew them to himself. He knew what they were worth; but in his state he found it easier to be with people he despised.

Burial of Sergei Yesenin
Although he was one of Russia's most popular poets and had been given an elaborate funeral by the State, most of his writings were banned by the Kremlin during the reigns of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. Nikolay Bukharin's criticism of Esenin contributed significantly to the banning. Only in 1966 were most of his works republished.

Sergei Yesenin's poems are taught to Russian schoolchildren and many have been set to music, recorded as popular songs. The early death, unsympathetic views by some of the literary elite, adoration by ordinary people, and sensational behavior, all contributed to the enduring and near mythical popular image of the Russian poet.

Sergei Yesenin is interred in Moscow's Vagankovskoye Cemetery. His grave is marked by a white marble sculpture.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sergei+Yesenin
Address: Moscow, Russia
Contact: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sergei+Yesenin
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