Yvonne Howell, Nikolai Krementsov, eds. The Art and Science of Making the New Man in Early Twentieth-Century Russia. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Illustrations. 296 pp. $115.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-350-23283-9.
Reviewed by Catherine Gibson (University of Tartu)
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (March, 2023)
Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
The concept of the “new man” in late imperial Russia and the Soviet Union has garnered significant attention from scholars and is the subject of numerous books, such as Richard Stites’s Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (1988), John Haynes’s New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema (2003), and Tijana Vujosevic’s Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man (2017). These studies, however, approach the topic from the perspective of cultural history, focusing on the multiple iterations of the “new man” concept in art, literary fiction, film, and political culture. The present volume, by contrast, concentrates specifically on the influence of life sciences in shaping the emergence of radical and aspirational ideas about the future of humanity. Against the backdrop of rapid scientific and technological transformations at the turn of the twentieth century, it aims to understand how the interplay between science and fiction, and between bio-psycho-medical technologies and art, fueled utopian dreaming about a new and improved humanity.
Arising out of a multidisciplinary conference held in St. Petersburg in 2019, “Making a New Man: Scientific and Artistic Experiments (Russia-USSR, c.1900-39),” co-organized by St. Petersburg State University and the University of Toronto, the volume brings together historians, anthropologists, and literary and film scholars to discuss how ideas about “new men” emerged in various spheres and were shaped by human biology, medicine, and psychology. The editors go beyond examining the gulf between the rhetorical ideal of the “new man” and harsh realities of life in the Soviet Union, and endeavor to present a more nuanced and complex picture of how the “new man” trope developed as a cultural trend and practice in different spheres of intellectual and daily life.
Coeditor Nikolai Krementsov’s introduction sketches a conceptual history of the “new man” and traces trends in the usage of the Russian-language terms “new man” (novyi chelovek) and “new men” (novye liudi) using Google Ngrams. He argues that two distinct peaks can be discerned in the use of these terms during key moments of political, economic, and cultural transformation: the Great Reforms and abolition of serfdom under Tsar Aleksandr I in the 1860s and the period from 1910 to the 1920s, spanning the First World War, Bolshevik Revolution, and early Soviet years. This macro perspective provides an important scaffolding for the volume, for while the book claims to span the late imperial, Bolshevik, and Stalinist periods, the majority of contributing authors focus on the second surge of popularity during the postrevolutionary era.
The body of the book is divided into three subsections. Contributions in part 1, “Nurturing the New Man,” examine debates in the fields of human cognition, child development, and education about raising future “new men,” with case studies on encyclopedias, pedagogical experiments, and children’s dolls. Chapters in part 2, “Imagining the New Man,” tackle the use of the “new man” trope from a comparative perspective in British, American, and Soviet literary fiction and film. Part 3, “Displaying the New Man,” comprises chapters on representations of the “new man” in particular spaces, such as the All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition (1923), Moscow Darwin Museum, and Museum of Ethnography. Coeditor Yvonne Howell’s conclusion brings the volume to a close with a discussion of the continuing relevance of the “new man” concept for understanding contemporary discussions about posthumanism and transhumanism. Taken together, the volume presents a convincing case for examining the “new man” concept as a point of intersection between art and the history of science, technology, and medicine. The volume makes an important contribution both to conceptual history (focusing on ideas and ideals) and the history of how practices and everyday life in the Soviet Union were shaped by ideas about “new men.”
One of the key questions posed to the contributors by the volume’s editors at the outset is to reflect on what was particular about the “new man” concept in Russia and the Soviet Union and what similarities existed with “new man” tropes circulating in other cultures. The editors argue that this approach is crucial for debunking the myth of a uniquely Soviet “new man” and allows us to examine the multiple visions of this concept, which appeared across different cultures in the early twentieth century. Only some of the chapters, however, apply this broader geographical perspective, notably the contributions by Krementsov and Irina Golvacheva focusing on literary comparisons. Lyubov Bugaeva’s chapter on how the Soviet secret police were influenced by American experiments in progressive education goes the furthest in terms of examining the interconnectedness and entanglements between concurrent discussions of “new men” in the East and West. It is a shame that more contributors did not pursue a similar approach. At the same time, a more pressing concern with the volume is the tendency of the authors to use the terms “Russian” and “Soviet” synonymously. With the exception of Stanislav Petriashin’s analysis of the representation of different Soviet nationalities in the Museum of Ethnography, the lack of acknowledgment that the Soviet Union was a multiethnic state looms large and would have added a crucial dimension to the analyses of physical anthropology, eugenics, and racial science discussed in the book.
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Citation:
Catherine Gibson. Review of Howell, Yvonne; Krementsov, Nikolai, eds., The Art and Science of Making the New Man in Early Twentieth-Century Russia.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2023.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58321
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