In fin-de-siècle and early revolutionary Russia, a group of self-educated workers produced a large body of poetry and prose in which they attempted to comprehend their rapidly changing world. Witnesses to wars and revolution, these men and women grappled on paper with the nature of civilization and the imperatives of ethical truth. In a strikingly original approach to Russian culture, Mark D. Steinberg listens to their words, which are little known today. The results of their literary creativity, he finds, were frequently not what the new Soviet order was expecting from its workers, despite its celebration of the notion of a proletarian art.Through insightful readings of a vast fund of lower-class writings, Steinberg shows that the authors focused above all on the uncertain nature and place of the self, the promise and dangers of modernity, and the qualities of the sacred in both their lives and their imaginations. Like their counterparts in the intelligentsia, these worker writers were ambivalent about Marxist ideology's celebration of the city and the factory and even about modern progress itself. Drawing on vast research, Steinberg demonstrates the texts' significance for an understanding of Russian popular mentalities, indeed for the very meaning, philosophically and morally, of these years of crisis and possibility at the end of the old order and the early years of the Soviet regime.
Mark D. Steinberg is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is author of several books, including Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907 and Voices of Revolution, 1917, and the coauthor of A History of Russia, 7th edition.
What People are Saying About This
Katerina Clark
Mark D. Steinberg's fascinating book analyzes a crucial aspect of the transition from Russian to Soviet culture. In so doing, it fills a significant void in Western historiography on the Soviet Union.
Reginald Zelnik
Mark D. Steinberg has written one of the most original books of Russian history to appear for many years. He has combed the writings of creative worker intellectuals in search of their special sensibility and imagination and found some wonderful affinities with his own. The result is an outstanding work of scholarship, one that illuminates important parts of the past that were previously in shadow.
James von Geldern
Mark Steinberg explores the borderlands between social and cultural history. Introducing us to articulate workers, their social environments and the often contradictory ways they understood their lives, Steinberg creates a fine-grained map of Russia's route to modernity. His book features a tremendous amount of new material and a graceful writing style, and covers a range of topics that few historians would attempt.
William G. Rosenberg
This ambitious, pathbreaking exploration of the Russian proletarian 'voice' distills a carefully read literature into the complex themes of self, modernity, and the sacred. Mark D. Steinberg's prodigious interpretations provoke a reexamination of many familiar assumptions about the 'proletarian mind.' A remarkable achievement, Proletarian Imagination brilliantly weaves social, intellectual, and cultural history into a new understanding of proletarian voices and their meanings. It will stimulate critical thinking about Russian workers and the revolutionary moment for many years to come.
