From The Liberator, Vol. 6 No. 8. August 1923.
Originally published in France’s Clarté, this translated and abridged version appeared in The Liberator.
Copied with thanks from the Revolution’s Newsstand Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
IN the soil of Russia, ploughed up by the Revolution, tares are mingled with the sprouting grain. Between what is coming to birth, and what wishes to survive, war continues, incessant and inexorable, in every field of life. This is particularly true of the field of intelligence. The intellectual life of an epoch is always rigidly conditioned by the necessary contacts between classes, that is to say by the part they play in production and distribution. This first principle of historic materialism finds a singularly strong illustration in Russian intellectual life. A proletarian and revolutionary State, in possession of the principle industries and means of transportation expropriated from the bourgeoisie, a Communist Party exercising the power of a dictatorship to lead the country to socialism-and private commerce, private industries, fairs, exchange, speculation, concessions, businessmen shopkeepers, goldseekers, parasites; these two worlds confront each other every day. Everyone knows that there can be between them no lasting peace. Strong in victory, proud of being the hope of the world, the Revolution counts on conquering the future. Strong in the apparently unshaken power of the dollar and of some capitalist States, whose old skeletons they do not wish to hear cracking, the Reaction hopefully watches and waits-and not inactively ...
Even the Terror has not annihilated the intellectual resistance. In 1922 – the year V – this resistance showed itself in various ways. Early in the year a strike of the University teachers, which spread to the majority of the high-schools of the country, tried to drive the hated “sovietism” from the Faculties; the professors demanded “autonomy,” no more, no less. They protested against the preference shown the worker-students. The scientific Congresses followed, notably that of the physicians, which were really political manifestations; the old counter-revolutionary liberalism gave them their tone. In the universities, the proletarian students find themselves sometimes treated as plague-carriers; they must respond to this by organization.
Is the NEP (New Economic Policy) the beginning of a return to the old capitalist regime? Professor Oustrialov, Cadet, who noisily rallied to the Soviet Government, says it is. “Bolshevism is evolving – let us help it evolve.” This is the theme developed, with the reticence demanded by prudence, by a whole literature which is unexpectedly springing up in the two capitals exhausted by civil war. The Academician, V.M. Bechterev, published an edifying work in the manner of Lombroso, on Collective Reflexology. Bolshevism is a collective psychosis, nothing more – this pamphlet appeared in Petrograd where the author serves on the Commissariat of Public Instruction. Two economic reviews (since suppressed) also appeared in Petrograd, the Economist and Economic Renaissance, which took upon themselves the task of preaching the reconstruction of capitalist Europe. Professor Venediktov announced one day the infallible defeat of the proletarian state in mixed enterprises with the capitalists. M. Zaitsev, in the first number of Economic Renaissance asks, “What shall we do with our railways?” and concludes that a good part, to begin with, must be given to private industry. The program of Stinnes and Mussolini, unfolding in Petrograd in 1922! The economist Stein says much in the same direction ...
The works of Oswald Spengler, recently translated into French, contain an audacious affirmation of imperialist doctrines. They bring to the not long since ruling class of Russia, beheaded and dispossessed, an explanation of disaster and a new hope. The old religious philosopher Berdaiev and his friends, Boukspan, Stepounang, Frank, consecrate to the revelation of Spengler a volume of poems. Eight-tenths, certainly, of poetry and literature of Russia during these last months is not concerned with actuality; and to be “unactual,” to take refuge in the ivory tower, is just another way of being counter-revolutionary without risking one’s skin in political activity. While red Russia struggled in a ring of fire, great poets turned their creative power to translating Henri de Regnier (Kouzmin) or announced in pretty. mystical sonnets the defeat of the Apocalyptic Beast (Sologub).
And in the streets, half given over to the merchants by the NEP, other and no less dangerous phenomena are witnesses to the intellectual offensive of the forces of the past; the idiotic movie-shows; the little theatres of the boulevards; the cheap literature, exciting and pornographic; the widespread new editions of rotten novels. It is an orderly attack against the new spirit, in which all weapons are used. There is the fashionable philosopher for cultivated folk; the pseudo economist for the highbrows; “art for art’s sake” for the educated; idealism and mysticism are the subjects of innumerable lectures for souls homesick for the Beyond; the film-before-last of “Fatty”; the popular song and “parisian” review for the passers-by; and what an atmosphere, what teaching in the schools in which the Youth formed by the Revolution must ask for food for their souls!
At the Twelfth Congress of the Communist Party, Zinoviev, in a long and detailed report, warned of the danger. Radek and Bukharin announced the counter-offensive of the Revolution in the realm of ideas. And truly the Russian Communists have never ceased to be active and aggressive in that realm. Only, when all is said, their blood has flowed more freely in the civil war than that of the intellectuals of the old regime; and they were fewer to begin with. The Russian proletariat lacks educated men who know how to teach and to handle the weapons of the spirit. The present teaching personnel of the universities is almost entirely that of the old days; the war was very unequal, above all in the higher schools; this is the explanation of the recourse to repression, the recent exile of a certain number of incurably reactionary intellectuals whose senile ambitions were too much encouraged by the NEP.
THE grouping of the advanced elements among the professors (the Red Professorate); the formation of new faculties of superior instruction, recruited among the young intellectuals, and also when possible among the young educated proletarians; the work of party education; the organization of Communist students for the conquest of the universities; creation and distribution of numerous communist periodicals; systematic defense of the materialist philosophy, the work of Marxism; the refutation of adversaries, so many means tirelessly set to work by the Russian Revolution in the battle of ideas. Let us recall here several important facts; the appearance of Bukharin’s Treatise on Historic Materialism, and a good half-dozen refutations of Spengler in the reviews. Also the work of Professor Pokrovski, author of a compact History of Russia, conceived in the Marxist spirit, and making it possible for Russia to dispense with the poor old history-book-battles still in use everywhere else.
The new spirit has two other tools, and valuable ones, though hardly known elsewhere; satire, led by Demian Biedny; and literary criticism, which Trotzky has just enriched with a powerful book. Demian Biedny – “Demian the poor, the mischievous Moujik” as he lately called himself to tease the profiteers of the NEP – has a genius for criticizing social customs. He enjoys an enormous popularity. In the great soviet dailies he has published rhymed “columns” every day for years, in which excellent stuff is to be found. Demian Biedny has an extraordinary instinct for rhythm and for the popular tongue; all the rhythms of Russian verse are well-known to him, and all the slang of the farmer, and the new and often savory slang of the street during these years of torment. But what wins for him the dearest place in the hearts of the simple, the frustrated, the workers and the fighters, is that he never misses a chance to hit off with priceless banter just what the public is thinking. Not a folly of the moment gets by him; not a fad nor a waste, nor a mistake, that he does not brand; not a disagreeable truth that he does not sooner or later serve up to “His Friends the Commissars.” Unfortunately, he seems to be untranslatable. Nobody has done more in red Russia to combat bureaucracy, to scourge bad communists, to ridicule the profiteers of the NEP. It is hard to give any idea of his style; we remember his story of the used-up mare that fell dead in the street; by the time the Commissariats of Food, of Leather, and of Bones, had finished quarreling over the poor carcass, and the Cheka had intervened to settle the quarrel, the dogs had eaten it . The comrades who lived through war, blockade, and socialist reconstruction, who accomplished their revolutionary duty against all odds, read that bit with great amusement; the satire revenged them a little against the odious petty bourgeoisie which already infested the Soviet administration.
Literature Since the October Revolution (La Litterature en dehors d’Octobre) is the title of Trotzky’s new book. The Pravda has published extracts from it. Trotzky studies one by one the contemporary Russian writers, from the Marxist point of view, showing in each one the class origin of his ideas. For there is no work of the spirit which is entirely a stranger to the class war: there is none which cannot fruitfully be criticized from the revolutionary angle; this searchlight must be brutally turned on the literary sanctuary; the new thought must free itself from the strangle-hold of a dying age. In certain pages the critic Trotzky becomes pamphleteer and polemist; then his style attains a violence, a precision, a sharpness of expression that are extraordinary. This cruel word cuts like a scalpel; that judgment stuns like a club. The Epic of Andre Biely, an egocentric and mannered book, itself almost unreadable, thus is the subject of a terrible and beautiful chapter which is one of the most striking in Trotzky’s book.
It is dictated by the indignation of the revolutionist before those who, while the peoples of the world transform it, are absorbed in self-contemplation. In another place how well he disposes of the critic Tchoukovski, who ingeniously misinterprets Blok’s poem, The Twelve, making it out “nationalist.” This scribbler, guardedly counter-revolutionist, is pummeled, shaken up, denuded, thrown at the foot of the pillory. And between these hand to hand combats with the enemies of his class, are periods of contemplation during which his thought unfolds and rises. I wish I could quote here a page, in the most impeccably cadenced language, on the lyricism of the revolution.
In this combat between the Reds and the Whites, the new literature occupies an indeterminate position as to ideas, not to say an intentionally equivocal one. Let us say right away that it is very rich. The year 1921-22 has seen the rise of a good dozen young talents, or older talents rejuvenated by the hurricane. But if one excepts Mayakovski, a poet who, judging by his works has long been a communist, all exert themselves to be non-partisan politically. Mayakovski has just published International Life, a great fresco of lands, masses, machines, the whole planet perceived through the electric brain of the wireless. This is a literature that has nothing “literary” about it at first glance – a poem to be declaimed on a public square, brutally imagined, dominated by new feeling – the love and understanding of technique, the will to social transformation, the “planetary” vision of things, to use a word beloved of Maxim Gorky.
The Serapion Brotherhood made a sensational entry into the lists, with several new talents, none of which lacks originality. The very different men, allied in this brotherhood, describe, unaffectedly but with much truth, life under the revolution. The influence of Zemiatine whose style is counter-revolutionist, Fedine, once a communist, and Vsevolod Ivanov, red partisan from Siberia, is strong among them. The greatest reproach against them is their enormous insistence upon form; but they are, above all, Russians who are freed from foreign influences, able to return to common sources of their racial originality. Their language is that of village, workshop, and steppe; their style has nothing of the “pink tea,” thank God!
But they are weakened by a neo-nationalism, a certain incomprehension of the revolution, which Trotzky attributes to the fact that they are all of peasant spirit and therefore do not fully understand the revolution of the city proletariat. Boris Pilniak, the greatest Russian writer, head and shoulders above even the Serapion Brotherhood, has the same fault. Pilniak and Jakovlev, have made a whole literature out of the famine. Lidine, in Nights and Days has shown us, in black night, blood and torture, through years of torment and war, vermin, outrages and hopes, the rise of the October Revolution.
We are going to hear more of this new Russian literature. When the revelation is made in Europe there will be great surprises. We have only been able to indicate, too roughly, the character of this development; but it is enough to show what an abyss separates it from the boudoir and alcove literature of the past, whose sentimental complications are still in favor with the most cultivated public of old Europe.
The Liberator was published monthly from 1918, first established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman continuing The Masses, was shut down by the US Government during World War One. Like The Masses, The Liberator contained some of the best radical journalism of its, or any, day. It combined political coverage with the arts, culture, and a commitment to revolutionary politics. Increasingly, The Liberator oriented to the Communist movement and by late 1922 was a de facto publication of the Party. Max Eastman would sell the paper to the Party and in 1924, The Liberator merged with Labor Herald and Soviet Russia Pictorial into Workers Monthly. An essential magazine of the US left.
PDF of full issue: ../../../../history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1923/08/v6n08-w64-aug-1923-liberator.pdf.
Last updated on 20 January 2023