The papers in this special issue address the reception, critique, and appropriation of existentialist philosophy in state-socialist Europe from complementary thematic and methodological vantage points, focusing either on specific case studies from the various socialist states or develo** a more comprehensive transnational perspective. In doing so, the authors no doubt deploy a more encompassing concept of existentialism than is currently in academic use, understanding it as a philosophical direction, which is foremost interested in advancing the understanding of human existence, while emphasising the key values of individual freedom and personal authenticity. Although difficult to place in the watertight compartments of existentialism and phenomenology as understood by contemporary philosophers, the various philosophical positions revisited in this issue all share one common element: they bring into play the questions of finite, individual experience seeing this as a specific type of challenge to Marxist–Leninism. To be more precise, two complementary aspects in particular motivated the virulent rejection of existentialism in the early stages of this confrontation: on the one hand, the ties of some of its proponents to fascism in the interwar period, which were read most influentially by Lukács as an intellectual affinity with irrationalism; and on the other hand, the vulnerability of really existing socialism when faced with questions of alienation, which was supposed to be abolished in communist society, or individual freedom, which was ostensibly lacking during Stalinism. By revisiting the reception of existentialism in the socialist bloc in its entire development, the papers gathered in this dossier aim to show how the sinuous, yet rich, dialog between the existentialist and the Marxist–Leninist camps during the Cold War helped in sha** new questions and theorems to the benefit of both sides. Although this dialogue ultimately led to no enduring success, but rather to a form of indifferent cohabitation, it brought into play, while it unfolded, some undeveloped potentialities that are well worth documenting and rediscovering.

In their opening paper, “Encounters: East/West Dialogues on Existence”, Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Alex Cistelecan discuss the historical background and transnational context of the dialogue between East-European Marxist philosophy and Western existentialism, by focusing primarily on instances of mutual engagement between philosophers in the East and in the West at summer schools, conferences, and large-scale international congresses during the 1960s. The paper first reconstructs the context and content of the dialogue between Lukács, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty in the 50s, highlighting a certain paradox: on the one hand, Lukács’ early critiques represented the most sophisticated Marxist response to existentialism; on the other hand, they had to be set aside because of their apparent convergence with official Stalinist denunciations in order for a more fruitful contact to commence after Stalin’s death and the turn to Marxist humanism in the East. The paper then discusses three instances of transnational dialogue between Eastern Marxism and Western existentialism. The Morale e società colloquium in Rome, 1964, brought together Marxists from both East and West, either humanist-revisionists or orthodox, and Sartre. Whereas the line-up of this event seemed extremely promising, the dialogues that ensued were rather disappointing, with the invited PCF intellectuals debating with Sartre, whereas the East-European Marxist revisionists took their aim at the official dogmatic bureaucratism. A more fertile ground for dialogue is found in the Korčula summer school, organized by the Praxis group between 1964 and 1975, which both created a breech in the monolithic bloc of Marxist–Leninist philosophy by opening it towards recent trends in contemporary Western theory, including phenomenology and existentialism, while simultaneously allowing Western philosophers to engage with the philosophical positions of really existing socialism. Finally, the paper abuts with a discussion of the International Congress for Philosophy organized in Vienna in September 1968, a congress designed by its organizers as an “encompassing dialogue between the East and the West” under the sign of Marx. Whereas the conference brought to the fore some of the main contradictions between Eastern Marxism and existentialism, which continued to stay in the way of a more fertile dialogue, authors from both sides also arrived at more nuanced attempts to negotiate a sort of philosophical truce between the two clashing positions. The article concludes with an epilogue, briefly describing the subsequent evolution of the existentialist reception in the socialist states. This took the form of a gradual normalization of existentialist philosophy, which became a mere tolerated reserve within the official system, that no longer posed any threat to the accepted truths of Marxism–Leninism.

Jiří Růžička and Jan Mervart’s contribution, “Marxism and Existentialism in State Socialist Czechoslovakia”, follows the evolution of the reception of existentialism in Czechoslovakia in its three main phases—Stalinist, post-Stalinist and Real-Socialist—focusing on the second and most prolific one. Růžička and Mervart retrace how the short-lived but promising opening and positive reception of existentialism between 1945 and 1948 (with translations from Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger and articles devoted to them) was followed by a ruthless critique from 1948, very much along the lines of Lukacs’ Marxism and Existentialism, which was also translated and published almost immediately (1949). After Khrushchev’s speech in 1956, a change of tone also became visible in the opening towards existentialism, and an attempt was made to bring Marxism out of its isolation and provincialism and to ‘toughen it up’ in confrontation with existentialism and Western philosophy in general, according to Kosík, one of the representatives of the new perspective. This new opening towards existentialism was not only due to the political climate of détente and peaceful coexistence, but also—perhaps crucially—due to the fact that, for Czechoslovak thinkers, the crisis of Stalinism meant an acknowledgement that the crises experienced in the East and in the West were similarly rooted in contemporary scientific and technological civilization, as existentialist authors criticized. Thus, during the 60s, Czechoslovak Marxists, such as Jan Bodnár, came to see existentialism as a philosophy that “espouses the personal engagement of the philosopher in matters of society” and involved “an active stance towards reality as its essential feature”, thus recognizing and praising the philosophical rival for what should have been the defining trait of Marxism. Existentialism became a tool for post-Stalinist Czechoslovak Marxists to criticize and revise Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, especially its theory of reflection and laws of dialectics, accused of not giving proper consideration to the practical nature of the human being. Existentialism was also a way for Czechoslovak Marxists to recuperate the young Marx’s original intuition that “human reality consists primarily in sense-object (praxis) and not contemplative (reflection) activity”, by focusing on some key attempts to rethink subjectivity: Sartre’s distinction between the in-itself and for-itself, Heidegger’s ontological difference and Merleau-Ponty’s incarnated conscience. The reception of existentialism was fruitful also in the debates concerning the concept of freedom and human action, with various concepts, such as “authenticity” and “irreducible freedom”, being deployed by Czechoslovak humanist Marxists (Miroslav Kusý, Robert Kalivoda, Jiří Pešek) against the Marxist orthodoxy. However, most humanist Marxists (Kosík, Radovan Richta, Josef Cibulka, besides the aforementioned three) also went beyond existentialism, considering that its view on human action was ultimately unable to accommodate the human capacity to transform the world through praxis. After 1968, all the aforementioned figures involved in these debates were expunged from the academic system. Consequently, the previous positive reception of existentialism at the hands of Marxists humanists came to be seen as a subjective idealist deviation, whereas existentialism remained ill-reputed until the late 80s.

Una Blagojevic’s contribution, “Phenomenology and Existentialism in Dialogue with Marxist Humanism in Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s”, shows how Yugoslavia’s early opening to the West, following its split with the Soviet Union, brought a far earlier and more substantial receptivity towards existentialism than was the case in other countries of the Eastern Bloc. Thus, Yugoslav Marxism in the 1950s crossed paths with existentialism in its turn towards the early Marx’ problematics of humanism and alienation. The article shows how the 1950s engagement with existentialism and phenomenology in Yugoslavia was essential for sha** the better-known Marxist Humanist discourse of the 1960s. Thus, retracing the less well-known philosophical debates of the 1950s, the article follows the works of Dušan Nedeljković, who saw philosophy at the forefront of an ideological struggle conducted simultaneously against the bureaucratic Soviet Union and the decadent West. His lectures in 1952 helped inaugurate the critical rethinking of Marxism-Leninism in post-war Yugoslavia. Another important figure considered in this context is Zagorka Mićić, frequently seen as the first phenomenologist in Serbia, who polemicised with Nedeljković on the nature and meaning of Marxist philosophy in Yugoslavia. However, despite these openings, existentialism was nonetheless also criticised during this time along Lukácsean lines by authors such as Boris Ziherl or Rudi Supek. In her paper, Blagojevic follows this dialogue through the 1960s, with the younger generation of Marxist humanists grouped around the journal Praxis and the Korčula Summer School, which became the most important platforms for encounters between Western existentialism and the Eastern blend of Marxist-Leninism. Thus, the Praxis group indeed came to internalise many existentialist concepts in its revisionist Marxism, as there are: alienation, freedom, or humanism, which could also explain, in Blagojevic’s view, the subsequent drift towards ethno-nationalism in the 1980s.

In his paper “Unbalanced Exposure: Existentialism, Marxism, and Philosophical Culture in State Socialist Hungary”, Ádám Takács shows how Georg Lukács’s polemics with existentialism, which first determined the highly critical reception of the latter during the 1940s, also opened the path for a more open-minded Marxist reading of existentialism in the 1960s in Hungary. Takács sets out by retracing the sustained criticism of existentialism articulated by Lukács at various stages of his post-war thought (from his 1948 Marxism and Existentialism, to his 1954 Destruction of Reason, to his posthumous Ontology of Social Being), in which he consistently condemned existentialism’s “idealist and irrationalist” anthropological underpinnings. However, despite his philosophical stature, Lukács’ take on existentialism did not have such a major or lasting impact on the reception of existentialism in Hungary, not only because of his political isolation after 1956, but also because of Sartre’s change of position towards Marxism with the publication in 1960 of his Critique of Dialectical Reason. This, coupled with the context of the 1960s, which combined cultural liberalization with an ideological struggle for a new blend of socialist culture, allowed for a more positive assessment of existentialism. The same period witnessed the publication of selected essays and fragments from existentialist thought, as well as translations from fellow Eastern humanist Marxists, such as Kosík’s Dialectic of the concrete and Schaff’s Marxism and the Individual. As Takács points out, the publication of these translations in particular highlighted the convergence of this growing interest for existentialism with local debates throughout the Eastern Bloc concerning the Marxist conception of man and alienation in the socialist world. Among the domestic critical engagements with existentialism from this period, Takács singles out the remarkable monograph by Tordai Zádor, Existence and Reality (1967), an in-depth philosophical analysis of Sartre’s thought, critical in its Marxist shortcomings, yet very generous in recognizing its historical merits. In parallel with this philosophical reception and criticism of existentialism at the hands of Hungarian Marxists, Takács also retraces the even richer and more permissible reception of existentialism in literature—a sphere in which the growing influence and popularity of existentialist themes alarmed the cultural authorities of the 70s, prompting another round of ideological and philosophical rebuttals of existentialism. In this regard, Takács singles out László Farkas’ Existentialism, Structuralism, Marxization (1972), which, along with existentialism and structuralism, also condemned the nascent Budapest school as a form of revisionism with existentialist overtones. Afterwards, the growing ideological tolerance of the late 1970s and early 1980s nourished local interest for other versions of existentialism: Heideggerian, or the Christian existentialism of Maritain, Gabriel Marcel and Ortega y Gasset. The main tendency in the reception of existentialism during this closing decade is illustrated in Takács by revisiting two notable approaches to existentialism from the 70s and 80s: the one put forth by Béla Suki, translator of Kierkegaard and author of a monograph on Heidegger (1976), in which he still condemned the latter’s philosophy as “subjective idealist ontology”; and that of István M. Fehér, whose 1984 book on Heidegger’s thought abandoned the usual Marxist critique and resituated it in its own right as a specimen of philosophical thinking. By the summer of 1988, the philosophical journal Világosság [Light] could declare in one of its editorial notes that without Heidegger’s influence, the intellectual culture of the country would become provincial, thus anticipating the imminent post-communist recuperation of Heidegger as a postmodern thinker.

Finally, using a mixed approach combining quantitative and hermeneutical analyses, Adela Hîncu and Ştefan Baghiu show, in their paper “Existentialism, Existentialists, and Marxism: From Critique to Integration within the Philosophical Establishment in Socialist Romania”, how the early critique of existentialism combined a polemics against bourgeois philosophy in general with the condemnation of the predominant local philosophies of the interwar period. While acknowledging the comparably richer reception of existentialism in literature, the article focuses on the philosophical journals Cercetări filozofice [Philosophical Investigations] and Revista de filozofie [Journal for Philosophy] in order to investigate how the official philosophical establishment of Socialist Romania engaged with existentialism and phenomenology. In their view, this reception evolved in the 1950s from a critique of “existentialism without existentialists”, a criticism that denounced the current in general terms without mention of existentialist authors, to a nominal critique, directed at Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger, but only rooted in a superficial reading of their works. A good example for the reception in this period is Pavel Apostol’s critique of existentialism, which was very much inspired by Lukács, but already proved somewhat outdated in light of the growing professionalisation of philosophical discourse in the 1950s. Overall, the reception of existentialism in the 1950s in Romania proves broader in scope than its standard socialist version, as it involves a more ample criticism of the local philosophies of the interwar period and also drew from a large variety of sources from the capitalist West, the Eastern Bloc, and even the Global South. The new, more positive perspective on existentialism from the 1960s was opened by a reappraisal of Kafka’s modernist and existentialist writing by Pavel Câmpeanu in 1965. Illustrative for this new turn is also the evolution of Constantin Gulian, one of the main figures of the local philosophical establishment, who condemned existentialism virulently in the late 1950s. After his participation in the colloquium Morale e società organised by the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1964, and also attended by Sartre, Gulian’s position became far more accommodating. Around the same time, local Marxists, such as Magda Stroe or Ana Katz, were praising Sartre as a genuine “existentialist among Marxists”. In contrast to the two preceding decades, the 1970s witnessed attempts to develop a Marxist approach to the key problems of situated human existence as posed by existentialists, leading to a growing integration of existentialist topics and concepts into the Marxist-Leninist framework. Although Gulian’s ambitious project of develo** a “philosophical anthropology” along these lines never materialised, his approach to existentialism nonetheless set the stage for a gradual disentangling of existentialist authors from the standard view of existentialism as a philosophical approach to be challenged. Thus, from the late 70s onwards, philosophers priorly considered as existentialists were stripped of that label and debated for their own sake, which went along, as Hîncu and Baghiu argue, with a fragmentation of philosophical discourse and the convenient integration of existentialist authors among the “contemporary classics of dialectical thought”. Finally, in the 1980s, following the failure of Marxist philosophical anthropology and at the height of national communism, existentialism became autochtonized through the recovery of selected philosophers from the interwar period, whose work had been previously criticised as irrationalist, as seen best in the case of Lucian Blaga, now interpreted as a proto-existentialist.

Of course, these presentations only cover a small fraction of the intellectual debates here involved. Important similar case studies focusing on Poland, or the Soviet Union itself and its various provinces, which are unfortunately missing in this special issue, would have probably brought some important supplementary nuances. However, these parallel stories nonetheless add to a converging pattern one can read in manifold ways: as the story of the gradual erosion of the Marxist-Leninist philosophical system in its complex interaction with Western contemporary philosophy; or as a history of some unrealised hybrid potentialities, which briefly emerged during these interactions.