Studies on Soviet culture have treated the aesthetics of the sublime predominantly in terms of the Soviet sublime as manifested in Stalinist culture. This article will argue that the sublime cannot, in its impact on Soviet aesthetics, be delimited to imperial representations. The aesthetics of the sublime in Romanticism and its continuation into modernism in European Literatures arose from a problematization of the very notion of representation in art, in the mind and in politics. The legacy of this aesthetics in Soviet literature can be linked to the paradoxical quest for a means of representing or writing the breakdown in the understanding of the world that occurred after the Revolution. As will be shown in examples from 1920s Soviet literature, the people appear as an immense natural force that demands a different means of presentation.