Background
Volsky, Stanislav was born in 1880 in Moscow.
Volsky, Stanislav was born in 1880 in Moscow.
Studied at Moscow University, from which he was expelled for radical activities in 1899.
Political activist, journalist: until 1927 held minor posts in Gosplan and other Soviet agencies. From c. 1930 worked as a translator.
Like the other Russian ‘Nietzschean Marxists’ of the early twentieth century Volsky saw that, despite differences on other points, Marx and Nietszche shared a powerful future orientation and a conviction that the just society and the highest possible culture both stand ‘beyond good and evil’. According to Volsky, individuals in the distant future, under socialism, will be ‘freed from the numbing pattern of coercive norms’ and the ‘idea of duty’, the ‘inevitable companion of bourgeois society’, and will become free, creative, passionate and proud. ‘Struggle’, he insisted, ‘is the joy of existence’ and ‘socialism is freedom of struggle'. Developing Nietzsche’s insight that ‘enemy’ means not scoundrel but adversary, Volsky celebrated the cultural agon of ‘friend-enemies’, free and fervent defenders of opposed cultural values and ideals. But he saw clearly that in Lenin's Russia of 1917-1920 there was neither freedom nor the joy of cultural creativity but only dull submission to brutal repression.