“Plato, Too, Advised Us... to Imprison the Akhmatovas of His Day”: An Unknown Polemic Between A. Kozhev and N. Berdyaev on Creative Freedom in the Context of Post-War Soviet Censorship

The article that precedes the publication of Alexandre Kojève’s text “On creative freedom and the souls’fabrication. Response to Professor N.A. Berdyaev” explores a little-known polemic between a famous interpreter of Hegel and an eminent Russian thinker on the topic of creative freedom, which was triggered by the postwar Soviet campaign to combat the absence of ideas and apolitics in art (“Zdanovism”). The historical context preceding the philosophers’ works (Berdyaev’s article “On Creative Freedom and the Fabrication of Souls” and Kojève’s manuscript “Response to Professor N.A. Berdyaev”) is reconstructed: the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” and the theses of A.A. Zhdanov’s report for Leningrad writers are examined. The leading role of Stalin in the Soviet cultural program after the war is emphasized (in view of Kojève’s Stalinist sympathies, this fact is recognized as particularly important). We reconstruct Berdyaev’s arguments against the practice of Soviet censorship (the unity of freedom and creativity, the incomparability of the human soul with factory production, the primacy of spiritual life, the threat of creative sterility), the origins of which can be found in Berdyaev’s pre-emigrant work. Kojève’s counter-arguments (the primacy of the production basis, the fact that works of art were created in less free epochs of the past, the compatibility of creative originality with social order) are reproduced. It is pointed out that they go back to his early publications in the pro-Soviet journal “Eurasia” (“Philosophy and the Communistic Party”), in which Soviet censorship was justified in the name of a “new culture of the future”. It is noted that the factor explaining Kojève’s harsh reaction to Berdyaev’s text is the fact that it was published at the height of the anti-Soviet campaign in the Western press. It has been argued that the fundamental reason for Kojève’s exasperation is that the polemic with Berdyaev was for Kojeve an episode in his critique of intellectuals (“intelligent animals”) who evade work and struggle through “creativity”. The conclusion argues that the most significant distinction in the positions of Berdyaev and Kojève is the difference in their attitude to creativity (supreme and godlike spiritual activity / sublimated and ahistorical form of “desire for recognition”). It is also hypothesized that Kojève did not publish his text because he feared that publicly expressing a pro-Soviet position in those years could turn into the end of his newly begun political career in France.

Nikolai Berdyaev, Soviet experiment, “Zdanovism”, Stalinism, state censorship, problem of freedom, philosophy of creativity, criticism of intellectuals, “desire for recognition”