CULTURE
Valentin Tolstykh (b. 1929): Doctor of Philosophy and I winner of the USSR State Prize, specialist in socio-phil- osophical Marxist theory ethics and aesthetics. Tol- stykh is the author of Art and Morality (1973) and Socrates and Us (1981-1986). He has edited and contributed to the Spiritual Production (1981), Production as a Social Process (1986) and Forms of Social Awareness (1986) as well as numerous articles.
In Place of a Foreword
The title of this collection, Culture and Perestroika, has been carefully chosen. It does not just refer to the “slot” the well- known cultural figures featured here occupy in society but to something more substantial. The revolutionary renewal our society is now undergoing, called perestroika or restructuring, has deep spiritual, intellectual, moral and aesthetic roots. Therefore it needs to be given a thorough cultural grounding.
Lenin once astutely equated communism and culture, thus offering criteria for determining both what kind of life com- munism creates and how far the ideals of the new social system have been realized. Structuring society in a new way and living in a new way meant, to Lenin’s mind, learning to do what people did before in other social contexts, but in a fundamen- tally new manner. The concept of culture is valuable precisely because it differentiates between eras, social systems and civi- lizations by how people in various social contexts produce what they have always produced-goods, ideals, themselves, their relationships and attitudes.
In philosophical terms culture is nothing other than a speci- fically human mode of living. Long regarded as the antithesis of “savagery” and “barbarianism”, culture offers a measure (specific, naturally, to each stage in history, each spiral in our species’ development) of the “anthropomorphism” of the indi-
CULTURE AND PERESTROIKA
Valentin Tolstykh
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
Translated from the Russian Designed by Vladimir Gordon Compiled by Galina Dzyubenko
line Duboko 1123799
КУЛЬТУРА И ПЕРЕСТРОЙКА
на английском языке
Compilation and English translation
Progress Publishers 1988
Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
4702010204-714
K без объявл.
014 (01)-88
ISBN 5-01-001759-8
