The Skill of Imagining the Future: The Utopian Dimension of Soviet Revolutionary Festivities

Abstract

This paper considers revolutionary festivities as one of the main manifestations of the Soviet culture of the 1917–1920s. Festivals varied in types and forms (mainly mass performances) and came to make part of the space of utopias in the first post-revolutionary decade. In this context, utopia is regarded as a cultural form of the sensual and rational comprehension of social reality. It produces ideas about happiness and harmony in response to the eternal human need both to foresee the future and to model it. According to recent findings in utopian studies (Ernst Bloch, Frederic Jameson, etc.), a utopia is articulated not in the form of literary texts containing the ideal blueprints of a new social order, but in the form of various intentions that contain the ability and skill to wish for the best, create alternative projects of the future, and criticise what hinders its achievement. Revolutionary festivities are interpreted as a set of value-based cultural practices – iconic actions and artifacts associated with memorable events, outstanding personalities, and special ceremonials. The use of the method of imaginary reconstitution of society (IROS) by Ruth Levitas and the model of a revolutionary festival constructed by Mona Ozouf as a theoretical tool make it possible to reconstruct the utopian dimension of Soviet revolutionary festivities. The festival chronotype is analysed through the prism of three modes of utopia as a method: archaeological, ontological, and architectural. There are interacting strategies or techniques – defamiliarisation, criticism, creating an alternative, and experiencing it – that work on the coherent image of a positive future. The research optics constructed in this way make it possible to reveal why, in the absence of holistic pictures of the future, revolutionary festivities nevertheless involved participants in forming a new political, social, and cultural order, as well as legitimising the revolution. The article refers to the description of the festivities in the publications of contemporaries of that epoch, i. e., authors (A. Piotrovsky) and critics (O. Tsekhnovitser, N. Shubsky et al.).