Fables for the Crossed-Out | City Journal (city-journal.org)
"What had emerged by 1922, when Krzhizhanovsky moved to Moscow, was a “country of nonexistences,” as he wrote in a story published a few years later; a war-torn land haunted by “former people”—the Bolshevik term for those who had outlived their time: Orthodox priests, aristocrats, businessmen, doubting intellectuals. Marx had envisioned “the true realm of freedom” as consisting of men and women liberated from their economic functions: “the development of human powers as an end in itself.” What grew from the Marxist agitating that overtook Russia like a fungal bloom in the late nineteenth century, spreading its spores from Saint Petersburg to Sebastopol, Kostroma to Krasnoyarsk, was instead a regime that reduced men and women to their basic material functions and that broke human beings down, ruthlessly and systematically, discarding everything inessential to the state."
"What had emerged by 1922, when Krzhizhanovsky moved to Moscow, was a “country of nonexistences,” as he wrote in a story published a few years later; a war-torn land haunted by “former people”—the Bolshevik term for those who had outlived their time: Orthodox priests, aristocrats, businessmen, doubting intellectuals. Marx had envisioned “the true realm of freedom” as consisting of men and women liberated from their economic functions: “the development of human powers as an end in itself.” What grew from the Marxist agitating that overtook Russia like a fungal bloom in the late nineteenth century, spreading its spores from Saint Petersburg to Sebastopol, Kostroma to Krasnoyarsk, was instead a regime that reduced men and women to their basic material functions and that broke human beings down, ruthlessly and systematically, discarding everything inessential to the state."
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