Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Symposium One Hundred Years on

The Vekhi (Landmarks) symposium (1909) is one of the most famous publications in Russian intellectual and political history. Its fame rests on the critique it offers of the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia in the period of crisis that led to the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was published as a polemical response to the revolution of 1905, the failed outcome of which was deemed by all the Vekhi contributors to exemplify and illuminate fatal philosophical, political, and psychological flaws in the revolutionary intelligentsia that had sought it. Landmarks Revisited offers a new and comprehensive assessment of the symposium and its legacy from a variety of disciplinary perspectives by leading scholars in their fields. It will be of compelling interest to all students of Russian history, politics, and culture, and the impact of these on the wider world.

Robin Aizlewood holds an honorary position at UCL, having been director of UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and also of the inter-university Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies. He is the author of two books on Maiakovskii’s verse (Verse Forma and Meaning in the Poetry of Vladimir Maiakovskii, 1989, and Two Essays on Maiakovskii’s Verse, 2000) and a wide range of studies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian philosophy and literature, both prose and poetry. Ruth Coates is senior lecturer in Russian studies at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author, 1998, and numerous articles on the Russian intellectual tradition. She is currently researching the reception of the doctrine of deification in Russian culture, with an emphasis on the late imperial period.