>Interesting point. There was some good philosophy, but lots of rubbish.
>I thought that Ilyenkov in USSR and Zeleny in Czechoslovakia both made
>pretty positive contributions. But these are rare flowers in an
>otherwise arid desert. Also there is the psychology of Vygotsky and
>Luria.
>
>There were also some interesting developments in sociology of
>literature, like Bakhtin and Propp (? - I mean the morphology of the
>folk-tale man), and Roman Jakobson - but these were often distrusted,
>and dissident.
>
>The good scholarship crushed for its tendency is well-known - Pashukanis
>(Law), Preobrazhensky (economics), II Rubin (economics) etc. etc..
>
>Who would you have in mind, Justin, as the good ones?
Pretty much the same list; I'd add a bunch of logicians. If you go outside of philosophy, there's lots of good work in the sciences, and actually a lot of first class history of earlier periods. Perry Anderson surveysa lot of the good Soviet stuff in his Passages book.
>
>I met a Soviet philosopher once, by the name of Irina from Irkutsk. As
>she described it to me higher education was taught with a great degree
>of formality - not altogether a bad thing. Lectures were expected to
>convey a corpus of work according to a regular timetable, as I
>understood it from her description (maybe I'm exaggerating). I
>sympathised with her frustration at the slack teaching methods that
>predominate in the West.
Well, it's not "the west," it's just a European exam system. It's the same at Cambridge. At Cambs, the undergrads have to wear robes to lectures. You want formal, try the French and Germans.
>
>She was very frustrated with the teaching of dialectical materialism,
>which was utterly lifeless as she experienced it -
Which I've heard from every Soviet philosopher who wasn't a hack.
She was re-training herself in the philosophy of
>Heidegger, which sounds quite a waste to me,
Whyzzat? Heidegger's a great philosopher. Not my cuppa, but I can recognize greatness even if it's different. Ever read Goldmann on Lukacs & Heidegger?
jks
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