Anastasia Grigorovskaya's Talk: 'Russian-European Utopian Dialogue: Modernization Practices (from N. G. Chernyshevsky to Utopias of the XX Century)'

On May 30, 2024, within the framework of the seminar 'West and East: Universalism of culture', Anastasia V. Grigorovskaya, PhD, a research fellow of the Laboratory, made a report

Anastasiya V. Grigorovskaya continued her research 'Russian-European Utopian Dialogue (from folk utopias to utopias of the first half of the XIX century)', the main provisions of which were presented at a scientific seminar of the Center for Modernization Studies of the European University in St. Petersburg. In the framework of her new report, the author traced the further path of evolution of the Russian utopia in its close contact with the Western European one. In the first part of the report, Chernyshevsky's utopia is considered in the focus of the phenomenon of life-building, and also demonstrates the movement from an economic utopia to an anthropological utopia in his novel What Is to Be Done? In the second part of the report, the texts of the Soviet authors (A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky), I. Efremov, the Strugatsky brothers) are analyzed in the context of Western European modernization practices. The report pays special attention to how the ideas of Western European authors were radicalized (T. Mohr, F. Bacon, J.-J. Rousseau, K. Lasswitz) on Russian basis, which ensured the final transformation of reflection on the future in Russian utopia from a discursive form to a practical one.

You can watch the videorecording of the seminar on the YouTube channel of the Laboratory.