Revolutionary Utopianism and Subjectivation: Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s and Lu Märten’s Queer Aesthetic Paradigms, 1860s-1920s

Abstract

"Revolutionary Utopianism and Subjectivation: Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s and Lu Märten’s Queer Aesthetic Paradigms, 1860s-1920s" examines the utopianisms of the revolutionary socialist literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) and the Marxist author and theorist Lu Märten (1879-1970). Both figures turned to utopianism to intervene in distinct, yet historically interconnected revolutionary moments: the radicalism of 1860s Russia and the Marxist cultural politics of the early Weimar Republic. Their revolutionary utopianisms present a counternarrative to the increasingly dominant modes of “scientific socialism” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which drew rigid distinctions between reform and revolution, gender and class, and fiction and nonfiction. In contrast, Chernyshevsky and Märten imagine queer aesthetic paradigms based on the transformation of labor processes, sensuality, and gendered subjectivity. Through an analysis of Chernyshevsky’s and Märten’s literary and theoretical texts, this dissertation defines utopianism as an ongoing intervention in processes of subjectivation aimed at collectively generating new aesthetic paradigms. These histories of revolutionary utopianism contribute to the contemporary field of queer Marxism by demonstrating the potential of literary forms and queer relationality to transform socialist projects from within.