Research Colloquium | Ilya Kalinin (Berlin) | Socialist Law of Energy Exchange: Fossil Base and Cultural Superstructure

On 11 December 2025 we will welcome Ilya Kalinin to our Regensburg Research Colloquium. He will give a lecture on "Socialist Law of Energy Exchange: Fossil Base and Cultural Superstructure". The lecture will be held in English.

Abstract | From a geophilosophical and geopoetic perspective, the Marxist political economy of the base and superstructure can be represented as the relationship between the subsoil containing minerals and the social relations creating various techniques for extracting and processing these minerals. The "base"/subsoil and the "superstructure"/socialist industrialisation (the plans of the first five-year plans) considered in this perspective act as links in a single dialectical chain of transformations. The meaning of this chain is that the productive forces of nature, having been included in socialist production relations, were to change not only the nature of the relationship between man and nature, but also the nature of social relations themselves. The focus of my presentation will be the reconstruction of the relations between natural and social objects, geology and sociology, subsoil and technology, the structure of the earth and the structure of society, geological and historical temporalities. The material for this reconstruction will be literary works, journalism, cinematography, and works on economics and geology from the 1920s and 1930s.

Ilya Kalinin | He received his PhD in Russian Literature at Saint Petersburg State University in 2002 with his project "Russian Literary Utopia, 18-19th Centuries: The Philosophy and Poetics of the Genre". From 2021 to 2022 he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His research focuses on early Soviet intellectual and cultural history and the historical and cultural politics of contemporary Russia. His articles and essays have been published in a wide range of journals and translated into 16 languages. In 2026, two of his books will be published by Moscow based Publishing house New Literary Observer:  "Socialist Exchange Economy: Natural Forces and Cultural Relations"and "History as Art of Articulation. Russian Formalists and Revolution".

Cooperation: Lehrstuhl für Slavische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies

Venue: GS OSES^UR, Landshuter Straße 4, 93047 Regensburg, room 017 (ground floor)