Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Symposium One Hundred Years On(Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century)

The symposium entitled Vekhi, or Landmarks, is one of the most famous publications in Russian intellectual and political history. Its fame rests on the critique it offers of the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia. It was published in 1909, under the editorship of Mikhail Gershenzon, as a polemical response to the revolution of 1905, the failed outcome of which was deemed by all the Landmarks contributors to exemplify and illuminate fatal philosophical, political, and psychological flaws in the revolutionary intelligentsia that had sought it. Its fame persists until today not least because the volume has been deemed by many in Russia and the West to have proven prophetic in its prediction (and urgent warning) that the realisation of the intelligentsia’s platform would bring ruin upon Russia. More than any other text, its republication in 1991 symbolically heralded the end of the ideological hegemony of Marxist-Leninism in the Soviet Union.

About the Author :
Robin Aizlewood holds an honorary position at UCL, having been director of UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and also of the inter-university Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies. He is the author of two books on Maiakovskii's verse (Verse Forma and Meaning in the Poetry of Vladimir Maiakovskii, 1989, and Two Essays on Maiakovskii's Verse, 2000) and a wide range of studies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian philosophy and literature, both prose and poetry. Ruth Coates is senior lecturer in Russian studies at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author, 1998, and numerous articles on the Russian intellectual tradition. She is currently researching the reception of the doctrine of deification in Russian culture, with an emphasis on the late imperial period.

Review :
“Vekhi (1909) was a collection of essays by major Russian thinkers who set out to examine and challenge the boundaries between social thought, epistemology, religion, and law. In its wide-ranging and stimulating papers, the present volume offers a rich and helpful contextualization of this important work and ponders its impact on later decades in political and moral philosophy.” —Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary, University of London