Myth, Philosophy, Avant-gardism

The intellectual history of the twentieth-century avant-garde read as a nihilistic revolt: Spengler's Decline of the West, Nietzsche's death of God, the aesthetics of the Frankfurt School, surrealism, the argument over committed literature, left-wing Freudianism, the LSD counterculture, and what Davydov calls, borrowing Trilling's phrase, the adversary culture.

Unlike most volumes of its kind this is the work of a real specialist writing on his own subject, and his own note lists the career behind it: books on art and the elite, on the October Revolution and the arts, on art as a sociological phenomenon, then a second series aimed squarely at the West on the aesthetics of nihilism and the New Left, on the Frankfurt School, on neo-Marxism and the sociology of culture, and on the counterculture. This was the man the Soviet Academy sent against Adorno and Marcuse, and he had read them.

He is candid about what set him going: the two themes grew sharper, he says, as he read about the Cultural Revolution in China on one hand and the New Left in the West on the other.

Written around 1980 and reaching English in 1983 - the counterculture examined in the past tense, at fifteen years' distance, by a man who watched it happen and disapproved.

Not a Progress book: the title page reads Raduga Publishers, the Soviet state's literary export house, which gave it a proper production. Translated by Laura Beraha and Alex Miller.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.