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Blog: Dr Andy Willimott on his HCIC residency

14th December 2018 Blog, News, Tay Noronha

Dr Andy Willimott blogs about his residency, working with the HCIC’s extensive collections and materials.

Throughout my residency, I will be working with HCIC materials on the topics of Russia, the Russian Revolution, and the concept of ‘Utopia’. This includes working with the publishers’ archives and the MERL, looking at the reports and writings of travellers to the Soviet Union.

After 1917, western intellectuals of all political stripes, from Bernard Shaw to John Maynard Keynes, tended to view the Soviet Union as a utopian experiment – a possible glimpse into the future. ‘Utopia’ is used as a criticism in common language—meaning isolated, irrelevant, and fantastical—but throughout history, utopian visions have stimulated debates about alternatives to the perceived injustices of the world.

The philosophical essayist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) wrote of man’s utopian urge to change the present as an attempt to “blast open the continuum of history.” Similarly, the utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) claimed that utopia is the “determined negation of that which merely is” in the name of “what should be”—a radical challenge to conventional thinking about what is possible – and what is not. From this perspective, utopia is not viewed as a fantastical destination; rather it is seen as a dialogue with change. I will use my residency with the HCIC to seek out evidence of those engaging in this dialogue.

By examining HCIC holdings relating to ‘Utopia’, I aim to develop new avenues of research and uncover new topics of research for future students and those attached to the Department of History’s Utopias and Revolutions Research Cluster. The residency will inform my developing research on the utopian discourses that surrounded the October Revolution and the broader Bolshevik project. Some of this research can be seen in: “People of the Future,” History Today Vol. 67, Issue 10 (2017): 24-35 https://www.historytoday.com/andy-willimott/russian-revolution-people-future and a forthcoming chapter entitled “Utopia at Home: Inventing a Socialist Lifestyle,” in Rebecca Freidman & Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman (eds.) The Soviet Home: Domestic Ideology and Practice (Pittsburgh University Press).

I have already been getting to grips with some of the materials held by the HCIC and am pleased to say that I have helped to find Russian materials that did not previously have a place with the HCIC catalogue, which may prove of interest to researchers. I hope to help identify and catalogue further materials relating to Russia, the Revolution, and ‘Utopia’ over the next year.