Looking at the regular appearance of the Institute’s researchers in the Finnish media concerning the on-going war and Russian contemporary politics, one might forget that the Institute also focuses on Eastern Europe and the Eurasian region. In addition, there is a long tradition of intellectual and cultural historical scholarship at the Institute, conducted by researchers originally from the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, musicology, literary studies and cultural history. ARGIH is a newly established, publicly visible research network for scholars doing intellectual history in the wide area studies context.
Organized by the ARGHI group’s chairperson and the CUPOLA project’s PI Elina Viljanen, this intense workshop brought together a few locals in a seminar room and three colleagues joining in over Zoom from their respective time zones. The leading ideas was to bring together people with overlapping interests, to expose them to each other’s current research, and to reflect on that basis on what kind of a community ARGIH could be.
The hybrid format brought us all back to the most authentic (post-)pandemic atmosphere, also revitalizing the novel discourses we’ve adopted since: we can’t hear you, you’re on mute, you should be seeing my slides now, please enable ‘anyone can share.’ We also encountered the usual echo, delay, feedback, and doubled voices – all appropriate sonic phenomena if you’re the lead guitarist in a progressive ensemble. Occasionally we communicated via the chat function, and when someone was typing, this caused an interval of everyone falling silent in two languages like proper Finns according to Bertolt Brecht. Communality, however, emerges naturally when like-minded academics spend hours in the same space, no matter how virtual or occasionally chaotic.
We opened the workshop with two keynote talks that focused on historical, regional and methodological questions of intellectual history. Relying on a cardboard box for laptop support in the absence of a podium, Timo Pankakoski first provided an overview of the German tradition of intellectual history, including history of ideas, conceptual history, metaphorology, topos studies, and related approaches. The idea was to enable comparative observations regarding the Russian tradition, on intellectual history’s links with national characteristics or even directly nationalist narratives, or on the influence of German and European traditions on Russian intellectual history. Pankakoski paid particular attention to entanglements of method and substance matter that highlight how methodological thinking is thought like any other and as such historically contingent and oftentimes culturally or politically biased. With examples from German and emigrant theorists, Pankakoski proposed that much of 20th-century methodological quarrels in the humanities could be traced back to the German confrontation between abstract Ideengeschichte (history of ideas), focusing on ideas as such and emphasizing continuities, and Geistesgeschichte (intellectual history), which rather situated ideas in organic interaction with historical life and with respect to each era’s broader cluster of central ideas.
Vesa Oittinen has been the pioneer and most prominent voice of intellectual-historical work at the Aleksanteri institute. His keynote presentation examined different methodologies for tackling the claim of Russian philosophy’s distinctness from the Western tradition. Oittinen discussed the possibility of approaching the issue from the viewpoint of different “philosophical cultures,” linked to the discipline of sociology of philosophy. He concluded, however, that the difference might be better grasped through a conceptualization of modernity (in a Weberian sense) as a philosophical category. According to Oittinen, because of its idiosyncratic understanding of subjectivity, the so-called “Russian philosophy” (not philosophy in Russia!) has remained attached to pre- or non-modern views.
On the second day, Liisa Bourgeot, a founding member and coordinator of ARGIH, addressed Oittinen’s keynote with some crucial questions. Bourgeot’s presentation “Studying Russian philosophy and/or/as intellectual history?” examined the methodological relationship between the disciplines of Russian (or Russophone) philosophy and intellectual history. Russian philosophy is typically studied by people in area studies departments and institutions. This makes sense historically and linguistically, but how does it affect our approach to the philosophical questions themselves? Bourgeot suggested that as the work to deconstruct the particularity of Russian thought progresses, it is crucial for “Western” researchers to critically examine their potentially biased outlooks as well.
The second day focused mostly on on-going projects of ARGIH members. To kick-start the day, Elina Viljanen introduced the key ideas and concepts of the CUPOLA project (2024–2028). CUPOLA studies the Soviet humanities and “culture’s politicality” amid Stalin-era authoritarianism (1928–1953). The project hypothesizes that not only should cultural ideas be taken seriously since they may be instrumentalized by politics, but that political ideas can also be instrumentalized by cultural authors for purposes of scientific autonomy. Viljanen introduced her new methodological tool of “culture’s politics” which she is seeking to elaborate further. While previous theorists have addressed the political nature of culture mostly in liberal contexts or in relation to anti-authoritarian revolutionary politics, Viljanen seeks to extend culture’s politicality onto authoritarianism which, despite systematic suppression, grants artists a societal voice. The CUPOLA project seeks to find tools to understand how people fought back and found their way to think and act independently during late Stalinism and the political and intellectual strategies they used. To illustrate this, Viljanen especially introduced the case of renown Soviet pianist Heinrich Neuhaus whose non-Marxist and non-Stalinist philosophy of music was political both in a state-political sense and the non-state cultural-political sense. The CUPOLA project will soon announce a call for papers for an international seminar, which aims at producing an edited volume on the late-Stalin-era humanities and culture.
Also, Karoliina Pulkkinen’s paper focused on the interaction of politics and intellectuals in a non-democratic context. Many normative accounts issued by philosophers of science propose that social, political, and ethical values influencing scientific research may gain the needed political legitimacy through the use of various democratic mechanisms. Pulkkinen argued that aside from normatively motivated accounts, there is also a need for explanatory approaches to better understand the workings of political legitimization strategies in nondemocratic settings. A closer study of science in one particular context – in this case, the Soviet Union – suggests that scientists and engineers contributed to so-called “output” legitimization of the political orders that enabled or sponsored the said research. Pulkkinen illustrated this with Kendall Bailes’ (1976, 1978) classic case study on Soviet achievements in aviation in legitimizing Stalin’s rule.
One of the crucial questions for the CUPOLA project is: what is the relationship between intellectual-historical and political-historical narratives of Soviet civilizationism? In relation to this, Rebecca Mitchell presented on the evolution of the “Russian Idea” (the concept that Russian civilization has a particular messianic role to play in the modern era) amongst the Russian emigre community after the 1917 revolution. She focused specifically on the intersection between the ideas of philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev and composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky in post-World War II Paris. For both men, she concluded, an idealized image of Stalinist victory over Nazi forces provided a basis for further elaboration of this concept in the mid-twentieth century. Mitchell works currently amidst political protests in Tbilisi where she is conducting archival work regarding another intellectual historical research project.
During a well-received break, we convened around the AeroPress to boost our senses with a rush of presence and agitation. So did presumably Anatoly Pinsky, currently in Washington D.C., who had heroically woken up in the wee hours. In his paper, “Cognition as a Category of Analysis,” Pinsky argued that cognition per se (poznanie) was an express concern of early Soviet prose writers, poets, and literary critics. Anatoly grounded the attention of the literary community to cognition in the influence of Lenin’s 1909 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as well as the critic Aleksandr Voronskii's so-called theory of cognition (teoriia poznaniia). Pinsky’s overall objective, however, was to suggest that a concern for cognition persisted through the Stalin and early post-Stalin eras of Soviet history. Pinsky is, among other things, currently writing a book which seeks to demonstrate that diary writing, among Soviet writers, captured a mode of cognition that played a crucial role in propelling post-Stalin change.
Tatiana Levina will be working as visiting scholar of the CUPOLA project at the Aleksanteri Institute in the spring of 2025. Related to her work in the project, she spoke on the Epistemology of Ignorance: Women Philosophers in the Soviet Era. Levina asked pertinent and genuinely disturbing questions related to the exclusion of women from the canon of Russian and Soviet philosophy. The prominent book series The Philosophy of Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century features 21 volumes exclusively on male philosophers. Only Lubov Akselrod (1868-1946) has been included in the volume on Russian Marxism, and Agnessa Zvonitskaya (1897-1942) features in the publican plan for a volume on sociology. To what extent could the almost total exclusion of women in the philosophical canon help to explain certain processes in the Russian political reality, Levina asked.
Santeri Kytöneva highlighted an approach to the study of the contemporary Russian political regime’s ideology that does not take as its starting point anything essentially “Russian”. In his presentation titled Political Philosophy with a Focus on Russia Kytöneva reflected on the methodological framing of the articles he is currently working on for his doctoral thesis. One of his aims is to clarify the contextual role of different actors and more general mechanisms at play in a setting that is inherently political. Kytöneva discussed the concept of the Katechon, or the Biblical force restraining or delaying the end of the world – a mythical idea with a rich intellectual-historical background in European discussions and one currently brought up by Russian cultural, political, and religious agents to account for Russia’s historical role and justify the war effort. Hereby one intellectual circle was closed, as the discussion centered on the direct and indirect influence of Carl Schmitt, the German radical conservative political theorist, on Russian thinkers, similar to the intellectual influence Schmitt exercised on German conceptual history, which Pankakoski discussed in his opening talk. Kytöneva’s paper equally underscored the need to acknowledge the intellectual pedigree of one’s objects of study as well as the intellectual history methods applied.
Extensively discussing the Katechon could not, however, restrain the seminar’s inevitable end or compete with the physical limits of this-worldly creatures, more particularly the organizers' want of nutrients. After a few concluding notes, some sketched next steps, and a Christmas eve-like family portrait, the intense two-day seminar came to a close.
ARGIH is not only a scholarly network but also a support network for its scholars. Its website will provide a platform dedicated to disseminating our research on intellectual and cultural history and philosophy to a broader audience; a conduit through which we can showcase critical cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary investigations currently underway in the fields of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies.