In 1921, the literary critic Yuri Tynyanov observed that every poet and writer arranges similar objects in a hierarchical order and places dissimilar objects on an equal plane. In this sense, ‘every construction regroups the world’. In the post-revolutionary artistic and literary avant-gardes, the new groupings of words and things emerged to address how the experience of revolution penetrates subjects and object, creates new forces and environments, and shifts attention away from the obvious to what has been unseen and invisible. This affects the understanding of the notion of the proletariat, which, given the post-revolutionary motley composition of peasants, ethnic minorities and small urban working classes, receives a rather heterodox, anti-colonial and generally expanded understanding that differs radically from the Western Marxist version and context. For such author as Andrei Platonov, the notion of the proletariat embraces not only peasants and nomadic people, but also animals, plants and the earth. Conceptually, writers and artists close to Platonov focus on the politics of the new post-revolutionary sensibility, problematised as a rupture with the old systems of heliocentric and anthropocentric perspective. Sight, sense, and point of view become an important framework to address who and what could be seen as the subject of art and literature, and who and what articulates the experience of revolution. 

The paper considers from a decolonial perspective less-known concepts of proletarian sensibility, life-building and perspectival vision developed by the artistic and literary avant-gardes in the 1920s and 1930s. The first part of the paper outlines the theory of sensation in the avant-garde understood a complex relation of reciprocal mirroring and perspectivism, which constructs material forms and shapes composite structures. In the second part of the paper a conceptual relationship between the artistic theories and Alexander Bogdanov’s understanding of relational and environmental structures, perspectivism and perception, objectivity and social totality will be established by staging a discussion on the expanded definition of proletarian experience in works of Andrei Platonov and other authors. 

Maria CHEHONADSKIH is a Lecturer in Russian at Queen Mary University of London. She was a Max Hayward Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2019-2021). Maria Chehonadskih received her PhD in Philosophy from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University in 2017. Her research and work concentrate on the epistemologies of (post-)socialism across philosophy, science, literature, and art. She is the author of ‘Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge After the October Revolution’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).