Soviet Writers Congress 1934
Speech: delivered in August 1934.
Source: Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov and others, Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934, pp.73-182, Lawrence & Wishart, 1977;
Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2004;
Transcribed by: Andy Blunden for the Marxists Internet Archive.
COMRADES, Maxim Gorky in his report has painted in bold strokes a picture of the development of literature from the moment when mankind, not yet split up into classes, reflected its struggle for life through the medium of songs and fables down to the moment when bourgeois literature began to collapse. A history of the literature of class society is the history of how literature has become severed from the life of the masses. Needless to say, this great history contains periods of efflorescence and periods of decline, but taken as a whole, it shows us a literature severed from real life as led by the masses of the people.
My task is to survey the final period of this literature – a period in which all tendencies of parasitism and decay in bourgeois literature have obtruded themselves in most glaring relief, in which the material collapse and decay of capitalism is being accompanied by a parallel process – the decay of world capitalist literature.
It goes without saying that just as the decay of capitalism does not represent an absolutely continuous process, inasmuch as we are confronted, even in the period of capitalism’s decay, with examples of temporary progress in certain spheres and in certain domains, so the literature of decaying capitalism is still capable, in certain spheres and in the case, of certain nations, of producing great works of art.
What we have to do is to discern and reveal the general line of this progress of development. This general line of development should be determined, first and foremost, by examining the attitude taken, by literature towards those great events which have moulded the history of mankind during the last twenty years and which should have found their reflection in literature.
Present-day literature is a literature which began with the World War. There is, of course, no complete rupture between it and the literature of the preceding phase; it is a continuation of what has gone before. But here, as in all fields of social life, the World War drew a sharp boundary line.
Three great historical events of the last twenty years constitute those criteria by which we judge the content and the tendency of world literature. These three events are: the World War, the October Revolution and the fascists’ advent to power in a number of countries. To aesthetes, this may appear very strange. How, it may be asked, can literature be judged, not by aesthetic canons, but by the criteria of great historical events? But in such a gathering as this there is no need to prove that, since literature is a reflection of social life, the standard by which it should be gauged is precisely the attitude which it takes to such great facts of historical development as the war, the October Revolution, and fascism.
The World War of 1914 was an imperialist war. It was a war organized and waged in the interests of monopoly capital, in the interests of the ruling cliques of the bourgeoisie in the various belligerent countries. At the beginning of the war, this proposition was hailed as blasphemy by the pundits of literature. Today it is accepted as an axiom in all countries – the only difference being that the German bourgeoisie tries to represent the war of the German coalition as a war of defence, charging the former Allies with imperialism, whereas the bourgeoisie of the more western countries, who entered the war as allies, speak of an attack on France and Belgium by Germany and explain it by the imperialist policy of German capitalism. The imperialist bourgeoisie succeeded in mobilizing not only the bourgeois but also the petty-bourgeois masses for the war, succeeded in subjecting to their will considerable sections of the proletariat, in imbuing the minds of the great mass of the people with imperialist ideas, in forcing their “cannon fodder” to think in the way desired by their masters, who were sending the masses to the slaughter. And in just the same way, world literature deserted to the side of imperialism at the first gunshot, defending and glorifying war. Not one of the leading lights of bourgeois world literature spoke out against the war. Literature proved to be what Marx in his younger days said of ideology in general:
“Division of labour ... in the ruling class takes the form of a division into brain work and manual labour; among one and the same class it very often happens that those who rank as the thinkers of the class are active creators of its ideology, who make the production of the illusions of this class about itself their principal means of subsistence, while the other part takes a more passive, a more receptive attitude towards these thinkers and illusions, since, while being in reality active members of the class, they lack sufficient time to create illusions about themselves.”
World literature busied itself with the production of illusions about the World War, and the most obscure aesthete rendered no less valuable service to the war bosses than did the woman munition worker who was forced to stand at her machine and turn out shells. The only difference being that the woman worker who made shells was forced to do so by hunger, while the pundits of literature who sang anthems to the bursting of shells did so of their own free will.
At the moment when war broke out, all the world’s writers, who considered that they were above classes, above material interests, who considered themselves to be the representatives of pure art, proved to be on the side of imperialism, which was hurling millions of workers and peasants into the vortex of imperialist war. It would be hard to find a single well-known figure in pre-war bourgeois literature who, at the moment when the guns began to boom, did not sing anthems in praise of this war.
Even such a man as Anatole France, a profound sceptic, accustomed to seek for material causes even in the revolt of the angels, believed that the war had arisen without any economic causes, without the struggle of trusts and cartels, and “saluted this war.”
Of all the outstanding bourgeois writers in the belligerent countries, only the great humanist, Romain Rolland, did not bow down before the Moloch of imperialism, but, hiding his face from the horrors of war, endeavoured to heal its wounds by organizing aid for war prisoners.
Only two writers of world-wide reputation opposed war at this time: Maxim Gorky, who proved even at that time how right Lenin was when he called him a proletarian writer, and our old friend, Comrade Andersen Nexö. And this, of course, was no accident, for they were representatives of the working class.
Only when profound unrest had set in among the war-weary masses of the people did the first literary expression of protest against war make its appearance; and here again, as history has shown, this was no chance phenomenon. In 1916 Henri Barbusse published his book, Under Fire, which Lenin and all of us who were then with him in Switzerland immediately recognized as an expression of the first protest against war among the masses.
In this book Barbusse drew a pitiless picture of how the toiling people were being annihilated in the interests of bourgeois monopoly. He set out with ideas of the most commonplace bourgeois kind, but war opened his eyes. While truthfully depicting war, and thereby laying the foundations of anti-war literature, Barbusse was still in a state of complete coma; he could not yet wring from his stifled bosom a cry to rouse the masses for the war against war, he could not yet sound the call for socialist revolution, as the sole way out of those contradictions which have been created by capitalism and deepened by imperialism.
“How will they regard this slaughter, they who’ll live after us, to whom progress – which comes as sure as fate – will at last restore the poise of their conscience? How will they regard these exploits, which even we who perform them don’t know whether to compare with these of Plutarch’s and Corneille’s heroes, or with those of hooligans and apaches?
“‘And for all that, mind you,’ Bertrand went on, ‘there is one figure that has risen above the war and will blaze with the beauty and strength of his courage – ‘
“I listened, leaning on a stick and towards him, drinking in the voice that came in the twilight silence from the lips that so rarely spoke. He cried with a clear voice – ‘Liebknecht!’
“He stood up with his arms still crossed. His face, as profoundly serious as a statue’s, drooped upon his chest. But he emerged once again from his muteness to repeat: ‘The future, the future! The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and shameful.’”
But the name of Liebknecht, which cut through the gloom of war like a flash of lightning, was not yet a call to battle for Corporal Bertrand; it was a remote star, which would one day draw closer to lacerated, bloodstained humanity. For Corporal Bertrand went on to say:
“And yet this present – it had to be, it had to be! Shame on military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier’s calling, that changes men by turns into stupid victims or ignoble brutes. Yes, shame. That’s the true word, but it’s too true; it’s true in eternity, but it’s not yet true for us. It will be true ... when it is found written among the other truths that a purified mind will let us understand. We are still lost, still exiled far from that time. In our time of today, in these moments, this truth is hardly more than a fallacy, this sacred saying is only blasphemy!”
And brave Corporal Bertrand led his men into battle, where he himself was killed. And millions of others were killed too on all the battlefields of the war.
Meanwhile world literature sang songs in praise of war. Only in a tiny segment of world literature, on the extreme Left flank of the petty-bourgeois writers, did the complaining whine of the human being, crushed in the mill-stones of war, make itself heard. The first shoots of pacifist literature, protesting against war, were beginning to spring up.
The lightnings of the February Revolution presaging the thunderclaps of October, and the thunder of October itself, the spectacle of a great country rising up under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, under the banner of Lenin, for a fight to the death against the war monster, were unavailing to turn world literature against the war. Up to the very end of the war it remained in the service of imperialism, helping to recruit the last energies of the masses to serve the interests of the war Moloch.
And only when the war was over, leaving millions of corpses to rot upon the battlefields, leaving behind it tens of millions of cripples and orphans and a world reduced to smoking ruins – only then did bourgeois literature commence its pacifist propaganda. This pacifist propaganda was like an echo – repeating the slogans of President Wilson, like an echo repeating the Pacifist legends about the “war to end war” – legends created by the world bourgeoisie in order to keep back the rising masses of the people from a real struggle for socialism, which was the sole means of making war impossible in the future. This literature showed up the fun horror of the World War. Writers in all countries who had lived through this horror communicated it to the masses of the people. But even the best of these writers, who not only did not seek in their works to deceive the masses but who, like Zweig, wanted to warn them, were only able to show the world through tear-stained eyes, only able to show the fate of the human atoms, caught up in the vortex of the war events, as impotent and helpless. Not one of these writers was able to show the spirit of mutiny generated among these masses. And just as the French bourgeoisie tried to conceal in its archives the documents relating to the menacing events of May 1917, when the French army was swept by a wave of mutinies, just as the German bourgeoisie tried to wrap in a veil of legend the story of the uprising in the German fleet. so bourgeois and Left-bourgeois literature did not touch upon these scenes; which made the bourgeois world feel that it was standing on the edge of a precipice and which made the masses feel that they were not powerless atoms in the face of dread forces conjured up by the war, if only they chose to act unitedly, if only they told themselves. “If we are to die, let us die fighting for our freedom!” Even Dos Passos. the outstanding American revolutionary writer, lost as he was in contemplation of the bubbles of protest rising up in the souls of petty-bourgeois intellectuals disillusioned by the war, overlooked the hurricane which swept through the French army.
Remarque in his first book gave a masterly portrayal of the destruction of the peoples by the forces of war, but he was unable to portray the rising revolt against war; and his subsequent book, The Road Back, was a most striking expression not only of the impotence of bourgeois literature in the face of war (impotence, that is to say, if we speak of that part of bourgeois literature which did not consciously take the side of imperialist war), but also of unwillingness to fight against war. The hero of this book, returning home to a country in the first throes of a proletarian revolution, finds himself a place as school teacher in a secluded village with a view to disseminating ideas on the brotherhood of the peoples, on peaceful labour, and, turning his back on revolution, soothes himself with the thought that not everyone need be a pioneer.
“I've had a look at most things,” complains one of the returning soldiers, “professions, ideals, politics – but I don’t fit into this show. What does it amount to? Everywhere profiteering, suspicion, indifference, utter selfishness.”
And the central figure in the book, having found an escape from the emptiness of life in school teaching, stands before the children whom he has to teach, and says:
“Were I stand before you, one of the hundreds of thousands of bankrupt men in whom the war destroyed every belief and almost every strength. Here I stand before you, and see how much more alive, how much more rooted in life you are than I. Here I stand and must now be your teacher and guide. What should I teach you? Should I tell you that in twenty years you will he dried up and crippled, maimed in your freest impulses, all pressed mercilessly into the selfsame mould? Should I tell you that all learning, all culture, all science is nothing but hideous mockery, so long as mankind makes war in the name of god and humanity with gas, iron, explosive and fire?”
It does not even occur to Remarque’s hero that it is possible to teach how to destroy the social system which generates war. Civil war was sweeping across post-war Germany Remarque’s. hero learns about this civil war by chance; he happens to be present during some street fighting, in which his former commander kills his former comrade. He shudders with horror, but does not draw any revolutionary conclusions from this, nor does he do so when he sees the nationalist organizations training the bourgeois youth for the future war.
The conclusion with which Remarque’s book closes is to take refuge in a “quiet life.”
“One part of my life was given over to the service of destruction; it belonged to hate, to enmity, to. killing. But life remained in me ... I will work in myself and be ready; I will bestir my hands and my thoughts. I will not take myself very seriously, nor push on when sometimes I should like to be still. There are many things to be built and almost everything to repair; it ‘is enough that I work to dig out again what was buried during the years of shells and machine-guns. Not every one need he a pioneer; there is employment for feeble hands, lesser powers. It is there I mean to look for my place. Then the dead will be silenced and the past will not pursue me any more; it will assist me instead.”
Here we have the whole essence of petty-bourgeois pacifism. “Not everyone need be a pioneer.” Remarque does not want to he one. He hoped that when he found some quiet asylum where he could live by the illusion of useful labour, the dead would be silenced, the horrors of war would vanish from his brain, and perhaps the remembrance of them would teach him to value still more highly the quiet life and its quiet cares. And if this means shutting your eyes to the fact that new war machines are being made, that factories are being built which will create millions of new corpses, if this means shutting your eyes to the fact that tempests and hurricanes are brewing which will demolish all the quiet asylums of the petty-bourgeoisie – why then, Remarque will shut his eyes and stop up his ears. With ears stopped, with eyes shut, he went into hiding abroad, when victorious fascism hunted him out of his quiet asylum and burnt his books.
Jacob Wassermann, the eminent German bourgeois writer who died recently, admits in his survey of the post-war development of German literature that it has not created an epos of the war. This applies to bourgeois literature all over the world. It failed to create such an epos, not because the scale of this war surpassed the writers’ powers of imagination, their ability to grasp the great historical events which shook the entire world, but because, being bourgeois, present-day literature could not give the masses of the people the true answer as to the origin of the war, and could not tell them how to fight against it. The preaching of pacifism, which in the first post-war years took the abstract form of portrayal of the horrors of war, and which afterwards shifted its ground to propaganda of the United States of Europe (Marguerite, Jules Romains), was quickly shown in the light of actual events to be nothing but simple deception. Imperialism, routed by the victorious proletariat in tsarist Russia alone, has begun to seek an avenue of escape from its contradictions by means of a new war. Fresh preparations for war, feverish building of fresh armaments, have commenced throughout the world. Fascism, the most naked form of bourgeois dictatorship, has come to power in several countries; its purpose is to suppress the proletarian revolutionary movement and to prepare for war. The danger of a new war is becoming evident. And in addition to this, monopoly capitalism is creating a new literature to carry on war propaganda. Such propaganda is carried on by fascist art in Italy, by the new German literature of Jünger, Beumelburg and others, by Japanese fascist literature which is producing novels to extol not only the past war but the future one as well. Bourgeois pacifist literature is proving utterly impotent
H. G. Wells, who sang the glories of pacifism in his book, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, when faced with the new danger of war, proves unable, in his The Autocracy of Mr. Parham, to discover any other force capable of arresting the preparations for a new war crime than that of sensible capital. ists who understand the foolhardiness of war. But he soon loses faith in his sensible capitalists, and, when confronted with the bankruptcy of the Disarmament Conference, he writes his book, The Shadows of Things to Come, in which he presents humanity with the reassuring news that when the new war, after a duration of fifty years, will have utterly devastated the world, the aviators – this international association whose mission is to kill mankind – will be so horrified by the task imperialism has set them that they will create a world-wide republic which will put an end to war. In his book, Public Faces, Harold Nicholson, son of one of the organizers of the World War of 1914-18, saves humanity from war, after it has already broken out, with the aid of a romantic accident.
The literature of the bourgeoisie cannot give a portrayal of the imperialist war of 1914-18, cannot portray the preparations for a new war, cannot tell the masses how to fight against the danger of this new war, which will be a hundred times more destructive than the last. And this means that on a fundamental question, a question of life and death for hundreds of millions of people, this literature remains nothing but dust thrown in the eyes of the masses, hindering them from seeing the danger; it remains either the direct weapon of the enemies of mankind, or else the helpless wail of a world mourner. It need hardly be said that this literature cannot rise to any great heights from the artistic viewpoint. The attempt to extol the war, to reconcile mankind to ruin in the interests of finance capital, represents such a vile and hopeless task, that even if a Homer or a Shakespeare were to attempt it, they would prove impotent to do so. From the artistic viewpoint, literature which defends war represents nothing but a worthless daub, having about as much relation to art as a war-time poster has to the paintings of Raphael or Rubens. The pacifist literature of the bourgeoisie, prescribing a poultice against an earthquake, can bring forth only jejune productions; it cannot adequately reflect the menacing reality of life, cannot become a high artistic image, such as would, of itself, constitute a challenge.
Summing up the attitude taken by bourgeois literature to this great world event, which cost humanity ten million corpses, which undermined and’ loosened the very foundations of capitalism, we may say that bourgeois literature fulfilled its function as purveyor of cannon fodder. It did not become a mouthpiece of protest and a voice of struggle against world imperialism; it became a means of extolling war or of lulling the militant preparedness of the proletariat. Proletarian literature in the West is as yet only in its infancy, but it can already present a number of works whose appeal is precisely to the revolt of the masses against war. These works are not all of equal value, but we may say nevertheless that the beginning of proletarian anti-war literature dates from Johannes Becher’s novel, which proclaims the revolt against war, and the novel of Theodor Plivier, which portrays the uprising in the German fleet. A large number of young proletarian writers not only give, expression to the protest against war but attempt to reflect the anti-war struggle waged by the masses of the people.
Our Japanese comrades have won immortal glory for themselves. Despite the rabid oppression of imperialist censorship, despite the fact that the prisons of Japan are filled with fighters from the ranks of the proletariat, the young proletarian literature of Japan has nevertheless succeeded in portraying even the unrest which prevails in the Japanese army in Manchuria, has succeeded in producing many works in which this struggle finds its expression. It is endeavouring not only to depict the growing struggle of the masses but also to stimulate this struggle and to exercise an influence over it.
But we must not forget, comrades, that in this sphere there is an untouched field of work lying ahead of proletarian literature. The literature of the bourgeoisie fell on its knees before the Moloch of war. The literature of the proletariat should give the masses of the people a picture of the complex mechanism of murder and destruction which modern capitalism has created; it should reveal the wires by means of which monopoly capital governs the marionettes of diplomacy and drives the masses into wart The task confronting proletarian literature is to reflect the protest of the masses, their aspiration to struggle, and to show them that – way out from war which the Soviet proletariat found *hen it over threw the power of the bourgeoisie and established a proletarian republic.
Our friends among foreign writers often ask what they should do in the event of war. Some of them declare that they will at once join the ranks of the Red Army. We esteem – such feelings very highly, but we must also tell them: Don’t think about what you will do in time of war, but think first about what you, as artists, must do now, before war has yet broken out, in order to show the broadest masses of the people what fate imperialism has in store for them in the next war.
The first duty of proletarian literature is to portray the war preparations of imperialism, to portray the mighty peaceful labour of the Soviet Union, and to show the masses of the people why they are being driven into war and how to fight against it.
The World War gave birth to the October Revolution. The October Revolution had been prepared for by Bolshevism through its whole history. It was no accident that the victory of October fell to the Bolsheviks. Power is not won by the weak. This victory of theirs the Bolsheviks forged and hammered out in underground, illegal work, on the barricades, in the sufferings of prison and penal servitude, in the great school where Lenin was teacher.
This victory was a still greater historical fact than the Great War, for history has known many great wars and has seen empires shattered, but never before throughout all the history of mankind’s existence has war brought into power a class whose interests are opposed to imperialist war, the only class which is able to lay the foundations of a new society, capable of developing without wars of any kind.
History confronted the literature of the world bourgeoisie with the question: What is the October Revolution and what attitude should be taken towards it?
World literature passed the second test with the same results as the first. It showed itself to he the protector of the interests of capital, a means which served to prevent the masses from obtaining a true picture of what was taking place.
For bourgeois literature the October Revolution at first became an object of libel. Hundreds of books appeared which portrayed the first victory of the world proletariat as a mutiny of slaves engineered by scoundrels, books which represented the Russian revolution as the progeny of hell.
There is no need to dwell on this type of literature. Whether it took the form of the political lampoon or that of the detective novel, it did not produce a single work which can claim a place in the history of letters. These libellous productions merely gave vent to the frenzied malice of the world bourgeoisie on seeing the Russian proletariat break through the front of imperialist war. These pronouncements on the Russian revolution are best summed up in. the words of the French “writer,” Gabriel Doumergue, author of the book, On Lust, Filth and Blood, who cites the opinion of one of the White generals: “Before the revolution Russia was a chamber pot full of filth. The revolution smashed the pot, and only the filth remains.” This attitude of hatred towards Russia, as to a chamber pot full of filth, only shows what a crushing blow was dealt by the October Revolution to the world bourgeoisie, who had invested so many billions in this chamber pot. There is therefore nothing to be surprised at in this attitude towards the Russian revolution on the part of the bourgeoisie and its literature. This began to change from the moment when the defeats inflicted by the Red Army on the armies of intervention gave rise to waverings in the bourgeois camp. Then there arose, even among the pioneers of imperialism, a trend of opinion opposed to intervention. Hand in hand with this came the so-called “friendly” literature dealing with the Soviet Union.
The most typical example of such literature is Mr. Wells’s book, Russia in the Shadows. Wells was an opponent of intervention. But after a visit to Russia, he told the bourgeois World that his impression was “an impression of ... modern civilization completely shattered and overthrown by misgovernment, under-education. and finally six years of war-strain.” Wells described how “science and art were starving and the comforts and many of the decencies of life gone.”
But what were the thoughts of the famous author of the History of the World – from the times of primitive man down to the days of his own apotheosis – as he promenaded on the ruins of “Modern civilization”? This writer, who had laid claim not so much to the title of a great artist as to that of the brain of English literature, understood literally nothing. Of course, he did not believe that the Whites would return to power. “The Russian refugee’s in England are politically contemptible,” he wrote. But the Soviet government for him was “a government of amateurs.” “Never was there so amateurish a government since the early Moslim found themselves in control of Cairo, Damascus and Mesopotamia,” the learned Writer informs us. Indeed, how can they avoid being amateurs, these Russian Bolsheviks? They are Marxists, and “find themselves in control of Russia in complete contradiction ... to the theories of Karl Marx.” And who have they behind them, these Bolsheviks who have come to power despite Karl Marx? They have behind them some comparatively illiterate manual workers from the United States.” It stands to reason that respectable Mr. Wells was obliged to declare: “I disbelieve in their faith, I ridicule Marx, their prophet, but” – and here comes the unexpected! – Mr. Wells declares: “I understand and respect their spirit. They are – with all their faults, and they have abundant faults – the only possible backbone now to a renascent Russia.” The Russian Bolsheviks, the pupils of Marx – Mr. Wells, from the imposing heights of his portly History of the World, looks down and laughs at Marx – the Russian Bolsheviks have come to power in Russia, as he thinks, contrary to all the theories of Marx, but Mr. Wells none the less respects – the spirit of the Russian Bolsheviks. Just what it is that he respects, the reader is not told, but it is, apparently, the fact that, in contrast to the White generals, the Russian Bolsheviks – did not steal silver spoons and did not engineer Jewish pogroms. When Lenin, in a conversation with this “giant of bourgeois literature,” unfolded the program for the electrification of Russia, Mr. Wells merely shrugged his shoulders. The “brain of English bourgeois literature” was not only incapable of grasping that he would have to begin a new chapter in his History of the World, but he did not have even a premonition of those mighty works which were initiated by the October Revolution.
Another great writer of pre-war literature, a man with a great heart a humanist to the marrow of his bones – Romain. Rolland, who, in contrast to Mr. Wells, did not prostrate himself before the god of war, declared after Lenin’s death: “I never shared the views of Lenin and of Russian Bolshevism, and have never concealed this fact I am too much of an inveterate individualist and idealist to adhere to the Marxist world and to materialist fatalism.” But he paid homage to the greatness of Lenin, as the man who delivered a country from war. Over the grave of our teacher, Romain Rolland declared his conviction that “for long ages his ineffaceable trace will be seen.” And he uttered the words: “The cause of Lenin A the most vital cause of the world.”
What this trace was, the great humanist could not tell.
It goes without saying that the enemies – of the October Revolution could not create any artistic image of it in their literature. But the friends of the October Revolution in other countries likewise failed to do so. John Reed’s book, Ten Days that Shook the World, has made a place for itself in world literature as an historical document, but not as a reflection of the revolution in art – he did not, in fact, intend it to be such. The same may. he said of the books of Ransome, Rhys Williams, Price and – other foreign authors who got through to us during the war of intervention or immediately after it; these books are the first accounts, written by non-Communists, of the first socialist republic.
The period of the New Economic Policy began. Commercial and political relations were established between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world. Foreign writers came pouring into Russia. Fresh hundreds of books were published. However, they not only failed to produce a single work of art on this theme, but could not even assist public opinion in other countries to an understanding of what was really happening in Soviet Russia. The root of the trouble here has been well expressed by the Danish proletarian writer, Andersen Nexö, who firmly supported our cause both during the war and at the time of the October Revolution. Returning from Russia at the time when the country had entered upon the period of the New Economic Policy, Nexö wrote: “It is not easy to write about Russia now. Having been there a few years ago, I found it much easier then. True, at that, time it was still in a state of chaos ... but then it was clear in what direction the ship of state was heading; at that time a retreat had not yet been sounded, such as is now being spoken of in the West.”
The policy conceived by Lenin’s genius was to re-establish peasant farming, which could only be done at that time on the basis – within certain limits – of free trade, and on this foundation to set industry on its feet again. To world literature this seemed like a retreat to capitalism. That this policy was paving the way for a future offensive upon all capitalist elements, that it was laying the foundation for the building of socialism – these were things of which the leading representatives of world literature did not even dream. Those who directly voiced bourgeois tendencies in literature contemplated this supposed return to capitalism, some with spiteful malice, others with “benevolence,” for they were all of the opinion that it was impossible for any country to develop save on capitalist lines. They regarded the NEP as a confirmation of their bourgeois ideas.
Others, while admitting that this policy was correct in the main, considered none the less that it gave them grounds for losing any great interest in the Russian revolution. They had regarded with admiration the heroism displayed by the masses of the Russian people during the period of intervention. True, they did not much relish the coarse herring soup, but at least it was an unusual dish. The cutlets of the NEP seemed less interesting to them, for they were accustomed to such fare. The hero, who should have died in the third act, took to trade.
A new period began in the history of the Russian revolution, a period full of sublimity. The battle for the Five-Year Plan commenced. World literature revived its interest in the land of proletarian dictatorship. Once again hundreds of writers came streaming to the U.S.S.R. Once again hundreds of books appeared, dealing with the development of the Soviet Republic.
But this time the representatives of world literature were compelled to contrast developments in the U.S.S.R. with those in the capitalist countries. for the fight for the Five-Year Plan coincided with the greatest crisis which the capitalist world has ever experienced in all its history. And this contrast disturbed the minds of the more reflective representatives of world literature far more than did the events of October 1917.
Romain Rolland, who a few years ago declared that Bolshevik ideas were alien to him, now not only proclaims Russian thought to be in the vanguard of the world’s thinking, but sees in the Five-Year Plan the birth of a new society. “At long last both the actual course of events and fate. which Marx reduces to the iron laws of economic materialism, cleaving the world into two camps and deepening with every day the gulf between international capitalism and the other giant – the union of workers, of proletarians – have inevitably compelled me to step over this gulf and join the ranks of the U.S.S.R.”
The great French poet, André Gide, who had previously been fluctuating between a real conception of the world and the ivory tower of the recluse,, an aesthete who held that in the modern world Prometheus, descending from his rock, could only win the world’s ear by jesting – André Gide, confronted with capitalist reality, which was revealed to him in all its starkness in the French colonies, and confronted on the other hand with the heroic struggle which the Soviet proletariat is waging for the new order of society, declared, to the amazement of the capitalist world, that he sided with the U.S.S.R. and would be glad to, lay down his life for it.
The old sceptic, Bernard Shaw, whose brilliant ridicule has laid bare the ulcers of capitalism, has proclaimed with fervour that a new world is being created in the Soviet Union In. his speech which was transmitted to America over the radio. he poured scorn on the capitalist world, declaring that the only good thing which has come out of the criminal war is the U.S.S.R.
“This isn’t quite what you expected, is it? You did not send your young men to the slaughter in order to have them learn Karl Marx and repeat his slogan: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ However, this is just what happened. This amazing new state – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – is what you got in return for your Liberty Loan and for the blood shed by your youth. This is not what you intended to get, but evidently it is what the Lord decided to send you!”
In America writers who had already won a great name for themselves before the war, such as the novelist, Theodore Dreiser, portrayed the mighty social changes taking place in the U.S.S.R. Dreiser declared that:
“The Soviet form of government is likely to endure in Russia ... and not only that but spread to and markedly affect. politically, all other nations .... I have the feeling that our own country may eventually be sovietized – perhaps in my day ....
“And out of Russia, as out of no other country today, I feel, are destined to come great things, mentally as well as practically. At least, such is my faith. And with such a possibility in so troubled and needful a world as ours, is it not common sense to aid it to do the best it can?”
A socialist writer who has exposed American monopoly capital, Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle and of Jimmy Higgins, who preached the solidarity of the American with the Russian proletariat at the time when the war of intervention was at its height, wrote an excellent answer to a book, full of senile hatred, written by Karl Kautsky; when this pundit of the Second International sought to prove that the victory of Bolshevism was impossible, Sinclair compared him to the American provincial farmer who, on seeing a camel, exclaimed: “There ain’t no such beast!” “Soviet Russia is coming up, and the capitalist nations are going down,” wrote Sinclair. But at the same time he expresses the hope that the Western countries may win what the Soviets have won, even without a revolution.
“I am one of those old-fashioned persons who still have hope that in countries such as Britain and the United States where the people have been accustomed to self-government, the change from capitalism to socialism can be accomplished without the overthrow of the government.”
The Five-Year Plan and the crisis of the capitalist system brought bourgeois writers face to face with something which they did not understand; but this time it was something that was happening, not in our country, but in theirs. How did it come about that after the period of “prosperity” – such was the name given to the attempts of the capitalist world to drag itself out of the morass of post-war depression – like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky came the crisis, which is growing graver every day and is beginning to affect the pockets and the stomachs and the brains of the world’s bourgeois writers? And at the same time how was it that that country which, according to their common conviction, should have been throttled by the war of intervention – how was it that this country, after the period of the NEP, which was only a temporary retreat in preparation for a great attack, now launched a mighty offensive against all capitalist elements, launched it at the moment when the capitalist economic system was suffering crisis and collapse, and pressed impetuously forward, building the foundation of socialism?
And it must be said that the world crisis and the great achievements of the Five-Year Plan have exercised a more powerful. influence on world literature than all previous events; they have influenced it more than did the war, more than did the October Revolution.
The victories of the Five-Year Plan and the deepening of the international crisis of capitalism have had the effect of hastening on the process of disintegration in world literature. Every day we may observe how it is splitting up ever more markedly into three parts – the literature of decaying capitalism, inevitably evolving towards fascism, the new proletarian literature, and the literature of the wavering elements, some of whom are already coming to side with us, while others will go over to fascism unless they overcome their vacillating tendencies.
There is not a country in the world in which the most outstanding writers have not recognized the presence of what is to them an unheard-of fact – the profound crisis of capitalism and the tremendous growth of socialism. And this is causing the more courageous of these writers to think and to turn our way.
Even before this the world bourgeoisie had lost its monopoly in world literature, for proletarian literature was beginning to spring up in all countries. Now, however, a split is taking place in the very entrails of the bourgeois literary world. It is not now unknown writers, literary beginners, who are coming forward; the great writers of the bourgeois literary world are now coming over to our side.
Dreiser, a man who had already won a great name for himself in American literature prior to the war, who declared a few years ago that his whole life had not provided him with an, explanation, of what is going on in the world and that he was absolutely at sea, now not only comes out in courageous defence of the Soviet Union but calls upon America to follow the Soviet Union’s example.
Romain Rolland, France’s greatest writer, a man whose voice had never sounded the stern trumpet call to struggle, a man whom humanism divided from us, writes his Farewell to the Past, declares that the U.S.S.R. has shown the way to all mankind and calls upon humanity to take the path along which the Soviet Union is advancing.
But Dreiser is a realist, who had already exposed capitalism in his previous works, though he did not draw the full conclusions from this exposure, while Romain Rolland, even though he never was a fighter, has always been a great friend of mankind. In their cases, the process of evolution is easy to understand. But take André Gide, a writer who has shut himself up in his ivory tower, secluded from life; he declares that the development of capitalist countries on the one hand and that of the U.S.S.R. on the other have convinced him that the downfall of capitalism is both inevitable and desirable, and that it is his duty to support socialism and the Soviet Union with all his might.
The pundits of the world bourgeoisie raised a howl of horror. It is enough to read the article written in the Echo de Paris, the organ of the French general staff, by one of the members of the French Academy; the latter was unable or unwilling to regard André Gide’s going over to our side as anything but an act of intellectual snobbery on the part of this great poet, who had already been acknowledged by the bourgeoisie and tasted all the good things of life, and who, knowing that he would not have to live under a communist society, decided to take a sniff at this – from the bourgeois viewpoint – far from sweet-smelling flower. But of course anyone who carefully examines the evolution of André Gide will see that his withdrawal from life was in reality a protest against the conditions of life in the capitalist world. When, however, this life broke into his ivory tower and showed him that there is no refuge for the writer from the loathsomeness of capitalism, André Gide, who up to that time had sought for salvation from capitalism in solitude, made a step forward, a very difficult step for such an old, settled writer with such a settled view of the world, and courageously came over to our side.
The literature of the bourgeoisie is splitting up. Such a split, of course, can never take place without friction. A writer can never cut at one stroke all the threads that unite him with the past. And besides the writers who are openly going over. to fascism, besides the writers who are openly coming to socialism, to the civil struggle for socialism, we may also observe writers who are wavering, who are seeking an avenue of escape, who have lost their bearings, who see all the horrors of imperialism, who have a dim premonition of the great things that are happening in our life, but who cannot yet cut the navel-string that unites them with the imperialist world.
And it is very important that we should understand what it is that is hindering many writers – sincere writers – from crossing the Rubicon, from taking their stand on our side of the barricades, what it is that causes these agonizing processes. From the works of many writers one can see that these are profoundly honest ideological processes – processes which merit our fullest sympathy and which call for our friendly interference in order to render them more rapid.
There are several causes. Some writers cannot make up their minds to join the struggle. The French critic Fernandez, speaking of these deterrent factors in his article on André Gide, writes as follows: “We writers have not been fighters; we have described life, and it is difficult for us to take a stand which would oblige us to participate in the struggle.”
History gave its answer to this argument on May 10, 1933, when on the public squares of Berlin the German fascists burned not only the books of Gorky, of Stalin, and of German revolutionary writers such as Ludwig Renn and others, but. also those of all humanitarian writers, declaring: “He who is not for us is against us.” On May 10, 1933, all the world’s writers were told: There is no such thing as neutrality in that struggle which is now taking place on the arena of history.
The second argument put forward by these writers is one which merits the most careful appraisal, the most friendly examination, for this is the central argument. They pay homage to the Soviet Union. They say: “Yes, in your country mighty works are being wrought, in your country whole peoples are finding a written language for the first time in their history. In your country the slave of yesterday is rising to new life, in your country woman is free. We do not know what to call this process. But one thing is indisputable. There is a revolutionary force in your country, but we in the West do not know this force.”
This last obstacle standing in the way of writers who are coming to us from the other side has found its most striking expression in two plays by Bernard Shaw. You know that Shaw courageously opposed the war of intervention, that Shaw has always been a friend of the Soviet Union. Shaw has found splendid words to defend the Soviet Union, to extol its achievements, and these sympathies of Bernard Shaw have their roots in his profound sense of the downfall and collapse of capitalist culture.
The two plays by Bernard Shaw which I want to deal with were both written after his return from the U.S.S.R.
The first of them, entitled Too True to be Good, is one of the most biting satires that have been written on post-war capitalism. The son. of an English bourgeois atheist, having lost faith in science, joins the army as a chaplain and goes to the front. Returning from the war, where he has seen all the crimes of capitalism and lost his faith in all the teachings of religion and bourgeois morality, he becomes a gentleman-burglar. Bernard Shaw puts his central idea into the mouth of the old atheist and into that of his son, the chaplain and gentleman-burglar. The old man says:
“The universe of Isaac Newton, which has been an impregnable citadel of modern civilization for three hundred. years, has crumbled like the walls of Jericho before the criticism of Einstein. Newton’s universe was the stronghold of rational Determinism: the stars in their orbits obeyed immutably fixed laws; and when we turned from surveying their vastness to study the in finite littleness of the atoms, there too we found the electrons in their orbits obeying the same universal. laws.. Every moment of time dictated and determined the following moment, and was itself dictated and determined by the moment that came before it. Everything was calculable: everything happened because It must: the commandments were erased from the tables of the law; and In their place came the cosmic algebra: the equations of the mathematicians. Here was my faith: here I found my dogma of infallibility ... And now – now – what is left of it? The orbit of the electron obeys no law: it chooses one path and rejects another: it is as capricious as the planet Mercury, who wanders from his road to warm. his hands at the sun. All is caprice: the calculable world has become in. calculable. Purpose and Design, the pretexts for all the vilest superstitions, have risen from the dead to cast down the mighty from their seats and put paper crowns on presumptuous fools. Formerly, when differences with my wife, or business worries, tried me too hard, I sought consolation and reassurance in our natural history museums, where I could forget all common cares in wondering at the diversity of forms and colours in the birds and fishes and animals, all produced without the agency of any designer by the operation of Natural Selection. Today I dare not enter an aquarium, because I can see nothing in those grotesque monsters of the deep but the caricature of some freakish demon artists .... I have to rush. from the building lest I go mad, crying, like the man in your book, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma. As I stand here I am falling into that abyss, down, down, down. We are all failing into it; and our dizzy brains can utter nothing but madness. My wife has died cursing me. I do not know how to live without her: we were unhappy together for forty years. My son, whom I brought up to be an incorruptible godfearing atheist, has become a thief and a scoundrel; and I can say nothing to him but ‘Go, boy: perish in your villainy; for neither your father nor anyone else can now give you a good reason for being a man of honour.’
Bourgeois positivism, the theory of evolution, gave the representatives of capitalism confidence in. the laws of development. But bourgeois science is passing through a profound crisis. Only hypocrites or idiots can assert that the world economic crisis, which is shaking the edifice of capitalism, is conducive to a selection of the soundest elements of mankind! When, as a result of the crisis, tens of millions of people, in many of whose brains there lurked, most probably, a spark of genius, are dying of hunger, when such men as Kreuger end their lives as common criminals, and when the world’s most reliable. trusts are on the brink of bankruptcy, capitalism is – falling into the abyss and the honest upholder of capitalist ideas finds himself unable to tell his son whether one should be a man of honour or not. And the son, to whom the father can no longer prove the laws of evolution, is obliged to say:
“I have no bible, no creed: the war has shot both out of my hands. The war has been a fiery forcing house in which we have grown with a rush like flowers in a late spring following a terrible winter. And with what result? This: that we have outgrown our religion, outgrown our political system, outgrown our own strength of mind and character. The fatal word NOT has been miraculously inserted into all our creeds: in the desecrated temples where we knelt murmuring ‘I believe’ we stand with stiff knees and stiffer necks shouting ‘Up, all! The erect posture is the mark of the man: let lesser creatures kneel and crawl: we will not kneel and we do not believe.’ But what next? Is NO enough?”
He leaves the scene, and Bernard Shaw observes: “The fog has enveloped him; the gap with its grottoes is lost to sight; the ponderous stones are wisps of shifting white cloud; there is left only fog: impenetrable fog.”
The words spoken by the old man in this play hold good for Bernard Shaw: “For me, not to understand means to
In this “comedy” of his, Bernard Shaw presents the tragedy of the best elements in the capitalist world. Did not the great American writer Theodore Dreiser, before he adopted the viewpoint of the proletariat, cry out in the surrounding darkness: “I cannot find any meaning in what. I have seen, and go through life just as I came into this world – in dismay and horror.”
The words of the old man in Shaw’s comedy: “For me, not to understand means to perish,” were for him not an empty phrase, but a challenge. He has understood, and will live for the good of mankind. But these words have a decisive significance for the whole of present-day literature and, above all, for the writers who are wavering between a conviction in the victory of socialism and a failure to understand the forces which lead to this victory.
This comes out with tremendous force in Bernard Shaw’s next play, On the Rocks, which appeared in 1933. In this play he. attempts to portray the crisis of the democratic system, the’ fatuity, unbelief and hypocritical cant of a so-called “democratic” government. The Prime Minister, Sir Arthur Chavender, is so busy that he cannot find time for any action or for any thought. He is supposed to lead the House of Commons, though his own secretary asks him: “What’s the use of leading the House if it never goes anywhere?” Having presented a picture of the shiftlessness and imposture of the regime, which is ready to advertise one measure as salutary today, and the opposite tomorrow, a regime of numskulls, of ossified conceptions and hysterical decisions, Bernard Shaw puts into the mouth of the old trade unionist, Hipney, the following characterization of the working class:
“Old Dr. Marx – Karl Marx they call him now – my father knew him well – thought that when you'd explained the capitalist system to the working classes of Europe they'd unite and overthrow it. Fifty years after he founded his Red International the working classes of Europe rose up and shot one another down and blew one another to bits, and turned millions and millions of their infant children out to starve in, the snow or steal and beg in the sunshine, as if Dr. Marx had never been born. And they'd do it again tomorrow if they was set on to do it. Why, did you set them on? All they wanted was to be given their job, and fed and made comfortable according to their notion of comfort.”
The Prime Minister, Sir Arthur, answers:
“I don’t believe in the class war any more than you do ... I know that half the working class is slaving away to pile up riches only to he smoked out like a hive of bees and plundered of everything but a bare living by our class. But what is the other half doing? Living on the plunder at second hand. Plundering the plunderers .... The working class in hopelessly divided against itself.”
The working class is divided against itself. One part is living the life of slaves, enriching the slave-owners, while another part forces its plunderers to grant it certain concessions. Where does the way out lie? The old trade unionist, Hipney, who was once an admirer of democracy, now regards it as mobocracy. Democracy has proved false; it has become a weapon of deceit:
“Parliamentary leaders say one thing on Monday and just the opposite on Wednesday; and nobody notices any difference. They put down the people in Egypt, in Ireland, and in India with fire and sword, with floggings and hangings, burning the houses over their heads and bombing their little stores for the winter out of existence; and at the next election they’d be sent back to Parliament by working class constituencies as if they were plaster saints ... It wasn’t that the poor silly sheep did it on purpose. They didn’t notice: they didn’t remember: they couldn’t understand: they were taken in by any nonsense they heard at the meetings or read in the morning paper ... Now I’m for any Napoleon or Mussolini or Lenin or Chavender that has the stuff in him to take both the people and the spoilers and oppressors by the scruffs of their silly necks and just sling them into the way they should go with as many kicks as may be needful to make a thorough job of it ... Better one dictator standing up responsible before the world for the good and evil he does than a dirty little dictator in every street responsible to nobody, to turn you out of your house if you don’t pay him for the right to exist on the earth or to fire you out of your job if you stand up to him as a man and an equal. You can’t frighten me with a word like dictator. Me and my like has been dictated to all our lives by swine that have nothing but a snout for money.”
We have purposely quoted these lengthy tirades, since the question here is not whether Bernard Shaw is giving us a picture of the rise of social-fascism, i.e., a picture of how the representatives of so-called democratic socialism desert to the camp of fascism, or whether he is voicing his own views. The question here is of the submerged rock upon which the ship of every artist is wrecked, if he has not grasped the fact that the victory of the proletariat in the U.S.S.R. is not only a national phenomenon, resulting from the peculiarities of Russia’s historical development, but that it is the first victory of the international proletariat, which will be followed by others, the first victory of the socialist world revolution.
When Bernard Shaw, and many others with him, express their admiration at the victories of the Soviet Union, and portray its great achievements, when they sincerely declare themselves friends of the Soviet Union, we are grateful to them, and we regard their actions as proof of the fact that the truth about the great socialist revolution, accomplished by the Soviet proletariat, is piercing its way through all the fog of bourgeois lies. Their actions are of enormous political significance, and that not only as a symptom of the state of feeling among the “intermediate strata” in capitalist countries. Their actions are of enormous positive significance because they are hindering world imperialism in its efforts to engineer a new and supreme crime – namely, an attack upon the U.S.S.R., which would be the signal for the outbreak of a new world war. However, we are not only citizens of. the Soviet Union, not only patriots of our socialist-fatherland. We are also members of the international working class, and we must tell our friends, in the words of Lenin, that the Russian proletariat is not a chosen people, to whom it was destined that it should enter the promised land, but the pioneer of the international proletariat – a pioneer which has conquered earlier than the others as a result of the peculiarities of Russia’s historical development. We must say this, not from modesty, but in the interests of the truth, in the interests of the development of these same friends of ours. We must say this in order that we may help them to accomplish the task that confronts them in their own countries.
When they describe the collapse of Social-Democracy, when they describe the betrayal of the working class by the leaders of the Second International, when they describe the helplessness of the European and American proletariat in face of this betrayal, in face of the fraud of bourgeois democracy, we, while applauding the profoundly lifelike character of these descriptions, must say to their authors: This duped proletariat, split by the policy of the monopolist bourgeoisie into an exploited mass, living the life of slaves, and a small segment consisting of the labour aristocracy and the labour bureaucracy – this proletariat, which has been betrayed by the Second International, which has not yet overcome. the split in its ranks, which has suffered cruel defeats – this proletariat is none the less the sole force capable of freeing the world from the dictatorship of swine, to employ old Hipney’s expression. No one but this proletariat can save mankind, on the brink of the precipice, from tumbling into the abyss. It alone is able to lead humanity onward. It is harder for it to rise than it was for the Russian proletariat. The Russian proletariat came to power in a country where capitalism was less highly developed than in other countries, where the proletariat was numerically weaker than in other countries, but where it was better prepared for revolution.
Power did not drop into its lap from the skies. During the course of tens of years it prepared itself for this struggle for power. It underwent slavish exploitation. It had to endure the savage, arbitrary regime of a semi-Asiatic despotism. It became steeled in battles against these evils. It created a party which schooled the broadest masses of the working class in the ideas of the revolutionary struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, a party which taught the working class to become the leader of all the oppressed masses of the people. The proletariat of the West, corrupted by titbits from the table of the bourgeoisie, corrupted, with the aid of the Second International, by the democratic system of fraud, split by the criminal policy of Social-Democracy, while overcoming supreme difficulties in its hard-fought battles, is creating for itself a party able to lead it to victory, is developing in itself the ability to become the leader of the masses.
And when writers of Western countries who are sympathetic towards the U.S.S.R., full of contempt for decaying capitalism, convinced of its inevitable doom, look down patronizingly upon the young Communist Parties of the West, and see only their mistakes, without being able to discern the paths of development in these mistakes, we would remind them that at one time it was not only the bourgeoisie who ridiculed Lenin’s idea of converting the World War into civil war, who derided Lenin’s idea of overthrowing the power of the tsars and bourgeoisie by means of a workers’ and peasants’ revolution. A few days prior to the October Revolution, the newspaper Rech, organ of the educated Russian liberal bourgeoisie, wrote that, were it not for the costliness of such an experiment, one should welcome the advent to power of the Bolsheviks, since this experiment would quickly come to grief and thus purify Russia. All the so-called radical and “socialist” intelligentsia thought the same. Plekhanov, a highly educated man, leader of the, Russian Mensheviks, called Lenin’s strategic plan a “dream-farce.” And, as we have shown above, the “salt of the earth,” all the world’s intellectuals who filled the ranks of world literature, regarded the October Revolution, at best, as a result of war-time disorder, of the war fever, and not as the beginning of a new epoch in the history of mankind.
Failure to grasp the role of the western proletariat as a decisive revolutionary force is reminiscent of this attitude of the Russian radical intelligentsia towards the Revolution of October 1917 – an attitude which history has now rendered ridiculous.
We Soviet writers must tell our wavering friends beyond our borders: The October Revolution was the first proletarian revolution in the world. If the proletarian-revolution in Russia was victorious sooner than elsewhere, this is not because socialism is a form of society possible only in the U.S.S.R., but because in Russia, as a result of the peculiarities of historical development, the iron Leninist Party was created earlier – a party which was able to train the cadres of the revolution, able to make the proletariat the leader of the peasant masses and of the poor in the towns. But the sources of the October Revolution are world-wide; it is the decay of monopoly capitalism and its contradictions. which generated the October. Revolution, and which will lead the proletariat to world victory.
And those who have not grasped the international character of the October Revolution, those who have not grasped that we represent not the end but the beginning of world revolution, those who have not grasped that the Communist movement in the West, however weak it may still be in some countries, is the beginning of the same revolution as that which conquered in October 1917 – those who have not grasped these facts will voluntarily or involuntarily fall victims to fascism. For those who do not understand that there is a force in their countries that is able to seize power, able to put an end to capitalist ruin and to heal all the ulcers of capitalism – those who do not understand this, and who will not help these forces in the struggle for socialism, will take their stand in the final analysis on the other side of the barricades.
This lack of faith in the powers of the proletariat has already driven Upton Sinclair, an artist who has tried to depict the struggle of the American working class, who for one quarter of a century exposed capitalism, showed up the fraud of bourgeois democracy, into the ranks of that. same Democratic Party which he has so often unmasked and branded as a party of those who exploit the working class. And when Upton Sinclair in his book, The Way Out, appeals to the capitalists and recommends them, as a means of saving America from revolution, to sell their property to society at market price, when he advises them to withdraw peacefully and with dignity from the arena of the class struggle and puts forward his candidature for the governorship of California in order to carry out the reform of America in a democratic manner, and when Bernard Shaw extols the creative powers of Mussolini and Hitler, we are obliged to repeat to the whole world, paraphrasing the words of the old man in Shaw’s play:, “For you, not to understand means to perish – to perish in the morass of fascism.”
We Soviet people must tell our friends, the revolutionary writers of the West, that we attach a high value to every fervent word spoken in support of the Soviet Union, to all support that they give us. But we must tell these Writers, in the words of Karl Liebknecht: “The enemy is in your own country.” The forces which will crush this enemy are there in your own country – developing and alive. The writer who wants to help socialism, which is being built in our country, the writer who wants to fight against fascism, the writer who wants to fight against the war danger must find his way to these forces, must find his way to the proletariat, however small a minority the revolutionary proletariat may constitute as yet in his own country. The victorious Soviet Bolsheviks also started with a minority in the working class ....
We, the Congress of Soviet Writers, stretch out the hand of brotherhood to all writers who are on the Way to us, however far from us they may be as yet, if only we see in them the will and the desire to help the working class in its struggle, to help the Soviet Union. We tell them: The best help you can render us is to stand shoulder to shoulder with the working class in your own countries, with its revolutionary minority, ready to struggle against all those dangers which have banished the sleep from your eyes, which have dispelled your aesthetic quiet. Writers who do not grasp this fact will inevitably land up in the camp of fascism, and it is therefore of supreme importance that we and you should jointly consider the question: What does fascism mean for literature? Our revolutionary writers have a great task before them – that of studying, fully and specifically, the fate of literature under the rule of fascism. Occupied as we are with the political struggle first and foremost, we have not devoted enough time and attention to this task; nevertheless, the history of the fate of literature under the fascist sceptre constitutes the very gravest warning, the “writing on the wall” for all writers.
Writers should ask themselves – and should answer the question – what does fascism mean for culture, for literature? I will not here recount the history of the attitude taken by Italian and German fascism to the fundamental problems of science, or demonstrate the, mystical and irrational aspect, the medieval aspect of fascism. I will deal only with the question of its attitude to literature – You will remember how all world literature set up a howl when it learned of the views on literature held by the Marxists, by the Bolsheviks, who assert that literature is a social weapon, that it expresses the struggle of classes. To the aesthetes, to the representatives of world literature, this seemed a monstrous invention of the Bolsheviks. Our conception of writers who ought to serve the cause of the oppressed classes in their struggle seemed to these aesthetes to he a blasphemous abasement of literature from the intellectual heights of art to the post of handmaiden of history. The fascists, as represented by their theoreticians and leaders of art, say: “There can be no literature standing aloof from the struggle. Either you go with us or against us. If you side with us, then write from the viewpoint of our philosophy; and if you do not side with us, then your place is in the concentration camp.” Göbbels has said this hundreds of times. Rosenherg has proclaimed this hundreds of times.
There is a very talented German writer, Hans Fallada, whose book, Little Man, What Now?, is well-known in our country. Hans Fallada splendidly portrays the sufferings of the masses in bourgeois society, shows how they are duped by the representatives of capitalism, by the representatives of bourgeois democracy. He has depicted the Social-Democrats, the fascists.. But many have found it difficult to determine whether he is for the fascists or against them. The chief figure in his book is an honest little office worker whom the crisis has thrown out on the street, a man who can only just keep body – and soul – together and has no strength left to fight.
Hans Fallada has now written a new novel, Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frisst. The hero of this novel is a “fallen” petty bourgeois who has landed in jail and served a sentence of five years. He tries to get on his feet again, to live like an honest citizen, but the bureaucratic bourgeois machine of capitalism drags him back to prison. And when this hero finally lands up once again in jail, he feels as though he had returned to his own mother. Now he has a sentence of fifteen years before him, but there is no more need for him to struggle ...
This is a very talented book, but a hopeless one. It appeared when Hitler had already come to power. In his foreword Hans Fallada writes that the picture he has drawn refers to the past, that the fascists will create new conditions. He decided in this way to save both the book and himself, pretending that he was speaking only of the past.
But how did the fascists answer this? The Berlin Börsenzeitung published a fulminating article of the following content:
“We know that Hans Fallada did not write this book against us. Let him just try! But whom did he defend in this book? He wrote it in defence of failures, of those whom history has ground to powder. He awakens pity for those who must be removed from life in order to leave room for Storm Troopers with muscles and revolvers in their hands.”
Fascism, which betrays the interests of the petty bourgeoisie, knows that when people read this book, showing as it does how capitalism has. ground the petty bourgeoisie to powder under the democratic system, they will say: “Under the fascists it’s not better but worse.” And the fascists. demand of the writer: “You draw us a picture showing how under fascism everybody is advancing, developing and prospering. Don’t you dare to awaken pity for those whom capitalism grinds to powder.”
We do not know what the little man, Hans Fallada, will say, what his fate will be now, where he will hide. Fascism tells him: “There are no neutral zones. Write as we demand, or you will be destroyed.” The passages quoted above from Bernard Shaw’s two plays are no exception. They represent only. a more striking expression of the fact that criticism of capitalist civilization, criticism of bourgeois democracy, may become at one and the same time the first step in the artist’s evolution towards revolutionary socialism and also the first step in his evolution towards fascism. It is sufficient to mention such literary productions as Reger’s Union der festen Hand, the novels of von Salomon – to choose some examples from German literature – or to mention those works of French literature which expose parliamentary corruption, in order to see that the point at issue is the dilemma of the writer between the revolutionary solution of the crisis of capitalism and the fascist pseudo-solution of this crisis. It is sufficient to mention that Fallada’s books have given rise to a regular discussion as to whether they are revolutionary or fascist.
This happened at a time when fascism had already been ruling in Italy for nearly ten years, at a time when the fascist and semi-fascist governments in several countries had already disclosed the true face of fascism for all who wished to see it. And in all these novels the bridge leading to fascism was failure to appraise the role of the proletariat, reluctance to observe the beginning of its revolutionary struggle. Criticism of the results of capitalist culture has served in the past and, in the case of many petty-bourgeois writers, is still serving today as the springboard to fascism. This may happen in two ways: either the writer cherishes the illusion that fascism will effect the purification of modern civilization, that it represents a cruel medicine but still a medicine; or he may hold that there is no power which can stop the victory of fascism. Highly characteristic in this respect is the answer given by the well-known French writer, Céline, author of the much discussed novel, Journey to the End of the Night.
Céline has painted a frightful picture, not only of present-day France, but of the whole contemporary world. He looked into the abyss of war. He looked into the cesspool of colonial politics. He turned his gaze upon American “prosperity.” He penned a dismal description of the French petty bourgeoisie.
In the whole world the only human character whom he could find was a prostitute. And after all this, in answer to a questionnaire from a magazine regarding the danger of fascism, he said:
“Dictatorship? Why not! It would be good to have a look at.... Defence against fascism? You are jesting, mademoiselle! You were not in the war – this can be felt, you know, from such questions.. When a military man takes command, mademoiselle, resistance is impossible. One does not resist a dinosaur, mademoiselle. It croaks of itself, and we together with it, in its belly, mademoiselle, in its belly.”
To one who entertains such an opinion of the strength of fascism and the inevitability of its victory, struggle against it is impossible, submission unavoidable. Then the question of whether the writer, in the belly of victorious fascism, will earn his bread by blacking boots, or whether he will adapt himself to it and begin to seek. a justification for the inevitable, i.e., to serve it, is a question of secondary importance.
January 30, 1933 – the date when the German fascists came to power – and the March days of 1933, when German and world literature was consigned to the bonfire on the square before the University of Berlin – this was the last test which the world set bourgeois literature, this was the last challenge issued to it by history.
The World War descended upon the head of humanity like a rain of fire. Bourgeois literature continued to serve the bourgeoisie. October 1917 saw how the earth was opening, and the capitalist world began to quake beneath. the feet of world literature, but it, “the salt of the earth,” not only failed to point the way to mankind, but could not even grasp what was taking place. It needed the putrefaction of post-war capitalism, it needed the harsh lessons of the world crisis, before a part of present-day literature began to use its brains and to conceive that something had finally collapsed into the past, that something new had arisen.
The great majority of writers remained essentially on the side of the bourgeoisie, screening themselves behind empty phrases to the effect that “politics did not concern them.” Fascism, as represented by the German Nazis with their bonfires of books, has now planted its foot upon the breast of literature. Hundreds, if not thousands, of writers have been obliged to flee from Germany as from an earthquake, leaving their books for the hangman to destroy. They. are pursued by the frenzied cries of the high priests of German fascism:
“Back to earth and blood! Away from the culture of man kind! It does not exist at all, just as world history does not exist – there is only the history of separate nations. Its contents are the struggle of man against man, of god against god, of character against character.” (From a speech by Rosenherg.)
“The personality of the artist.” Rosenherg has declared, “should develop freely, without restraint. One thing, however, we demand – acknowledgment of our creed. Only he who accepts this is worthy to enter the struggle. No idylls! Firmness and iron staunchness! ... Artists and writers are those whom we recognize as such, they are those whom we call upon for this purpose.”
The charge which Göbbels has levelled at art is that “it did not see the people, did not see the community, did not feel any bond with it; it has lived alongside of the epoch and behind the people; it could not therefore reflect the spiritual experiences of this epoch and the problems that agitate, it, and only expressed surprise when time passed it by without paying attention ‘to literary researches and experiments. When complaints were raised – that the people was not connected with art, this was said by those same persons who had severed the connection between art and the people.” And, declaring that “the revolution is not stopping anywhere, it is winning over the people and society, it is setting its stamp upon economy, politics and private life – whereby he christened fascist counter-revolution with the name of revolution – Göbbels uttered the following threat to literature: “It would be naive to suppose that the revolution will spare art, that the latter will be able to lead its form of existence as a sleeping beauty somewhere alongside of the epoch or in its backyards. In this condition of sleep, art proclaims: ‘Art stands above parties, it is international; the tasks of art are higher than those of politics. We artists are outside politics, politics are detrimental to the character.”
Göbbels declares that this might have been permissible in the past, when politics reduced themselves to parliamentary squabbles, but when fascism came to power, – at that moment when politics become a national drama in which whole worlds tumbled to the ground, the artist cannot say: “This does not concern me.” It concerns him very much indeed. And if he lets slip the moment at which his art should take a definite stand in regard to the new principles, then he should not be surprised if life goes roaring past him.” Göbbels proclaims that “art should hold to definite standards in regard to morals, politics and views of life – standards which are set up once and for all.”
When the proletarian revolution reminded artists of the elementary truth that they are members of society, that their work is therefore rooted in society and, consciously or unconsciously, expresses the aspirations of some class or other, when the proletarian revolution called upon artists to side consciously with the proletariat, the overwhelming majority of them answered: “Leave us alone in peace.” They answered by referring to the non-political character of the artist, and regarded the proletarian revolution as a horde of vandals, breaking into the temple of art in order to destroy it. Now it is counter-revolution which, taking its cue from revolution, turns to art and says: “This is a fight to the death, and In the battle there can be no neutrals – either for us or against us.” Burning books on the squares of Berlin, fascism says to world literature: “Make your choice.”
And we see how throughout the whole world, the fixing of boundaries is beginning. We see how even in England, America, France, fascist tendencies are springing up in literature, how artists are rehearsing for the role of conscious instruments of the dictatorship of monopoly capital. The fact that the English literary magazine, The Criterion, has begun to speak in fascist tones, the fascist declarations of the English poet T.S. Eliot, the fact that fascist tendencies in American literature are beginning to crystallize, the statement of a well-known American critic to the effect that “if we are to speak of parties, then fascism, of course, can offer more than communism,” and that “of all the many forms of emotional and intellectual influence, patriotism is the sole means capable of restoring to the artist and critic their contact with the reading public and with their environment,” the rise of a number of fascist organs among the French literary youth – all these things are “signs of the time.” Even in those countries where fascism has not conquered, that No-Man’s-Land upon which the allegedly non-political writer can maintain himself is growing more contracted. The literary ‘world is forced to. choose between the revolution of the proletariat and the preventive counter-revolution of monopoly capital.
It need hardly he said that before making this choice one should first be clear as to what end fascism is serving and whom the artist wishes to serve.. Fascism is the power of the magnates of iron, of coal, of the exchange, who subject the proletariat to their rule with fire and sword, who are preparing for a new world war and who rely for support upon the duped masses of the petty bourgeoisie. However much fascism may seek to camouflage itself with “Left” tendencies, with social demagogy, it is none the less the rule of the bandits of monopoly capitalism.
Nay, more: even if a dictatorial bourgeois government were formed with the aim of preventing the triumph of fascism – and the semi-fascist – wing of the French radicals is playing with this idea, as are also the representatives of the “brain trust” in America – this represents nothing but deception and self-deceit. Dictatorial power cannot exist if it is not based on a powerful class force. If it hinds the working class hand and foot, it thereby unbinds the hands of the monopoly bourgeoisie. And the revolutionary French writer, Jean-Richard Bloch, is a hundred times right when he says in his answer to a newspaper questionnaire:
“In democratic countries the way is opened for fascism by the ‘law granting plenary powers.’ The passing of such laws is best secured by Left governments, which find them necessary. When, however, the usual swing of the see-saw of parliamentary politics brings a party of social reaction into power, these laws are there, ready for such a party to make use of them.”
There are no middle positions, there is no “Left” fascism, having the alleged aim of defending democracy and the masses. There is either proletarian revolution or fascism. In making his choice, the writer will he deciding not only the question of his place in the coming struggle, but also that of the fate of literature, the fate of art.
Meanwhile German fascism is busily destroying that art upon which Germany used to plume herself before the entire world. It advances, in the capacity of its writers, individuals devoid of talent, who can only utter cries of “land, blood, the nation” – persons of the type of Johst and Beumelburg. It might perhaps plead in its defence that it has only been in power for a year and a half. But it is sufficient to examine the development of Italian literature during the ten years of fascism’s existence in order to see that fascism mean’s death to literature and art. The older Italian writers who have lived on under fascism, such as D’Annunzio, Pirandello, Papini, are almost silent, or else publish only weak productions, which show that the authors have outlived their day. There is nothing to be surprised at in this. What coherence can there be in Pirandello, the meaning of whose work the Italian critic Adriano Tilgher has correctly defined as “The tragedy of impotence and longing for initiative life.” All Pirandello’s work has frankly reflected the downfall of the bourgeoisie., his masks and marionettes, by which he tries to break up reality into a number of mutually mocking ‘contradictions, are obliged to be silent when confronted with fascism, which claims to hold. in its hands the solution to all world problems.
An artist like Corrado Alvaro, who still possesses some significance from the point of view of art, stands aloof from the realities of Italian life. The proscenium of the Italian literary stage is occupied by the producers of light reading matter, such as D'Ambra, Brocchi, Varaldo, or by dealers in pornography, like Verona, Pitigrilli, Mura – such is the opinion of Rank, the German historian of post-war Italian literature.
This fact is admitted by the fascists themselves, Ercole Rivalta writes as follows in the Giornale d’Italia:
“Literature depicts Italian youth as abandoned to vicious instincts, devoid of the least gleam of spirituality, a slave to animal lusts. And this represents, not literary fantasy, but profound reality, embodied in people who, having been born in the first decade of the century and not having been through all the horrors of war, have not accomplished great deeds, have not fought for the fascist revolution, but are the incarnation of chaotic triviality. We must stop the mouths of these homunculi without more ado.”
Just imagine us telling one of our Y.C.L.ers that he is not accomplishing great deeds, that he is a worthless “homunculus” because, having been born too late, he did not take part in the October Revolution.
We know that our Y.C.L.ers are the pride of our country, that all the great construction works are Y.C.L. works. Anyone who has been on our great construction jobs will have seen that Y.C.L.ers are working everywhere – from workers at the bench to engineers. Our Y.C.L. is accomplishing great deeds. But of the fascist youth who have grown up after the fascists came to power, the Giornale d’Italia writes that they are homunculi who have not accomplished great deeds.
Gherardo Casini, editor of Lavoro Fascista, writes as follows in Critica Fascista:
“The, main historical and political question is: How in a fervid, triumphant period of revolution, can a literature exist which obstinately tries to shut itself up within the most limited bounds, repudiating all renovation? We must breathe into literature a stream of new life, make it take part in, the building of new history.”
Telesio Interlandi, editor of Tevere, wails:
“We need a writer who will see our villages gay, our peasants joyful, our workers calm, trustful and reconciled to the fatherland, who will see how our roads, radiating out from Rome, stretch to all corners of the world, who will hear the metallic voice of Mussolini filling the squares.”
And the unfortunate fascist writers battle with the task assigned them: they depict Italy as she is not.
In his Fascist Stories, Dario Lischi describes a brave fascist officer who – though somewhat reminiscent of Falstaff – is none the less a doer of good deeds, while the villain. of the piece, a Bolshevik, is portrayed as a criminal.
Orsini Ratto tells in his Love Fourfold how the hero, having tried a number of women, ultimately finds satisfaction in fascism, acquires wealth, travels around the world, is ruined only to get rich again and founds a philanthropical institute in the fascist province of Tripoli.
The hero of a third fascist novelist, Donato, had already fallen into complete despair and would most probably have perished to no purpose, had not the spectacle of a fascist demonstration reawakened his love of life.
Albatrelli in his book Conquistadors describes how a peasant movement was broken up by a number of devout fascists.
Finally, Mario Carli, in the novel An Italian of the Times of Mussolini – a book which was awarded the Labia Prize and which was published under the auspices of Mussolini himself – has tried to give a picture of the realization of the fascist program. And what is the gist of it? An old aristocrat, representing the old Italy, does not want to develop agriculture by modern methods. The son – a fascist, close to Mussolini – tries to persuade his father, and secures the aid of an old uncle, who has returned to Italy after acquiring a fortune in America. But it is all to no purpose; and when the wicked old aristocrat refuses, even with the financial aid of his American brother, to develop Italian agriculture and thus free Italy from dependence upon foreign agriculture, Mussolini decrees that the parasitic aristocrat be deprived of his estates and that they be placed under state control, and hands over the administration of the estates to the land-owner’s son – the fascist.
For, as Carli writes, “rights of property exist and will be preserved so long as the owner does not violate those obligations which are inalienable from them; but when he forgets the obligations, his rights will vanish” – and be transferred to his son, we might add.
This image may prove inspiring to the fascist sons of prodigal fathers. But why should it inspire the reader and the writer? The reader and the writer are evidently intended to feel satisfaction at what the hero of the novel tells his uncle after the latter’s arrival from America: “Naples, you see, used to be dirty, but now it’s clean, and the beggars have been removed from the streets.”
However, if all this proves insufficiently inspiring to the reader, the following piece of rant on the subject of war may fairly be expected to strike home:
“War represents a really valuable phenomenon, for it compels all people to make the choice between courage and cowardice, between self-sacrifice and egoism, between inner experience and pure materialism. It is, of course, a rude phenomenon – man against man, character against character, nerves against nerves; but this phenomenon divides the hysterical folk, the worms, the whiners, the spoilt children from the courageous, wise idealists, from the mystics of dangers, from the heroes of blood.”
The fascist heroes of blood are persons who sacrifice the blood of others with supreme facility, and it may he that rant has an inspiring effect upon them. Among the masses of the people, who will have to shed their blood on behalf of Italian fascism, this rant will probably arouse nothing but a feeling of disgust. The fascist writers are aware of this, which is why this rant sounds so unconvincing and why their art is so lifeless, so febrile.
Let us take a glance at Polish literature. For one hundred and fifty years Poland was torn asunder by three conquerors. In bondage, she created one of the most brilliant literatures in the world. One might have expected that national unification would usher in a golden age of Polish literature. And she does possess some very talented writers even now. But the greatest Polish writer of our day, Zeromski, Went to the grave with the question on his lips – the question which forms the core of his Early Spring: Was it for this Poland. that we fought? The most outstanding writer of the fascist tendency now ruling in Poland, the staunch adherent of Pilsudski, Kaden-Bandrowski, is attempting to give a picture of contemporary Poland in a series of novels.
In the first part of his trilogy he depicts the decline of Polish capitalism, the treachery of the parties of the Second International. He endeavoured to represent communism as a movement of helpless though honest workers, but he did not dare to show the Polish fascists in the setting of Poland’s main coal area. In the second part of his trilogy he has portrayed the corruption and decay of the young Polish parliamentary system – the party of the Polish kulaks, the party of the Polish aristocrats, the party of the Polish socialists, who. have betrayed the workers. But although he brings down his story almost to the moment of Pilsudski’s final advent – to power, he has not portrayed the followers of Pilsudski, the representatives of the Polish form of fascism. He did not portray them, because he was afraid to do so, because the face of Polish fascism is too unattractive for a great artist to dare to show it and to convince the reader that fascism is a blessing. Kaden’s talent comes into conflict with his political convictions.
We must answer the question – and this represents the basic question from the point of view of literature – why literature is dying out under fascism. This does not mean that a talented fascist writer cannot make his appearance. But there has not been and will not be a fascist literature capable of convincing the millions.
Fascism means the end of great literature; by the logic of its own inner laws it means the decay of literature. Why? The reason for this is perfectly clear. It is connected with the very roots of literature and art. In the period when slave-owning society was flourishing, when the culture of the ancient world was arising on its basis, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristotle. and the rest did not perceive any cracks in the foundations of this slave-owning society. They believed it to be the only possible and rational form of society, and were therefore able to create their works without feeling any twinges of doubt. Men feudalism represented the only possible organization of society, it was possible for great feudal poets to exist.
But when, in the days when serfdom was already declining, Gogol defended it in his Letters To Friends, Belinsky spat in the face of the great poet, and everything which made for the creation of great Russian literature was on’ Belinsky’s side. Serfdom could not find advocacy in great works of art because it was already dying, because it was corroded with the worms of capitalist development, because abroad there already existed a society freed from serfdom, and the intelligence, the conscience of an artist could not any longer defend a perishing system, doomed by history.
In the period when capitalism was flourishing, when it was the bearer of progress, it could have its bards, and these bards, in creating their works, knew and believed that they would find an echo among hundreds of thousands and millions of people who regarded capitalism as a good thing.
We should ask ourselves the following question: Why was there a Shakespeare in the sixteenth century, and why is the bourgeoisie today unable to produce a Shakespeare? Why were there great writers in the eighteenth century and in the beginning of the nineteenth? Why are there no such great. writers today as Goethe, Schiller, Byron, Heine, or even Victor Hugo? The literature of the bourgeois period has always been bourgeois literature; it has always served the aims of the bourgeoisie. But in the days when the bourgeoisie was fighting against feudalism, when it was liberating the mind, albeit its own mind, from all the burden of medieval thought, when it was setting free the productive forces, it produced writers who depicted these mighty battles.
It is enough to read Coriolanus or Richard III in order to see what titanic passion, what strain and stress the artist is portraying. It is enough to read Hamlet in order to see that the artist was confronted with the great problems of which way the world was going. The artist beat his wings against these problems. He cried: Alas that it should fall to my lot to set right a world that is out of joint. But these great problems were nevertheless the food on which he lived.
When Germany in the eighteenth century emerged from the period of her utter exhaustion, when she asked herself: “Where is the way out?” – and the way out lay in unification – she gave birth to Goethe and to Schiller.
Men the writer is able to take an affirmative attitude to reality, he can portray this reality truthfully.
Dickens painted an ugly picture of the genesis of English industrial capitalism , but Dickens was convinced that industry was a good thing, that industrial capital would raise England to a higher level, and for this reason Dickens was able to tell the approximate truth about this reality. He toned it down with his sentiment, but in David Copperfield and other works he has painted such a picture that even today the reader can see how modern England came into being.
Dickens, Balzac were able to paint harsh pictures of the contradictions of capitalism. They did so in a spirit of free creation, without fear of shaking the foundations, unashamed, for they believed in the future of the capitalist system.
There can be very talented writers. who will express in imagery the dream of the fascist cut-throats, who will describe how the blonde beast lashes the faces of the masses, and their writings will perhaps constitute great works of art.
We had such a writer in Russia-Gumilev, who gave vent to the spirit of the conquistador, of the imperialist, of the colonizer in the Russian bourgeoisie. He was an outstanding writer, and from the artistic point of view he could and did produce great things. But take this Gumilev’s books and give them, without any commentary, to our workers or our peasants. They will tell you: “He’s a scoundrel to mock at mankind like that.”
Again, there may exist outstanding fascist writers who will express the fascist dream of rule by the sword in major works of art, but these will he works which convince only the fascists themselves; they cannot become a weapon of fascist influence over the masses of the people.
We know that there are people in the Soviet Union who grumble, who are discontented. After reading works like those of Sholokhov, they come to understand, through him, what they did not understand before, when they looked at some small section of life, when they regarded only what was as yet hard for them to contemplate. Through works like Sholokhov’s they came to understand the necessity of those severe, firm, drastic measures which had to be taken in order to build socialism. I have heard with my own ears from intellectuals, from persons who were permeated with humanitarian ideas and who had not grasped what was happening during the period of the First. Five-Year Plan, during the period of collectivization when the kulak class was being liquidated, how they declared after reading Sholokhov’s book: “He has convinced me that it had to he that way.”
But show me an opponent of fascism or a neutral person whom their novels convince or will convince of the rightness of fascism, even if the novel in question, thanks to the author’s talents, attains a high artistic level.
Where will you find an artist who will be able to convince the millions of workers and peasants that a world imperialist war is a blessing? Men they were driven to the battlefields, when they were duped by the story that they were fighting for the fatherland, for themselves, they believed for a moment, but now they can see the ruins, all the consequences of war. And there is no artist who could write a true war book capable of agitating the millions in favour of imperialist war.
Try to find a major contemporary artist who will give us a truthful book about the Italian countryside – a book which would convince the peasants and us that fascism has brought liberation to the Italian countryside. Incidentally, there does exist one truthful book about Italian village life – a book by Silone, a man who has committed great political errors in his life, but who has given a truthful picture in this case, since he is an enemy of fascism. The truth about the Italian countryside can only be this: that Italian fascism has not destroyed the power of the landlord, has not done away with capitalism’s exploitation of the peasantry, has not destroyed, but has strengthened, the oppression of bureaucracy in the fascist countryside.
And if a writer’ possessing even such talent as Shakespeare, Michaelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci were born today, if such a writer were confronted with the task of portraying fascist reality in a picture convincing to the masses of the people, then the picture which he produced would speak against fascism, against capitalism; he would not he able to draw one which would speak in their favour.
This is the reason why fascist literature is decaying. This is the reason why fascism will never create a great literature, a great convincing literature, convincing to the broad masses.
An art which proclaims the greatness of capitalism in the face of forty million unemployed is impossible, for, as Bernard Shaw quite rightly stated in his speech, The Madhouse in America, delivered in New York on April 11, 1933.
“Your proletariat is unemployed. That means the breakdown of your capitalist system, because, as any political scientist will tell you, the whole justification of the system of privately appropriated capital and land on which you have been working, is its guarantee, elaborately reasoned out on paper by the capitalist economists, that although one result of it must he the creation of a small but enormously rich propertied class which in also an idle class, living at the expense of the propertyless masses who are getting only a hare living, nevertheless that hare living is always secured for them. There must always be employment available; and they will always he able to obtain a subsistence wage for their labour.
“When that promise is broken (and never for one moment has it been kept right up to the hilt), when your unemployed are not only the old negligible 5 per cent of this trade, 8 per cent of that trade, 2 per cent of the other trade, but, millions of unemployed, then the capitalist system has broken down.”
What writer who is not devoid of all conscience, of all feeling, of all capacity to speak the truth can defend a system which renders tens of millions of people unemployed, a system which ruins and pauperizes the peasants, giving them no access to urban life, a system under which hundreds of thousands of people who have received an education find no chance to apply their knowledge, a system which trembles at the idea of new inventions, a system which, after the World War with its ten million killed, its tens of millions crippled and mutilated, is now preparing for a fresh war? Fascism wants to perpetuate this system; it wants to defend it from destruction by a policy of blood and iron. That is what fascism is for. Fascism can buy a handful of writers; it can find a handful of persons who will sincerely advocate the power of the blonde beast, of persons who will preach war as a panacea, but out of mercenary souls or knights-errant of historical adventure it will not be able to create a literature which will convince millions. An artist may twist as a man; as a man, he may fawn and cringe. But no one will create a great work of art by portraying what he does not believe in, by advocating a cause which he despises in the depths of his soul, for art great art, is truth and life.
There is no other art And even if there should be a handful of persons who will find romance in putrefying capitalism, – they will not be able to create works which will he convincing to the masses of the people, and they will fade away, for the creative artist needs hearts where his notes will find an echo.
The decay of capitalism, its downfall, which finds its expression in fascism, means the decay and downfall of all literature which cannot tear from its neck the fatal noose of capitalism, which cannot tear the shirt of Nessus, from its body. This does not mean that such literature cannot produce works of great craftsmanship in regard to form. The ancient world perished and rotted away, but the craftsmanship created by the artists of antiquity in the heyday of its youth lived on in the monasteries. Just as the decay of capitalism does not preclude the development of productive forces in some domain or other, in some country or other, so the decay of capitalist literature does not mean the complete disappearance of art, even in the camp of the bourgeoisie; but it does mean that no more great works will he accomplished by that art which is created in order to serve moribund capitalism. It cannot create images which will find an echo among the millions of people who aspire to a new and better life.
At best, it cannot be more than the art of minstrels who entertain revellers in a time of plague, and the artist of today who does not want to be a bard of exploitation, a bard of the burning of books, a bard of the public execution of the best sons of the people, the artist who does not want to be the bard of a new imperialist war, of a senseless and all-destroying war, must put out from that tainted coast and head for new shores, where new life is flourishing.
And those who want world literature to develop again, those who want literature of real value, those who want this great lever in the development of mankind – which has given mankind supreme enjoyment, which. fills the lives of many people, which represents a source of great creative work – to live and develop, must put off from that coast, seek their way to us, join the proletariat in the struggle against capitalism, in the struggle against fascism, for only in this struggle will a literature that is truly great arise, develop and grow strong.
The October Revolution has’ created a new literature, just as it creates new things in all other spheres of culture. The thinkers of the peasant revolution might underrate the importance of literature, for the only object which the peasant revolution sets itself is to destroy the feudal system. It cannot set itself the task of completely remoulding all the achievements of mankind. Such aims overstep the narrow local horizon of the peasantry. Tolstoy, who reflected the narrow-mindedness of peasant life, was employing just such peasant criteria when he arrived at the idea of the destruction of art.
The proletarian revolution does not merely destroy the capitalist system. Out of the bricks which have been created during the entire period of mankind’s cultural development, it builds a new edifice of human culture. In contrast to the peasantry, the proletariat – the driving force of the proletarian revolution – begins in part to take possession of the old culture even under the capitalist system; in the person of its vanguard, it takes over the best elements of this old culture, creating with their help its picture of the future world and attaining comprehension of its historical tasks. Literature already begins to play a considerable part in the development of the proletariat, while the latter is still a force fighting against capitalism. And just as inevitably, the proletariat must take possession of all the achievements of the old culture, after it has come to power, as it must take possession of all the riches left it as a heritage by capitalism. But it does not passively accept the heritage of the past. It makes a careful selection of this inheritance. It creates the very elements of the new culture, and during the long process of revolution, while remoulding itself, it creates a new literature too.
Even during the period of struggle against tsarism, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party showed a perfect understanding of the importance of literature; they took pride in the fact that a great writer like Maxim Gorky adhered to the Bolshevik movement and reflected in literature the thoughts of the militant proletariat. The year 1912, when a great wave of the working class movement was rising and when the newspaper Pravda was founded, saw the appearance of the first collection of stories by proletarian writers, recruited from the ranks of the proletariat, which was fighting under the banner of Bolshevism.
In the very teeth of the devastating struggle in which the edifice of tsarism and of Russian capitalism was utterly demolished, in the very teeth of the fight against intervention, the Soviet government and the Bolshevik Party made every endeavour to preserve the writers and to bring them closer to the struggle of the proletariat. After the Civil War was over, the Communist Party exerted all efforts to bring closer to the proletariat those writers Who, while not holding the latter’s viewpoint, nevertheless reflected the great revolutionary process from the angle. of the peasantry or of the intelligentsia, and who were striving to merge themselves with this process. The works of these “fellow-travellers of the revolution,” who received the backing of the Soviet government, were not the only works produced, even during the first revolutionary years. The workers’ and peasants’ own literature was originating – a literature which, in the person of its creators, was organically connected with the proletariat. And it could not be otherwise.
Revolution rouses vast masses of the people to a new cultural life, and these masses, during their struggle, simultaneously strive to express their aspirations, to express their thoughts in artistic form. Between proletarian literature, i.e., literature which looks at the world from the standpoint of the militant proletariat and which tries to help in the transformation of this world, and the literature of the “fellow-travellers,” there is a process of emulation, of struggle going on, a process of reciprocal influence and of mutual enrichment. And now, after seventeen years of proletarian revolution in Russia, we may say that this revolution has created a literature which has already outgrown its infancy.
The plain fact that, despite the resistance of the big capitalist publishers, the books of Soviet writers have found their way to all countries in the world, that these books are widely read, that they convey the news of the proletarian revolution in the U.S.S.R. to wide circles of workers and intellectuals, that they arouse the deepest interest – these plain, irrefutable facts are in themselves a proof of the great achievements of Soviet literature. Without any fear of boasting we may say that Soviet literature is now the best literature in the world, for it is the only literature in which great creation and great construction are portrayed; it is a literature which provides an answer to the basic questions of mankind.
We know how much Soviet writers still have to learn, in order that the artistic forms created by them may rise to the level of their subject. The Soviet proletariat, which in actual life has already created Magnitostroy, Dnieprostroy, Kuznetskstroy, has not yet created any works of literature commensurate with the greatness of its material and political achievements. But if we are to compare Soviet literature with the literature of decaying capitalism, then we may safely declare: Soviet literature already has works to its credit against which the literature of the world bourgeoisie can set nothing similar.
Soviet literature’s process of development is a lengthy one. Achievements in this domain can only be won at the cost of persistent labour – labour which requires a long period of time, since the problem here is one of mastering the whole culture of the past, of raising to the level reached by the best models of the old culture not a small group of writers but millions of human beings, who represent the readers of Soviet literature and who are producing hundreds, thous. ands of new writers from their midst.
Soviet literature, which reflects first and foremost the struggle of the Soviet proletariat and of the collective farm peasantry, has not yet mastered to an adequate degree the art of writing on international themes. It has not yet succeeded in portraying those events which are shaking the whole capitalist world, has not yet been fully able to depict the face of the international foe of the proletariat – the face of imperialism which is preparing for war, the face of fascism which is its weapon.
The young proletarian literature of the West is coming to the aid of Soviet literature. We are witnessing not only the growth of literature in the Soviet Union, where it is developing before our very eyes into the mighty vanguard literature of the world, but also the genesis of proletarian literature throughout the whole world.
The question as to whether proletarian literature is possible – a question which formerly aroused disputes – has now been solved in actual practice, in the thick of battle. You know how sharply Lenin opposed the attempts that were made to create a specious form of proletarian literature in special closed “preserves” laboratories, employing, as it were, for the breeding of such literature, as was recommended in theory and done in practice by the “Proletcult.” Lenin, however, not only considered that proletarian literature was possible, but held that we must fight to create such literature.
All the fundamental principles determining our attitude to the problem of proletarian literature can he found in Lenin, in those passages where he gives an appraisal of different authors of bourgeois – and landlord society, and where he enunciates general principles regarding the cultural revolution. Trotsky’s assertion that proletarian literature is impossible is based, in the first place, on a failure to understand that the world revolution covers a lengthy period of time, a period of defeats and victories, that it is not a short-lived explosion that it is not the result of any special combination of circumstances which arose in connection with the war and which may prove transient, and, in the second place, on a denial of the possibility of building socialism in one country.
Proletarian literature has become possible in our country because seventeen years of struggle, during the course of which the Soviet proletariat has laid the foundation of socialism and is building the edifice of socialism, have developed tremendous cultural powers in the proletariat and have filled the broadest masses of the people with the desire to seek in literature a reflection of their struggle, to find in literature a reflection of their aspirations, a reflection of their strivings.
But. the world proletariat, whose advanced detachments are fighting to overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie, which is experiencing unprecedented advances and suffering tremendous defeats in this struggle, which is witnessing the death of bourgeois culture and the birth of proletarian socialist culture in the U.S.S.R. – the world proletariat cannot remain dumb in the face of these concussions. Battling against the bourgeoisie, battling for the conditions of its development, the revolutionary proletariat needs a literature which will help it to comprehend its struggle, to comprehend what is happening in the world – a literature that will help it to express the feelings motivating this struggle. That is why there is hardly a country in the world where proletarian literature has not begun to arise. For the revolutionary proletariat in the countries of capitalism, it is more difficult to create its own literature than for the proletariat of the U.S.S.R. The capitalist world boasts of the culture which it has produced and the cultural level which the working masses have attained, but in reality all the revolutionary worker in the West receives from capitalism is a miserable education in the elementary school; all other knowledge he is obliged to acquire in the meagre hours which are left over to him after work in a capitalist factory and direct participation in the revolutionary struggle. Those sources of science, which are so widely accessible to the working masses in the Soviet Union, are closed to him.
Despite all these difficulties, however, the revolutionary movement, both in the West and in the East, is creating its own literature. I am not speaking of countries so profoundly shaken by revolution as Germany, which has behind it years of civil war full of the most dramatic episodes, which has experienced the unheard-of treachery of Social-Democracy, and whose history is filled with the supreme heroism and death of such people as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, with the tragic fate of the Bavarian republic and of its heroic fighters.
All these great battles could not but find their reflection in literature, and the most interesting point is that German proletarian literature comes from the heart of the German working class, that it is being created by writers who were yesterday working in factories or fulfilling the duties of Party agitators, of Party organizers. I refer to such writers as Marchwitza, Grunberg, Kleber, Plivier and others.
All this goes to show that this literature grows directly out of the very roots of the movement; it grows out of the revolutionary movement of the working class.
Proletarian literature has been able to attract not only public opinion; it has also been able to attract into its ranks the writers of the bourgeoisie. I am not speaking of such writers as the Communist poet Johannes Becher, who has been in the revolutionary movement from the very start and who did not enter it as a man of letters. But Ludwig Renn’s entry into our Party was not only the result of the struggle waged by our Party and by the proletariat; it was also influenced by the rise of proletarian literature.
If you take another part of the world – Asia; if you consider what is happening in Japan, you will see that that country can present a magnificent picture of the rise of a proletarian literature, richer in quantity than anywhere else, excluding the U.S.S.R. This literature is profoundly moving in its simplicity, in its closeness to the proletariat. Kobayashi, Kukushima, Seketi, Hayashi and Tokunaga – these are writers who have come from the masses.
Some of these have become writers because they wanted to serve the cause of the working class, and they reflect the struggle of the Japanese proletariat; others have joined the Communist Party because, as writers, they cannot give a truthful portrayal of life unless they are in the ranks of our Party.
Japanese proletarian literature is the most autochthonous proletarian literature in existence. It breathes the very life of the masses. It unfolds before us a picture of the struggle that is being waged by the Japanese proletariat, shows from what sections of the population it has issued, whither it is going. Despite its shortcomings, this literature shows what a powerful weapon of struggle proletarian literature can become. Often, when the proletariat of Japan is muzzled and cannot give expression to its aspirations, the proletarian literature of Japan speaks for it. This !proletarian literature
enjoys wide popularity, and that not only among the masses of the people. It evokes profound interest among wide circles of the intelligentsia. The facts confirm this. Bourgeois magazines and publishing houses publish this literature, evidently understanding that there is a demand for it among the wider reading public.
In a country like the U.S.A. we may also observe a profound split among the intellectuals. This process finds its expression in the ranks of proletarian literature. It is enough to mention as an example the book of James Steele describing the conditions in the Ford works in Detroit.
At the same time we may observe how the writers who are wavering and coming over to our side pay visits to strike centres, where the local magnates do not permit any Communist agitators to intrude. In such cases literature not only takes upon itself the task of investigating what is going on, of inquiring into all the brutalities of capitalism, but also assumes the functions of direct defender of the proletariat’s interests.
We see how a proletarian literature is arising in France, how from the heart of the proletariat, from sections of the population closely allied to it, writers are appearing who openly declare themselves Communists, proletarian writers.
We see the beginning of a proletarian literature in England. In the heart of bourgeois England, at Oxford, where the sons of the English bourgeoisie are educated a group is taking shape which realizes that the only salvation lies in alliance with the proletariat.
There is no country in the world where the militant proletariat is not disputing the bourgeoisie’s monopoly in literature, where it has not attempted to create its own literature of struggle – a literature which is helping the proletariat, through the medium of art, to realize its own position and which is also helping those sections of the population, whose position borders upon that of the proletariat, to do the same.
The failing of this literature lies not only in the fact that it has not yet fully mastered artistic form, that it presents as yet little more than a simple chronicle of the history of proletarian struggle. Its main shortcoming is that its authors, in their tales and stories, do not go beyond portrayal of the immediate struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, often confining themselves to direct portrayal of the economic struggle of the proletariat. The proletarian artist, relying on his experience of struggle, does not as yet go beyond the sphere of direct relations between bourgeoisie and proletariat.
But proletarian art should take in all spheres of human life. It should reflect the main processes which are going on in society. It should not only reflect the struggle of proletariat and bourgeoisie, but should also depict the very condition of the bourgeoisie and its tendencies, should describe the position of the “intermediate strata,” who will still have a big part to play in the final battle of the proletariat against the