Maxim Gorky 1934
Soviet Literature
Speech: delivered in August 1934;
Source: Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov and others “Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934,” page 25-69, Lawrence & Wishart, 1977. First published in 1935;
Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2004;
Transcribed by: Jose Braz for the Marxists Internet Archive.
THE ROLE of the labour processes, which have converted a two-Legged animal
into man and created the basic elements of culture, has never been investigated
as deeply and thoroughly as it deserves. This is quite natural, for such
research would not be in the interests of the exploiters of labour. The latter,
who use the energy of the masses as a sort of raw material to be turned into
money, could not, of course, enhance the value of this raw material. Ever since
remote antiquity, when mankind was divided into slaves and slave-owners, they
have used the vital power of the toiling mass in the same way as we today use
the mechanical force of river currents. Primitive man has been depicted by the
historians of culture as a philosophizing idealist and mystic, a creator of
gods, a seeker after “the meaning of life.” Primitive man has been saddled with
the mentality of a Jacob Böhme, a cobbler who lived at the end of the sixteenth
and the beginning of the seventeenth century and who occupied himself between
whiles with philosophy of a kind extremely popular among bourgeois mystics;
Böhme preached that “Man should meditate on the Skies, on the Stars and the
Elements, and on the Creatures which do proceed from them, and likewise on the
Holy Angels, the Devil, Heaven and Hell.
You know that the material for the history of primitive culture was furnished
by archaeological data and by the reflections of ancient religious cults, while
the elucidation and study of these survivals have been carried on under the
influence of Christian philosophical dogma, to which even atheist historians
have been no strangers. This influence may be clearly traced in Spencer’s theory
of super-organic evolution, and not in his works alone, but also in those of
Frazer and many others. But no historian of primitive and ancient culture has
used the material of folklore, the unwritten compositions of the people, the
testimony of mythology, which, taken as a whole, is a reflection in broad
artistic generalizations of the phenomena of nature, of the struggle with nature
and of social life.
It is very hard to conceive of a two-legged animal, who spent all his
strength in the struggle for existence, thinking in abstraction from the
processes of labour, from questions of clan and tribe. It is difficult to
conceive an Immanuel Kant, barefoot and clothed in an animal’s skin, cogitating
on the “thing-in-itself.” Abstract thought was indulged in by man at a later
period, by that solitary man of whom Aristotle in his Politics said: “Man
outside society is either a god, or a beast.” Being a beast, he sometimes
compelled recognition as a god, but as a beast, he served as the material for
the creation of numerous myths about beast-like men, just as the first men who
learned to ride on horseback furnished the basis for the centaur myth.
The historians of primitive culture have completely waived the clear evidence
of materialist thought, to which the processes of labour and the sum total of
phenomena in the social life of ancient man inevitably gave rise. These
evidences have come down to us in the shape of fables and myths in which we hear
the echo of work done in the taming of animals, in the discovery of healing
herbs, in the invention of implements of labour. Even in remote antiquity men
dreamed of being able to fly in the air, as can be seen from the legend about
Phaethon, about Daedalus and his son Icarus, and also from the fable of the
“magic carpet.” Men dreamed of speedier movement over the earth – hence the
fable of the “seven-league boots.” They learned to ride the horse. The desire to
navigate rivers faster than the current led to the invention of the oar and the
sall. The striving to kill enemy and beast from a distance prompted the
invention of the sling, of the bow and arrow. Men conceived the possibility of
spinning and weaving a vast amount of fabric in one night, of building overnight
a good dwelling, even a “castle,” that is, a dwelling fortified against the
enemy. They created the spinning wheel, one of the most ancient instruments of
labour; they created the primitive hand loom, and also the legend of Vassllisa
the Wise. It would be possible to produce many more proofs to show that all
these ancient tales and myths contained a purpose, to show how far-sighted were
the fanciful, hypothetical, but already technological thoughts of primitive man,
which could rise to such hypotheses of our own day as that of using the force of
the earth’s revolution around its own axis, or of breaking up the polar ice. All
the myths and legends of ancient times find their consummation, as it were, in
the Tantalus myth. Tantalus stands up to his neck in water, he is racked by
thirst, but unable to allay it – there you have ancient man amid the phenomena
of the outer world, which he has not yet learned to know.
I do not doubt that you are familiar with ancient legends, tales and myths,
but I should like their fundamental meaning to be more deeply comprehended. And
their meaning is the aspiration of ancient working people to lighten their toll,
increase its productiveness, to arm against four-footed and two-footed foes, and
also by the power of words, by the device of “exorcism” and “incantation,” to
gain an influence over the elemental phenomena of nature, which are hostile to
men. The last-named is particularly important, as it betokens how deeply men
believed in the power of the word, and this belief is accounted for by the
obvious and very real service of speech in organizing the social relations and
labour processes of men. “Incantations” were even used to influence the gods.
This is quite natural, as all the ancient gods lived on the earth, bore human
shape and behaved like men; they were benevolent to the humble, hostile to the
recalcitrant; like men, they were envious, vengeful, ambitious. The fact that
man created god in his own image goes to prove that religious thought had its
origin not in the contemplation of nature, but in social strife. We are quite
justified in believing that the raw material for the fabrication of gods was
furnished by the “illustrious men” of ancient days. Thus, Hercules, the “hero of
labour,” the “master of all trades,” was ultimately exalted to the seat of the
gods, Olympus.
God, in the conception of primitive man, was not an abstract concept, a
fantastic being; but a real personage, armed with some implement of labour,
master of some trade, a teacher and fellow-worker of men. God was the artistic
generalization of the achievements of labour, and the “religious” thought of the
tolling masses should be placed in quotation marks, since it represented a
purely artistic creativeness. In idealizing the abilities of men, and having, as
it were, a premonition of their mighty future development, mythology was,
fundamentally speaking, realistic. Beneath each flight of ancient fancy it is
easy to discover the hidden motive, and this motive is always the striving of
men to lighten their labour. It is obvious that this striving originated among
men who had to perform physical labour. And it is obvious, too, that god would
not have made his appearance and would not have continued so long in the daily
lives of men of toil, had he not been so doubly useful to the lords of the
earth, the exploiters of labour. The reason why god is so quickly and easily
failing into disuse in our country is just because the reason for his existence
has disappeared – the need to vindicate the power of man over man, for man
should be only a fellow-worker, a friend, companion, teacher to his fellow-man,
not the master over his mind and will.
But the more powerful and masterful the slave-owner grew, the higher in the
heavens did the gods rise, and among the masses there appeared a desire to
combat god, personified in the image of Prometheus, the Esthonian Kalevi and
other heroes, who saw god as a hostile lord of lords.
Pre-Christian pagan folklore has not preserved any clearly expressed
indications of the existence of thought on “fundamentals,” on “first
causes,” on the “thing-in-itself.” In general it has left no signs of
that way of thinking which was organized into a system in the fourth
century before our era by the “prophet of Attica,” Plato, the founder of
a philosophy of abstract aloofness from the processes of labour, from
the conditions and phenomena of life. It is well known that the church
recognized Plato as a forerunner of Christianity. It is well known that
the church, from its inception, stubbornly fought against the “survivals
of paganism” – survivals which are a reflection of the materialist
outlook of labour. It is well known that as soon as the feudal lords
began to feel the strength of the bourgeoisie, there arose the idealist
philosophy of Bishop Berkeley, the reactionary nature of which was
exposed by Lenin in his militant book against idealism [1]. It is well known that on the eve of the French Revolution, at
the end of the eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie availed itself of the
materialist idea in order to fight feudalism and its inspirer-religion,
but that, having conquered its class foe, and in fear of its new enemy,
the proletariat, it immediately reverted to the idealist doctrine and
sought the protection of the church. During the course of the nineteenth
century, the bourgeoisie, feeling with varying degrees of alarm how
iniquitous and precarious was its power over the masses of the toiling
people, tried to vindicate its existence by the philosophy of criticism,
positivism, rationalism, pragmatism and other attempts to distort the
purely materialist thought emanating from the processes of labour. These
attempts revealed, one by one, their powerlessness to “explain” the
world, and in the twentieth century we find that the reputed leader of
philosophical thought is the idealist Bergson, whose teaching, by the
way, is “favourable to the Catholic religion.” Here you have a definite
admission of the need for regression. Add to this the present. wailings
of the bourgeoisie concerning the disastrous portent of the irresistible
growth of technique, which has created fantastic riches for the
capitalists, and you will obtain a pretty clear idea of the degree of
intellectual pauperism to which the bourgeoisie has fallen, and of the
necessity of destroying it as a historical relic which, in decay, is
contaminating the world with the cadaveric poison of its decomposition.
The cause of intellectual impoverishment is always to be found in a
refusal to recognize the basic meaning of real phenomena, in an escape
from life through fear of it, or through an egotistical craving for
quiet, through social indifference created by the sordid and loathsome
anarchism of the capitalist state.
* * *
There is every ground for hoping that when the history of culture will have
been written by the Marxists, we shall see that the role of the bourgeoisie in
the process of cultural creation has been greatly exaggerated, especially in
literature, and still more so in painting, where the bourgeoisie has always been
the employer, and, consequently, the law-giver. The bourgeoisie has never had
any proclivity towards the creation of culture – if this term be understood in a
broader sense than as a mere steady development of the exterior material
amenities of life and the growth of luxury. The culture of capitalism is nothing
but a system of methods aimed at the physical and moral expansion and
consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie over the world, over men, over the
treasures of the earth and the powers of nature. The meaning of the process of
cultural development was never understood by the bourgeoisie as the need for the
development of the whole mass of humanity. It is a well known fact that, by
virtue of bourgeois economic policy, every nation organized as a state became
hostile to its neighbours, while the less well organized races, especially the
coloured peoples, served the bourgeoisie as slaves, disfranchised to an even
greater extent than the bourgeoisie’s own white-skinned slaves.
The peasants and the workers were deprived of the right to education
– the right to develop the mind and will towards comprehension of life,
towards altering the conditions of life, towards rendering their working
surroundings more tolerable. The schools trained and are still training
no one but obedient servants of capitalism, who believe in its
inviolability and legitimacy. The need for “educating the people” was
talked of and written about, and the progress of literacy was even
boasted of, but in actual fact the working people were only being split
up, imbued with the idea of incompatible distinctions between races,
nations and religions. This doctrine is used to justify an inhuman
colonial policy, which gives an ever wider scope to the insane lust for
profit, to the idiotic greed of shopkeepers. This doctrine has been
upheld by bourgeois science, which has even sunk so low as to assert
that a negative attitude on the part of people of the Aryan race towards
all others “has grown organically out of the metaphysical activity of
the whole nation” – although it is quite obvious that if “the whole
nation” has become infected with an infamous animal hostility towards
the coloured races or the Semites, this infection has been engrafted on
it in an actual, physical sense by the foul work of the bourgeoisie,
wielding fire and sword. If we remember that the Christian church has
turned this work into a symbol of the suffering of the loving son of
god, the grim humour of it is exposed with disgusting transparency. We
may note in passing that Christ, “the son of god,” is the only “positive
type” created by ecclesiastical literature, and this type of one who
vainly seeks to reconcile all life’s contradictions is an especially
striking proof of this literature’s creative feebleness.
The history of technical and scientific discoveries abounds in cases
where even the growth of technical culture has been resisted by the
bourgeoisie. These cases are commonly known, as is also the motive for
such resistance, viz., the cheapness of labour power. It will be argued
that technique, nevertheless, has developed and reached considerable
heights. This is indisputable. But this is due to the fact that
technique itself augurs, as it were, and suggests to man the possibility
and necessity of its further development.
I will certainly not attempt to deny that in its time – for example,
in regard to feudalism – the bourgeoisie constituted a revolutionary
force and contributed to the growth of material culture, inevitably
sacrificing in the process the vital interests and forces of the working
masses. However, the case of Fulton shows that the bourgeoisie of
France, even after its victory, did not at once appreciate the
importance of steamships in the development of trade and for
self-defence. And this is not the only case which testifies to the
conservatism of the bourgeoisie. It is important that we should grasp
the fact that this conservatism, concealing as it did the anxiety of the
bourgeoisie to strengthen and safeguard its power over the world, placed
all kinds of restrictions in the way of the intellectual growth of the
working people; that this nevertheless led in the end to the birth of a
new power in the world – the proletariat, and that the proletariat has
already created a state where the intellectual growth of the masses is
unrestricted. There is only one sphere in which the bourgeoisie has
accepted all technical innovations instantly and without demur – that
is, in the manufacture of instruments for human destruction. Nobody, I
believe, has yet noted the influence which the manufacture of weapons of
self-defence for the bourgeoisie has had on the general trend of
development in the metal-working industry.
Social and cultural progress develops normally only when the hands
teach the head, after which the head, now grown more wise, teaches the
hands, and the wise hands once again, this time even more effectually,
promote the growth of the mind. This normal process of cultural growth
in men of labour was in ancient times interrupted by causes of which you
are aware. The head became severed from the hands, and thought from the
earth. Speculative dreamers made their appearance among the mass of
active men; they sought to explain the .world and the growth of ideas in
the abstract, independent of the labour processes, which change the
world in conformity with the aims and interests of man. Their function
at first was, probably, that of organizing labour experience; they were
just such “illustrious men,” heroes of labour, as we see now in our own
day, in our country. And then, among these people, the source of all
social ills was born – the temptation of one to wield power over many,
the desire to lead an easy life at the expense of other men’s labour,
and a depraved, exaggerated notion of one’s own individual strength, a
notion that was originally fostered by the acknowledgment of exceptional
abilities, although these abilities were but a concentration and
reflection of the labour achievements of the working collective-the
tribe or clan. The severance of labour from thought is attributed by
historians of culture to the whole mass of primitive mankind, while the
breeding of individualists is even credited to them as a positive
achievement. The history of the development of individualism is given
with splendid fullness and lucidity in the history of literature. I
again call your attention, comrades, to the fact that folklore, i.e.,
the unwritten compositions of tolling man, has created the most
profound, vivid and artistical1y perfect types of heroes. The perfection
of such figures as Hercules, Prometheus, Miku1a, Selyaninovich,
Svyatogor, of such types as Doctor Faustus, Vassilisa the Wise, the
ironically lucky Ivan the Simple and finally Petrushka, who defeats
doctor, priest, policeman, devil and death itself – all these are images
in the creation of which reason and intuition, thought and feeling have
been harmoniously blended. Such a blending is possible only when the
creator directly participates in the work of creating realities, in the
struggle for the renovation of life.
It is most important to note that pessimism is entirely foreign to
folklore, despite the fact that the creators of folklore lived a hard
life; their bitter drudgery was robbed of all meaning by the exploiters,
while in private life they were disfranchised and defenceless. Despite
all this, the collective body is in some way distinguished by a
consciousness of its own immortality and an assurance of its triumph
over all hostile forces. The hero of folklore, the “simpleton,” despised
even by his father and brothers, always turns out to be wiser than they,
always triumphs over all life’s adversities, just as did Vassilisa the
Wise.
If the notes of despair and of doubt in the meaning of terrestrial
existence are sometimes to be heard in folklore, such notes are clearly
traceable to the influence of the Christian church, which has preached
pessimism for two thousand years, and to the ignorant scepticism of the
parasitic petty bourgeoisie whose existence lies between the hammer of
capital and the anvil of the working folk. The significance of folklore
stands out most vividly when we compare its fantasy, founded on the
achievements of labour, with the dull and ponderous fantasy of
ecclesiastical literature and the pitiful fantasy of chivalrous
romances.
The epic and the chivalrous romance are a creation of the feudal
nobility; their hero is the conqueror. It is well known that the
influence of feudal literature was never particularly great.
Bourgeois literature began in ancient times, with the Egyptian “Tale
of the Thief.” It was continued by the Greeks and the Romans. It emerged
again in the epoch of knighthood’s decay to take the place of the
chivalrous romance. This is a genuinely bourgeois literature, and its
principal hero is the rogue, the thief, later on the detective, and then
again the thief – this time the “gentleman burglar.”
From the figure of Till Eulenspiegel, created at the end of the
fifteenth century, that of Simplicissimus in the seventeenth century,
Lazarillo de Tormes, Gil Blas, the heroes of Smollett and Fielding, down
to the “Dear Friend” of Maupassant, to Arsène Lupin, to the heroes of
“detective” literature in present-day Europe, we can count thousands of
books the heroes of which are rogues, thieves, assassins and agents of
the criminal police. This is what constitutes genuine bourgeois
literature, reflecting most vividly the real tastes, the interests and
the practical “morals” of its consumers. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good” – and on the subsoil of this literature, generously manured
with every conceivable form of vulgarity, including the vulgarity of
middle-class “common sense” have sprung up such remarkable artistic
generalizations as, for instance, the figure of Sancho Panza, the Till
Eulenspiegel of De Coster, and many others of equal worth. One of the
best proofs of the deep class interest shown by the bourgeoisie in the
portrayal of crime is the well-known case of Ponson du Terrail; when
this writer, after many volumes, had at length concluded his story of
Rocambole with the death of his hero, the readers organized a
demonstration outside Terrails apartment, demanding that the novel be
continued. Such success had never fallen to the lot of any of the
eminent writers in Europe. The readers received several more volumes of
“Rocambole” who was resurrected morally as well as physically. This is a
crude example, but one that has its parallels in all bourgeois
literature, of how a cut-throat and robber is converted into a good
bourgeois. The bourgeoisie read about the dexterity of thieves and the
cunning of murderers with the same relish as they read about the
astuteness of detectives. Detective fiction is to this very day the
favourite spiritual food of well-fed persons in Europe. Moreover, in
penetrating into the environment of the semi-starved working man, this
type of literature has been and is one of the causes retarding the
growth of c1ass consciousness; it arouses sympathy for the adroit thief,
it engenders the will to steal, to carry on the guerrilla warfare of
isolated individuals against bourgeois property, and, by emphasizing the
paltry value which the bourgeoisie sets on working c1ass life, it
stimulates an “increase of murders and other crimes against the person.
The fervent attachment of Europe’s middle classes to crime fiction is
corroborated by the plentiful supply of authors who write such fiction
and by the wide circulation which their books enjoy.
It is an interesting fact that in the nineteenth century, when petty
knavery assumed heroic and imposing dimensions on the stock exchange, in
parliament and in the press, the rogue as a hero of fiction was
supplanted by the detective who, in a world full of patent crimes
against the working people, showed remarkable ingenuity in unravelling
mysterious crimes-of the imagination. It is, of course, no accident that
the celebrated Sherlock Holmes should have made his appearance in
England, and it is even less of an accident that side by side with this
detective genius appeared the “gentleman burglar,” who dupes the clever
detectives. Those who interpret this change of heroes as a “play of the
imagination” will be mistaken. What the imagination creates is prompted
by the facts of real life, and it is governed not by baseless fantasy,
divorced from life, but by very real causes – such as those, for
example, which impel the “Left” and Right politicians in France to play
football with the corpse of the “gentleman burglar” Stavisky, while
endeavouring to finish the game “in a draw.”
Of all the forms of artistic creation in words, the most powerful in
its influence on people is admitted to be the drama, which reveals the
emotions and thoughts of the heroes in living action on the stage. If we
trace the progress of European drama from the days of Shakespeare, it
descends to the level of Kotzebue, Nestor Kukolnik, Sardou and still
lower, while the comedy of Molière declines to that of Scribe; in our
country, after Griboyedov and Gogol, it disappears almost entirely.
Since art depicts people, it might perhaps be assumed that the decline
of the dramatic art points to the decay of strong, boldly chiselled
characters, to the fact that “great men” have vanished from the scene.
However, such types are still living a thriving existence to this day
as, for instance, the scurrilous Thersites in bourgeois journalism, the
misanthrope Timon of Athens in literature, the moneylender Shylock in
politics, not to mention Judas, the betrayer of the working class, and
many another figure which has been splendidly portrayed in the past.
From the seventeenth century to our day this category has grown in
quantity and become still more loathsome in quality. The adventurer John
Law is a whippersnapper in comparison with adventurers of the type of
Oustric, Stavisky, Ivar Kreuger and similar super-swindlers of the
twentieth century. Cecil Rhodes and other agents in the field of
colonial pillage are worthy counterparts of Cortez and Pizarro. The oil
kings, the steel magnates and the like are much more appalling and more
criminal than Louis XI or Ivan the Terrible. The little republics of
South America contain figures no less lurid than the condottieri of
Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ford is not the sole
caricature of Robert Owen. The sinister figure of Pierpont Morgan has no
equal in the past, if we except the ancient monarch into whose throat
molten gold was poured.
The types enumerated above do not, of course, exhaust the list of
diverse “great” men produced by the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. These people cannot be denied strength of
character, a genius for counting money, plundering the world, and
engineering international massacres to increase their personal wealth;
one cannot deny their amazing shamelessness or the inhumanity of their
diabolically vile work. The realistic criticism and the high artistic
literature of Europe have passed by these people without, apparent1y, so
much as noticing their existence.
Neither in drama nor in fiction do we find the types of the banker,
the manufacturer or the politician depicted with the strength of art
which literature has displayed in giving us the type of the “superfluous
man.” Nor has literature paid heed to the tragic and all too common fate
of the masters and creators of bourgeois culture – the men of science,
the artists, the inventors in the technical field. It has failed to
notice the heroes who fought to liberate nations from the heel of the
foreigner, the dreamers of a brotherhood of man, people like Thomas
More, Campanella, Fourier, SaintSimon and others. This is not meant as a
reproach. The past is not irreproachable, but there is no sense in
reproaching it. It should be studied.
What has brought the literature of Europe to the state of creative
impotence which it has revealed in the twentieth century? The liberty of
art, the freedom of creative though have been upheld with passionate
redundance; all sorts of arguments have been produced to show that
literature can exist and develop without reference to classes, that it
is not dependent on social politics. This was bad policy, for it
imperceptibly impelled many men of letters to constrict their
observations of real life, within narrow bounds, to abstain from a broad
and many-sided study of life, to shut themselves up “in the solitude of
their soul,” to confine themselves to a fruitless form of
“self-cognition” by way of introspection and arbitrary thought,
altogether detached from life. It has turned out, however, that people
cannot be grasped apart from real life, which is steeped in politics
through and through. It has turned out that man, no matter what
crotchety ideas he may fabricate in regard to himself, still remains a
social unit, and not a cosmic one, like the planets. And moreover it has
turned out that individualism, which turns into egocentrism, breeds
“superfluous people.” It has often been noted that the best, most
skilfully and convincingly drawn hero of European literature in the
nineteenth century was the type of “superfluous person.” Literature
halted in its development to depict this type of person. After the hero
of labour – the man who, though technically unarmed, nevertheless had a
premonition of his triumphant strength; after the feudal conqueror – the
man who understood that it was easier to take things away than to make
them; after the bourgeoisie’s favourite swindler, its “teacher in the
art of life,” the man who sensed that to steal and defraud was easier
than to work, literature halted in its development, paying no heed to
the glaring figures of the founders of capitalism, the oppressors of
mankind, who are far more inhuman than the feudal nobles, bishops, kings
and tsars.
Two groups of writers should be distinguished in the bourgeois
literature of Europe. One group extolled and entertained its class,
e.g., Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Braddon, Marryat, Jerome, Paul de Kock,
Paul Féval, Octave Feuillet, Georges Ohnet, Georges Samarov, Julius
Stinde, and hundreds of similar authors. All these are typical “good
bourgeois” writers not possessing much talent, but dexterous and
trivial, like their readers. The other group, numbering not more than a
few dozen, consists of those great writers who created critical realism
and revolutionary romanticism. They are all apostates, the “prodigal
sons” of their class, aristocrats ruined by the bourgeoisie or scions of
the petty bourgeoisie who tore themselves away from the suffocating
atmosphere in which their class lived. The books of this latter group of
European writers possess a twofold and indisputable value for us:
firstly, as works of literature which are models of technical execution,
secondly, as documents which explain the process of the bourgeoisie’s
development and decay, documents drawn up by apostates of their class,
but which elucidate its life, traditions and deeds in a critical light.
It is not my purpose in this report to give a detailed analysis of
the role of critical realism in European literature of the nineteenth
century. Its essence may be summed up in the struggle against the
conservatism of the feudal lords resuscitated by the big bourgeoisie, a
struggle waged by organizing democracy – i.e., the petty bourgeoisie – on
the basis of liberal and humanitarian ideas, this organizing of
democracy being understood by many writers and most readers as a
necessary defence both against the big bourgeoisie and against the ever
more powerful onslaught of the proletariat.
* * *
You are aware that the exceptionally and unprecedentedly powerful
growth of Russian literature in the nineteenth century repeated –
although somewhat late – all the moods and tendencies of western
literature, and in turn influenced it. The special feature of Russian
bourgeois literature may be said to be the profusion of types of
“superfluous people,” including such altogether original types,
unfamiliar to European readers, as the “playboy,” e.g., Vassily Buslayev
in folklore, Fedor Tolstoy, Michael Bakunin and others in history – the
type of “contrite noble” in literature, the crank and “cross-headed”
person in life.
As in the West, our literature developed in two directions. There was
the line of critical realism, represented by Von-Vizin, Griboyedov,
Gogol, etc., down to Chekhov and Bunin, and the line of purely
middle-class literature represented by Bulgarin, Massalsky, Zatov,
Golitsynsky, Vonlyarlyarsky, Vsevolod Krestovsky, Vsevolod Solovyev down
to Leikin, Averchenko and so on.
When the lucky swindler with his ill-gotfen wealth took his place
beside the feudal conqueror, our folklore gave the rich man a companion
in the shape of “Ivan the Simple,” an ironical type of personage who
achieves riches and even kingship with the aid of a hunchback horse,
which takes the place of the good fairy of romance.
The church, striving to reconcile the slave to his fate and to
strengthen its power over his mind, sought to comfort him by creating
heroes of meekness and longsuffering, martyrs for “Christ’s sake.” Lt
created “hermits,” banishing those for whom it had no use to the
wilderness, the forest and the monastery.
The more the ruling class split up, the smaller did its heroes
become. There came a time when the “simpletons” of folklore, turning
into Sancho Panza, Simplicissimus, Eulenspiegel, grew cleverer than the
feudal lords, acquired boldness to ridicule their masters, and without
doubt contributed to the growth of that state of feeling which, in the
first half of the sixteenth century, found its expression in the ideas
of the “Taborites” and the peasant wars against the knights.
The real history of the toiling people cannot be understood without a
knowledge of their unwritten compositions, which have again and again
had a definite influence on the making of such great works as, for
instance, Faust, The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, Pantagruel and
Gargantua; the Till Eulenspiegel of de Coster, Shelley’s Prometheus
Unbound, and numerous others. Since olden times folklore has been in
constant and quaint attendance on history. It has its own opinion
regarding the actions of Louis XI and Ivan the Terrible and this opinion
sharply diverges from the appraisal of history, written by specialists
who were not greatly interested in the question as to what the combat
between monarchs and feudal lords meant to the life of the toiling
people. The grossly coercive “propaganda” employed to urge the
cultivation of the potato has inspired a number of legends and popular
beliefs attributing its origin to the copulation of the devil with a
harlot; this is a deviation in the direction of ancient barbarism,
consecrated by the foolish church idea that “Christ and the apostles did
not eat potatoes.” But this same folklore in our days has raised
Vladimir Lenin to the level of a mythical hero of ancient times, equal
to Prometheus.
Myth is invention. To invent means to extract from the sum of a given
reality its cardinal idea and embody it n imagery that is how we got
realism. But if to the idea extracted from the given reality we add –
completing the idea, by the logic of hypothesis – the desired, the
possible, and thus supplement the image, we obtain that romanticism
which is at the basis of myth and is highly beneficial in that it tends
to provoke a revolutionary attitude to reality, an attitude that changes
the world in a practical way.
Bourgeois society, as we see, has completely lost the capacity for
invention in art. The logic of hypothesis has remained, and acts as a
stimulus only in the field of the sciences, based on experiment.
Bourgeois romanticism, based on individualism, with its propensity for
fantastic and mystic ideas, does not spur the imagination or encourage
thought. Sundered, detached from reality, it is built not on
convincingness of imagery but almost exclusively on the “magic of
words,” as we see in Marcel Proust and his votaries. The bourgeois
romanticists, from Novalis onward, are people of the type of Peter
Schlemihl, “the man who lost his shadow,” and Schlemihl was created by
Chamisso, a French émigré who wrote in Germany in German. The literary
man of the contemporary West has also lost his shadow, emigrating from
realities to the nihilism of despair, as can be seen from Louis Céline’s
book, A Journey to the End of the Night; Bardomu the hero of this book,
has lost his country, despises mankind, call his mother “bitch” and his
mistresses “carrion,” is indifferent to all crimes, and, having no
grounds for “joining” the revolutionary proletariat, is quite ripe for
the acceptance of fascism.
Turgenev’s influence on the writers of the Scandinavian peninsula is
an established fact; Leo Tolstoy’s influence on Count Pahlen, Réné
Bazin, Estaunier, Thomas Hardy (in his Tess of the D’Urbervilles) and
various other writers in Europe is commonly acknowledged. And the
influence of Dostoyevsky has been and remains an especially strong one.
This influence was admitted by Nietzsche, whoose ideas form the basis of
the fanatical creed and practice of fascism. To Dostoyevsky belongs the
credit of having painted with the most vivid perfection of word
portraiture a type of egocentrist, a type of social degenerate in the
person of the hero of his Memoirs from Underground. With the grim
triumph of one who is insatiably taking vengeance for his personal
misfortunes and sufferings, for his youthful enthusiasms, Dostoyevsky in
the figure of his hero has shown the depths of whining despair that are
reached by the individualist from among the young men of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries who are cut off from real life. This type of his
combines within himself the most characteristic traits of Friedrich
Nietzsche and of the Marquis Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans Against
the Grain, Le Disciple of Paul Bourget; and Boris Savinkov, who made
himself the hero of his own composition, Oscar Wilde and Artsybashev’s
“Sanine” and many another social degenerate created by the anarchic
influence of inhuman conditions in the capitalist state.
As narrated by Vera Figner, Savinkov argued exactly like the
decadents: “There is no morality, there is only beauty. And beauty is
the free development of persona1ity, the unrestrained unfolding of all
that lies within its soul.”
We know quite well with what rottenness the soul of bourgeois
personality is burdened!
In a state founded on the senseless and humiliating sufferings of the
vast majority of the people, it is fitting that the creed of
irresponsible self-will in word and action should be the guiding and
vindicating principle. Such ideas as “man is a despot by nature,” that
he “likes to be a tormentor,” that he is “passionately fond of
suffering,” and that he envisages the meaning of life and his happiness
precisely in self-will, in unrestricted freedom of action, that only
this self-will will bring him his “greatest advantage,” and “let the
whole world perish so long as I can drink my tea” – such are the ideas
capitalism has inculcated and upheld through thick and thin.
Dostoyevsky has been called a seeker after truth. If he did seek, he
found it in the brute and animal instincts of man, and found it not to
repudiate, but to justify. Yes, the animal instincts in mankind cannot
be extirpated so long as bourgeois society contains such a vast number
of influences which arouse the beast in man. The domesticated cat plays
with the mouse it has caught, because the muscles of the beast, the
hunter of small swift prey, demand that it should do so; this play is a
training of the body. The fascist who, kicking a worker under the chin,
dislodges his head from the spinal column, is not a beast, but something
incomparably worse – he is a mad animal that should be destroyed, the
same heinous brute as the White officer who cuts stripes and stars out
of the skin of the Red Army man.
It is difficult to understand just what Dostoyevsky was seeking for,
but towards the close of his life he found that that talented and most
honest of Russian men, Vissarion Belinsky, was “the most noisome, obtuse
and disgraceful thing in Russian life,” that Constantinople must be
taken away from the Turks, that serfdom is conducive to “ideal moral
relations between the landowners and the peasants,” and finally
acknowledged as his preceptor Constantine Pobedonostsev, one of the
grimmest figures of nineteenth century Russian life. Dostoyevsky’s
genius is indisputable. In force of portrayal his talent is equal
perhaps only to Shakespeare. But as a personality, as a “judge of men
and the world,” he is easy to conceive in the role of a medieval
inquisitor.
The reason why I have devoted so much space to Dostoyevsky is because
without the influence of his ideas it would be almost impossible to
understand the volte face which Russian literature and the greater part
of the intelligentsia made after 1905-06 from radicalism and democracy
towards safeguarding and defending bourgeois “law and order.”
Dostoyevsky’s ideas became popular soon after his speech on Pushkin,
after the breaking up of the Narodnaya Volya party, which attempted to
overthrow the autocracy. Before the proletariat, grasping the great and
simple truth of Lenin, had shown its stern countenance to the world in
1905, Peter Struve prudently began to persuade the intelligentsia, like
a maiden who had chanced to lose her innocence, to enter into legal
marriage with the elderly capitalist. A marriage broker by profession, a
bookworm absolutely devoid of original ideas, he issued the call in 1901
of “Back to Fichte” to the idea of subservience to the will of the
nation personified by the shopkeepers and the landowners, while in 1907
there was published under his editorship and with his collaboration a
collection of articles entitled Landmarks, where the following sentence,
quoted word for word, may be round: “We should be grateful to the
government for de fending us with bayonets against the wrath of the
people.”
These vile words were uttered by the democratic intelligentsia in the
days when the bailiff of the landowners, the minister Stolypin, was
hanging dozens of workers and peasants daily. The underlying idea in
Landmarks was a reiteration of the fanatical idea expressed in the
seventies by that inveterate conservative, Constantine Leontiev: “Russia
must be chilled,” i.e., all the sparks of social revolution must be
stamped out of her. Landmarks, this renegades act of the
“Constitutional-Democrats,” won the high approval of the old renegade
Leo Tikhomirov, who called it “the sobering of the Russian soul and the
revival of conscience.”
* * *
The period from 1907 to 1917 was a time when irresponsible ideas ran
riot, when Russian men of letters enjoyed complete “freedom of
creation.” This liberty found its expression in propaganda of all the
conservative ideas of the Western bourgeoisie – ideas which gained
currency after the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth
century and which flared up again at regular intervals after 1848 and
1871. It was announced that “the philosophy of Bergson marks a
tremendous step forward in the history of human thought,” that Bergson
“replenished and deepened the theory of Berkeley,” that “the systems of
Kant, Leibnitz, Descartes, and Hegel are dead systems, and the works of
Plato, like the sun, shine above them in eternal beauty” – this of
Plato, who founded the most pernicious of all fallacies of thought,
utterly detached from hard reality, which is continually unfolding in
all its aspects in the processes of labour and creation.
Dmitri Merezkovski, a writer of influence in his time, cried:
“Come what may – ‘tis all the same!
Long they’ve wearied of the game,
The three Fates, the eternal Parces –
Dust to dust and ash to, ashes!”
Sologub, following Schopenhauer, and in obvious dependence on
Baudelaire and “the damned,” gave a remarkably lucid picture of “the
cosmic fatuity of the existence of personality,” and though he
plaintively moaned over this in rhyme, he nevertheless went on living a
comfortable, bourgeois existence, and in 1914 threatened the Germans to
destroy Berlin as soon as “the snow vanishes from the valleys.” The
gospel of “Eros in politics,” of “mystical anarchism” was preached.
Crafty Vassily Rozanov preached eroticism, Leonid Andreyev wrote
nightmare stories and plays, Artsybashev selected as the hero of his
novel a lascivious two legged goat in trousers, and altogether, the
decade of 1907-17 fully deserves to be branded as the most shameful and
shameless decade in the history of the Russian intelligentsia.
As our democratic intellectuals were less disciplined by history than
those in the West, the process of their “moral” disintegration, of their
intellectual impoverishment, was more rapid in our country. But this
process is common to the petty bourgeoisie of all countries and
unavoidable for every intellectual who lacks the strength and
determination to throw in his lot with the mass of the proletariat,
whose historical mission is to change the world for the common benefit
of all honestly working people.
It should be added that Russian literature, like its Western
counterpart, neglected the landowners, the promotors of industry and the
financiers in the period preceding the revolution, although this
category of person offered far more colourful and original types in our
country than in the West. Russian literature overlooked such nightmare
types of landowner as, for instance, the famous Marlame Saltychikha,
General Izmailov, together with scores and hundreds of similar
characters. Gogol’s caricatures and sketches in his book Dead Souls are
not so very characteristic of landed, feudal Russia. The Korobochkas,
Manilovs and Petukhs, the Sobakyeviches and Nozdrevs influenced the
policy of tsarist autocracy merely by the passive fact of their
existence; as blood-suckers of the peasantry, they are not very typical.
There were other masters and artists of the blood-sucking art, people of
dreadful moral aspect, voluptuaries and aesthetes of cruelty. Their evil
deeds have not been noted by artists of the pen, even by the greatest of
them, even those who professed their love for the muzhik. There is an
abundance of characteristic traits that sharply distinguish our big
bourgeoisie from that of the West, the explanation being that our
historically young bourgeoisie, pre-eminent1y of peasant extraction, got
rich more quickly and easily than did the historically quite elderly
bourgeoisie of the West. Our industrialist, untrained by the severe
competition of the West, retained almost up to the twentieth century the
characteristic traits of the “crank” and the “playboy,” induced perhaps by his own astonishment at the silly ease with which he accumulated
millions. One of these, Peter Gubonin, is described by the well-known
Tibetan doctor, P. A. Badmayev, in his booklet Wisdom in the Russian
People, published in 1917. This entertaining booklet, urging young
people to “abjure the writings of the devil which tempt them with the
empty words of liberty, equality and fraternity,” gives us the following
information about Gubonin, the son of a mason and himself a mason by
trade, who became a railroad constructor:
“Most venerable old officials of the period of Russia’s
emancipation, who still remember the times of Gubonin, relate the
following: Gubonin, appearing at the Ministry in high, tarpolished
boots, in a caftan, with a bag of silver, greeted the janitors and
messengers in the hall, drew silver out of his bag and gave generously
to everybody, bowing low, that they might not forget their- Peter
Ionovich. Then he proceeded to the different Departments and
Sub-Departments, where he left each official a sealed envelope – each
according to hisrank – calling them all by their Christian names and
1ikewise bowing to them. The more exalted personages he greeted and
kissed, calling them benefactors of the Russian people, and was quickly
admitted to the presence of His Excellency. After Peter Ionovich’s
departure from the Ministry, everybody rejoiced. It was a real holiday,
such as could only be compared with Christmas or Easter Day. Each one
counted what he had received, smiled, wore a gay and cheerful look and
was thinking how to spend the rest of the day and night until the
following morning. The janitors in the hall were proud of Peter
Ionovich, who came from their midst; they called him clever and good,
and asked each other how much each had received, but they all concealed
it, not wishing to compromise their benefactor. The petty officials
whispered among themselves with deep feeling that kind Peter Ionovich
had not forgotten them either – so clever, agreeable and honest was he.
The high officials, including His Excellency, loudly proclaimed what a
lucid, statesmanlike mind he had, what great benefits he was bringing to
the people and the state, meriting some distinction. He ought to be
invited they said, to the conference dealing with railroad questions, as
he is the only clever man concerned with these matters. And indeed, he
was invited to the most important conferences, where only distinguished
personages and engineers were present, and at such conferences the
decisive voice was that of Gubonin.”
This narrative sounds ironical, nut it is actually written in sincere
praise of an order of society under which the proud watchword of the
bourgeoisie – “Liberty, equality, fraternity” – proved to be nothing more than an empty phrase.
All that I have Said about the creative impotence of the bourgeoisie,
as reflected in its literature, may seem to be excessively gloomy; and
may expose me to the charge of “tendencious” exaggeration. But facts are
facts, and I see them as they are.
It would be silly and even criminal to underestimate the enemy’s
strength. We are all perfectly well aware of the strength of his
industrial technique-particularly that of the war industries, which
sooner or later will be directed against us, but will inevitably provoke
a world-wide social revolution and destroy capitalism. Military experts
in the West utter loud warnings to the effect that war will involve the
entire rear, all the population of the warring countries. It may be
presumed that the numerous lower middle class of Europe who have not yet
altogether forgotten the :horrors of the 1914-18 massacre and who are
scared by the dread inevitability of a new and more horrible carnage,
will at last realize who it is that will profit by the coming social
catastrophe, who is the criminal that periodically and for the sake of
his own nefarious gain exterminates millions of people that they will
realize this, and help the proletarians to smash capitalism. We may
presume this, but we cannot rely upon its happening, for the jesuit and
the craven, the leader of the philistines, the Social-Democrat, is still
living. We must firmly rely on the growth of the proletariats
revolutionary sense of justice, but it is better still for us to be sure
of our own strength and to develop it ceaselessly. It is one of the most
essential duties of literature to develop the revolutionary
self-consciousness of the proletariat, to foster its love for the home
it has created, and to defend this home against attack.
* * *
Once, in ancient times, the unwritten artistic compositions of the
working people represented the sole organizer of their experience, the
embodiment of ideas in imagery and the spur to the working energy of the
collective body. We should try to understand this. The object our
country has set itself is to ensure the equal cultural education of all
units, the equal acquaintance of all its members with the victories and
achievements of labour, aspiring to convert the work of men into the art
of controlling the forces of nature. We are more or less familiar with
the process of the economic-and therefore political-stratification of
people, with the process by which the labouring people’s right to the
free development of their minds is usurped by others. When the task of
interpreting the world became the affair of priests, the latter could
arrogate it to themselves only by giving a metaphysical explanation of
phenomena and! of the resistance offered by the elemental forces of
nature to the aims and energies of men of labour. This criminal process
of excluding, debarring millions of people from the work of
understanding the world, initiated in antiquity and continuing down to
our own day, has resulted in hundreds of millions of people, divided by
ideas of race, nationality and religion, remaining in a state of the
most profound ignorance, of appalling mental blindness, in the darkness
of superstition and. prejudices of every kind; The Communist-Leninist
Party, the workers and peasants government of the. Union of Socialist
Soviets, which have destroyed capitalism throughout. the length and
breadth of tsarist Russia, which have handed over political power to the
workers and the peasants, and which are organizing a free c1assless
society, have made it the object of their daring, sage and indefatigable
activity to free the working masses from the age-old yoke of an old and
outworn history, of the capitalist development of culture, which today
has glaringly exposed all its vices and its creative decrepitude. And it
is from the height of this great aim that we honest writers of the Union
of Soviets must examine, appraise and organize our work.
We must grasp the fact that it is the toll of the masses which forms
the fundamental organizer of culture and the creator of all ideas, both
those which in the course of centuries have minimized the decisive
significance of labour – the source of our knowledge-and those ideas of
Marx, Lenin and Stalin which in our time are fostering a revolutionary
sense of justice among the proletarians of all countries, and in our
country are lifting labour to the level of a power which serves as the
foundation for the creative activity of science and art. To be
successful in our work, we must grasp and fully realize the fact that in
our country the social1y organized labour of semi-literate workers and a
primitive peasantry has in the short space of ten years created
stupendous values and armed itself superbly for defence against an enemy
attack. Proper appreciation of this fact will reveal to us the cultural
and revolutionary power of a doctrine which unites the whole proletariat
of the world.
All of us – writers, factory workers, collective farmers still work
badly and cannot even fully master everything that has been made by us
and for us. Our working masses do not yet quite grasp the fad that they
are working only for themselves. This feeling is smouldering everywhere,
but it has not-yet blazed up into a mighty and joyous flame. But nothing
can kindle until it has reached a certain temperature, and nobody ever
was so splendidly capable of raising the temperature of labour energy as
is the Party organized by the genius of Vladimir Lenin, and the
present-day leader of this Party.
As the principal hero of our books we should choose labour, i.e., a
person, organized by the processes of labour, who in our country is
armed with the full might of modern technique, a person who, in his
turn,. so organizes labour that it becomes easier and more productive,
raising it to the level of an art. We must learn to understand labour as
creation. Creation is a concept which we writers use all too freely,
though we hardly possess the right to do so. Creation is a degree of
tension reached in the work of the memory at which the speed of its
working draws from the reserves of knowledge and impressions the most
salient and characteristic facts, pictures, details, and renders them
into the most precise, vivid and intelligible words. Our young
literature can not boast of possessing this quality. The stock of
impressions, the sum of knowledge of our writers is not large, and there
is no sign of any special anxiety to extend or enrich it.
The principal theme of European and Russian literature in the
nineteenth century was personality, in antithesis to society, the state
and nature. The main reason which prompted personality to set itself
against bourgeois society was an abundance of negative impressions,
contradictory to class ideas and social traditions. Personality felt
keenly that these impressions were smothering it, retarding the process
of its growth, but it did not fully realize its own responsibility for
the triviality, the baseness, the criminality of the principles on which
bourgeois society was built. Jonathan Swift was one in all Europe, but
Europe’s bourgeoisie considered that this satire struck at England
alone. Generally speaking, .rebellious personality, in criticizing the
life of its society, seldom and barely realized its own responsibility
for society’s odious practices. And still more seldom was the prime
motive for its criticism of the existing order a deep and correct
understanding of the significance of social and economic causes; more
often criticism was provoked either by a sense of the hopelessness of
one’s life in the narrow iron cage of capitalism, or by a desire to
avenge the failure of one’s life and its humiliations. And it can be
said that when personality turned to the working mass, it did not do so
in the interests of the mass, but in the hope that the working class, by
destroying bourgeois society, would ensure it freedom of thought and
liberty of action. I reiterate: .the main and fundamental theme of
pre-revolutionary literature was the tragedy of a person to whom life
seemed cramped, who felt superfluous in society, sought therein a
comfortable place for himself, failed to find it, and suffered, died, or
reconciled himself to a society that was hostile to him, or sank to
drunkenness or suicide.
In our Union of Socialist Soviets, there should not, there cannot be
superfluous people. Every citizen enjoys wide freedom for the
development of his abilities, talents and faculties. One thing only is
demanded of personality: Be honest in your attitude to the heroic work
of creating a classless society.
In the Union of Socialist Soviets the workers and peasants government
has called upon the whole mass of the population to help build a new
culture – and it follows from this that the responsibility for mistakes,
for hitches, for spoilage, for every display of middle-class meanness,
for perfidy, duplicity and unscrupulousness lies on each and all of us.
That means our criticism must really be self-criticism; it means that we
must devise a system of socialist morality as a regulating factor in our
work and our relationships.
When narrating facts which mark the intellectual growth of the
factory workers and the transformation of the age old proprietor into a
collective farm member, we writers tend to become mere chroniclers of
the bare facts, doing scant justice to the emotional process of these
transformations.
We are still poor observers of reality. Even the landscape of the
country has changed; gone is its motley poverty – the bluish patch of
oats, and, alongside of it, the black strip of ploughed land, the golden
ribbon of rye, the green band of wheat, strips of land overgrown with
weeds – the whole many-coloured sadness of universal dismemberment and
disseverance. In our days, vast expanses of land are coloured a single
mighty hue. Above the village and the country town looms not the church,
but huge buildings of public usage; giant factories glitter with a
million panes of glass, while the toy-like little heathen churches of
ancient times speak to us eloquently of the giftedness of our people as
expressed in church architecture. the new landscape that has so sharply
changed the aspect of our land has not found a place in literature.
We are living in an epoch of deep-rooted changes in the old ways of
life, in an epoch of mans awakening to a sense of his own dignity, when
he has come to realize himself as a force which is actually changing the
world. Many are amused to read that people with names like Svinukhin,
Sobakin, Kuteinikov, Popov, Svishchev, etc.,[2]
” have changed them to such names as Lensky, Novy, Partisanov, Dedov,
Stolyarov, etc. This is not funny, for it marks precisely the growth of
human dignity; it shows how people are refusing to bear a name or
nickname that is humiliating and reminiscent of the harassed servile
past of their grandfathers and their fathers.
Our literature is not sufficiently attentive to the outwardly petty
but intrinsically valuable signs which show that people are seeing
themselves in a new light, to the processes by which the new Soviet
citizen is developing. Svinukhin quite possibly took his name of Lensky,
not from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but by association with the mass
murder of the workers on the Lena Goldfields in 1912; Kuteinikov may
have really been a partisan, while Sobakin, whose grand father, a serf,
may have been exchanged for a dog, really feels himself “new.” To change
one’s name before the revolution one had to present a petition in the
“sovereign name” of the tsar and when a certain Pevtsov [3] asked for
his surname to be changed to that of his mother and grandmother,
Avdotin, the rescript “traced” on the petition was: “Mentally
deficient.”
Recently I heard this fact: a sailor in the German navy, a man with a
historic name, a descendant of the Decembrist Volkonsky, became a
fascist.
“Why?” he was asked.
“Because the officers have been forbidden to strike us,” he replied.
Here is a glaring example of how an hereditary aristocrat, a man of the
“blue blood,” loses his sense of personal dignity.
The growth of the new man can be seen with especial c1arity among
children, yet children remain quite outside literature’s sphere of
observation. Our writers seem to consider it beneath their dignity to
write about children and for children.
I believe I will not be mistaken in saying that fathers are beginning
to show more care and tenderness for their children, which, in my view,
is quite natural, as children for the first time in the whole life of
mankind are now the inheritors not of their parents money, houses and
furniture, but of a real and mighty fortune-a socialist state created by
the labour of their fathers and mothers. Never before have children been
such intelligent and stern judges of the past, and I quite believe the
fact that was related to me of an eleven year-old tubercular little girl
who said to the doctor in the presence of her father; pointing her
finger at him: “It is his fault that I am ill. Till he was forty years
old, he wasted his health on all sorts of bad women, and then married
mama. She is only twenty-seven, she is healthy, and he – you can see how
miserable he is, and I have taken after him.”
There is every reason to expect that such reasoning among children
will be no uncommon thing.
Reality is giving us ever more “raw material” for artistic
generalizations. But neither the drama nor the novel has yet given an
adequately vivid portrayal of the Soviet woman, who is distinguishing
herself as a free agent in all spheres where the new socialist life is
being built. It is even noticeable that playwrights are endeavouring to
write as few women’s parts as possible. It is hard to understand why.
Though woman in our country is the social equal of man, and though she
is successfully proving the diversity of her endowments and the breadth
of her capacities, this equality is all too frequently and in many ways
external and formal. The man has not yet forgotten, or else he has
prematurely forgotten, that for centuries woman has been brought up to
be a sensual plaything and a domestic animal, fitted to play the part of
“housewife.” This old and odious debt of history to half the earth’s
inhabitants ought to be paid off by the men of our country first and
foremost, as an example to all other men. And here literature should try
to depict the work and mentality of woman in such a manner as to raise
the attitude towards her above the general level of accepted
middle-class behaviour, which is borrowed from the poultry yard.
Further, I deem it necessary to point out that Soviet literature is
not merely a literature of the Russian language. It is an All-Union
literature. Since the literatures of our fraternal republics,
distinguished from ours only by language, live and work in the light and
under the wholesome influence of the same ideas which unite the whole
world of the working people that capitalism has torn asunder, we
obviously have no right to ignore the literary creation of the national
minorities simply because there are more of us than of them. The value
of art is gauged not by quantity but by quality. If we can point to such
a giant as Pushkin in our past history, it does not follow from this
that the Armenians, Georgians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and other peoples are
incapable of producing great masters of literature, music, painting and
architecture. It should be remembered that the process by which the
entire mass of the toiling people is being re-born to “honest human
life,” to the free creation of a new history, to the creation of a
socialist culture, is developing rapidly throughout the length and
breadth of the Union of Socialist Republics. We can see already that,
with each advance, this process brings out more powerfully the latent
abilities and talents that are concealed in this mass of a hundred and
seventy mll1ion people.
I deem it needful, comrades, to communicate to you a letter I have
received from a Tatar writer:
The great October Revolution has given us writers of
the opressed and backward nations unlimited possibilities, including the
possibility of appearing in Russian literature with our works, which, it
is true, are as yet far from perfect. As you know, we writers of the
national minorities, whose works are printed in the Russian language,
already number tens and even hundreds. That is one side of the question
on the other hand, Soviet literature in Russian is read today not only
by the Russian masses, hut by the working people of all nationalities in
our Soviet Union; millions of the rising generation of all the
nationalities are being brought up on it. Thus, Soviet proletarian
literature in the Russian language is already ceasing to be the
exclusive literature of Russian speaking people and people of Russian
origin, and is gradually acquiring an international character even in
its form. This important historical process advances new and unexpected
problems and new demands.
It is highly regrettable that not all writers, critics
and editors understand this. That is why so called approved literary
opinion in the great centres continues to regard us as an
“ethnographical exhibit.” Not all publishing houses like to print us.
Some of them often make us feel, when taking our manuscripts, that we
are “overhead charges” or a “compulsory quota” for them, that they are
“deliberately allowing a rebate on the Party’s national policy.” These
“noble .gestures” quite justly off end our sense of international unity
and feeling of human dignity. The critics, on the appearance of the
work, will at best let fall a few “kind words” for the author and the
book, again not so much on their merits as out of “respect” for the
Leninist-Stalinist national policy of the Party. This does not educate
us either; on the contrary, on some less experienced comrades it has a
“demobilizing” and demoralizing effect. And then, after a single
edition, usually of five thousand copies, all of which are bought up by
lovers of .the exotic and the rare in the big cities, we are relegated
to the archives. This practice, apart from the bad moral and material
effects it has for us, blocks our way to the mass reader and leads to
inevitable national restriction. We very naturally would like to hear
about our achievements, if any, about our shortcomings and errors (of
which we have more than others), so as to, be able to avoid them in
future and we should like to become accessible to the mass reader.
Representatives of literature from all the Union republics and autonomous
regions will probably be ready to subscribe to this letter. The historians and
critics of our literature should pay heed to this letter and begin to work in
such a way as may impress upon people in our country that, though they may
belong to different tribes and speak different tongues, each and every one of
them is nevertheless a citizen of the first socialist fatherland in the world.
As for the rebuke levelled at our critics, we must admit it to be just. Our
criticism, especially the newspaper kind, which is most widely read by writers,
is untalented, scholastic and uninstructed in regard to current realities. The
worthlessness of mere book-and-newspaper knowledge is especially glaring in
these days, when real life is changing so quickly, when there is such an
abundance of varied activity. Without possessing or elaborating a single guiding
critico-philosophical idea, employing one and the same quotations from Marx,
Engels and Lenin, the critics hardly ever judge themes, characters and relations
between people by facts which are obtained from a direct observation of the
rushing current of life. There is much in our country and in our work which Marx
and Engels could not, of course, have foreseen. Critics tell the author: “That
is wrong, because our teachers have said so and so in this connection.” But they
are incapable of saying: “That is wrong, because the facts of reality contradict
the author’s statements.” Of all the borrowed ideas which critics use, they
have, apparently, quite forgotten that most valuable idea expressed by Engels:
“Our teaching is not dogma; it is a guide to action.” Criticism is not
sufficiently vital, flexible and alive, and finally the critic cannot teach the
author to write simply, vividly, economically, for he himself writes
long-windedly and obscurely, and, which is still worse, either perfunctorily or
with excessive fervour – the latter when he entertains personal sympathies for
the author or is associated with the interests of a clique that is afflicted
with “leaderism,” that contagious philistine disease.
“Leaderism” is a disease of the times, resulting from the lowered vitality of
philistinism, from the sense of its inevitable downfall in the combat between
capitalist and proletarian, and from fear of destruction – a fear which drives
the philistine to the side he has long been accustomed to regard as physically
the strongest, to the side of the employer, the exploiter of other people’s
labour, the plunderer of the world. Inwardly, “leaderism” is the fruit of
effete, impotent and impoverished individualism; outwardly, it takes the form of
such festering sores as, for instance, Ebert, Noske, Hitler and, similar heroes
of the capitalist world. Here, where we are creating a socialist world, such
sores are of course impossible. But we still have a few pustules left among us
as a heritage from philistinism – people who are incapable of appreciating – the
essential distinction between “leaderism” and leadership, although the
distinction is quite obvious: leadership, placing a high value on men’s energy,
points the way to the achievement of the best practical results with the minimum
expenditure of forces, while “leaderism” is the individualistic striving of the
philistine to overtop his comrade, which can be done easily enough given a
mechanical dexterity, an empty head and an empty heart.
Too often the place of critics is taken by semi-literate reviewers, who
merely bewilder authors and wound their feelings, but are incapable of teaching
them anything. They fall to notice attempts to resuscitate and restore to
currency certain ideas of “Narodnik” literature, and finally-which is most
important-they are not interested in the growth of literature in the various
regions, let alone the whole Soviet Union. It should he mentioned also that
critics do not deal with the public statements of authors in answer to the
question of “how they write,” although these statements call for critical
attention.
Self-criticism is necessary, comrades. We are working before the eyes of the
proletariat, which, as it grows more and more literate, is constantly raising
its demands on our art, and, incidentally, on our social behaviour.
Communism of ideas does not coincide with the nature of our actions and the
mutual relations existing among us – relations in which a very grave part is
played by philistine menta1ity, finding vent in envy, avidity, trivial gossip,
and mutual disparagement.
We have written and continue to write a good deal about philistinism, but no
embodiment of philistinism in a single person, in a single image, has been
given. It is just in a single person that it must be portrayed, and this must be
done as powerfully as in such universal types as Faust, Hamlet, etc.
I would remind you that the philistines are a numerous class of parasites
who, while producing nothing, endeavour to consume and devour as much as they
can-and they do devour it. Battening on the peasantry and the working class,
gravitating always toward the paws of the big bourgeoisie, and sometimes, by
force of pressure from without, passing over to the side of the proletariat,
bringing into its midst anarchism, egocentrism and all the bana1ity which is the
historical concomitant. of the philistine, banality of thought which feeds
exclusively on routine facts and not the inspirations of labour – philistinism,
in so far as it has thought and does think at all, has always propagated and
upheld the philosophy of individual growth along the line of least resistance,
has sought a more or less stable equilibrium between the two forces. The
philistine’s attitude towards the proletariat is most forcibly illustrated by
the fact that even the half beggarly peasant, the owner of a miserable plot of
land, despised the factory worker, who was destitute of all property except his
hands. That the proletariat had a head as well, the philistine noticed only when
the proletarians hands came into revolutionary action outside the factory.
Not all weeds are harmful or useless, for many of them yield healing toxins.
Philistinism produces only pernicious toxin. If the philistine did not feel
himself such an insignificant detail in the capitalist machine, he would not
strive so persistently and with such futility to prove his significance and the
freedom of his thoughts, his will, his right to existence, and he would not have
produced in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries so many
“superfluous people,” “contrite nobles,” people of the type that is “neither
peacock nor crow.”
In the Union of Soviets, philistinism has been displaced, driven out of its
lair, out of hundreds of provincial towns, has scattered everywhere and, as we
know, has penetrated even into Lenin’s Party, whence it is forcibly ejected
during every Party purge. Nevertheless, it remains and acts like a microbe;
causing shameful maladies.
The Party leadership of literature must be thoroughly purged of all
philistine influences. Party members active in literature must not only be the
teachers of ideas which will muster the energy of the proletariat in all
countries for the last battle for its freedom; the Party leadership must, in all
its conduct, show a morally authoritative force. This force must imbue literary
workers first and foremost with a consciousness of their collective
responsibility for all that happens in their midst. Soviet literature, with all
its diversity of talents, and the steadily growing number of new and gifted
writers, should be organized as an integral collective body, as a potent
instrument of socialist culture.
The Writers Union is not being created merely for the purpose of bodily
uniting all artists of the pen, but so that professional unification may enable
them to comprehend their corporate strength, to define with all possible clarity
their varied tendencies, creative activity, guiding principles, and harmoniously
to merge all aims in that unity which is guiding all the creative working
energies of the country.
The idea, of course, is not to restrict individual creation, but to furnish
it with the widest means of continued powerful development.
It should be realized that critical realism originated as the individual
creation of “superfluous people,” who, being incapable of the struggle for
existence, not finding a place in life, and more or less clearly realizing the
aimlessness of personal being, understood this aimlessness merely as the
senselessness of all phenomena in social life and in the whole historical
process.
Without in any way denying the broad, immense work of critical realism, and
while highly appreciating its formal achievements in the art of word painting,
we should understand that this realism is necessary to us only for throwing
light on the survivals of the past, for fighting them, and extirpating them.
But this form of realism did not and cannot serve to educate socialist
individuality, for in criticizing everything, it asserted nothing, or else, at
the worst, reverted to an assertion of what it had itself repudiated.
Socialist individuality, as exemplified by our heroes of labour, who
represent the flower of the working class, can develop only under conditions of
collective labour, which has set itself the supreme and wise aim of liberating
the workers of the whole world from the man-deforming power of capitalism.
Life, as asserted by socialist realism, is deeds, creativeness, the aim of
which is the uninterrupted development of the priceless individual faculties of
man, with a view to his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his
health and longevity, for the supreme joy of living on an earth which, in
conformity with the steady growth of his requirements, he wishes to mould
throughout into a beautiful dwelling place for mankind, united into a single
family.
* * *
Having said so much about the shortcomings of our literature, it is my duty
to note its merits and attainments. I have neither space nor time here to point
out the vital distinction between our literature and that of the West – that is
a lengthy and laborious task, and will partially be dealt with by Comrade Radek
in his report. I will only say what is quite clear to any dispassionate judge –
namely, that our literature has outstripped the West in novelty of theme, and
would remind you that many of our writers are appreciated in the west even more
highly than in their own country. In 1930, in an article published in the book,
On Literature, I spoke in no uncertain terms and with great joy about our
literary attainments. Four years of arduous work have elapsed since then. Does
this work warrant my giving a higher appraisal of our literature’s achievements
today? It is warranted by the high estimation in which many of our books are
held by our principal reader – the worker and collective farmer. You know these
books, therefore I will not name them. I will only say that we already have a
strong group of artists of the pen, a group that we can acknowledge as the
“leading” force in the development of literature.
This group unites the most talented Party writers with the non-Party writers,
and the latter are becoming “Sovietist” not in word but in deed, assimilating
ever more profoundly the common meaning for all humanity of the heroic work
which is being done by the Party and the workers and peasant’s Soviet
government. It should not be forgotten that it took Russian bourgeois literature
nearly a hundred years reckoning from the end of the eighteenth century-to take
up a commanding position in life and influence it in some measure. Soviet
revolutionary literature has achieved that influence in the space of fifteen
years.
The high standard demanded of literature, which is being rapidly remoulded by
life itself and by the cultural revolutionary work of Lenin’s Party, is due to
the high estimation in which the Party holds the importance of the literary art.
There has never been a state in the world where science and literature enjoyed
such comradely help, such care for the raising of professional proficiency among
the workers of art and science.
The proletarian state must educate thousands of first class “craftsmen of
culture,” “engineers of the soul.” This is necessary in order to restore to the
whole mass of the working people the right to develop their intelligence,
talents and faculties – a right of which they have been deprived everywhere else
in the world. This aim, which is a fully practicable one, imposes on us writers
the need of strict responsibility for our work and our social behaviour. This
places us not only in the position, traditional to realist literature, of
“judges of the world and men,” “critics of life,” but gives us the right to
participate directly in the construction of a new life, in the process of
“changing the world.” The possession of this right should impress every writer
with a sense of his duty and responsibility for all literature, for all the
aspects in it which should, not be there.
The Union of Soviet Writers unites 1,500 persons. In ratio to the total
population, we thus have one writer to every hundred thousand readers. This is
not much; the inhabitants of the Scandinavian peninsula at the beginning of this
century had one writer to every 230 readers. The population of the Union of
Socialist Republics is constant1y and almost dally demonstrating its giftedness,
but we should not think that we shall soon have 1,500 writers of genius. Let us
hope for fifty. Not to be deceived, let us say five writers of genius and
forty-five very talented ones. I think this figure will do for a start. In the
balance, we get people who are still insufficiently attentive to realities, who
organize their material poorly all work on it carelessly. To this balance should
be added the many hundreds of candidates to the union, and further, hundreds of
“beginners” in all the republics and regions. Hundreds of them are writing,
dozens are appearing in print. During 1933-34, in different towns from
Khabarovsk and Komsomolsk to Rostov and Stalingrad, Tashkent, Voronezh,
Kabardino-Balkaria, Tiflis, etc., about thirty symposiums and almanacs have
appeared, filled with the works of local beginners.
It is the duty of critics to judge this work. They still fall to notice it,
though it is high time they did so. This work, whatever its merits, is evidence
of a profound cultural process going on in the mass of the people. In reading
these books, you feel that the authors of the different verses, stories and
plays are worker correspondents and village correspondents. I believe that we
have at least ten thousand young people who aspire to work in literature.
Needless to say, the future Literary Institute will not be able to absorb a
tenth part of this host.
Now I will ask:
Why has the Congress of Writers been organized, and what aims will the future
union pursue? If it is only for the professional welfare of literary workers, it
was hardly worth making such a great fuss about. It seems to me that the union
should make its aim not only the professional interests of writers, but the
interests of literature in general. The union should in some degree assume
guidance over the army of beginners, should organize it, distribute its forces
to different tasks and teach these forces to work on material derived both from
the past and from the present.
Work is being done in our country to bring out a History of Factories and
Plants. It appears that it has been a very difficult job to get highly skilled
writers to help in this work. So far excel1ent work has been done only by the
poetess Shkapskaya and by Maria Levberg; the others not only do not touch the
raw material, but do not find time even to edit what has already been prepared.
We do not know the history of our past. It is proposed to publish a history
of the former ducal and border towns, from the time of their foundation down to
our own day, and a beginning has already been made. This work is to describe to
us, in sketches and narrative form, life in feudal Russia, the colonial policy
of the princes of Muscovy and the tsars, the development of commerce and
industry; it will present a picture of the exploitation of the peasantry by the
prince, the waywode, the merchant, the petty trader, the church, and conclude
the whole with the organization of the collective farms – the act of complete
and real emancipation of the peasantry from the “power of the earth,” from the
yoke of ownership.
We should know the past history of the federal republics. To these and many
other collective works hundreds of literary beginners can be attracted, and this
work will furnish them with the widest scope for self-education, for raising
their proficiency through collective work on raw material and through mutual
self-criticism.
We should know about everything that existed in the past – not in the way it
has already been narrated, but as this illuminated: by the teaching of Marx,
Lenin, Stalin, which is being realized by work in the factories and on the
farms, work which is organized and guided by a new force in history – by the
will and reason of the proletariat of the Union of Socialist Republics.
Such, in my view, is the task of the Writers Union. Our congress should be
not only a report to our readers, not only a parade of our endowments; it should
take upon itself the organization of literature, the training of young writers
on work of nation-wide significance, aimed at a full knowledge of our country’s
past and present.
Notes
1.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
2.
In Russian, these names are derived from words meaning pig, dog,
priest, fistula, etc. The adopted names are derived from the words new,
partisan, carpenter, etc. – Ed.
3.
From the word “singer.” – Ed.