In search of yeti (a response to Sergei Nikolsky’s book “The Soviet. literary and Philosophical Analysis”)

The response article to the book by S.A. Nikolsky “Soviet Philosophical and Literary Analysis” is a dialogue between Oleg Leibovich and Alexander Kazankov. The conversation covers a wide range of topics related to reading the specified treatise. Firstly, the possibility of classifying S.A. Nikolsky’s philosophical analysis as a real anthropological type is discussed. According to modern Russian sociologists, the Soviet man emerged in the 1960s and his presence in society can be confirmed by mass surveys. However, this scientific approach is not interesting for S.A. Nikolsky, as both interlocutors point out. For a philosopher, it is not a question of whether or not the Soviet person existed, but rather who he was and what his role in literature was. Even if you assign it the status of a noumenal thing-in-itself or a hypothetical Bigfoot, it is a legitimate subject for literary and philosophical analysis. S.A. Nikolsky’s methodology allowed him to identify two fundamental features in the image of the Soviet man: clandestine and submissive. According to the author, these human qualities were discovered by Russian literary classics (I.S. Turgenev, F.M. Dostoevsky, N.S. Leskov, etc.). During the discussion, it turns out that the existence of substantial human qualities is problematic, and clandestinity and submission are socially conditioned features of the ethos of the Russian writing intelligentsia itself. The interlocutors conclude their discussion of S.A. Nikolsky’s treatise on Soviet man with a discussion on the actual “Sovietness” of Soviet man.