A revolutionary who turned to Japanese literature and philosophy
He described his intellectual turn as having moved “through Shakespeare from Marx to Christ.”
Alexander Vannovsky was an early organizer of Russian social democracy who later became a scholar of Japanese literature and philosophy. Representing Moscow’s Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, he attended the founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and later organized underground printing and military-technical work. After leaving the party in 1912, he reflected on revolutionary ideals and their consequences through Christian thought while studying Russian literature and Japanese mythology in Japan.
Career Timeline
- 1896Student at the Moscow Technical School; joined the revolutionary movement
- 1898Delegate to the First Congress of the RSDLP, representing Moscow’s Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class
- 1898–1900Arrested and exiled to Solvychegodsk
- 1903–1905Organized the Volya social-democratic group and underground presses in Rybinsk and Yaroslavl
- 1905–1906Took part in the Kiev sapper uprising and Moscow December uprising; worked in Moscow’s military-technical bureau
- 1910s–1960sTaught Russian literature at Waseda University in Japan; studied Japanese mythology and Shakespeare