Andrey Maidansky explains what has been found in the archive belonging to Ilyenkov’s daughter Illesh:
Zaira Rodríguez Ugidos
The name Zaira Rodríguez Ugidos is barely known outside the Latin American and Spanish-speaking world. And yet she was a charismatic Marxist thinker at a time when philosophy in general, and Marxist philosophy in particular, rarely included a woman. International Friends of Ilyenkov co-organiser Corinna Lotz interviewed Cuban philosopher Rogney Piedra Arencibia about his discovery of this outstanding woman thinker, who died tragically young at 44 in 1985.
Her focus on dialectical logic was inspired by the work of Evald Ilyenkov, who was still alive when she studied in Moscow during the late 1960s.
Continue readingEngels in the crosshairs
Review-article by Corinna Lotz
Frederick Engels was Karl Marx’s closest friend and collaborator. In the light of the ongoing ecological crisis and Covid-19 pandemic, Engels’ Dialectics of Nature takes on a new significance.
So it is good that Kaan Kangal, currently a philosophy scholar at Nanjing University in China, has made a new study of Engels’ work.
Continue readingYuletide Quiz Answers
Yuletide Quiz
Dear Friends, here is the quiz for those who missed it on the day. Sorry, it’s too late for you to win the prize. But you can try to beat Ralph Dumain who scored an amazing total of 11 points. Enjoy!
Mareev & Mareeva
This is an index to documents by/about Sergei Mareev and Elena Mareeva.
Sergei Mareev 
Elena Mareeva
Sergei Mareev: champion of Ilyenkov and thinker in his own right
I first met Sergei Nikolaivich Mareev, who has died at the age of 78, on a trip to Moscow in the aftermath of Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It was the period of “shock therapy” during which Russia’s GDP fell by 50%. The economy was in chaos and people’s lives were being turned upside down. Demonstrators were being killed by the paramilitary riot police OMON outside the state television centre at Ostankino.
Continue readingSergei Mareev
Entry in Encyclopedia of Russian Philosophy, 3rd edition, General editor M. A. Salina. Moscow, Mir Philosophii, 2020.
Published with the kind permission of Andrey D. Maidansky
Translated by Alla Potapova
MAREEV Sergey Nicolaevich (2 May 1941 – 12 September 2019, Moscow) was a philosopher, a doctor of philosophy and a university professor. He was the pupil and associate of Ilyenkov, a specialist in the field of dialectical logic and a historian of Soviet philosophy.
Continue readingPhilosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: A Contemporary View from Russia and Abroad
Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century edited by Vladislav Lektorsky and Marina Bykova is a ground-breaking book combining recent Russian archival research with inspiring contributions from key thinkers from around the world. Lektorsky and Bykova’s volume has a Tolstoyan breadth of action. This, together with Dostoevskian reflection, makes the volume an epic and absorbing account of philosophy in the Soviet era and beyond.
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How Evald Ilyenkov was ‘found’
How a philosopher considered the most significant theorist of the Soviet era came to influence Nordic, British, American and German thinkers, as well as revolutionary activists, is revealed in Finding Evald Ilyenkov.
Ilyenkov and his co-thinkers were driven by a desire to rescue Marxism from the dead hand of Stalinist orthodoxy. As cultural theorist and philosopher Vadim Mezhuev remarked, paradoxically, “it was harder to be a Marxist in the Soviet Union than in any other country”.
International Friends of Ilyenkov 