Apollonic and Dionysian principles in Soviet culture and philosophy

This article is devoted to the analysis of the internal tendencies of Soviet culture and philosophy. The Soviet culture was an organic whole and its various aspects were closely related. One of the most important axes of this culture was the relationship between the city and the countryside. Moreover, the city was perceived as an active, rational beginning, transforming nature and dominating over it, and the village as a natural, inartificial beginning. This was reminiscent of the Apollonian and Dionysian beginnings of culture which Friedrich Nietzsche revealed. This dichotomy in Russia manifested itself in everything: in the confrontation between urban and rural poets, industrialists and ecologists in the public environment. In philosophy, this was expressed in the confrontation between Marxism and naturalist philosophy (cosmism of Vladimir Vernadskiy and Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy, neo-Eurasianism of Lev Gumilev), and in Soviet Marxism itself - in the existence of a primitive rational, crypto-positivist line and metaphysical materialism - “diamat”, which contained an irrationalistic understanding of matter and the material world before and outside of man. The philosophical concepts of Evald Ilyenkov and Mikhail Lifshits were the syntheses that allowed avoiding the extremes of these two directions.