Category Archives: Former issues

Theses on the interpretation of the system-change

In works studying the history of the system-change and its consequences there is an explicit or implicit war between different interpretational schools – "discourses" or "narratives" – on the use of different concepts and on defining the causes and outcomes. Politics and the mainstream professional literature, including diligent contributions of former Marxists, systematically crowded out the class based approach and Marxian social form analysis. This study shows that the essence of the system-change – under the flag of "democracy and freedom" – everywhere was to change ownership, to create a new capitalist class and to establish and extend the power of the supranational class.

For reinterpreting Master and Margarita – Aristophanes-style festivity

Master and Margarita was written in a period when the terror of Stalin put an end to the "papier-máché rationalism" of the 1920s and when mass arrests, losses of livelihood, hundreds of thousands of people sent to lagers and death sentences created an atmosphere where impossible was very possible and where the world of fantasies, reality and unreality easily merged. The study also presents the philosophy of Bulgakov and the moral stand featuring his works in this historic context. The real evil is "represented" in the book not by trivial trick players and neighbours reporting each other hoping for getting a flat as a reward but by Berlioz who has no ideas; his only goal is to service the power unscrupulously. The existence of Berlioz thus in fact a non-existence – and that could be the judgement of Bulgakov on all power that became an end in itself.

The article is tthe edited version of the chapter on Bulgakov in Арсланов В.Г. : Постмодернизм и русский "третий путь": Tertium datur российской культуры XX века. Культурная революция, 2007г., Серия: AEstetica