BOGDANOV. - This is the pseudonym of Alessandro Alexandrovič Malinovskij, Russian revolutionary, physician, and philosopher, b. in 1873. A member of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, around 1909 he organized, together with Lunačarskij and Gorkij, a Bolshevik propaganda school in Capri. He later broke away from the party. After the revolution he founded and directed the Institute for Blood Transfusion.
Under the influence of Mach, B. sought to give Marxism an empiriocritical basis, transforming empiriocriticism into an empiriomonism. This gave Lenin occasion to write his famous work Materialism and Empiriocriticism, in which he set out to defend dialectical materialism, as the genuine Marxist philosophy, against the attempt to introduce other philosophical conceptions into II. B. sought to overcome the dualism between the physical and the psychical found in Mach, regarding them as elements of a single experience. The difference would consist solely in this: psychical phenomena represent individually organized experience, whereas physical phenomena represent socially organized experience.
Works: Empiriomonizm (Empiriomonism), Moscow-Petersburg 1906-1908; Tectologia (Tectology), Berlin 1922.