The Prison Manuscripts

Socialism and its Culture

Nikolai Bukharin

Translated by George Shriver

 

6.25 x 9.25 inches, xliv + 258pp. 2006

ISBN : 9781905422227

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Bukharin’s Prison Manuscripts were written in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison during 1937–1938 while awaiting his inevitable liquidation. Like Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Bukharin’s Manuscripts too have their central emphasis on issues such as culture, ideology and philosophy in the context of building up an alternative vision of socialism, as against capitalism, fascism and the kind of socialism practised in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Written between February and April 1937, this thought-provoking volume deals with themes such as: the realization of the concept of total man, the problem of freedom, the problem of equality and hierarchy, the style of socialist culture, the problem of progress, diversities in capitalism and socialism, the role of the Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the cultural revolution. Its publication will be a major event for anyone interested in cultural studies, history of socialism, philosophy and ethics. 

Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was a Bolshevik intellectual and revolutionary, as well as the author of more than a hundred articles and books. Executed as a 'counter-revolutionary', he was exonerated fifty years later by Mikhail Gorbachev.

 

George Shriver has translated and edited Roy Medvedev’s On Soviet Dissent, The October Revolution, and Let History Judge. He is also the translator of Bukharin’s How It All Began: The Prison Novel and Socialism and Its Culture.

Culture Studies