Nikita Nankov

Osip Mandelstam’s criticism has been studied much less than his poetry and life. This article sheds some light on three complex ideas in Mandelstam’s critical texts viewed as a whole: synchrony and diachrony, word and language, and dialogicity. Taken together, these three areas form what I term Mandelstam’s cultural and literary holism. One of my leading ideas is that this criticism is imbued with implicit phenomenology. This type of philosophizing also influences Mandelstam’s critical style — it does not define but describes and narrates. This explains why my effort to “translate” Mandelstam’s critical ideas into a stricter scholarly idiom by necessity uses long quotes. The study concludes that Mandelstam’s holism is utopian and idealistic because it thinks the cultural past can be reenacted in the cultural present. Today, in its totality, Mandelstam’s holism is somewhat archaic because it is an apparatus by which a subjective mind attempts to control all meanings. Yet, many aspects of this holism, such as dialogicity, reader’s activity, and the eclectic accumulation of various cultural strata, are still viable in our contemporary postmodern thinking and practices. Initially, the study was written in English in December 1996 and was reworked in Bulgarian in October 2022.

In the context of western utopian philosophical and literary tradition from Plato to Dostoevsky, Mikhail Gorbachev’s book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (1987 and 1988) demonstrates not only its utopian character, but simultaneously tempts one to come with theoretical and practical dystopian objections. This essay analyzes six key utopian features of the book and their dystopian metamorphoses. First, the utopian postulate assuming all people are philosophers and, therefore, embrace perestroika’s only possible truth is an abstract philosophical concept, but not a practical possibility. Second, glasnost is the new garb of the old utopian requirement for a cataphatic language fully expressing the truth; language, however, can lie, too. Third, utopian self-criticism of Soviet dignitaries fosters incredulity and hatred in their subjects, who detest them as either weak leaders or self-serving hypocrites. Fourth, utopian belief in a future true and flourishing socialism is undermined by the paucity of real socialism. Fifth, perestroika as a utopia presupposes an idealistic temporality, which, however, contradicts perestroika’s claims to historical materialism and dialectics. Finally, following in the footsteps of utopia, which is an oxymoronic closed-open world not allowing imports of imperfection but exporting perfection, perestroika proclaims its self-sufficiency, but also lays bare its latent imperialism and militarism. Perestroika’s contradictory utopian-dystopian essence results to a great extent from the naïve quasi Marxism enjoying an unchallenged status in the USSR. Paradoxically, but also inevitably, pseudo Marxism smothers all other philosophical alternatives and thus leads not to strengthening, but collapsing of the USSR and its own philosophical and practical suicide. 
Keywords: perestroika, utopia, dystopia, philosophy, literature