Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934

The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism

Introducción.

Zdhanov: Soviet Literature - The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced

Literature

Maxim Gorki: Soviet literature.

Karl Radek: Literatura mundial contemporánea y las tareas del Arte

Proletario.

Discurso en respuesta a la discusión.

Bujarin: Poesía,poética y los problemas de la poesía en la URSS.

Stetsky: Bajo la bandera de los soviets, bajo la bandera del socialismo.

Resoluciones del primer congreso de escritores soviéticos.

 Introducción.

El primer congreso nacional de escritores soviéticos ocurrió en agosto de 1934.

Durante estos días, mientras el congreso estaba sesionando, no es exagerado decir que
toda la Unión soviética, con sus millones de trabajadores, concentró su atención en
cuestiones literarias.

Desde todas las esquinas de la Unión Soviética llegaron cientos y miles de cartas
dirigidas al congreso, que contenían felicitaciones, agradecimientos cálidos, sugerencias
prácticas y consejos. Estas cartas fueron escritas por obreros, granjeros colectivos,
estudiantes de colegios y universidades, Jóvenes Pioneros, erúditos y científicos, por
ingenieros, por artistas; todos y cada uno de ellos expresaron el mayor amor por la
literatura soviética y por sus creadores.

Numerosas delegaciones, representando a millones de lectores, asistierony hablaron

en el congreso. Los discursos que llevaron a la tribuna del congreso sonaron como una
poderosa demanda a los escritores soviéticos: encontrar grandes expresiones artísticas
para la nueva vida, la nueva gente, las nuevas relaciones sociales y personales existentes
entre ellos.

La importancia de este congreso no puede ser entendida salvo que se entienda esto, su
característica más notable. ¿Cuál es el significado de esta indisoluble ligazón que unía la
literatura con millones de trabajadores, que no sólo enviaron mensajes de
agradecimiento sino que también tomaron parte activa en la discusión de las cuestiones
más importantes? Significa que el trabajo literario en la Tierra de los Soviets se está
convirtiendo en problema de todos los trabajadores.

Y este evento, el Congreso de Escritores Soviético, fue un verdadero fenómeno

histórico, que muestra el crecimiento sin precedentes de la cultura en la URSS.

Una enorme revolución cultural está sucediendo en la Unión Soviética. Esta era de
los Soviets es comparada a veces con la Antigüedad o con el período renacentista. La
base de esta comparación son atributos generales tan externos como la personalidad
vivida, bravura, festivales de masas, florecimiento del arte, etc.

Pero en realidad ¡cuánto más sublime es esta era Soviética! ¡Cuánto más rica es no
sólo desde el punto de vista del desarrollo cuantitativo en la esfera de la técnica,
industria, cultura…sino también desde el punto de vista de las relaciones sociales
existentes entre la gente!
 Millones y decenas de millones de trabajadores y trabajadoras están tomando parte en
la construcción de la sociedad socialista, millones están llegando en mayor medida al
disfrute de las ventajas de la cultura, obteniendo las alturas del conocimiento, la ciencia
y la filosofía. Aquí yace la cuestión decisiva de esta era, y en este sentido no puede ser
comparado con ningún otro período del desarrollo histórico.

En la Unión Soviética los trabajos de autores tales como Gogol, Belinsky, Flaubert y
Balzac, Pushkin y Chernyshevsky se publican en ediciones, en centenas de miles. Estos
libros se compran tan rápid que son difíciles de obtener en el mercado.

Volúmenes pequeños de Pushkin o grandes tomos de los trabajos de Belinsky se

están convirtiendo en “artículos de consumo de masas. Y son precisamente estos
profundos procesos de la revolución cultural los que explican el enorme interés en el
cual el Congreso de Escritores Soviéticos fue hecho el centro.

Hasta el tiempo de este primer histórico congreso la literatura soviética atravesó un

largo camino. Fue en el fuego de la guerra civil, en las fieras batallas de clases del
período de postguerra, en los heroicos años del Primer Plan Quinquenal, cuando la
literatura soviética nació.

Este proceso de creación de la literatura soviética ha sido un proceso variado; cada

república nacional, de cada región de la URSS, fue escena de este proceso. En cada una
de ellas una literatura socialista propia fue creada en diferentes formas nacionales, en
diferentes lenguas y condiciones. Pero todas las literaturas de las Repúblicas de la unión
estaban unidas por unidad de aspiración, ideas y ánimo.

La literatura soviética es una Unón literaria, como Máximo Gorky pudo declarar con
perfecto derecho en el congreso. Los informes leídos enn el congreso de literatura de los
pueblos que habitan la Unión Soviética y los discursos y trabajos de los muchos
escritores, poetas y dramatistas de todas las minorías nacionales son la mejor prueba de
estas palabras.

Uno de los resultados más importantes del congreso fue que dio a conocer tanto a
escritores como a lectores los enormes logros literarios en las lenguas de las minorías
nacionales, que críticos

One of the most valuable results of the congress was that it made known to both
writers and readers the tremendous achievements of literature in the languages of
national minorities, that writers and critics were convinced that it is impossible to write,
argue or form judgments about Soviet literature unless the whole wealth of this all-
Union literature is taken into account.

Thus Soviet literature, varied in language and single in ideas, reviewed the results of
its development at the congress. In his great report, which constituted the main and
central report at the congress, Maxim Gorky defined the place and the significance of
Soviet literature in the literature of the world, showed the ideological and stylistic
peculiarities which distinguish it from the literature of the bourgeoisie, gave an
appraisal of its present state and outlined the tasks of further development.

In the discussion which followed Gorky’s report speeches were delivered by writers -
eminent masters of language - who belong to the generation of the “old intelligentsia.”
They told of their development as thinkers and artists, of all their doubts and waverings,
and of how they came to link their fate irrevocably with that of the proletariat. This was
the main, dominant note in the speeches of these writers, and their words at the congress
sounded like a confirmation of the victory of the Bolshevik Party, which has constantly
guided the movement of literature and educated writers in the spirit of Bolshevism.

The second result of the development of literature in the U.S.S.R., demonstrated with
absolute clarity at the Writers’ Congress, was complete ideological and political unity of
Soviet writers, who consciously take their stand on the platform of the Soviet power, on
the positions of the Communist revolution, consciously setting them selves the task of
contributing by means of their literary works to the victory of socialist construction.

At the same time the congress was a tremendous literary event in Soviet and world
revolutionary literature.

In the discussions which followed the reports on Soviet literature, on dramaturgy and
on poetry, scares of most vital questions were raised, embracing the whole complex
mass of problems involved in the creation of belles lettres. In this respect the records of
the congress represent a most valuable document.

The central question discussed at the congress was that of how to portray the new
man in works of art. And in close connection with this all-important problem scores of
other questions were raised - questions of new forms, subjects, themes, methods of
work, images old and new, etc.

Profound processes are at work today in Soviet literature. Today, as never before,
writers are studying and investigating real life, accumulating raw material for works;
collective works are appearing, with the first rough sketches, not yet polished to
completion; diaries are being written, various records are being kept, more and more
attempts are being made to express reality in new forms, etc, etc.

Prior to the congress Soviet writers created a number of images and literary types of
the new man, and there are some among these which are executed with talent and will
long be remembered. But as a whole, all these represent only a rough design for the
monumental portrait of the new man which must be created by literature. To present a
full, worthy portrait, a profoundly artistic, masterful portrayal of the socialist man, to
depict him in his most essential relations, with tremendous artistic power rising to the
level of the great writers of the past, to show his new feelings, concepts, passions,
perception of life-such is the great talk. of Soviet literature, a task which will determine
a whole. stage, a whole epoch - and moreover a decisive epoch - in the creation of
socialist literature.

This applies to all spheres of literature - prose, poetry and drama alike. Soviet poetry,
despite all its achievements, was justly subjected to severe criticism at the congress for
its insufficiently high level of culture, for provincialism, for the fact that many poets are
lacking in deep ideas and feelings. Soviet poetry falls short of that wide revolutionary
sweep, of those bold flights of thought proper to a socialist epoch. Poets should
understand that in such an epoch a poet who does not wish to lag behind or take refuge
in the backyards of poetry must live attuned to the great ideas and passions of this
epoch, must march in step with it, his poetic scales proportionate to the scales of the
time.

Great successes have been achieved in the sphere of drama and the theatre. But
Soviet dramaturgy too, is confronted by great problems, contains the same shortcomings
as are to be met with in other branches of Soviet literature. At the congress speeches
were delivered by the representatives of different dramatic tendencies, who gave
different definitions of the tasks confronting playwrights.

One of the things that lent a special interest to the congress was the presence of a
large group of foreign revolutionary writers, who, in their speeches delivered from the
rostrum of the congress, declared their solidarity with Soviet writers.

Soviet literature is still in its youth, but the best evidence of its great Bolshevik
wisdom is the fact that some of the greatest writers in capitalist countries of the West
and of the East are turning their gaze in its direction, are voluntarily and consciously
choosing it as their intellectual guide, and are holding it up before the whole world as an
example of a genuinely vital and progressive literature.
 The congress showed that Soviet writers are fully aware of the place they occupy as
the advance guard of international revolutionary literature, which is scoring one success,
after the other.

The socialist era and the socialist people of this era are creating a literature in their
own image.

A heroic epoch gives birth to heroic literature; heroic people call into being heroic
artists.

The first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers was a congress of great revolutionary
passions, of profound ideas, of mighty creative aspirations and impulses.
 Zdhanov: Soviet Literature - The Richest in Ideas, the Most
Advanced Literature

COMRADES, in the name of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) and of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, permit me to convey to the first Congress of Soviet Writers
and to all writers of our Soviet Union-with the great proletarian author, Maxim Gorky,
at their head-flaming Bolshevik greetings.

Comrades, your congress is convening at a time when the main difficulties

confronting us in the work of socialist construction have already been overcome, when
our country has finished laying the foundations of a socialist economy - achievements
which go hand in hand with the victory of the policy of industrialization and the
building of Soviet and collective farms.

Your congress is convening at a time when under the leadership of the Communist
Party, under the guiding genius of our great leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin, the
socialist system has finally and irrevocably triumphed in our country. Consistently
advancing from one stage to the next, from victory to victory, from the inferno of the
Civil War to the period of restoration and from the period of restoration to the socialist
reconstruction of the entire national economy, our Party has led the country to victory
over the capitalist elements, ousting them from all spheres of economic life.

The U.S.S.R. has become an advanced industrial country, a country whose socialist
agriculture is organized on the largest scale in the world. The U.S.S.R. has become a
country in which our Soviet Culture is growing and developing in exuberant splendour.

The victory of the socialist system in our country has resulted in the abolition of
parasite classes, the abolition of unemployment, the abolition of pauperism in the
countryside, the abolition of city slums. The whole aspect of the Soviet land has
changed. The mentality of its people has been radically altered. The “illustrious
persons” of our country have come to he the builders of socialism, the workers and
collective farmers.

Closely linked up with the victories of socialism in our country is the strengthening
of the Soviet Union’s position at home and abroad, the growth of its weight and
authority in international affairs, its increased significance as the shock brigade of the
world proletariat, as a mighty bulwark of the coming world proletarian revolution.

At the Seventeenth Congress of our Party, Comrade Stalin gave a masterful,

unsurpassed analysis of our victories and of the factors conditioning them, of our
position at the present time and of the program for further work in completing the
building of a classless socialist society. Comrade Stalin gave an exhaustive analysis of
the backward sectors in our work and of the difficulties which our Party and, under its
leadership, the million-strong masses of the working class and collective farm
peasantry, are waging a tireless, day-to-day struggle to overcome.

We must at all costs overcome the backward state of such vital branches of the
national economy as railway and water transport, commodity circulation, non-ferrous
metallurgy. We must make all efforts to develop livestock breeding, which constitutes
one of the most important sections of our socialist agriculture.

Comrade Stalin laid bare the very roots of our difficulties and shortcomings. They
result from the fact that our practical organizational work does not come up to the level
which is required by the political line of the Party, to the demands with which the
carrying out of the Second Five Year plan confronts us. That is why the Seventeenth
Party Congress set us the urgent task of raising our organizational work to the level of
those tremendous political tasks with which we are faced. Under the leadership of
Comrade Stalin, the Party is organizing the masses for a struggle for the final
liquidation of capitalist elements, for overcoming the survivals of capitalism in
economic life and in the consciousness of people, for completing the technical
reconstruction of the national economy. Overcoming the survivals of capitalism in the
consciousness of people means fighting against all relics of bourgeois influence over the
proletariat, against laxity, against loafing, against idling, against petty-bourgeois
dissoluteness and individualism, against an attitude of graft and dishonesty towards
public property.

We have in our hands a sure weapon for the overcoming of all difficulties that stand
on our way. This weapon is the great and invincible doctrine of Marx, Engels, Lenin
and Stalin, embodied in life by our Party and Soviets.

The mighty banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin has triumphed. It is to the
victory of this banner that we owe the fact that the first Congress of Soviet Writers has
gathered here. Were it not for this victory, your congress would not be taking place.
Such a congress as this can be convened by none save us Bolsheviks.
 The key to the success of soviet literature is to be sought for in the success of socialist
construction. Its growth is an expression of the successes and achievements of our
socialist system. Our literature is the youngest of all literatures of all peoples and
countries. And at the same time it is the richest in ideas, the most advanced and the most
revolutionary literature. Never before has there been a literature which has organized
the toilers and oppressed for the struggle to abolish once and for all every kind of
exploitation and the yoke of wage slavery. Never before has there been a literature
which has based the subject matter of its works on the life of the working class and
peasantry and their fight for socialism. Nowhere, in no country in the world, has there
been a literature which has defended and upheld the principle of equal rights for the
toilers of all nations, the principle of equal rights for women. There is not, there cannot
be in bourgeois countries a literature which consistently smashes every kind of
obscurantism, every kind of mysticism, priesthood and superstition, as our literature is
doing.

Only Soviet literature, which is of one flesh and blood with socialist construction,
could become, and has indeed become, such a literature--so rich in ideas, so advanced
and revolutionary.

Soviet authors have already created not a few outstanding works, which correctly and
truthfully depict the life of our Soviet country. Already there are several names of which
we can be justly proud. Under the leadership of the Party, with the thoughtful and daily
guidance of the Central Committee and the untiring support and help of Comrade Stalin,
a whole army of Soviet writers has rallied around the Soviet power and the Party. And
in the light of our Soviet literature’s successes, we see standing out in yet sharper relief
the full contrast between our system the system of victorious socialism - and the system
of dying, moldering capitalism.

Of what can the bourgeois author write, of what can he dream, what source of
inspiration can he find, whence can he borrow this inspiration, if the worker in capitalist
countries is uncertain of the morrow, if he does not know whether he will have work the
next day, if the peasant does not know whether he will work on his plot of ground
tomorrow or whether his life will be ruined by the capitalist crisis, if the brain worker
has no work today and does not know whether he will receive any tomorrow?

What can the bourgeois author write about, what source of inspiration can there be
for him, when the world is being precipitated once more - if not today, then tomorrow -
into the abyss of a new imperialist war?
 The present state of bourgeois literature is such that it is no longer able to create great
works of art. The decadence and disintegration of bourgeois literature, resulting from
the collapse and decay of the capitalist system, represent a characteristic trait, a
characteristic peculiarity of the state of bourgeois culture and bourgeois literature at the
present time. Gone never to return are the times when bourgeois literature, reflecting the
victory of the bourgeois system over feudalism, was able to create great works of the
period when capitalism was flourishing. Everything now is growing stunted - themes,
talents, authors, heroes.

In deathly terror of the proletarian revolution, fascism is wreaking its vengeance on

civilization, turning people back lo the most hideous and savage periods of human
history, burning on the bonfire and barbarously destroying the works of humanity’s best
minds.

Characteristic of the decadence and decay of bourgeois culture are the orgies of
mysticism and superstition, the passion for pornography. The “illustrious persons” of
bourgeois literature - of that bourgeois literature which has sold its pen to capital - are
now thieves, police sleuths, prostitutes, hooligans.

All this is characteristic of that section of literature which is trying to conceal the
decay of the bourgeois system, which is vainly trying to prove that nothing has
happened, that all is well in the “state of Denmark,” that there is nothing rotten as yet in
the system of capitalism. Those representatives of bourgeois - literature who feel the
state of things more acutely are absorbed in pessimism, doubt in the morrow, eulogy of
darkness, extolment of pessimism as the theory and practice - of art. And only a small
section - the most honest and far-sighted writers - are trying to find a way out along
other paths, in other directions, to link their destiny with the proletariat and its
revolutionary struggle.

The proletariat of capitalist countries is already forging the army of its writers, of its
artists - the revolutionary writers whose representatives we are glad to welcome here
today at the first Congress of Soviet Writers. The detachment of revolutionary writers in
capitalist countries is not large as yet, but it is growing and will continue to grow every
day, as the class struggle becomes more intense, as the forces of the world proletarian
revolution grow stronger.

We firmly believe that these few dozens of foreign comrades who are here today
represent the nucleus, the core of a mighty army of proletarian writers which will be
created by the world proletarian revolution in capitalist countries.
 That is how matters stand in capitalist countries. Not so with us. Our Soviet writer
derives the material for his works of art, his subject-matter, images, artistic language
and speech, from the life and experience of the men and women of Dnieprostroy, of
Magnitostroy. Our writer draws his material from the heroic epic of the Chelyuskin
expedition, from the experience of our collective farms, from the creative action that is
seething in all corners of our country.

In our country the main heroes of works of literature are the active builders of a new
life-working men and women, men and women collective farmers, Party members,
business managers, engineers, members of the Young Communist League, Pioneers.
Such are the chief types and the chief heroes of our Soviet literature. Our literature is
impregnated with enthusiasm and the spirit of heroic deeds. It is optimistic, but not
optimistic in accordance with any “inward,” animal instinct. It is optimistic in essence,
because it is the literature of the rising class of the proletariat, the only progressive and
advanced class. Our Soviet literature is strong by virtue of the fact that it is serving a
new cause - the cause of socialist construction.

Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls. What does this
mean? What duties does the title confer upon you?

In the first place, it means knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works
of art, not to depict it in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as “objective reality,” but to
depict reality in its revolutionary development.

In addition to this, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic portrayal
should be combined with the ideological remolding and education of the toiling people
in the spirit of socialism. This method in belles lettres and literary criticism is what we
call the method of socialist realism.

Our Soviet literature is not afraid of the charge of being tendencious.” Yes, Soviet
literature is tendencious, for in an epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be a
literature which is not class literature, not tendencious, allegedly nonpolitical.

And I think that every one of our Soviet writers can say to any dull-witted bourgeois,
to any philistine, to any bourgeois writer who may talk about our literature being
tendencious: “Yes, our Soviet literature is tendencious, and we are proud of this fact,
because the aim of our tendency is to liberate the toilers, to free all mankind from the
yoke of capitalist slavery.”
 To be an engineer of human souls means standing with both feet firmly planted on
the basis of real life. And this in its turn denotes a rupture with romanticism of the old
type, which depicted a non-existent life and non-existent heroes, leading the reader
away from the antagonisms and oppression of real life into a world of the impossible,
into a world of utopian dreams. Our literature, which stands with both feet firmly
planted on a materialist basis, cannot be hostile to romanticism, but it must be a
romanticism of a new type, revolutionary romanticism. We say that socialist realism is
the basic method of Soviet belles lettres and literary criticism, and this presupposes that
revolutionary romanticism should enter into literary creation as a component part, for
the whole life of our Party, the whole life of the working class and its struggle consist in
a combination of the most stern and sober practical work with a supreme spirit of heroic
deeds and magnificent future prospects. Our Party has always been strong by virtue of
the fact that it has united and continues to unite a thoroughly business-like and practical
spirit with broad vision, with a constant urge forward, with a struggle for the building of
communist society. Soviet literature should be able to portray our heroes; it should be
able to glimpse our tomorrow. This will be no utopian dream, for our tomorrow is
already being prepared for today by dint of conscious planned work.

One cannot be an engineer of human souls without knowing the technique of literary
work, and it must be noted that the technique of the writer’s work possesses a large
number of specific peculiarities.

You have many different types of weapons. Soviet literature has every opportunity of
employing these types of weapons (genres, styles, forms and methods of literary
creation) in their diversity and fullness, selecting all the best that has been created in this
sphere by all previous epochs. From this point of view, the mastery of the technique of
writing, the critical assimilation of the literary heritage of all epochs represents a task
which you must fulfill without fail, if you wish to become engineers of human souls.

Comrades, the proletariat, just as in other provinces of material and spiritual culture,
is the sole heir of all that is best in the treasury of world literature. The bourgeoisie has
squandered its literary heritage; it is our duty to gather it up carefully, to study it and,
having critically assimilated it, to advance further

To be engineers of human souls means to fight actively for the culture. of language,
for quality of production. Our literature does not as yet come up to the requirements of
our era. The weaknesses of our literature are a reflection of the fact that people’s
consciousness lags behind economic life - a defect from which even our Writers are not,
of course, free. That is why untiring work directed towards self-education and towards
improving their ideological equipment in the spirit of socialism represents an
indispensable condition without which Soviet writers cannot remold the mentality of
their readers and thereby become engineers of human souls.

We require a high mastery of artistic production; and in this connection it is

impossible to overrate the help that Maxim Gorky is rendering the Party and the
proletariat in the struggle for quality in literature, for the culture of language.

And so our Soviet writers have all the conditions necessary for them to produce
works which will be, as we say, consonant with our era, works from which the people of
our times can learn and which will be the pride of future generations.

All the necessary conditions have been created to enable Soviet literature to produce
works answering to the requirements of the masses, who have grown in culture. Only
our literature has the chance to be so closely connected with the readers, with the whole
life of the working population, as is the case in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The present congress is in itself peculiarly significant. The preparations for the congress
were conducted not only by the writers but by the whole country together with them. In
the course of these preparations one could clearly see the love and attention with which
Soviet writers are surrounded by the Party, the workers and the collective farm
peasantry, the consideration and at the same time the exacting demands which
characterize the attitude of our working class and collective farmers to Soviet writers.
Only in our country is such enhanced importance given to literature and to writers.

Organize the work of your congress and that of the Union of Soviet Writers in the
future in such a way that the creative work of our writers may conform to the victories
that socialism has won.

Create works of high attainment, of high ideological and artistic content.

Actively help to remold the mentality of people in the spirit of socialism.

Be in the front ranks of those who are fighting for a classless socialist society.
 Maxim Gorki: Soviet literature.

THE ROLE of the labour processes, which have converted a two-Legged animal into
man and created the basic elements of culture, has never been investigated as deeply
and thoroughly as it deserves. This is quite natural, for such research would not be in the
interests of the exploiters of labour. The latter, who use the energy of the masses as a
sort of raw material to be turned into money, could not, of course, enhance the value of
this raw material. Ever since remote antiquity, when mankind was divided into slaves
and slave-owners, they have used the vital power of the toiling mass in the same way as
we today use the mechanical force of river currents. Primitive man has been depicted by
the historians of culture as a philosophizing idealist and mystic, a creator of gods, a
seeker after “the meaning of life.” Primitive man has been saddled with the mentality of
a Jacob Böhme, a cobbler who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the
seventeenth century and who occupied himself between whiles with philosophy of a
kind extremely popular among bourgeois mystics; Böhme preached that “Man should
meditate on the Skies, on the Stars and the Elements, and on the Creatures which do
proceed from them, and likewise on the Holy Angels, the Devil, Heaven and Hell.

You know that the material for the history of primitive culture was furnished by
archaeological data and by the reflections of ancient religious cults, while the
elucidation and study of these survivals have been carried on under the influence of
Christian philosophical dogma, to which even atheist historians have been no strangers.
This influence may be clearly traced in Spencer’s theory of super-organic evolution, and
not in his works alone, but also in those of Frazer and many others. But no historian of
primitive and ancient culture has used the material of folklore, the unwritten
compositions of the people, the testimony of mythology, which, taken as a whole, is a
reflection in broad artistic generalizations of the phenomena of nature, of the struggle
with nature and of social life.

It is very hard to conceive of a two-legged animal, who spent all his strength in the
struggle for existence, thinking in abstraction from the processes of labour, from
questions of clan and tribe. It is difficult to conceive an Immanuel Kant, barefoot and
clothed in an animal’s skin, cogitating on the “thing-in-itself.” Abstract thought was
indulged in by man at a later period, by that solitary man of whom Aristotle in his
Politics said: “Man outside society is either a god, or a beast.” Being a beast, he
sometimes compelled recognition as a god, but as a beast, he served as the material for
the creation of numerous myths about beast-like men, just as the first men who learned
to ride on horseback furnished the basis for the centaur myth.

The historians of primitive culture have completely waived the clear evidence of
materialist thought, to which the processes of labour and the sum total of phenomena in
the social life of ancient man inevitably gave rise. These evidences have come down to
us in the shape of fables and myths in which we hear the echo of work done in the
taming of animals, in the discovery of healing herbs, in the invention of implements of
labour. Even in remote antiquity men dreamed of being able to fly in the air, as can be
seen from the legend about Phaethon, about Daedalus and his son Icarus, and also from
the fable of the “magic carpet.” Men dreamed of speedier movement over the earth –
hence the fable of the “seven-league boots.” They learned to ride the horse. The desire
to navigate rivers faster than the current led to the invention of the oar and the sall. The
striving to kill enemy and beast from a distance prompted the invention of the sling, of
the bow and arrow. Men conceived the possibility of spinning and weaving a vast
amount of fabric in one night, of building overnight a good dwelling, even a “castle,”
that is, a dwelling fortified against the enemy. They created the spinning wheel, one of
the most ancient instruments of labour; they created the primitive hand loom, and also
the legend of Vassllisa the Wise. It would be possible to produce many more proofs to
show that all these ancient tales and myths contained a purpose, to show how far-
sighted were the fanciful, hypothetical, but already technological thoughts of primitive
man, which could rise to such hypotheses of our own day as that of using the force of
the earth’s revolution around its own axis, or of breaking up the polar ice. All the myths
and legends of ancient times find their consummation, as it were, in the Tantalus myth.
Tantalus stands up to his neck in water, he is racked by thirst, but unable to allay it –
there you have ancient man amid the phenomena of the outer world, which he has not
yet learned to know.

I do not doubt that you are familiar with ancient legends, tales and myths, but I
should like their fundamental meaning to be more deeply comprehended. And their
meaning is the aspiration of ancient working people to lighten their toll, increase its
productiveness, to arm against four-footed and two-footed foes, and also by the power
of words, by the device of “exorcism” and “incantation,” to gain an influence over the
elemental phenomena of nature, which are hostile to men. The last-named is particularly
important, as it betokens how deeply men believed in the power of the word, and this
belief is accounted for by the obvious and very real service of speech in organizing the
social relations and labour processes of men. “Incantations” were even used to influence
the gods. This is quite natural, as all the ancient gods lived on the earth, bore human
shape and behaved like men; they were benevolent to the humble, hostile to the
recalcitrant; like men, they were envious, vengeful, ambitious. The fact that man created
god in his own image goes to prove that religious thought had its origin not in the
contemplation of nature, but in social strife. We are quite justified in believing that the
raw material for the fabrication of gods was furnished by the “illustrious men” of
ancient days. Thus, Hercules, the “hero of labour,” the “master of all trades,” was
ultimately exalted to the seat of the gods, Olympus.

God, in the conception of primitive man, was not an abstract concept, a fantastic
being; but a real personage, armed with some implement of labour, master of some
trade, a teacher and fellow-worker of men. God was the artistic generalization of the
achievements of labour, and the “religious” thought of the tolling masses should be
placed in quotation marks, since it represented a purely artistic creativeness. In
idealizing the abilities of men, and having, as it were, a premonition of their mighty
future development, mythology was, fundamentally speaking, realistic. Beneath each
flight of ancient fancy it is easy to discover the hidden motive, and this motive is always
the striving of men to lighten their labour. It is obvious that this striving originated
among men who had to perform physical labour. And it is obvious, too, that god would
not have made his appearance and would not have continued so long in the daily lives of
men of toil, had he not been so doubly useful to the lords of the earth, the exploiters of
labour. The reason why god is so quickly and easily failing into disuse in our country is
just because the reason for his existence has disappeared – the need to vindicate the
power of man over man, for man should be only a fellow-worker, a friend, companion,
teacher to his fellow-man, not the master over his mind and will.

But the more powerful and masterful the slave-owner grew, the higher in the heavens
did the gods rise, and among the masses there appeared a desire to combat god,
personified in the image of Prometheus, the Esthonian Kalevi and other heroes, who
saw god as a hostile lord of lords.

Pre-Christian pagan folklore has not preserved any clearly expressed indications of
the existence of thought on “fundamentals,” on “first causes,” on the “thing-in-itself.” In
general it has left no signs of that way of thinking which was organized into a system in
the fourth century before our era by the “prophet of Attica,” Plato, the founder of a
philosophy of abstract aloofness from the processes of labour, from the conditions and
phenomena of life. It is well known that the church recognized Plato as a forerunner of
Christianity. It is well known that the church, from its inception, stubbornly fought
against the “survivals of paganism” – survivals which are a reflection of the materialist
outlook of labour. It is well known that as soon as the feudal lords began to feel the
strength of the bourgeoisie, there arose the idealist philosophy of Bishop Berkeley, the
reactionary nature of which was exposed by Lenin in his militant book against
idealism [1]. It is well known that on the eve of the French Revolution, at the end of the
eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie availed itself of the materialist idea in order to fight
feudalism and its inspirer-religion, but that, having conquered its class foe, and in fear
of its new enemy, the proletariat, it immediately reverted to the idealist doctrine and
sought the protection of the church. During the course of the nineteenth century, the
bourgeoisie, feeling with varying degrees of alarm how iniquitous and precarious was
its power over the masses of the toiling people, tried to vindicate its existence by the
philosophy of criticism, positivism, rationalism, pragmatism and other attempts to
distort the purely materialist thought emanating from the processes of labour. These
attempts revealed, one by one, their powerlessness to “explain” the world, and in the
twentieth century we find that the reputed leader of philosophical thought is the idealist
Bergson, whose teaching, by the way, is “favourable to the Catholic religion.” Here you
have a definite admission of the need for regression. Add to this the present. wailings of
the bourgeoisie concerning the disastrous portent of the irresistible growth of technique,
which has created fantastic riches for the capitalists, and you will obtain a pretty clear
idea of the degree of intellectual pauperism to which the bourgeoisie has fallen, and of
the necessity of destroying it as a historical relic which, in decay, is contaminating the
world with the cadaveric poison of its decomposition. The cause of intellectual
impoverishment is always to be found in a refusal to recognize the basic meaning of real
phenomena, in an escape from life through fear of it, or through an egotistical craving
for quiet, through social indifference created by the sordid and loathsome anarchism of
the capitalist state.

***

There is every ground for hoping that when the history of culture will have been
written by the Marxists, we shall see that the role of the bourgeoisie in the process of
cultural creation has been greatly exaggerated, especially in literature, and still more so
in painting, where the bourgeoisie has always been the employer, and, consequently, the
law-giver. The bourgeoisie has never had any proclivity towards the creation of culture
– if this term be understood in a broader sense than as a mere steady development of the
exterior material amenities of life and the growth of luxury. The culture of capitalism is
nothing but a system of methods aimed at the physical and moral expansion and
consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie over the world, over men, over the
treasures of the earth and the powers of nature. The meaning of the process of cultural
development was never understood by the bourgeoisie as the need for the development
of the whole mass of humanity. It is a well known fact that, by virtue of bourgeois
economic policy, every nation organized as a state became hostile to its neighbours,
while the less well organized races, especially the coloured peoples, served the
bourgeoisie as slaves, disfranchised to an even greater extent than the bourgeoisie’s own
white-skinned slaves.

The peasants and the workers were deprived of the right to education – the right to
develop the mind and will towards comprehension of life, towards altering the
conditions of life, towards rendering their working surroundings more tolerable. The
schools trained and are still training no one but obedient servants of capitalism, who
believe in its inviolability and legitimacy. The need for “educating the people” was
talked of and written about, and the progress of literacy was even boasted of, but in
actual fact the working people were only being split up, imbued with the idea of
incompatible distinctions between races, nations and religions. This doctrine is used to
justify an inhuman colonial policy, which gives an ever wider scope to the insane lust
for profit, to the idiotic greed of shopkeepers. This doctrine has been upheld by
bourgeois science, which has even sunk so low as to assert that a negative attitude on
the part of people of the Aryan race towards all others “has grown organically out of the
metaphysical activity of the whole nation” – although it is quite obvious that if “the
whole nation” has become infected with an infamous animal hostility towards the
coloured races or the Semites, this infection has been engrafted on it in an actual,
physical sense by the foul work of the bourgeoisie, wielding fire and sword. If we
remember that the Christian church has turned this work into a symbol of the suffering
of the loving son of god, the grim humour of it is exposed with disgusting transparency.
We may note in passing that Christ, “the son of god,” is the only “positive type” created
by ecclesiastical literature, and this type of one who vainly seeks to reconcile all life’s
contradictions is an especially striking proof of this literature’s creative feebleness.

The history of technical and scientific discoveries abounds in cases where even the
growth of technical culture has been resisted by the bourgeoisie. These cases are
commonly known, as is also the motive for such resistance, viz., the cheapness of labour
power. It will be argued that technique, nevertheless, has developed and reached
considerable heights. This is indisputable. But this is due to the fact that technique itself
augurs, as it were, and suggests to man the possibility and necessity of its further
development.

I will certainly not attempt to deny that in its time – for example, in regard to
feudalism – the bourgeoisie constituted a revolutionary force and contributed to the
growth of material culture, inevitably sacrificing in the process the vital interests and
forces of the working masses. However, the case of Fulton shows that the bourgeoisie of
France, even after its victory, did not at once appreciate the importance of steamships in
the development of trade and for self-defence. And this is not the only case which
testifies to the conservatism of the bourgeoisie. It is important that we should grasp the
fact that this conservatism, concealing as it did the anxiety of the bourgeoisie to
strengthen and safeguard its power over the world, placed all kinds of restrictions in the
way of the intellectual growth of the working people; that this nevertheless led in the
end to the birth of a new power in the world – the proletariat, and that the proletariat has
already created a state where the intellectual growth of the masses is unrestricted. There
is only one sphere in which the bourgeoisie has accepted all technical innovations
instantly and without demur – that is, in the manufacture of instruments for human
destruction. Nobody, I believe, has yet noted the influence which the manufacture of
weapons of self-defence for the bourgeoisie has had on the general trend of
development in the metal-working industry.

Social and cultural progress develops normally only when the hands teach the head,
after which the head, now grown more wise, teaches the hands, and the wise hands once
again, this time even more effectually, promote the growth of the mind. This normal
process of cultural growth in men of labour was in ancient times interrupted by causes
of which you are aware. The head became severed from the hands, and thought from the
earth. Speculative dreamers made their appearance among the mass of active men; they
sought to explain the .world and the growth of ideas in the abstract, independent of the
labour processes, which change the world in conformity with the aims and interests of
man. Their function at first was, probably, that of organizing labour experience; they
were just such “illustrious men,” heroes of labour, as we see now in our own day, in our
country. And then, among these people, the source of all social ills was born – the
temptation of one to wield power over many, the desire to lead an easy life at the
expense of other men’s labour, and a depraved, exaggerated notion of one’s own
individual strength, a notion that was originally fostered by the acknowledgment of
exceptional abilities, although these abilities were but a concentration and reflection of
the labour achievements of the working collective-the tribe or clan. The severance of
labour from thought is attributed by historians of culture to the whole mass of primitive
mankind, while the breeding of individualists is even credited to them as a positive
achievement. The history of the development of individualism is given with splendid
fullness and lucidity in the history of literature. I again call your attention, comrades, to
the fact that folklore, i.e., the unwritten compositions of tolling man, has created the
most profound, vivid and artistical1y perfect types of heroes. The perfection of such
figures as Hercules, Prometheus, Miku1a, Selyaninovich, Svyatogor, of such types as
Doctor Faustus, Vassilisa the Wise, the ironically lucky Ivan the Simple and finally
Petrushka, who defeats doctor, priest, policeman, devil and death itself – all these are
images in the creation of which reason and intuition, thought and feeling have been
harmoniously blended. Such a blending is possible only when the creator directly
participates in the work of creating realities, in the struggle for the renovation of life.

It is most important to note that pessimism is entirely foreign to folklore, despite the
fact that the creators of folklore lived a hard life; their bitter drudgery was robbed of all
meaning by the exploiters, while in private life they were disfranchised and defenceless.
Despite all this, the collective body is in some way distinguished by a consciousness of
its own immortality and an assurance of its triumph over all hostile forces. The hero of
folklore, the “simpleton,” despised even by his father and brothers, always turns out to
be wiser than they, always triumphs over all life’s adversities, just as did Vassilisa the
Wise.

If the notes of despair and of doubt in the meaning of terrestrial existence are
sometimes to be heard in folklore, such notes are clearly traceable to the influence of the
Christian church, which has preached pessimism for two thousand years, and to the
ignorant scepticism of the parasitic petty bourgeoisie whose existence lies between the
hammer of capital and the anvil of the working folk. The significance of folklore stands
out most vividly when we compare its fantasy, founded on the achievements of labour,
with the dull and ponderous fantasy of ecclesiastical literature and the pitiful fantasy of
chivalrous romances.

The epic and the chivalrous romance are a creation of the feudal nobility; their hero is
the conqueror. It is well known that the influence of feudal literature was never
particularly great.

Bourgeois literature began in ancient times, with the Egyptian “Tale of the Thief.” It
was continued by the Greeks and the Romans. It emerged again in the epoch of
knighthood’s decay to take the place of the chivalrous romance. This is a genuinely
bourgeois literature, and its principal hero is the rogue, the thief, later on the detective,
and then again the thief – this time the “gentleman burglar.”

From the figure of Till Eulenspiegel, created at the end of the fifteenth century, that
of Simplicissimus in the seventeenth century, Lazarillo de Tormes, Gil Blas, the heroes
of Smollett and Fielding, down to the “Dear Friend” of Maupassant, to Arsène Lupin, to
the heroes of “detective” literature in present-day Europe, we can count thousands of
books the heroes of which are rogues, thieves, assassins and agents of the criminal
police. This is what constitutes genuine bourgeois literature, reflecting most vividly the
real tastes, the interests and the practical “morals” of its consumers. “It’s an ill wind that
blows nobody good” – and on the subsoil of this literature, generously manured with
every conceivable form of vulgarity, including the vulgarity of middle-class “common
sense” have sprung up such remarkable artistic generalizations as, for instance, the
figure of Sancho Panza, the Till Eulenspiegel of De Coster, and many others of equal
worth. One of the best proofs of the deep class interest shown by the bourgeoisie in the
portrayal of crime is the well-known case of Ponson du Terrail; when this writer, after
many volumes, had at length concluded his story of Rocambole with the death of his
hero, the readers organized a demonstration outside Terrails apartment, demanding that
the novel be continued. Such success had never fallen to the lot of any of the eminent
writers in Europe. The readers received several more volumes of “Rocambole” who was
resurrected morally as well as physically. This is a crude example, but one that has its
parallels in all bourgeois literature, of how a cut-throat and robber is converted into a
good bourgeois. The bourgeoisie read about the dexterity of thieves and the cunning of
murderers with the same relish as they read about the astuteness of detectives. Detective
fiction is to this very day the favourite spiritual food of well-fed persons in Europe.
Moreover, in penetrating into the environment of the semi-starved working man, this
type of literature has been and is one of the causes retarding the growth of c1ass
consciousness; it arouses sympathy for the adroit thief, it engenders the will to steal, to
carry on the guerrilla warfare of isolated individuals against bourgeois property, and, by
emphasizing the paltry value which the bourgeoisie sets on working c1ass life, it
stimulates an “increase of murders and other crimes against the person. The fervent
attachment of Europe’s middle classes to crime fiction is corroborated by the plentiful
supply of authors who write such fiction and by the wide circulation which their books
enjoy.

It is an interesting fact that in the nineteenth century, when petty knavery assumed
heroic and imposing dimensions on the stock exchange, in parliament and in the press,
the rogue as a hero of fiction was supplanted by the detective who, in a world full of
patent crimes against the working people, showed remarkable ingenuity in unravelling
mysterious crimes-of the imagination. It is, of course, no accident that the celebrated
Sherlock Holmes should have made his appearance in England, and it is even less of an
accident that side by side with this detective genius appeared the “gentleman burglar,”
who dupes the clever detectives. Those who interpret this change of heroes as a “play of
the imagination” will be mistaken. What the imagination creates is prompted by the
facts of real life, and it is governed not by baseless fantasy, divorced from life, but by
very real causes – such as those, for example, which impel the “Left” and Right
politicians in France to play football with the corpse of the “gentleman burglar”
Stavisky, while endeavouring to finish the game “in a draw.”
 Of all the forms of artistic creation in words, the most powerful in its influence on
people is admitted to be the drama, which reveals the emotions and thoughts of the
heroes in living action on the stage. If we trace the progress of European drama from the
days of Shakespeare, it descends to the level of Kotzebue, Nestor Kukolnik, Sardou and
still lower, while the comedy of Molière declines to that of Scribe; in our country, after
Griboyedov and Gogol, it disappears almost entirely. Since art depicts people, it might
perhaps be assumed that the decline of the dramatic art points to the decay of strong,
boldly chiselled characters, to the fact that “great men” have vanished from the scene.

However, such types are still living a thriving existence to this day as, for instance,
the scurrilous Thersites in bourgeois journalism, the misanthrope Timon of Athens in
literature, the moneylender Shylock in politics, not to mention Judas, the betrayer of the
working class, and many another figure which has been splendidly portrayed in the past.
From the seventeenth century to our day this category has grown in quantity and
become still more loathsome in quality. The adventurer John Law is a whippersnapper
in comparison with adventurers of the type of Oustric, Stavisky, Ivar Kreuger and
similar super-swindlers of the twentieth century. Cecil Rhodes and other agents in the
field of colonial pillage are worthy counterparts of Cortez and Pizarro. The oil kings, the
steel magnates and the like are much more appalling and more criminal than Louis XI
or Ivan the Terrible. The little republics of South America contain figures no less lurid
than the condottieri of Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ford is not the sole
caricature of Robert Owen. The sinister figure of Pierpont Morgan has no equal in the
past, if we except the ancient monarch into whose throat molten gold was poured.

The types enumerated above do not, of course, exhaust the list of diverse “great” men
produced by the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These people
cannot be denied strength of character, a genius for counting money, plundering the
world, and engineering international massacres to increase their personal wealth; one
cannot deny their amazing shamelessness or the inhumanity of their diabolically vile
work. The realistic criticism and the high artistic literature of Europe have passed by
these people without, apparent1y, so much as noticing their existence.

Neither in drama nor in fiction do we find the types of the banker, the manufacturer
or the politician depicted with the strength of art which literature has displayed in giving
us the type of the “superfluous man.” Nor has literature paid heed to the tragic and all
too common fate of the masters and creators of bourgeois culture – the men of science,
the artists, the inventors in the technical field. It has failed to notice the heroes who
fought to liberate nations from the heel of the foreigner, the dreamers of a brotherhood
of man, people like Thomas More, Campanella, Fourier, SaintSimon and others. This is
not meant as a reproach. The past is not irreproachable, but there is no sense in
reproaching it. It should be studied.

What has brought the literature of Europe to the state of creative impotence which it
has revealed in the twentieth century? The liberty of art, the freedom of creative though
have been upheld with passionate redundance; all sorts of arguments have been
produced to show that literature can exist and develop without reference to classes, that
it is not dependent on social politics. This was bad policy, for it imperceptibly impelled
many men of letters to constrict their observations of real life, within narrow bounds, to
abstain from a broad and many-sided study of life, to shut themselves up “in the solitude
of their soul,” to confine themselves to a fruitless form of “self-cognition” by way of
introspection and arbitrary thought, altogether detached from life. It has turned out,
however, that people cannot be grasped apart from real life, which is steeped in politics
through and through. It has turned out that man, no matter what crotchety ideas he may
fabricate in regard to himself, still remains a social unit, and not a cosmic one, like the
planets. And moreover it has turned out that individualism, which turns into
egocentrism, breeds “superfluous people.” It has often been noted that the best, most
skilfully and convincingly drawn hero of European literature in the nineteenth century
was the type of “superfluous person.” Literature halted in its development to depict this
type of person. After the hero of labour – the man who, though technically unarmed,
nevertheless had a premonition of his triumphant strength; after the feudal conqueror –
the man who understood that it was easier to take things away than to make them; after
the bourgeoisie’s favourite swindler, its “teacher in the art of life,” the man who sensed
that to steal and defraud was easier than to work, literature halted in its development,
paying no heed to the glaring figures of the founders of capitalism, the oppressors of
mankind, who are far more inhuman than the feudal nobles, bishops, kings and tsars.

Two groups of writers should be distinguished in the bourgeois literature of Europe.

One group extolled and entertained its class, e.g., Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Braddon,
Marryat, Jerome, Paul de Kock, Paul Féval, Octave Feuillet, Georges Ohnet, Georges
Samarov, Julius Stinde, and hundreds of similar authors. All these are typical “good
bourgeois” writers not possessing much talent, but dexterous and trivial, like their
readers. The other group, numbering not more than a few dozen, consists of those great
writers who created critical realism and revolutionary romanticism. They are all
apostates, the “prodigal sons” of their class, aristocrats ruined by the bourgeoisie or
scions of the petty bourgeoisie who tore themselves away from the suffocating
atmosphere in which their class lived. The books of this latter group of European writers
possess a twofold and indisputable value for us: firstly, as works of literature which are
models of technical execution, secondly, as documents which explain the process of the
bourgeoisie’s development and decay, documents drawn up by apostates of their class,
but which elucidate its life, traditions and deeds in a critical light.

It is not my purpose in this report to give a detailed analysis of the role of critical
realism in European literature of the nineteenth century. Its essence may be summed up
in the struggle against the conservatism of the feudal lords resuscitated by the big
bourgeoisie, a struggle waged by organizing democracy – i.e., the petty bourgeoisie –
on the basis of liberal and humanitarian ideas, this organizing of democracy being
understood by many writers and most readers as a necessary defence both against the
big bourgeoisie and against the ever more powerful onslaught of the proletariat.

***

You are aware that the exceptionally and unprecedentedly powerful growth of
Russian literature in the nineteenth century repeated – although somewhat late – all the
moods and tendencies of western literature, and in turn influenced it. The special feature
of Russian bourgeois literature may be said to be the profusion of types of “superfluous
people,” including such altogether original types, unfamiliar to European readers, as the
“playboy,” e.g., Vassily Buslayev in folklore, Fedor Tolstoy, Michael Bakunin and
others in history – the type of “contrite noble” in literature, the crank and “cross-
headed” person in life.

As in the West, our literature developed in two directions. There was the line of
critical realism, represented by Von-Vizin, Griboyedov, Gogol, etc., down to Chekhov
and Bunin, and the line of purely middle-class literature represented by Bulgarin,
Massalsky, Zatov, Golitsynsky, Vonlyarlyarsky, Vsevolod Krestovsky, Vsevolod
Solovyev down to Leikin, Averchenko and so on.

When the lucky swindler with his ill-gotfen wealth took his place beside the feudal
conqueror, our folklore gave the rich man a companion in the shape of “Ivan the
Simple,” an ironical type of personage who achieves riches and even kingship with the
aid of a hunchback horse, which takes the place of the good fairy of romance.

The church, striving to reconcile the slave to his fate and to strengthen its power over
his mind, sought to comfort him by creating heroes of meekness and longsuffering,
martyrs for “Christ’s sake.” Lt created “hermits,” banishing those for whom it had no
use to the wilderness, the forest and the monastery.
 The more the ruling class split up, the smaller did its heroes become. There came a
time when the “simpletons” of folklore, turning into Sancho Panza, Simplicissimus,
Eulenspiegel, grew cleverer than the feudal lords, acquired boldness to ridicule their
masters, and without doubt contributed to the growth of that state of feeling which, in
the first half of the sixteenth century, found its expression in the ideas of the “Taborites”
and the peasant wars against the knights.

The real history of the toiling people cannot be understood without a knowledge of
their unwritten compositions, which have again and again had a definite influence on
the making of such great works as, for instance, Faust, The Adventures of Baron
Münchhausen, Pantagruel and Gargantua; the Till Eulenspiegel of de Coster, Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound, and numerous others. Since olden times folklore has been in
constant and quaint attendance on history. It has its own opinion regarding the actions
of Louis XI and Ivan the Terrible and this opinion sharply diverges from the appraisal
of history, written by specialists who were not greatly interested in the question as to
what the combat between monarchs and feudal lords meant to the life of the toiling
people. The grossly coercive “propaganda” employed to urge the cultivation of the
potato has inspired a number of legends and popular beliefs attributing its origin to the
copulation of the devil with a harlot; this is a deviation in the direction of ancient
barbarism, consecrated by the foolish church idea that “Christ and the apostles did not
eat potatoes.” But this same folklore in our days has raised Vladimir Lenin to the level
of a mythical hero of ancient times, equal to Prometheus.

Myth is invention. To invent means to extract from the sum of a given reality its
cardinal idea and embody it n imagery that is how we got realism. But if to the idea
extracted from the given reality we add – completing the idea, by the logic of hypothesis
– the desired, the possible, and thus supplement the image, we obtain that romanticism
which is at the basis of myth and is highly beneficial in that it tends to provoke a
revolutionary attitude to reality, an attitude that changes the world in a practical way.

Bourgeois society, as we see, has completely lost the capacity for invention in art.
The logic of hypothesis has remained, and acts as a stimulus only in the field of the
sciences, based on experiment. Bourgeois romanticism, based on individualism, with its
propensity for fantastic and mystic ideas, does not spur the imagination or encourage
thought. Sundered, detached from reality, it is built not on convincingness of imagery
but almost exclusively on the “magic of words,” as we see in Marcel Proust and his
votaries. The bourgeois romanticists, from Novalis onward, are people of the type of
Peter Schlemihl, “the man who lost his shadow,” and Schlemihl was created by
Chamisso, a French émigré who wrote in Germany in German. The literary man of the
contemporary West has also lost his shadow, emigrating from realities to the nihilism of
despair, as can be seen from Louis Céline’s book, A Journey to the End of the Night;
Bardomu the hero of this book, has lost his country, despises mankind, call his mother
“bitch” and his mistresses “carrion,” is indifferent to all crimes, and, having no grounds
for “joining” the revolutionary proletariat, is quite ripe for the acceptance of fascism.

Turgenev’s influence on the writers of the Scandinavian peninsula is an established

fact; Leo Tolstoy’s influence on Count Pahlen, Réné Bazin, Estaunier, Thomas Hardy
(in his Tess of the D’Urbervilles) and various other writers in Europe is commonly
acknowledged. And the influence of Dostoyevsky has been and remains an especially
strong one. This influence was admitted by Nietzsche, whoose ideas form the basis of
the fanatical creed and practice of fascism. To Dostoyevsky belongs the credit of having
painted with the most vivid perfection of word portraiture a type of egocentrist, a type
of social degenerate in the person of the hero of his Memoirs from Underground. With
the grim triumph of one who is insatiably taking vengeance for his personal misfortunes
and sufferings, for his youthful enthusiasms, Dostoyevsky in the figure of his hero has
shown the depths of whining despair that are reached by the individualist from among
the young men of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who are cut off from real life.
This type of his combines within himself the most characteristic traits of Friedrich
Nietzsche and of the Marquis Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans Against the Grain,
Le Disciple of Paul Bourget; and Boris Savinkov, who made himself the hero of his
own composition, Oscar Wilde and Artsybashev’s “Sanine” and many another social
degenerate created by the anarchic influence of inhuman conditions in the capitalist
state.

As narrated by Vera Figner, Savinkov argued exactly like the decadents: “There is no
morality, there is only beauty. And beauty is the free development of persona1ity, the
unrestrained unfolding of all that lies within its soul.”

We know quite well with what rottenness the soul of bourgeois personality is
burdened!

In a state founded on the senseless and humiliating sufferings of the vast majority of
the people, it is fitting that the creed of irresponsible self-will in word and action should
be the guiding and vindicating principle. Such ideas as “man is a despot by nature,” that
he “likes to be a tormentor,” that he is “passionately fond of suffering,” and that he
envisages the meaning of life and his happiness precisely in self-will, in unrestricted
freedom of action, that only this self-will will bring him his “greatest advantage,” and
“let the whole world perish so long as I can drink my tea” – such are the ideas
capitalism has inculcated and upheld through thick and thin.

Dostoyevsky has been called a seeker after truth. If he did seek, he found it in the
brute and animal instincts of man, and found it not to repudiate, but to justify. Yes, the
animal instincts in mankind cannot be extirpated so long as bourgeois society contains
such a vast number of influences which arouse the beast in man. The domesticated cat
plays with the mouse it has caught, because the muscles of the beast, the hunter of small
swift prey, demand that it should do so; this play is a training of the body. The fascist
who, kicking a worker under the chin, dislodges his head from the spinal column, is not
a beast, but something incomparably worse – he is a mad animal that should be
destroyed, the same heinous brute as the White officer who cuts stripes and stars out of
the skin of the Red Army man.

It is difficult to understand just what Dostoyevsky was seeking for, but towards the
close of his life he found that that talented and most honest of Russian men, Vissarion
Belinsky, was “the most noisome, obtuse and disgraceful thing in Russian life,” that
Constantinople must be taken away from the Turks, that serfdom is conducive to “ideal
moral relations between the landowners and the peasants,” and finally acknowledged as
his preceptor Constantine Pobedonostsev, one of the grimmest figures of nineteenth
century Russian life. Dostoyevsky’s genius is indisputable. In force of portrayal his
talent is equal perhaps only to Shakespeare. But as a personality, as a “judge of men and
the world,” he is easy to conceive in the role of a medieval inquisitor.

The reason why I have devoted so much space to Dostoyevsky is because without the
influence of his ideas it would be almost impossible to understand the volte face which
Russian literature and the greater part of the intelligentsia made after 1905-06 from
radicalism and democracy towards safeguarding and defending bourgeois “law and
order.”

Dostoyevsky’s ideas became popular soon after his speech on Pushkin, after the
breaking up of the Narodnaya Volya party, which attempted to overthrow the autocracy.
Before the proletariat, grasping the great and simple truth of Lenin, had shown its stern
countenance to the world in 1905, Peter Struve prudently began to persuade the
intelligentsia, like a maiden who had chanced to lose her innocence, to enter into legal
marriage with the elderly capitalist. A marriage broker by profession, a bookworm
absolutely devoid of original ideas, he issued the call in 1901 of “Back to Fichte” to the
idea of subservience to the will of the nation personified by the shopkeepers and the
landowners, while in 1907 there was published under his editorship and with his
collaboration a collection of articles entitled Landmarks, where the following sentence,
quoted word for word, may be round: “We should be grateful to the government for de
fending us with bayonets against the wrath of the people.”

These vile words were uttered by the democratic intelligentsia in the days when the
bailiff of the landowners, the minister Stolypin, was hanging dozens of workers and
peasants daily. The underlying idea in Landmarks was a reiteration of the fanatical idea
expressed in the seventies by that inveterate conservative, Constantine Leontiev:
“Russia must be chilled,” i.e., all the sparks of social revolution must be stamped out of
her. Landmarks, this renegades act of the “Constitutional-Democrats,” won the high
approval of the old renegade Leo Tikhomirov, who called it “the sobering of the
Russian soul and the revival of conscience.”

***

The period from 1907 to 1917 was a time when irresponsible ideas ran riot, when
Russian men of letters enjoyed complete “freedom of creation.” This liberty found its
expression in propaganda of all the conservative ideas of the Western bourgeoisie –
ideas which gained currency after the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth
century and which flared up again at regular intervals after 1848 and 1871. It was
announced that “the philosophy of Bergson marks a tremendous step forward in the
history of human thought,” that Bergson “replenished and deepened the theory of
Berkeley,” that “the systems of Kant, Leibnitz, Descartes, and Hegel are dead systems,
and the works of Plato, like the sun, shine above them in eternal beauty” – this of Plato,
who founded the most pernicious of all fallacies of thought, utterly detached from hard
reality, which is continually unfolding in all its aspects in the processes of labour and
creation.

Dmitri Merezkovski, a writer of influence in his time, cried:

“Come what may – ‘tis all the same!

Long they’ve wearied of the game,
The three Fates, the eternal Parces –
Dust to dust and ash to, ashes!”

Sologub, following Schopenhauer, and in obvious dependence on Baudelaire and “the

damned,” gave a remarkably lucid picture of “the cosmic fatuity of the existence of
personality,” and though he plaintively moaned over this in rhyme, he nevertheless went
on living a comfortable, bourgeois existence, and in 1914 threatened the Germans to
destroy Berlin as soon as “the snow vanishes from the valleys.” The gospel of “Eros in
politics,” of “mystical anarchism” was preached. Crafty Vassily Rozanov preached
eroticism, Leonid Andreyev wrote nightmare stories and plays, Artsybashev selected as
the hero of his novel a lascivious two legged goat in trousers, and altogether, the decade
of 1907-17 fully deserves to be branded as the most shameful and shameless decade in
the history of the Russian intelligentsia.

As our democratic intellectuals were less disciplined by history than those in the
West, the process of their “moral” disintegration, of their intellectual impoverishment,
was more rapid in our country. But this process is common to the petty bourgeoisie of
all countries and unavoidable for every intellectual who lacks the strength and
determination to throw in his lot with the mass of the proletariat, whose historical
mission is to change the world for the common benefit of all honestly working people.

It should be added that Russian literature, like its Western counterpart, neglected the
landowners, the promotors of industry and the financiers in the period preceding the
revolution, although this category of person offered far more colourful and original
types in our country than in the West. Russian literature overlooked such nightmare
types of landowner as, for instance, the famous Marlame Saltychikha, General Izmailov,
together with scores and hundreds of similar characters. Gogol’s caricatures and
sketches in his book Dead Souls are not so very characteristic of landed, feudal Russia.
The Korobochkas, Manilovs and Petukhs, the Sobakyeviches and Nozdrevs influenced
the policy of tsarist autocracy merely by the passive fact of their existence; as blood-
suckers of the peasantry, they are not very typical. There were other masters and artists
of the blood-sucking art, people of dreadful moral aspect, voluptuaries and aesthetes of
cruelty. Their evil deeds have not been noted by artists of the pen, even by the greatest
of them, even those who professed their love for the muzhik. There is an abundance of
characteristic traits that sharply distinguish our big bourgeoisie from that of the West,
the explanation being that our historically young bourgeoisie, pre-eminent1y of peasant
extraction, got rich more quickly and easily than did the historically quite elderly
bourgeoisie of the West. Our industrialist, untrained by the severe competition of the
West, retained almost up to the twentieth century the characteristic traits of the “crank”
and the “playboy,” induced perhaps by his own astonishment at the silly ease with
which he accumulated millions. One of these, Peter Gubonin, is described by the well-
known Tibetan doctor, P. A. Badmayev, in his booklet Wisdom in the Russian People,
published in 1917. This entertaining booklet, urging young people to “abjure the
writings of the devil which tempt them with the empty words of liberty, equality and
fraternity,” gives us the following information about Gubonin, the son of a mason and
himself a mason by trade, who became a railroad constructor:
 “Most venerable old officials of the period of Russia’s emancipation,
who still remember the times of Gubonin, relate the following:
Gubonin, appearing at the Ministry in high, tarpolished boots, in a
caftan, with a bag of silver, greeted the janitors and messengers in the
hall, drew silver out of his bag and gave generously to everybody,
bowing low, that they might not forget their- Peter Ionovich. Then he
proceeded to the different Departments and Sub-Departments, where
he left each official a sealed envelope – each according to hisrank –
calling them all by their Christian names and 1ikewise bowing to
them. The more exalted personages he greeted and kissed, calling
them benefactors of the Russian people, and was quickly admitted to
the presence of His Excellency. After Peter Ionovich’s departure from
the Ministry, everybody rejoiced. It was a real holiday, such as could
only be compared with Christmas or Easter Day. Each one counted
what he had received, smiled, wore a gay and cheerful look and was
thinking how to spend the rest of the day and night until the following
morning. The janitors in the hall were proud of Peter Ionovich, who
came from their midst; they called him clever and good, and asked
each other how much each had received, but they all concealed it, not
wishing to compromise their benefactor. The petty officials whispered
among themselves with deep feeling that kind Peter Ionovich had not
forgotten them either – so clever, agreeable and honest was he. The
high officials, including His Excellency, loudly proclaimed what a
lucid, statesmanlike mind he had, what great benefits he was bringing
to the people and the state, meriting some distinction. He ought to be
invited they said, to the conference dealing with railroad questions, as
he is the only clever man concerned with these matters. And indeed,
he was invited to the most important conferences, where only
distinguished personages and engineers were present, and at such
conferences the decisive voice was that of Gubonin.”

This narrative sounds ironical, nut it is actually written in sincere praise of an order of
society under which the proud watchword of the bourgeoisie – “Liberty, equality,
fraternity” – proved to be nothing more than an empty phrase.

All that I have Said about the creative impotence of the bourgeoisie, as reflected in its
literature, may seem to be excessively gloomy; and may expose me to the charge of
“tendencious” exaggeration. But facts are facts, and I see them as they are.

It would be silly and even criminal to underestimate the enemy’s strength. We are all
perfectly well aware of the strength of his industrial technique-particularly that of the
war industries, which sooner or later will be directed against us, but will inevitably
provoke a world-wide social revolution and destroy capitalism. Military experts in the
West utter loud warnings to the effect that war will involve the entire rear, all the
population of the warring countries. It may be presumed that the numerous lower
middle class of Europe who have not yet altogether forgotten the :horrors of the 1914-
18 massacre and who are scared by the dread inevitability of a new and more horrible
carnage, will at last realize who it is that will profit by the coming social catastrophe,
who is the criminal that periodically and for the sake of his own nefarious gain
exterminates millions of people that they will realize this, and help the proletarians to
smash capitalism. We may presume this, but we cannot rely upon its happening, for the
jesuit and the craven, the leader of the philistines, the Social-Democrat, is still living.
We must firmly rely on the growth of the proletariats revolutionary sense of justice, but
it is better still for us to be sure of our own strength and to develop it ceaselessly. It is
one of the most essential duties of literature to develop the revolutionary self-
consciousness of the proletariat, to foster its love for the home it has created, and to
defend this home against attack.

***

Once, in ancient times, the unwritten artistic compositions of the working people
represented the sole organizer of their experience, the embodiment of ideas in imagery
and the spur to the working energy of the collective body. We should try to understand
this. The object our country has set itself is to ensure the equal cultural education of all
units, the equal acquaintance of all its members with the victories and achievements of
labour, aspiring to convert the work of men into the art of controlling the forces of
nature. We are more or less familiar with the process of the economic-and therefore
political-stratification of people, with the process by which the labouring people’s right
to the free development of their minds is usurped by others. When the task of
interpreting the world became the affair of priests, the latter could arrogate it to
themselves only by giving a metaphysical explanation of phenomena and! of the
resistance offered by the elemental forces of nature to the aims and energies of men of
labour. This criminal process of excluding, debarring millions of people from the work
of understanding the world, initiated in antiquity and continuing down to our own day,
has resulted in hundreds of millions of people, divided by ideas of race, nationality and
religion, remaining in a state of the most profound ignorance, of appalling mental
blindness, in the darkness of superstition and. prejudices of every kind; The
Communist-Leninist Party, the workers and peasants government of the. Union of
Socialist Soviets, which have destroyed capitalism throughout. the length and breadth of
tsarist Russia, which have handed over political power to the workers and the peasants,
and which are organizing a free c1assless society, have made it the object of their
daring, sage and indefatigable activity to free the working masses from the age-old yoke
of an old and outworn history, of the capitalist development of culture, which today has
glaringly exposed all its vices and its creative decrepitude. And it is from the height of
this great aim that we honest writers of the Union of Soviets must examine, appraise and
organize our work.

We must grasp the fact that it is the toll of the masses which forms the fundamental
organizer of culture and the creator of all ideas, both those which in the course of
centuries have minimized the decisive significance of labour – the source of our
knowledge-and those ideas of Marx, Lenin and Stalin which in our time are fostering a
revolutionary sense of justice among the proletarians of all countries, and in our country
are lifting labour to the level of a power which serves as the foundation for the creative
activity of science and art. To be successful in our work, we must grasp and fully realize
the fact that in our country the social1y organized labour of semi-literate workers and a
primitive peasantry has in the short space of ten years created stupendous values and
armed itself superbly for defence against an enemy attack. Proper appreciation of this
fact will reveal to us the cultural and revolutionary power of a doctrine which unites the
whole proletariat of the world.

All of us – writers, factory workers, collective farmers still work badly and cannot
even fully master everything that has been made by us and for us. Our working masses
do not yet quite grasp the fad that they are working only for themselves. This feeling is
smouldering everywhere, but it has not-yet blazed up into a mighty and joyous flame.
But nothing can kindle until it has reached a certain temperature, and nobody ever was
so splendidly capable of raising the temperature of labour energy as is the Party
organized by the genius of Vladimir Lenin, and the present-day leader of this Party.

As the principal hero of our books we should choose labour, i.e., a person, organized
by the processes of labour, who in our country is armed with the full might of modern
technique, a person who, in his turn,. so organizes labour that it becomes easier and
more productive, raising it to the level of an art. We must learn to understand labour as
creation. Creation is a concept which we writers use all too freely, though we hardly
possess the right to do so. Creation is a degree of tension reached in the work of the
memory at which the speed of its working draws from the reserves of knowledge and
impressions the most salient and characteristic facts, pictures, details, and renders them
into the most precise, vivid and intelligible words. Our young literature can not boast of
possessing this quality. The stock of impressions, the sum of knowledge of our writers
is not large, and there is no sign of any special anxiety to extend or enrich it.

The principal theme of European and Russian literature in the nineteenth century was
personality, in antithesis to society, the state and nature. The main reason which
prompted personality to set itself against bourgeois society was an abundance of
negative impressions, contradictory to class ideas and social traditions. Personality felt
keenly that these impressions were smothering it, retarding the process of its growth,
but it did not fully realize its own responsibility for the triviality, the baseness, the
criminality of the principles on which bourgeois society was built. Jonathan Swift was
one in all Europe, but Europe’s bourgeoisie considered that this satire struck at England
alone. Generally speaking, .rebellious personality, in criticizing the life of its society,
seldom and barely realized its own responsibility for society’s odious practices. And
still more seldom was the prime motive for its criticism of the existing order a deep and
correct understanding of the significance of social and economic causes; more often
criticism was provoked either by a sense of the hopelessness of one’s life in the narrow
iron cage of capitalism, or by a desire to avenge the failure of one’s life and its
humiliations. And it can be said that when personality turned to the working mass, it did
not do so in the interests of the mass, but in the hope that the working class, by
destroying bourgeois society, would ensure it freedom of thought and liberty of action. I
reiterate: .the main and fundamental theme of pre-revolutionary literature was the
tragedy of a person to whom life seemed cramped, who felt superfluous in society,
sought therein a comfortable place for himself, failed to find it, and suffered, died, or
reconciled himself to a society that was hostile to him, or sank to drunkenness or
suicide.

In our Union of Socialist Soviets, there should not, there cannot be superfluous people.
Every citizen enjoys wide freedom for the development of his abilities, talents and
faculties. One thing only is demanded of personality: Be honest in your attitude to the
heroic work of creating a classless society.

In the Union of Socialist Soviets the workers and peasants government has called upon
the whole mass of the population to help build a new culture – and it follows from this
that the responsibility for mistakes, for hitches, for spoilage, for every display of
middle-class meanness, for perfidy, duplicity and unscrupulousness lies on each and all
of us. That means our criticism must really be self-criticism; it means that we must
devise a system of socialist morality as a regulating factor in our work and our
relationships.

When narrating facts which mark the intellectual growth of the factory workers and
the transformation of the age old proprietor into a collective farm member, we writers
tend to become mere chroniclers of the bare facts, doing scant justice to the emotional
process of these transformations.
 We are still poor observers of reality. Even the landscape of the country has changed;
gone is its motley poverty – the bluish patch of oats, and, alongside of it, the black strip
of ploughed land, the golden ribbon of rye, the green band of wheat, strips of land
overgrown with weeds – the whole many-coloured sadness of universal dismemberment
and disseverance. In our days, vast expanses of land are coloured a single mighty hue.
Above the village and the country town looms not the church, but huge buildings of
public usage; giant factories glitter with a million panes of glass, while the toy-like little
heathen churches of ancient times speak to us eloquently of the giftedness of our people
as expressed in church architecture. the new landscape that has so sharply changed the
aspect of our land has not found a place in literature.

We are living in an epoch of deep-rooted changes in the old ways of life, in an epoch
of mans awakening to a sense of his own dignity, when he has come to realize himself
as a force which is actually changing the world. Many are amused to read that people
with names like Svinukhin, Sobakin, Kuteinikov, Popov, Svishchev, etc.,[2] ” have
changed them to such names as Lensky, Novy, Partisanov, Dedov, Stolyarov, etc. This
is not funny, for it marks precisely the growth of human dignity; it shows how people
are refusing to bear a name or nickname that is humiliating and reminiscent of the
harassed servile past of their grandfathers and their fathers.

Our literature is not sufficiently attentive to the outwardly petty but intrinsically
valuable signs which show that people are seeing themselves in a new light, to the
processes by which the new Soviet citizen is developing. Svinukhin quite possibly took
his name of Lensky, not from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but by association with the
mass murder of the workers on the Lena Goldfields in 1912; Kuteinikov may have
really been a partisan, while Sobakin, whose grand father, a serf, may have been
exchanged for a dog, really feels himself “new.” To change one’s name before the
revolution one had to present a petition in the “sovereign name” of the tsar and when a
certain Pevtsov [3] asked for his surname to be changed to that of his mother and
grandmother, Avdotin, the rescript “traced” on the petition was: “Mentally deficient.”

Recently I heard this fact: a sailor in the German navy, a man with a historic name, a
descendant of the Decembrist Volkonsky, became a fascist.

“Why?” he was asked.

“Because the officers have been forbidden to strike us,” he replied. Here is a glaring
example of how an hereditary aristocrat, a man of the “blue blood,” loses his sense of
personal dignity.
 The growth of the new man can be seen with especial c1arity among children, yet
children remain quite outside literature’s sphere of observation. Our writers seem to
consider it beneath their dignity to write about children and for children.

I believe I will not be mistaken in saying that fathers are beginning to show more care
and tenderness for their children, which, in my view, is quite natural, as children for the
first time in the whole life of mankind are now the inheritors not of their parents money,
houses and furniture, but of a real and mighty fortune-a socialist state created by the
labour of their fathers and mothers. Never before have children been such intelligent
and stern judges of the past, and I quite believe the fact that was related to me of an
eleven year-old tubercular little girl who said to the doctor in the presence of her father;
pointing her finger at him: “It is his fault that I am ill. Till he was forty years old, he
wasted his health on all sorts of bad women, and then married mama. She is only
twenty-seven, she is healthy, and he – you can see how miserable he is, and I have taken
after him.”

There is every reason to expect that such reasoning among children will be no
uncommon thing.

Reality is giving us ever more “raw material” for artistic generalizations. But neither
the drama nor the novel has yet given an adequately vivid portrayal of the Soviet
woman, who is distinguishing herself as a free agent in all spheres where the new
socialist life is being built. It is even noticeable that playwrights are endeavouring to
write as few women’s parts as possible. It is hard to understand why. Though woman in
our country is the social equal of man, and though she is successfully proving the
diversity of her endowments and the breadth of her capacities, this equality is all too
frequently and in many ways external and formal. The man has not yet forgotten, or else
he has prematurely forgotten, that for centuries woman has been brought up to be a
sensual plaything and a domestic animal, fitted to play the part of “housewife.” This old
and odious debt of history to half the earth’s inhabitants ought to be paid off by the men
of our country first and foremost, as an example to all other men. And here literature
should try to depict the work and mentality of woman in such a manner as to raise the
attitude towards her above the general level of accepted middle-class behaviour, which
is borrowed from the poultry yard.

Further, I deem it necessary to point out that Soviet literature is not merely a literature
of the Russian language. It is an All-Union literature. Since the literatures of our
fraternal republics, distinguished from ours only by language, live and work in the light
and under the wholesome influence of the same ideas which unite the whole world of
the working people that capitalism has torn asunder, we obviously have no right to
ignore the literary creation of the national minorities simply because there are more of
us than of them. The value of art is gauged not by quantity but by quality. If we can
point to such a giant as Pushkin in our past history, it does not follow from this that the
Armenians, Georgians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and other peoples are incapable of producing
great masters of literature, music, painting and architecture. It should be remembered
that the process by which the entire mass of the toiling people is being re-born to
“honest human life,” to the free creation of a new history, to the creation of a socialist
culture, is developing rapidly throughout the length and breadth of the Union of
Socialist Republics. We can see already that, with each advance, this process brings out
more powerfully the latent abilities and talents that are concealed in this mass of a
hundred and seventy mll1ion people.
I deem it needful, comrades, to communicate to you a letter I have received from a Tatar
writer:

The great October Revolution has given us writers of the opressed and
backward nations unlimited possibilities, including the possibility of
appearing in Russian literature with our works, which, it is true, are as
yet far from perfect. As you know, we writers of the national
minorities, whose works are printed in the Russian language, already
number tens and even hundreds. That is one side of the question on
the other hand, Soviet literature in Russian is read today not only by
the Russian masses, hut by the working people of all nationalities in
our Soviet Union; millions of the rising generation of all the
nationalities are being brought up on it. Thus, Soviet proletarian
literature in the Russian language is already ceasing to be the
exclusive literature of Russian speaking people and people of Russian
origin, and is gradually acquiring an international character even in its
form. This important historical process advances new and unexpected
problems and new demands.

It is highly regrettable that not all writers, critics and editors

understand this. That is why so called approved literary opinion in the
great centres continues to regard us as an “ethnographical exhibit.”
Not all publishing houses like to print us. Some of them often make us
feel, when taking our manuscripts, that we are “overhead charges” or a
“compulsory quota” for them, that they are “deliberately allowing a
rebate on the Party’s national policy.” These “noble .gestures” quite
justly off end our sense of international unity and feeling of human
dignity. The critics, on the appearance of the work, will at best let fall
a few “kind words” for the author and the book, again not so much on
their merits as out of “respect” for the Leninist-Stalinist national
policy of the Party. This does not educate us either; on the contrary,
on some less experienced comrades it has a “demobilizing” and
demoralizing effect. And then, after a single edition, usually of five
 thousand copies, all of which are bought up by lovers of .the exotic
and the rare in the big cities, we are relegated to the archives. This
practice, apart from the bad moral and material effects it has for us,
blocks our way to the mass reader and leads to inevitable national
restriction. We very naturally would like to hear about our
achievements, if any, about our shortcomings and errors (of which we
have more than others), so as to, be able to avoid them in future and
we should like to become accessible to the mass reader.

Representatives of literature from all the Union republics and autonomous regions
will probably be ready to subscribe to this letter. The historians and critics of our
literature should pay heed to this letter and begin to work in such a way as may impress
upon people in our country that, though they may belong to different tribes and speak
different tongues, each and every one of them is nevertheless a citizen of the first
socialist fatherland in the world. As for the rebuke levelled at our critics, we must admit
it to be just. Our criticism, especially the newspaper kind, which is most widely read by
writers, is untalented, scholastic and uninstructed in regard to current realities. The
worthlessness of mere book-and-newspaper knowledge is especially glaring in these
days, when real life is changing so quickly, when there is such an abundance of varied
activity. Without possessing or elaborating a single guiding critico-philosophical idea,
employing one and the same quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin, the critics hardly
ever judge themes, characters and relations between people by facts which are obtained
from a direct observation of the rushing current of life. There is much in our country
and in our work which Marx and Engels could not, of course, have foreseen. Critics tell
the author: “That is wrong, because our teachers have said so and so in this connection.”
But they are incapable of saying: “That is wrong, because the facts of reality contradict
the author’s statements.” Of all the borrowed ideas which critics use, they have,
apparently, quite forgotten that most valuable idea expressed by Engels: “Our teaching
is not dogma; it is a guide to action.” Criticism is not sufficiently vital, flexible and
alive, and finally the critic cannot teach the author to write simply, vividly,
economically, for he himself writes long-windedly and obscurely, and, which is still
worse, either perfunctorily or with excessive fervour – the latter when he entertains
personal sympathies for the author or is associated with the interests of a clique that is
afflicted with “leaderism,” that contagious philistine disease.

“Leaderism” is a disease of the times, resulting from the lowered vitality of

philistinism, from the sense of its inevitable downfall in the combat between capitalist
and proletarian, and from fear of destruction – a fear which drives the philistine to the
side he has long been accustomed to regard as physically the strongest, to the side of the
employer, the exploiter of other people’s labour, the plunderer of the world. Inwardly,
“leaderism” is the fruit of effete, impotent and impoverished individualism; outwardly,
it takes the form of such festering sores as, for instance, Ebert, Noske, Hitler and,
similar heroes of the capitalist world. Here, where we are creating a socialist world,
such sores are of course impossible. But we still have a few pustules left among us as a
heritage from philistinism – people who are incapable of appreciating – the essential
distinction between “leaderism” and leadership, although the distinction is quite
obvious: leadership, placing a high value on men’s energy, points the way to the
achievement of the best practical results with the minimum expenditure of forces, while
“leaderism” is the individualistic striving of the philistine to overtop his comrade, which
can be done easily enough given a mechanical dexterity, an empty head and an empty
heart.

Too often the place of critics is taken by semi-literate reviewers, who merely
bewilder authors and wound their feelings, but are incapable of teaching them anything.
They fall to notice attempts to resuscitate and restore to currency certain ideas of
“Narodnik” literature, and finally-which is most important-they are not interested in the
growth of literature in the various regions, let alone the whole Soviet Union. It should
he mentioned also that critics do not deal with the public statements of authors in
answer to the question of “how they write,” although these statements call for critical
attention.

Self-criticism is necessary, comrades. We are working before the eyes of the

proletariat, which, as it grows more and more literate, is constantly raising its demands
on our art, and, incidentally, on our social behaviour.

Communism of ideas does not coincide with the nature of our actions and the mutual
relations existing among us – relations in which a very grave part is played by philistine
menta1ity, finding vent in envy, avidity, trivial gossip, and mutual disparagement.

We have written and continue to write a good deal about philistinism, but no
embodiment of philistinism in a single person, in a single image, has been given. It is
just in a single person that it must be portrayed, and this must be done as powerfully as
in such universal types as Faust, Hamlet, etc.

I would remind you that the philistines are a numerous class of parasites who, while
producing nothing, endeavour to consume and devour as much as they can-and they do
devour it. Battening on the peasantry and the working class, gravitating always toward
the paws of the big bourgeoisie, and sometimes, by force of pressure from without,
passing over to the side of the proletariat, bringing into its midst anarchism, egocentrism
and all the bana1ity which is the historical concomitant. of the philistine, banality of
thought which feeds exclusively on routine facts and not the inspirations of labour –
philistinism, in so far as it has thought and does think at all, has always propagated and
upheld the philosophy of individual growth along the line of least resistance, has sought
a more or less stable equilibrium between the two forces. The philistine’s attitude
towards the proletariat is most forcibly illustrated by the fact that even the half beggarly
peasant, the owner of a miserable plot of land, despised the factory worker, who was
destitute of all property except his hands. That the proletariat had a head as well, the
philistine noticed only when the proletarians hands came into revolutionary action
outside the factory.

Not all weeds are harmful or useless, for many of them yield healing toxins.
Philistinism produces only pernicious toxin. If the philistine did not feel himself such an
insignificant detail in the capitalist machine, he would not strive so persistently and with
such futility to prove his significance and the freedom of his thoughts, his will, his right
to existence, and he would not have produced in the course of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries so many “superfluous people,” “contrite nobles,” people of the type
that is “neither peacock nor crow.”

In the Union of Soviets, philistinism has been displaced, driven out of its lair, out of
hundreds of provincial towns, has scattered everywhere and, as we know, has penetrated
even into Lenin’s Party, whence it is forcibly ejected during every Party purge.
Nevertheless, it remains and acts like a microbe; causing shameful maladies.

The Party leadership of literature must be thoroughly purged of all philistine

influences. Party members active in literature must not only be the teachers of ideas
which will muster the energy of the proletariat in all countries for the last battle for its
freedom; the Party leadership must, in all its conduct, show a morally authoritative
force. This force must imbue literary workers first and foremost with a consciousness of
their collective responsibility for all that happens in their midst. Soviet literature, with
all its diversity of talents, and the steadily growing number of new and gifted writers,
should be organized as an integral collective body, as a potent instrument of socialist
culture.

The Writers Union is not being created merely for the purpose of bodily uniting all
artists of the pen, but so that professional unification may enable them to comprehend
their corporate strength, to define with all possible clarity their varied tendencies,
creative activity, guiding principles, and harmoniously to merge all aims in that unity
which is guiding all the creative working energies of the country.
 The idea, of course, is not to restrict individual creation, but to furnish it with the
widest means of continued powerful development.

It should be realized that critical realism originated as the individual creation of

“superfluous people,” who, being incapable of the struggle for existence, not finding a
place in life, and more or less clearly realizing the aimlessness of personal being,
understood this aimlessness merely as the senselessness of all phenomena in social life
and in the whole historical process.

Without in any way denying the broad, immense work of critical realism, and while
highly appreciating its formal achievements in the art of word painting, we should
understand that this realism is necessary to us only for throwing light on the survivals of
the past, for fighting them, and extirpating them.

But this form of realism did not and cannot serve to educate socialist individuality,
for in criticizing everything, it asserted nothing, or else, at the worst, reverted to an
assertion of what it had itself repudiated.

Socialist individuality, as exemplified by our heroes of labour, who represent the

flower of the working class, can develop only under conditions of collective labour,
which has set itself the supreme and wise aim of liberating the workers of the whole
world from the man-deforming power of capitalism.

Life, as asserted by socialist realism, is deeds, creativeness, the aim of which is the
uninterrupted development of the priceless individual faculties of man, with a view to
his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his health and longevity, for the
supreme joy of living on an earth which, in conformity with the steady growth of his
requirements, he wishes to mould throughout into a beautiful dwelling place for
mankind, united into a single family.

***

Having said so much about the shortcomings of our literature, it is my duty to note its
merits and attainments. I have neither space nor time here to point out the vital
distinction between our literature and that of the West – that is a lengthy and laborious
task, and will partially be dealt with by Comrade Radek in his report. I will only say
what is quite clear to any dispassionate judge – namely, that our literature has
outstripped the West in novelty of theme, and would remind you that many of our
writers are appreciated in the west even more highly than in their own country. In 1930,
in an article published in the book, On Literature, I spoke in no uncertain terms and with
great joy about our literary attainments. Four years of arduous work have elapsed since
then. Does this work warrant my giving a higher appraisal of our literature’s
achievements today? It is warranted by the high estimation in which many of our books
are held by our principal reader – the worker and collective farmer. You know these
books, therefore I will not name them. I will only say that we already have a strong
group of artists of the pen, a group that we can acknowledge as the “leading” force in
the development of literature.

This group unites the most talented Party writers with the non-Party writers, and the
latter are becoming “Sovietist” not in word but in deed, assimilating ever more
profoundly the common meaning for all humanity of the heroic work which is being
done by the Party and the workers and peasant’s Soviet government. It should not be
forgotten that it took Russian bourgeois literature nearly a hundred years reckoning
from the end of the eighteenth century-to take up a commanding position in life and
influence it in some measure. Soviet revolutionary literature has achieved that influence
in the space of fifteen years.

The high standard demanded of literature, which is being rapidly remoulded by life
itself and by the cultural revolutionary work of Lenin’s Party, is due to the high
estimation in which the Party holds the importance of the literary art. There has never
been a state in the world where science and literature enjoyed such comradely help,
such care for the raising of professional proficiency among the workers of art and
science.

The proletarian state must educate thousands of first class “craftsmen of culture,”
“engineers of the soul.” This is necessary in order to restore to the whole mass of the
working people the right to develop their intelligence, talents and faculties – a right of
which they have been deprived everywhere else in the world. This aim, which is a fully
practicable one, imposes on us writers the need of strict responsibility for our work and
our social behaviour. This places us not only in the position, traditional to realist
literature, of “judges of the world and men,” “critics of life,” but gives us the right to
participate directly in the construction of a new life, in the process of “changing the
world.” The possession of this right should impress every writer with a sense of his duty
and responsibility for all literature, for all the aspects in it which should, not be there.

The Union of Soviet Writers unites 1,500 persons. In ratio to the total population, we
thus have one writer to every hundred thousand readers. This is not much; the
inhabitants of the Scandinavian peninsula at the beginning of this century had one writer
to every 230 readers. The population of the Union of Socialist Republics is constant1y
and almost dally demonstrating its giftedness, but we should not think that we shall
soon have 1,500 writers of genius. Let us hope for fifty. Not to be deceived, let us say
five writers of genius and forty-five very talented ones. I think this figure will do for a
start. In the balance, we get people who are still insufficiently attentive to realities, who
organize their material poorly all work on it carelessly. To this balance should be added
the many hundreds of candidates to the union, and further, hundreds of “beginners” in
all the republics and regions. Hundreds of them are writing, dozens are appearing in
print. During 1933-34, in different towns from Khabarovsk and Komsomolsk to Rostov
and Stalingrad, Tashkent, Voronezh, Kabardino-Balkaria, Tiflis, etc., about thirty
symposiums and almanacs have appeared, filled with the works of local beginners.

It is the duty of critics to judge this work. They still fall to notice it, though it is high
time they did so. This work, whatever its merits, is evidence of a profound cultural
process going on in the mass of the people. In reading these books, you feel that the
authors of the different verses, stories and plays are worker correspondents and village
correspondents. I believe that we have at least ten thousand young people who aspire to
work in literature. Needless to say, the future Literary Institute will not be able to absorb
a tenth part of this host.

Now I will ask:

Why has the Congress of Writers been organized, and what aims will the future union
pursue? If it is only for the professional welfare of literary workers, it was hardly worth
making such a great fuss about. It seems to me that the union should make its aim not
only the professional interests of writers, but the interests of literature in general. The
union should in some degree assume guidance over the army of beginners, should
organize it, distribute its forces to different tasks and teach these forces to work on
material derived both from the past and from the present.

Work is being done in our country to bring out a History of Factories and Plants. It
appears that it has been a very difficult job to get highly skilled writers to help in this
work. So far excel1ent work has been done only by the poetess Shkapskaya and by
Maria Levberg; the others not only do not touch the raw material, but do not find time
even to edit what has already been prepared.

We do not know the history of our past. It is proposed to publish a history of the
former ducal and border towns, from the time of their foundation down to our own day,
and a beginning has already been made. This work is to describe to us, in sketches and
narrative form, life in feudal Russia, the colonial policy of the princes of Muscovy and
the tsars, the development of commerce and industry; it will present a picture of the
exploitation of the peasantry by the prince, the waywode, the merchant, the petty trader,
the church, and conclude the whole with the organization of the collective farms – the
act of complete and real emancipation of the peasantry from the “power of the earth,”
from the yoke of ownership.

We should know the past history of the federal republics. To these and many other
collective works hundreds of literary beginners can be attracted, and this work will
furnish them with the widest scope for self-education, for raising their proficiency
through collective work on raw material and through mutual self-criticism.

We should know about everything that existed in the past – not in the way it has
already been narrated, but as this illuminated: by the teaching of Marx, Lenin, Stalin,
which is being realized by work in the factories and on the farms, work which is
organized and guided by a new force in history – by the will and reason of the
proletariat of the Union of Socialist Republics.

Such, in my view, is the task of the Writers Union. Our congress should be not only a
report to our readers, not only a parade of our endowments; it should take upon itself the
organization of literature, the training of young writers on work of nation-wide
significance, aimed at a full knowledge of our country’s past and present.

Notes

1. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

2. In Russian, these names are derived from words meaning pig, dog, priest, fistula, etc. The adopted
names are derived from the words new, partisan, carpenter, etc. – Ed.

3. From the word “singer.” – Ed.

 Karl Radek: Literatura mundial contemporánea y las tareas del
Arte Proletario.

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.

1. World Literature and the War

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.

2. World Literature and the October Revolution

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 be 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 USSR
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 USSR.

“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 USSR. 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.

3. The Crisis of Capitalism and the Split in World Literature

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 USSR 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 USSR 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.”

4. Between Proletarian Literature and Fascism

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 USSR.

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.”

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’ined the capitalist system to the working
 classes of Europe they’ 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’ 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 USSR 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 USSR, 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 USSR, 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 ...

5. Fascism and Literature

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 YCLers 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 YCLers are the pride of our country, that all the great construction
works are YCL works. Anyone who has been on our great construction jobs will have
seen that YCLers are working everywhere – from workers at the bench to engineers.
Our YCL 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 be
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.

6. The Birth of Revolutionary and Proletarian Literature

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 USSR 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 USSR – 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 USSR. 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 USSR. 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 USA 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 bourgeoisie.

Proletarian art cannot content itself with the class struggle alone. It should describe
the processes that are going on in the classes themselves – their way of life, their
psychology, their development, their strivings. This proletarian literature does not yet
do, for as yet the proletariat is only forming its fighting cadres; it has not yet mastered
all those problems which: it will have to solve in the future. But even of this
rudimentary literature of the proletariat, at which bourgeois aesthetes may turn up their
noses, we have a right to say: It is a reflection of the struggle, and it will develop in
proportion as the struggle of the revolutionary proletariat grows, deepens and broadens.

In particular we must welcome the fact that the proletarian writers of capitalist
countries and our Soviet proletarian writers have turned their attention to describing the
struggle of the colonial proletariat and peasantry. The Chinese stories of Oscar Erdberg
and of Agnes Smedley, by which the news of the hard struggle of the Chinese workers
and peasants is conveyed to the world proletariat, as well as Japanese proletarian
literature, have already done much to bring the world proletariat into closer touch with
the struggle of its Japanese and Chinese brothers.

This literature – the direct production of proletarian writers – is being aided by a

number of revolutionary writers, who are breaking away from the bourgeoisie and
beginning to draw closer to the proletariat. There is hardly a single capitalist country in
which this process cannot be observed. It is enough to mention the evolution of the
German author, Ludwig Renn. This writer’s past life had been connected with the army
and the nobility. His book on the war was received with great acclaim by bourgeois
pacifist literature. After this he made a step forward and sketched the evolution of a
soldier who, disillusioned by all the ideas of the bourgeoisie and of Social-Democracy,
seeks for a way to communism. Renn himself joined the ranks of the Communist Party
of Germany, and at the present time he is a prisoner in one! of the concentration camps
of German fascism. We send him fraternal greetings. In America such a great pre-war
writer as Dreiser has openly joined the side of the proletariat. Dos Passos is coming
closer to us in bis last works, The Forty-Second Parallel and 1919. He cannot yet take
in the whole picture of capitalist reality, reflect the significance of the struggle of the
proletariat. Meanwhile he portrays the collapse of capitalism and the growth of
revolutionary elements among the petty bourgeoisie.

Petty-bourgeois revolutionary writers, whose path of evolution is towards the

proletariat, encounter tremendous obstacles on their way, for the writer who comes over
to the side of the proletariat must re-cast his views of life, must make a new evaluation
of life and appraise its processes as a whole. When André Gide passed over to the side
of the militant proletariat, the bourgeois press of France declared that this meant his
death as a writer, since not one of those writers who have gone over to the side of the
proletariat has been able to develop his talent or to produce major works of art. It wrote
that one more publicist was coming to revolution, but not a creative writer, not a creator
of works of art. These predictions of the bourgeois press are completely refuted,
however, by the case of Romain Rolland. Romain Rolland began to write a novel after
the war, when he still held a humanist viewpoint and had not yet made up his mind to
join the side of revolution. He depicted a pure woman battling with the problems with
which life confronted her, and unable to solve these problems in solitude. Romain
Rolland broke off this novel half-way, leaving his heroine in a hopeless situation. And
when, after years of wavering, Romain Rolland joined the side of the proletariat, when
he made the courageous decision to break with the vacillations of the past and to declare
war on the world “where the wind howls over the ruins,” the new standpoint not only
did not impoverish the talent of the great French writer, but provided him himself with
an avenue of escape from those contradictions which had been gnawing his heart, from
those contradictions which had pinioned the wings of his genius, enabled him to
complete his cycle with a novel which represents a great artistic reflection of that
struggle through which the French intelligentsia, standing at the crossroads, is now
living.

And – most noteworthy of all – Romain Rolland does not give us a cheap daub, mere
eulogy of the new point of view. He gives us an honest, truthful picture of the struggle,
a picture of those great inner perplexities which hinder the intelligentsia from joining
the. revolutionary ranks. Romain Rolland, in his latest work. shows how the remnants of
bourgeois individualism constitute the main obstacle in the path of the intelligentsia
which is coming to revolution. And he shows the surmounting of these obstacles, in
battling with which the revolutionary intellectual, who joins the ranks of the proletariat
in its fight against fascism, not only does not lose his individuality, but develops it, by
placing it at the service of the class which alone is capable of dealing a death-blow to
the decaying capitalist world.

Romain Rolland’s latest novel, which places him on a higher level than that attained
in Jean-Christophe, marks the beginning of a great revolutionary literature, created in
the capitalist countries by persons who have found their way from petty-bourgeois
humanitarianism to the revolutionary proletariat. Romain Rolland, himself the epitome
of the great traditions of French humanitarian culture and one of the greatest writers of
the old world, has shown by this novel that there is a way leading from the old shores to
the new, that writers who have grown up in the old world are able – if they sincerely
come over to the side of the proletariat, if they endeavour to think out the position in
which humanity is placed – to render this humanity supreme service in the most difficult
and decisive years.

And in capitalist countries the way in which the literature of the coming revolutionary
battles will be formed is by the reciprocal action of those writers who have passed over
from the camp of the bourgeoisie to that of the proletariat, with the writers who have
arisen from the ranks of the militant proletariat itself. This reciprocal action should take
the following form: the young proletarian authors should learn from the older writers to
master artistic form, should try, through the medium of their works, to understand, to
sense the processes which are going on outside the ranks of the proletariat – above all,
the processes which are going on in the ranks of the peasantry, in the ranks of the urban
petty-bourgeoisie, in the ranks of the intelligentsia; while those writers whose life has
not been linked with the life and struggle of the proletariat should be able, with the aid
of the proletarian writers, to draw closer to that force which is to play a decisive role in
the struggle – to free mankind. This mutual rapprochement cannot be reached without a
struggle of ideas.

It is the proletariat’s duty to tell its writers, and those who wish to become its writers,
the whole truth about their works.

The proletariat must take under its control the literature which aspires to serve it. This
control ought to consist of fraternal criticism, of an open and honest attitude towards the
works of its friends. The proletariat does not have the same attitude towards literature as
towards a toy or a luxury. It regards it as a weapon of struggle. But at the same time the
brother proletarian parties in capitalist countries cannot fail to understand that literature
is a special weapon of struggle. It can only be created if there is a careful, solicitous
attitude towards the revolutionary writer. It can only be created if it is understood that
the education of a revolutionary writer requires time, that it requires patience, that it
requires the greatest care.

Ups and downs are inevitable in a revolutionary writer. And the Party of the
proletariat, while taking a critical attitude to everything in the writer’s work which does
not conform to the ideas and interests of the proletariat, should remember that it is very
easy to drop a writer, but very difficult to educate him.

Speaking of the main obstacles and hindrances which stand in the way of these older
writers when they are coming over to our side, I pointed to two factors. In the first
place, many of these writers do not see the revolutionary forces in their own countries.
In the second place, they shun the struggle. But if we attentively examine this approach
of petty-bourgeois writers to us revolutionary writers, if we examine the process of their
evolution, we may observe other hindrances besides; these must be clarified, for the
process of their approach to us is a painful one. They cannot be dragooned, and the
process cannot be accelerated artificially. But, on the other hand, these writers will not
overcome their perplexities until they realize how groundless are the causes that keep
them from us.

In France these questions are being discussed both in novels and in the most
interesting forms of publicist literature, in which artists who are coming over to our side
explain their perplexities. This demands an analysis of the most friendly and fraternal
kind.

Let us take Clerambault by Romain Rolland, a book written at a time when Romain
Rolland could not make up his mind to join us, a book in which all his doubts are set
forth; or let us analyse the book Destinies of the Age by our friend, the outstanding
French author, Jean-Richard Bloch, who is present here at our congress; or let us take
the articles of Fernandez, and you will see what is hindering these writers, or what
hindered them at certain stages of their development, from coming over to our side.

If we except those causes of which I have already spoken – pessimistic appraisal of

the state of revolutionary forces in the country, if we do not consider unwillingness to
struggle – what, fundamentally, is the navel-string that connects these wavering authors
with the other camp? I take the most reflective, the most thinking writers, and I do not
take them in order to start a dispute, but, on the contrary, in order to understand them
and help them to understand us.
 What is the idea that we must help them to overcome? It is the idea of individualism,
an idea which may be expressed as follows: “I, a writer, a worker of the mind, cannot
submit to any discipline. All parties mean blinkers. All parties tie down the artist. I want
to be a free lance fighting for the revolution. I cannot be a soldier in the army of
revolution.” This idea, formulated With varying degrees of clarity, represents the core
of those perplexities felt by all wavering writers who sincerely want to come over to us.

And of course this perplexity will not be made to vanish by our arguments; arguments
can only help. It will vanish when the battle breaks out and when the writer sees that he
cannot take part in the battle except as a soldier, that there is no such thing as a fighting
army which is not knit together by an inner unity and an inner discipline. Then the
writer will grasp this. But we should make his road to us easier by speaking with him on
this question, so vital to him, with the utmost frankness.

It goes without saying that the revolution and the Party do not exist in order to ensure
to all members complete liberty. Engels said that there is nothing more authoritarian
than revolution; the proletarian revolution secures freedom to mankind, and it must
create an army in which the members are united by what is most fundamental, in which
they are united by the aims of the struggle, in which they are united by a common
program, by a common path and must subordinate all individual considerations to this
common aim.

The Party of the proletariat is a party of revolution, pursuing its policy on the basis of
Marxism-Leninism. It knows whither it is leading the masses. And when a man thinks
that he is only upholding some individual shade of opinion against the Party, a political
test will always show that he is upholding interests alien to the proletariat. And if a
writer finds it hard to give up his most intimate, individual shades of opinion, let him
study the experience of the Soviet revolution and he will then see that if he wants to
fight against capitalism, against imperialism, if he wants to fight hand in hand with the
masses, then he must march in the ranks of these masses. But if he sets his so-called
shades of opinion in opposition to the masses, then it will be shown that this is not his
individual opinion, but the opinion of some bourgeois group hostile to the proletariat.

In this field we have a tremendous fund of experience. And if Lenin told the
international proletariat in 1920, when lie wrote his Left Wing” Communism – An
Infantile Disorder, that the experience of the Russian revolution can help to shorten the
sufferings of the proletariat in many other countries, then in this special province of
which we are speaking, viz., the individual freedom of the writer in its relation to the
revolution, we have had tremendous experience, not only of a literary kind. If we
consider the history of the struggle against the general line of the Communist Party, we
shall see that all those who fought against it at different stages (I was one myself)
thought as follows: We are in agreement with the Party at bottom; we only want it to
give us freedom in certain details – and these “details” consisted in the fact that we did
not understand the role of the peasantry, that we did not understand the role of the
enslaved peoples – tremendous questions, of decisive import for the fate of the
revolution – that we did not understand that our divergences were not divergences in
shades of opinion but in the most fundamental matters, and that behind these
divergences were the interests of another class.

Let every writer think this over most profoundly, and then he will understand that
either he will be excluded from the struggle which his heart is urging him to join, in
which he wants to take part, or he must march in the ranks of the militant masses of the
people. In war, every soldier is not free to choose his own way of reaching the
objective. In war, there is a common line of march, and our line of march is not foisted
upon us from without by the tyranny and arbitrary will of some dictatorial party; it is
history’s own line of march, revealed and illuminated by the highest human reason,
finding its expression in the teachings of Marx and Lenin.

Notwithstanding all these difficulties, history is compelling the writers to turn in our
direction.

The great writer Romain Rolland has found his way to us. Hundreds of the world’s
outstanding writers are finding it or will find it. They will find it, after a number of
mistakes on the way (for such a process of evolution does not happen in a day), upon
one basic condition – namely, provided these writers are not mere literary sportsmen,
provided these writers are linked up with the masses, provided the great tragedy through
which mankind is now living, the tragedy of the downfall of one system and the joy
attending the birth of another system of society, penetrates to their brains through their
hearts, which must be bound up with the masses of the people and beat in unison with
theirs, There may be an outstanding writer who can present the most talented pictures of
the shocks of revolution, but if he is not linked up heart and soul with these militant
masses, with the militant workers and peasants, if he is looking for a refuge from the
emptiness of life in revolution, then his talent will be void, and he will not flourish.

When, after the death of Lenin, we all gathered in the Opera House, Comrade
Krupskaya said something of which I would like to remind all writers who are seeking
for a way to join us. Her words were unusual, not only in her mouth, but in the mouths
of all us Communists. She said: “Lenin deeply loved the people.” And when the leader
of our Party, Comrade Stalin, answered – the greetings sent him by the Party of the
proletariat on his fiftieth birthday, he said something which, in the mouth of such a
reserved man as he, sounded as though it came from the very depths of his being. Stalin
said that he was ready to shed his blood “drop by drop” for the proletariat.

Such words as those spoken by Comrades Krupskaya and Stalin are said very seldom,
but we, too, are now speaking of great problems – the turning towards us of great artists,
who can greatly help the working class and peasantry in their struggle. And we say to
these artists: One may be a master but not be able to reflect this great struggle. You will
be able to do so only if your work echoes a love for the militant masses of the people,
who are not only suffering and struggling, but who represent the sole foundation for a
new life. Without this attitude to the revolution, there can be no great art.

And Romain Rolland, the great struggler, has risen to a higher stage of his
development because he is a man of great culture and great love. At first his humanism
hindered him, but when he saw that humanity and the masses of the people would perish
without that surgical operation which is called revolution, he found strength within
himself to rise up in its defence, and that wave of great love for humanity has surged up
in him, which has found its expression in all his works.

In the final analysis, the development of proletarian literature in all countries will be
determined by the strength of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Proletarian
literature cannot be made to order. Only to the extent that the proletariat, by its struggle,
arouses the creative powers that are latent in the great masses of the working class,
inspires the petty-bourgeois sections of the population with confidence in the leadership
of the proletariat, convinces wide circles of the intelligentsia, who are deserting
capitalism, that there is a way out of the crisis through which the capitalist world is
passing, that there is a way of saving human culture – only to the extent that the
proletariat becomes the leader of the movement of the masses, is it able to create its own
literature and to attract to its side those honest artists who were hitherto the unconscious
servants of the bourgeoisie, while regarding themselves as outside politics.

Proletarian writers suffer from other ailments than the old masters of literature. If the
latter suffered from insufficient contact with the working masses, from insufficient
resolution in struggle, our young proletarian literature suffers from an insufficiency of
culture.

It is not my function to grade writers in different classes. Almost all our writers suffer
from one complaint. What is it? In the first place, like all writers, they base their work
on their own experience, on what they have felt emotionally, but the only experience
they possess is that of struggle in the factories, of demonstrations, or at best, of armed
struggle in a certain field; they try to squeeze the whole world into this narrow
framework, and all that exists for them in this world Is the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie. But this is not a Communist approach. The Communist approach demands
that the writer see life as a whole, with all its various grades and social strata, because
all social strata will play a big part in the decisive battles of mankind.

In the second place, proletarian writers simply have not mastered form as yet. The
bourgeois school system has not given them literary culture, and the proletarian writer,
in fighting his way forward, has to labour hard over problems of form; it is like attaining
a qualification in factory work at the work-bench, on the machine.

All this takes time. All this demands that proletarian writers, without losing their
contact with the masses, without withdrawing for a single moment from the struggle of
the masses, without turning into spectators, onlookers of this struggle, find their way to
the treasury of past literature and to great living masters from whom they can learn. And
those great writers who are coming over to our side should help these proletarian writers
to master technique and thus to bring nearer the day when a great proletarian literature
will be born.

We are profoundly convinced that this proletarian literature will come into being
through the fusion, the organic fusion of the best writers from among the old
intelligentsia, who are coming over to us, with the proletarian writers. The proletarian
writers – they who art filled with the love and hatred that are boiling up in the breast of
the proletariat – will learn from these masters of language how to use their pens to serve
the proletariat, which they have served heretofore as agitators and soldiers. The pen is
often a more powerful weapon than the rifle. It cannot replace the rifle, but it can
mobilize rifles and it can multiply these rifles.

The proletarian writers, in conjunction with those revolutionary writers who come to
be organically fused with us, will be able to create, and will create, that literature of
which the proletariat stands’ in need in the approaching period with its new round of
wars and revolutions.

Writers often come to us with questions regarding form. Here, too, we have heard
speeches from our foreign friends, who have not only told us what they have learned
from the epoch of revolutions and from present-day life, but have given us advice from
the viewpoint of their craftsmanship, and have expressed apprehensions as to whether a
Shakespeare in our country might not perhaps be smothered to death by our solicitude
for literature.
 Belles lettres is not my special province of work. Problems of belles lettres only enter
into my sphere of study as a part of the whole picture of the world. But I will
nevertheless permit myself to say a few words about these problems of form; not being
a literary pope, I will have great pleasure in accepting all corrections and instruction
which our foreign writers, too, may give me in this field.

I think that the apprehensions of our friend Malraux as to whether a new-born

Shakespeare might not be smothered in the creches of our country evidence a lack of
confidence in those who mind the children in these creches. Let this Shakespeare be
born I am convinced that he will be born – and we will lose no time in bringing him out
into the world.

Even those who are not born Shakespeares we do our best to bring out into the world
and give them all assistance.

It is not only that our country affords a very good nursery for writers. The literary life
of our country, as the writers themselves have said, also has its bad sides, hindering the
writers’ work. But our country possesses one thing which will aid the development of
all those talents and geniuses who, we are profoundly convinced, are living and
developing among the millions that inhabit the Soviet Union.

We are advancing along a very wide front. In the days when past Shakespeares were
born, only a small section of society had access to culture. Even if we assume that this
section of society contained a higher percentage of gifted persons than we do,
nevertheless we, who are advancing in tens of millions to storm, the heights of culture,
have one hundred times better chances that more Shakespeares, more geniuses will he
found among us.

When the bourgeoise gave birth to its great literature, the bourgeois writer was
nevertheless obliged to entertain illusions in order to be able to extol this bourgeoisie
that was itself being barn. During the genesis of the capitalist world, the writer was
obliged to shut his eyes to the fact that this was an antagonistic world; he was obliged to
shut his eyes to the fact that this world was based on exploitation; he had to reconcile
himself with this fact. All this gave rise to very contradictory processes in the writer’s
mind, thwarting his development.

In our country the revolution is giving birth to a new socialist world – a world that
has emancipated woman, emancipated the backward peoples, emancipated the whole
mass of the people.
 When we were celebrating Gorky’s jubilee, a woman worker from the Trekhgorka
Textile Mill came to conduct me to a meeting of worker correspondents. She handed me
a little book in which she had written her life story. I began questioning her about her
life. It turned out that she had been working in the factory for thirty years, that she had a
husband and children. After work in the factory, after having to wash the children and
mend their clothes, when all the others had gone to sleep, she would write her
autobiography.

Hiding my excitement, I asked her jokingly: “People ought to sleep at night; why do
you sit up and write your autobiography?” She answered me: “Young folk are growing
up who don’t know what a hard time we had of it, and if we old textile workers don’t
tell how we lived, who is going to do it?”

Comrades, our country possesses hundreds of thousands of these chroniclers, whose

mouths the revolution has opened. In regard to them our publishers and newspapers
often display considerable obtuseness. I once received the manuscript of a woman who,
having read the article on Woman’s Day in the Izvestia, wrote a story about the position
of illegitimate children in the old days. This woman was paralysed, quite unable to
move, but her intelligence had remained alive. Lying in bed, she read our press, sensing
the mighty developments that are taking place in our country. She described the
shocking situation of an illegitimate child in an intellectual family before the revolution.
I must say to our shame that two magazines, two editors returned this story to her and
refused to print it. All too frequently one still meets with a bad attitude in our country to
the creative work of millions of people, who are rising up to new life. But I think that
we are overcoming this attitude and will overcome it. These people do not photograph
life a point on which some foreign artists have expressed apprehension. There is no
need for us to be afraid that our literature will pine away from excessive tutelage.

On the contrary, let me say that our literature, despite its greatness, despite the fact
that it has great achievements to its credit; does not listen sufficiently to the voice of
life, does not embrace to an adequate degree the life of the masses. Where else has it
been seen that a crowd of people daily stood on the street during a congress of writers in
the hope of securing admission? What does this signify? It signifies that our masses
want great literature. And they will create it, this great literature, as they have created
everything which we see today.

This literature will be a literature of labour fighting for emancipation. This literature
will be an international literature. This literature will emblazon its shield with the cause
of the defence of colonial peoples against imperialist barbarism. This literature will
make its cause the liberation of woman, whom fascism is seeking to enslave again. This
literature will manfully defend the Soviet Union – the main stronghold of the world
proletariat. It will be a literature of materialism, a literature of struggle against fascist
obscurantism and mysticism. It will teach the masses of the people in all countries how
to fight for those aims which human reason, embodied in the aspirations of the
international proletariat, has set mankind.

We do not doubt that the time is coming when a great revolutionary literature will be
created. The future belongs to it – a future which bourgeois literature lacks. The destiny
of the latter will be to rot in the fascist dungeons, to putrefy in the cesspools of
pornography, to wander in the shadows of mysticism. The destiny of revolutionary
‘proletarian literature will be to uphold the mighty banner under which the proletariat is
fighting.

7. James Joyce or Socialist Realism?

Our writers are not sufficiently well acquainted with foreign literature. Very many of
our writers, when they hear of some novelty abroad, ask with morbid interest: “Does not
this contain the great key to art?” When they hear that a book of eight hundred pages,
without any stops and without any commas, has appeared abroad, they ask: “Perhaps
this is that new art which is rising out of chaos?”

Comrades, Lenin and Stalin have taught us to eschew all boasting, all swollen-
headedness. It would be ridiculous for our artists to refuse to learn from artists abroad.

In respect of form, the average French author writes at any rate no worse than our
very good writers. There is nothing surprising in this. A French or an English worker is
also a better master of his machine than our young workers who have only been at the
workbench for three or four years. In regard to form, therefore, we have very much to
learn not only from the old classics of literature but also from the literature of dying
capitalism.

Is it necessary to learn from great artists, such as Proust, the ability to sketch, to
delineate the slightest motion in man? That is not the point at issue. The point at issue is
whether we have our own highroad, or whether this highroad is indicated by
experiments abroad.
 The literature of dying capitalism has become stunted in ideas. It is unable to portray
those mighty forces which are shaking the world – the death agonies of the old, the birth
pangs of the new. And this triviality of content is fully matched by the triviality of form
displayed by bourgeois world literature. All the styles which were evolved by past
bourgeois art, and in which great masterpieces were created – realism, naturalism,
romanticism – all this has suffered attrition and disintegration; all this exists only in
fragments, and is powerless to produce a single convincing picture.

It does not lie within the power of bourgeois art to imitate the realism of Balzac, who
endeavoured to paint a picture commensurate with the epoch in which he lived. For a
full picture of life as it is would be a condemnation of moribund capitalism, Naturalism,
in its younger days, and in its best productions, gave vent to the protest of petty-
bourgeois art against the ulcers of capitalism. But the bourgeois artist is now forbidden
to lay his fingers on the ulcers of capitalism. Romantic flights, such as those taken by
the intelligentsia, disappointed in the outcome of the French revolution, are impossible
now; for there is nowhere to fly – except into the abyss.

Searches for a new form have begun. There are two names which best express the
new ways by which bourgeois artists are attempting to create major works of art. One of
these is Proust. He wants to present the psychology of his heroes – heroes of the French
drawing-rooms – by delicately stretching out their souls under the microscope, subtly
dissecting their cells, probing into each one of their movements. The scalpel of analysis
is to lay bare the soul of the human being, no matter what he is, or what he aspires to be.
In the pages of Proust, the old world, like a mangy dog, no longer capable of any action
whatever, lies basking in the sun and endlessly licks its sores.

Dostoyevsky reached the summits of art by analysing some of the types who
inhabited suppurating semi-feudal Russia – people stifling in the tiny garrets where the
lower middle classes of the Russian cities were cooped up, oblivious of any way of
escape from their situation. But the vilest types, when revealed by the scalpel of
Dostoyevsky, become titans of suffering. Whereas the drawing-room heroes of Proust
seem to cry aloud that they are not worth analysing, that no analysis of them will
produce any results.

The other hero of contemporary bourgeois literature, though he is not widely known
even to bourgeois readers, is James Joyce, the mysterious author of Ulysses – a book
which the bourgeois literary world, while reading it but little, has made the object of
loud discussion.
 That is the peculiarity of Joyce’s method? He tries to depict a day in the life of his
subjects motion by motion the motions of the body, the motions of the mind, the
motions of the feelings in all their shades, from conscious feelings to those which rise
up in the throat like a spasm. He cinematographs the life of his subject with the
maximum of minuteness, omitting nothing.

Thought is crocheted to thought; if the thought leads off at a tangent, the author
hastens to follow it up. His hero, while drunk, is assailed by hallucinations. The author
breaks off his story in the middle and reproduces these hallucinations. More than eight
hundred pages are taken up with one day in the hero’s life.

We will not dwell on the extraneous matter that is woven into Joyce’s work, on how
he encircles the actions and thoughts of his heroes with an intricate cobweb of allegories
and mythological allusions, on all these phantasmagoria of the madhouse. We will
examine only the essence of the “new method,” by which naturalism is reduced to
clinical observation, and romanticism and symbolism to delirious ravings.

What is the basic feature in Joyce? His basic feature is the conviction that there is
nothing big in life – no big events, no big people, no big ideas; and the writer can give a
picture of life by just taking “any given hero on any given day,” and reproducing him
with exactitude. A heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema
apparatus through a microscope such is Joyce’s work.

But it is sufficient to consider the picture that he gives, in order to see that it does not
fit even those trivial heroes in that trivial life which he depicts. The scene of his book is
laid in Ireland in 1916. The petty bourgeois whom he describes are Irish types, though
laying claim to universal human significance. But these Blooms and Daedaluses, whom
the author relentlessly pursues into the lavatory, the brothel and the pot-house, did not
cease to be petty bourgeois when they took part in the Irish insurrection of 1916. The
petty bourgeois is a profoundly contradictory phenomenon, and in order to give a
portrayal of the petty bourgeois, one must present him in all his relations to life.

Joyce, who is alleged to give an impartial presentation of the petty bourgeois, who is
alleged to follow every movement of his hero, is not simply a register of life; he has
selected a piece of life and depicted that. His choice is determined by the fact that for
him the whole world lies between a cupboardful of medieval books, a brothel and a
pothouse. For him, the national revolutionary movement of the Irish petty bourgeoisie
does not exist; and consequently the picture which he presents, despite its ostensible
impartiality, is untrue.
 But even if one might conceive for a moment that the Joyce method is a suitable one
for describing petty, insignificant, trivial people, their actions, thoughts and feelings –
although tomorrow these people may be participants in great deeds – then it is perfectly
clear that this method would prove utterly worthless if the author were to approach with
his movie camera the great events of the class struggle, the titanic clashes of the modern
world.

A capitalist magnate cannot be presented by the method which Joyce uses in

attempting to present his vile hero Bloom, not because his private life is less trivial than
that of Bloom, but because he is an exponent of great worldwide contradictions,
because, when he is battling with some rival trust or hatching plots against the Soviet
Union, he must not be spied on in the brothel or the bedroom, but must be portrayed on
the great arena of world affairs. Needless to say, trying to present a picture of revolution
by the Joyce method would be like trying to catch a dreadnought with a shrimping net.

Just because he is almost untranslated and unknown in our country, Joyce arouses a
morbid interest among a section of our writers. Is there not some hidden meaning
lurking in the eight hundred pages of his Ulysses – which cannot be read without special
dictionaries, for Joyce attempts to create a language of his own in – order to express the
thoughts and feelings which he lacks?

This interest in Joyce is an unconscious expression of the leanings of certain Right-

wing authors, who have adapted themselves to revolution, but who in reality do not
understand its greatness. They want to get away from Magnitogorsk, from
Kuznetskstroy, to get away from the great deeds of our country to “great art,” which
depicts the small deeds of small people. They want to escape from the stormy sea of
revolution and take refuge in the stagnant waters of small ponds, in, marshes where
frogs croak.

The search of Soviet art for its own creative methods has been a long one, for it has
had to overcome the old traditions in art and to explore a new trail, leading to the
portrayal of our life as it is. This trail has been found. The methods of Soviet art have
been found, and they are commensurate with the tasks which revolutionary literature
sets itself. The slogan of socialist realism is as simple and understandable as was the
slogan of the Soviets, the slogan of industrialization, of the collectivization of our
country. And it was just because this slogan did not invent a method, but only expressed
the ripened requirements of revolutionary art – just for this reason it was instantly
accepted and comprehended, though much work yet remains to be done before we can
embody it in great works of art.
 The proletarian revolution firmly takes its stand on the basis of that stormy reality,
full of the most profound contradictions, which has been created by monopoly
capitalism, and on the basis of that reality which it has itself created despite monopoly
capitalism. Only by standing firmly on this basis can the proletarian revolution
overcome this reality and oppose it by another reality.

The capitalist world is a world of rotting monopoly capital in the “mother countries,”
and of complete decay in the colonial countries, throttled by a combination of the relies
of feudal exploitation and of the exploitation of trusts and cartels. The capitalist world is
witnessing the death of democracy and the birth of fascism, the decay and downfall of
the Second International and the genesis of the revolutionary movement, the beginning
of national-colonial revolutions, their betrayal by the native bourgeoisie and the birth of
a workers’ and peasants’ movement in the colonies. The capitalist world is witnessing
the break-up of capitalist culture, the decay of capitalist science, accompanied at the
same time by flights of scientific thought, by sudden advances of technique, which
reach the verge of a technical revolution, only to be hurled back by the capitalist crisis.

Finally, the capitalist world has given birth in its convulsions to the first socialist
republic on the territories of the former tsarist empire – a republic in which the
proletariat of a most backward country, weak in numbers, has had to accomplish
miracles in order to defend its state and realize its aims. It has laid the foundation of
socialism. In this great work of construction it is remoulding itself. In this work of
construction it has developed the powers which enabled it to set about the work – never
before witnessed in the world’s history – of transforming tens of millions of peasant
atoms into a harmoniously working collective – of persons striving towards the same
goal as the proletariat.

It is this activity, with all its contradictions, that the artists of the USSR and the
revolutionary artists of capitalist countries are rightly desirous of reflecting in art.
Realism means the portrayal of this reality in all its basic connections. Realism means
giving a picture not only of the decay of capitalism and the withering away of its
culture, but also of the birth of that class, of that force, which is capable of creating a
new society and a new culture. Realism does not mean the embellishment or arbitrary
selection of revolutionary phenomena; it means reflecting reality as it is, in all its
complexity, in all its contrariety, and not only capitalist reality, but also that other, new
reality – the reality of socialism.

An artist who tried to represent the birth of socialism as an idyll, who tried to
represent the socialist system, which is being born in hard-fought battles, as a paradise
populated by ideal people – such an artist would not be a realist, would not be able to
convince anyone by his works. The artist should show how socialism is built out of the
bricks of the past, out of the material which the past has left us, out of the material
which we ourselves create in the sweat of our brow, in the blood of our toil and
struggle, in, the hard battles of classes and in the hard toil of man to remould himself.

But there is no such thing as static realism, no such thing as realism which portrays
only what is. And if all the great realists of the past even though unaware of the fact,
were dialecticians, portrayed development through the conflict of contradictions, then
this dialectic character of our realism is still more strongly stressed by us, when we
speak of socialist realism.

Socialist realism means not only knowing reality as it is, but knowing whither it is
moving. It is moving towards socialism, it is moving towards the victory of the
international proletariat. And a work of art created by a socialist realist is one which
shows whither that conflict of contradictions is leading which the artist has seen in life
and reflected in his work.

This of itself implies that socialist realism demands a precise knowledge and
understanding of this contradictory epoch. The great creations of socialist realism
cannot therefore be the result of chance observations of certain sections of reality; they
demand that the artist comprehend the tremendous whole. Even when the artist depicts
the great in the small, when he wants to show the world in a drop of water, in the
destinies of one small man, he cannot accomplish his task without having in bis brain an
image of the movement of the entire world.

While the literature of dying capitalism invokes the aid of the irrational, of the
unconscious and the sub-conscious, the literature of socialist realism demands a
consciousness of the fate of humanity; it demands tremendous work of the mind,
demands an understanding of the position of our planet in the universe and of the
position of man on this planet. The literature of socialist realism is a literature of world
scales, for its task is to present a picture of the world.

The artists of dying capitalism seek to hide themselves under a cloak of impartiality.
They are sceptics; they are convinced that they believe in nothing, although the very
essence of their work is a faith that this decaying world will exist forever. The literature
of socialist realism does not set out to portray the world in order to satisfy curiosity, in
order merely to hold the mirror up to humanity. It sets out to be a participant in the great
struggle for the new Renaissance of mankind, or, to speak more exactly, not for the re-
birth, but for the birth of mankind.
 It is a literature of hatred for putrefying capitalism, which is preparing to let loose a
cataclysm, which is steeping mankind in loathsomeness. It is a literature of great love
for suffering humanity, for militant humanity, of great love for those whose bones form
the piles of the new world edifice

When we are told by the would-be aesthetes who fawn upon the bourgeoisie that we
are creating, a narrow Party literature, we answer them that the watch-tower of our Party
is the highest roof of the world, for the Party of the revolutionary proletariat is the
vanguard of humanity. It is an army which is fighting, not for special private interests,
but for the liberation of all mankind, and this enables it to perceive the whole. It is the
Party of the champions of the new order, which is creating a life fit for human beings. It
is the Party of the champions of the new world, and is there fore able to embrace the
whole world with its thoughts and with its feelings, able, for the first time in history, to
produce great human creative power.

When we are told by the representatives of dying bourgeois art that the clash of
classes and giant-like happenings are excluding man from our view, that man will perish
away in our art and that it is therefore they who are the prophets of man – that they
prefer to depict a tiny grain of sand in all its details rather than the monotonous waves
of the sea, or an army marching to the beating of drums – we answer them that the
socialist world which Is being born is creating millions of new individualities. Those
who had hitherto lived the life of slaves, whose hard existence caused their heads to
droop, have now become class-conscious fighters, are developing human qualities, are
becoming rich personalities.

We say to the would-be aesthetic writers, who are unacquainted with great deeds and
are therefore unacquainted with really great human beings, that in the capitalist world
they cannot find people to compare with the statues of ancient times. Whereas the
revolutionary proletariat has already produced hundreds of thousands of human beings,
each one of whom is worthy of the chisel of Pheidias or Michaelangelo.

We do not need to speak of the great historic figures of Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Stalin. It is enough to take a glance at those. heroes whom the Soviet Union is putting to
the fore on its construction works, the grey-coated heroes of the Red Army, our heroes
of the Arctic, the soldiers of the Chinese revolution who march barefoot over
continents, the heroes who lay, their heads on the block in Germany and who do not
tremble before their executioners in the fascist torture-chambers – it is enough to recall
this alone, in order to show how pitiful is the talk of the champions of bourgeois
literature who say that with us man is lost sight of.
 Our literature has already taken first place in the, world, even if our craftsmanship is
still inferior to that of Western literature. We represent the only literature which gives
the masses of the whole world a correct answer to the questions that are most vitally
important to them, which gives them a correct presentation of the death of capitalism
and the birth of socialism.

When I read, in Neue Deutsche Blätter, the answer given by some workers who had
escaped from a German concentration camp to the question – what did they read in the
camp; when I learned that in the concentration camp, where they were flogged by the
fascist Storm Troopers, they had been given strength by reading Panferov’s Brussky, I
felt proud of our literature.

But we are not swollen-headed. Lenin and his best pupil, Comrade Stalin, have
always taught us not to boast, not to give ourselves airs.

If we praise our literature as first in the world, we realize at the same time that our
literary successes represent not only the merit of our literature, but are first and foremost
a result of the fact that we have built the foundation of socialism. And we want our
comrades abroad to follow our example. We will be happy when we can say that the
masses of the people in Germany, Japan, Poland, France have created a literature better
than ours, for such a literature can arise only when they have conquered, when they will
build socialism. Then the wealth of their cultural past will enable, them speedily to
create a literature better than ours.

We must tell our writers: Learn from the best masters of proletarian revolutionary
literature abroad; help them to create a picture of our country which will be convincing
to foreign workers. And to our foreign comrades we say: Under the banner of the
militant proletariat, in the struggle for the cause for which the Soviet workers have
fought, in the struggle for the cause for which some of the best members of the working
class throughout the world laid down their lives, you will create a great literature.

We will learn from world revolutionary literature. From it we will learn

craftsmanship and an understanding of all the most intimate processes that are going on
among the proletariat and peasantry in other countries. Our workers are thirsting to see
not only portrayals of collective farmers and shock brigaders but also a portrayal of the
worker who, despite all the bestialities of the fascist hangmen, is hammering out the
future of the German proletariat in underground, illegal work; they want to see a
portrayal of the Chinese coolie who was yesterday a beast of burden in the eyes of the
whites, but today is marching barefoot through the length and breadth of China with a
rifle captured from the enemy, uniting the people in order to lead them to socialism.
 We expect of you foreign comrades that you will help us to show how the French,
how the English worker lives – the foreign worker whom we regard as our brother but
whom we now see but dimly, as through a mist.

There is a tremendous field of work lying ahead, both for our Soviet literature and for
that of the revolutionary artists of the West. All that is required is daring and faith. No,
we will not smother our Shakespeares; we will foster them. We will create a literature
higher than that of the Renaissance, for it derived its models from slave-owning Greece
and slave-owning Rome and expressed the interests of rising capitalism, while our
literature reflects the idea of a new, socialist society.

Proletarian literature is as yet only in its childhood. Only in the USSR has it attained
considerable dimensions. But it will develop hand in hand with the development of the
world revolution; it will grow together with the revolution, and it will become a
literature whose lungs will inhale great draughts of air, whose eyes and brains will
embrace whole centuries and continents; it will become a literature which will be the
joy and the war-cry of tens of millions Those whose strength is not sufficient for these
full draughts of air, those whose strength is not sufficient for these strides covering
continents and for these thoughts embracing centuries, will rot away together with the
literature of the bourgeoisie. But we are profoundly convinced that all that is best in
world literature, despite all waverings, all stages of rupture with the bourgeoisie and of
tortuous evolution – towards the proletariat will find its way to our shores, will come
out on to our broad highway of history and will take it’s place under the banner of
literature of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, for under this banner alone will humanity
conquer.

This literature, which we are creating together with you, will be a great literature of
love for all the oppressed, of hatred for the exploiting class, of resolute struggle to the
death against this class, of love for woman, whom we are making into a comrade, of
love for all the coloured races, who were formerly the outcasts of mankind.

We will put into this literature the very soul of the proletariat, its passion and its love,
and it will be a literature of mighty pictures, of great consolations. It will be a literature
of the struggle for socialism, of the victory of international socialism.
 Discurso en respuesta a la discusión.

Comrades, according to the custom prevailing at bourgeois congresses, I should be

expected to declare myself in a very embarrassing situation, since I, who delivered the
report, have been bombarded by a number of comrades who are our guests.

But our guests consist, on the one hand, of a detachment of proletarian writers from
the West, who are no guests in proletarian literature and in the revolutionary movement;
while the other guests are writers who, though not members of our Party, are
nevertheless coming over to join the proletariat. I consider that in regard to such guests
my first duty is to show absolute frankness.

The discussion to which my report gave rise has been a very fruitful one. I must say
that it has shown me much of which I was unaware when I made my report. It has
taught me something, though not what some of the speakers here wanted to impress
upon me.

I am not going to speak at length on the question regarding the “catalogue” of

proletarian literature, on the register of proletarian writers.

What is the duty of one who delivers a report at the congress? A report is not a text-
book on the history of literature. It was not my duty to name the good writers and the
bad, to enumerate their works. My task was to formulate the problems with which
literature is confronted in the present historical situation. Names I mentioned only in so
far as the given writer happened to be in the centre of the problem ander consideration.
In addition it should he remembered that at our congresses the deliverer of the report
expresses the results of collective thinking. The collective can very easily lay down a
general line for the solution of a problem, but it need not necessarily agree with the
appraisal given of each writer. Let us take, for example, Comrade Bela Illes. He is
indisputably a proletarian writer. We have circulated his book, The Tysza Aflame, in
hundreds of thousands of copies, not because it is a perfect book – no, this is the book of
an immature writer – but because in this book we find a reflection of the Hungarian
revolution, whose countenance is dear to us, though Illes’ picture is weakly drawn. We
do not have a single good portrait of Lenin, and we circulate portraits of which we
cannot say with conviction that they are really great works of art. The Organizational
Committee should not have to answer, let us say, for my opinion regarding the literary
merits of a book by Bela Illes or of other books and authors. That is why I did not state
my opinion on such matters in my report.
 In the second place, I think you have blamed me less for not naming writers than you
would have blamed me had I given a characterization of the writers The point at issue is
not of course, whether I mentioned the names of the writers or not. I know them just as
well as do the comrades who mentioned their names. The point is that the
representatives of different. groups have here. expressed their opinions on some very
vital questions, and in regard to their speeches we must speak with an absolute clarity of
ideas.

I tried to sketch the attitude taken by world literature towards those great historical
events which determine the further development of mankind – its attitude to the war, to
the October Revolution, to fascism. I also tried to describe the split which is taking
place in bourgeois literature and the birth of revolutionary literature.

In this respect no fundamental objections have been raised So in what does the
difference of opinion consist? The difference of opinion lies in the conclusion which
certain comrades (the positions they held were very contradictory) drew from these
basic propositions.

To speak more specifically, we have heard objections from two sides. We have heard
objections from a section of the proletarian writers, who said: “It was no accident that
you did not enumerate all the proletarian writers; the fact is, you underrate them. We are
already a big force. We already represent a great proletarian world literature.” Other
objections, expressed in a very friendly form, came from the writers who are coming
over to our side. They said approximately as follows: ‘We are coming over to you, such
are our views; but be so kind as to take us as we are. Don’t try to polish us up and don’t
keep worrying us.’”

The speeches made from both these angles have disclosed something very essential,
about which we must speak.

1. The Role of Proletarian Literature Abroad and Its Present State

I will begin with the question of proletarian literature. First of all, I must define our
views on proletarian literature. Do we aim at forming our own literary cadres, the cadres
of international. proletarian literature? Yes, this is a fundamental aim of ours. Soviet
literature reflects the philosophy of international Communism and its aims. International
Communism is a militant army. How can people who want to fight not want to create, in
such an important field as literature, their own cadres, bound up heart and soul with the
working class? To admit another point of view would mean assuming that we did not
want to conquer at all in the realm of ideas. It would, of course, be quite senseless to
assume anything of the kind.

Our attitude towards proletarian literature, in whatever state it may be in a given

country, is one of the greatest love and solicitude.

Willi Bredel has given me a book, Die Stimme aus Deutschland, published here in
Moscow by the Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers – a little collection
of verses and short stories written by illegal Party workers in Germany. As a matter of
fact, some of the poems and stories are not by illegal Party workers – Bredel was
exaggerating a little. But however that may be, I at once read through this volume with
the keenest interest. The stories are weak as yet. You will readily understand that Proust
is more of an artist, can write better than workers under illegal conditions, but what are
his drawing-room heroes to us, even though they are depicted by a master hand! They
move us far less than description of the struggle for our cause, even though the latter
come from the hands of immature proletarian writers. That is why we often publish
books that are far from perfect.

We know that proletarian literature must rise, grow up and become strong. That is
why we in the Soviet Union, in handling our proletarian writers, have discarded the old
“Proletcult” method, of which Lenin said that ten hysterical maidens keep on blowing at
one budding worker-author until they have extinguished every spark of talent in him.
Our method of helping proletarian writers is to devote great work to their cultural
advance, to bring them into contact with great masters of language, to print their still
imperfect works and criticize them frankly.

We love proletarian literature as the beginning of that great literature which the
proletariat will create. But we would be very bad champions of the proletariat and very
bad friends of proletarian literature if we were to, follow the call of those who want to
proclaim this literature’s period of infancy, of childhood, as its period of maturity.

I said that the proletarian literature of the West is in its infancy. Comrade Zhdanov,
secretary of our Party’s Central Committee, said that the comrades present at this
congress represent the beginning, the core of proletarian literature Why are we so
grudging in our praise? Because Lenin and Stalin have taught us what a, dangerous
thing “Communist conceit” is. “Communist conceit” is dangerous from two points of
view: firstly, because anyone who begins to pat himself on the back and say: “Look
what a fine fellow I am,” ceases to learn, and all of us – both Soviet writers and
international proletarian writers – need to learn day and night, because our proletarian
literature hag not yet produced a work which we could distribute among the workers in
millions of copies, telling them: “Here is a genuine book about the war, about fascism,
about the Russian revolution.”

Not long ago we had the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of imperialist war. To
explain the nature of this war to the masses of the people is a tremendous task. We have
many books by proletarian authors about war, and we must circulate them. But who can
lay his hand upon his heart and say that we have produced a book which we could
distribute in millions of copies and which would inflame the hearts, not only of our
comrades, but of the broad masses also, with hatred for those who engineer an
imperialist war? Proletarian literature has not yet produced such a great work.

We know that fascism is in power in Germany, in Italy. For a year and a half German
fascism has been destroying the best sons of the German proletariat with fire and sword.
And I ask you: Can you, dear comrades, proletarian writers of Germany, recommend me
a book about that hell in which the German proletariat is living, about all the unheard-of
crimes of German fascism – a book which we could distribute here in the USSR, in
millions of copies? We have a which is beginning to draw this picture, but as yet no
master work has appeared. Not to say this and not to know this means to retard the
development of this literature.

Comrades, Lenin and his best pupil, Stalin, have taught us to be truthful in regard to
ourselves – and we regard you as a part of ourselves. And when we speak to you of
literature, we cannot say – though we should very much like to be able to say this – that
proletarian literature is flourishing throughout the whole world. We ought to say: No, it
is as yet only in its infancy, and he who does not say this is not working for the victory
of proletarian literature.

The writers of the proletariat are having to toil hard to create their first works,
because it is often more difficult to attain a mastery of language than to learn – to
operate a machine. They love the children of their labours, and they would like to
appear before us like the woman worker from the Leningrad plant who stood up at this
congress and said: “We have made a turbine of 100,000 kilowatts.” She said this with
supreme pride. But if she had come here and said that we had a turbine of 1,000,000
kilowatts, when as a matter of fact such a turbine did not exist, she would not thereby
have encouraged the development of Soviet industry.

Under what circumstances could it be said that we were underrating proletarian

literature? Only if we, in the first place, were unwilling to create this mighty lever for
the development of the proletarian movement, and, secondly, if we held that it could not
be created until after the victory of the proletarian revolution. As a matter of principle
we fight for the creation of a proletarian literature in all countries, and we can say that
we have won considerable victories in this field.

If you ask me what I consider to be the best in proletarian literature outside the Soviet
Union, I would say outright – a number of works by Japanese proletarian writers, Take
Kobayashi. He has written a short story, about the arrests in 1928. I have seen how our
workers read this story! Let us take The Cannery Boat, another story by Kobayashi.
This story told me, a student of scientific literature, more about the condition of the
Japanese proletariat than all scientific literature could do, because this story showed
how those same workers who the day before were awaiting the coming of a warship as
if it would be their saviour from exploitation, who believed that the Japanese fleet was
their succour and defence, came to understand next day that this was nothing but an
illusion. This means that the question of proletarian revolution has already arisen in
Japan, notwithstanding the fact that the backward masses of the proletariat are still held
captive by monarchist ideas. That is what this proletarian artist told me in his simple
images.

He confirmed me in the conviction that Japan is approaching a democratic revolution,

which will evolve into a socialist revolution. From the literary point of view it is very
important to note that he showed this by means of images – not asserting it, not proving
it by arguments.

But the more conscientious our attitude to this literature, the more we rejoice at its
victories, the more firmly must we say: “Comrades, don’t rest on your laurels. Better
settle down to hard work, and together with us, who also have not created any
Magnitostroys of literature as yet, let us march forward shoulder to shoulder.”

“Communist conceit” in regard to these questions has yet another no less dangerous
side to it. This danger may be expressed in the following attitude: “If I am so strong, if
all is going well with me, why do I want allies, why should I look for allies?” And,
comrades, when I heard the speech of Bela Illes, I felt that I was listening to an echo of
RAPP [Russian Association of Proletarian Writers] methods and RAPP opinions. We
are overcoming them in our country and there is no sense in exporting them abroad.

A few years ago those same comrades who have here developed these tendencies
wanted to “rend” Barbusse, would not even recognize him as our comrade in struggle.
Today no one can openly turn his back on the literature of the wavering writers, of those
who are coming over to our side. The adherents of the RAPP are therefore trying to
attain the realization of their old aspirations by other methods. If we overrate the degree
of development which proletarian literature has reached, then we shall have to draw the
conclusion: “I am so strong that I don’t need any allies.”

I am not saying that anything similar to this has been said here in full. I am convinced
that such a good German worker as the Communist, Willi Bredel, who knows how
badly our Party in Germany needs allies, will reject this idea. But the important thing is
that a man should think things out. Most people in life do not think things out. When I
took to Trotskyism, I, too, was unaware that I would be standing on the other side of the
barricades after twenty-five years in the labour movement. And all the more needful is it
that we should say in the most cordial, friendly manner to the comrades who have not
overcome the RAPP tendencies: “Comrades, look out! This is dangerous for literature
and dangerous for the proletarian revolutionary movement of Germany.

2. The Split in World Literature

Let us now examine the reverse side of the medal.

I have outlined the position of world bourgeois literature. It has lost its literary
monopoly. Some of the masters of bourgeois literature are opposing those aims which
the world bourgeoisie is now pursuing. All this reflects the position of the world
bourgeoisie, which has lost its monopoly of rule. The USSR is there an immovable fact
in the world’s history. Nay, wore, the existence of the U.S.S.R. and its strength, coupled
with the ruin, of capitalism, are causing dissension in the camp of the world
bourgeoisie. And this fact is also reflected in literature.

Literature is splitting up into open fascist literature and into literature which, while
trying to defend bourgeois democracy, is unconsciously lapsing into fascism; and at the
same time a number of bourgeois writers are openly coming over to our side. The last
category includes various groups; some who are coming to us are halting ten paces off,
others are halting ten miles off, but they are already ten miles distant from bourgeois
fascist literature.

Comrades, what is the significance of this split? This split is of tremendous

significance, in the first place, because it reflects profound social processes. What does
it reflect? Let us take a typical work produced by the literature of decadence – the book
of Céline. Céline may be a fascist tomorrow. His book, contains elements which force
us to fear this. But today Céline reflects the despair felt by that section of the petty-
bourgeois intelligentsia who can see no way out of the crisis and who have completely
lost their faith in capitalism. This phenomenon possesses great importance for us. The
literature of decadence is not our literature, but it is a very good thing when your
opponent falls to pieces, when part of the petty bourgeoisie ceases to believe in the
leadership of the bourgeoisie. When the petty-bourgeois masses can see nothing but
darkness ahead, of them, this may lead them to seek a way out of the situation together
with us, or at any rate it may mean that they, being disillusioned by capitalism, will not
fight tooth and nail on behalf of this system.

There is a type of literature which does not expose the whole of capitalism but does
expose certain forms of lit. Take Feuchtwanger’s anti-fascist book, The Oppenheims;
or take Heinrich Mann’s satire, Hate. These are not anti-capitalist works; but they are
anti-fascist works. The artist is still afraid of proletarian revolution, but he hates
fascism. This type of literature possesses enormous importance.

I greatly love and esteem my Party comrades Plivier, Bredel and others, but they
themselves know that for the present Heinrich Mann will be more widely read than
they. He is afraid of revolution, but he feels hatred for fascism. Those into whose soul
he instils hatred for fascism will perhaps go further than he does and will not he afraid
of revolution.

Plivier has told us here that when. he was a sailor, he read Leonhard Frank’s
book Der Mensch ist gut, and this book had a revolutionizing effect on him. This is a
petty-bourgeois novel, but it gave vent to the protest against war. The sailor Plivier
came to revolution under its influence, while Frank himself withdrew into philistine life.
But Frank helped the sailor Plivier to become a revolutionary writer.

Literature which is still hostile to the revolution, but which is already hostile to
fascism, possesses great importance for us.

There is no need to say how important it is for us when the great spokesmen of world
literature – André Gide and Romain Rolland, who are known to the whole world,
Theodore Dreiser. who is extremely popular in America – stand up, and say: “The only
way humanity ought to go is the way shown us by the Soviet Union,” when they say
that capitalism will perish and socialism will conquer.

Comrades, what is the specific task with which we are confronted in view of the split
in bourgeois literature? Does this split confront us with the task of creating our own
cadres of writers? This task existed yesterday, exists today and will continue to exist
even after the victory of the proletarian revolution in the West. This is a constant task
which will confront us until ultimate victory is achieved. He who forgets about his
cadres and his army may manoeuvre as much as he pleases, but he will he routed.
 What, then, is the new task that confronts us? The new task is to make our Soviet
literature and proletarian literature abroad squarely face this fact of the split in
bourgeois literature, and to tell proletarian writers: “Do all you can to find allies there.”
We must tell proletarian writers: “Masters of language are coming over to you. Learn
from them, so that you yourselves may soon become masters.”

Consider, comrades, what the situation is in regard to the struggle against fascism.
What is the main thing in the field of politics for the German, Italian and Polish
proletarians? It is necessary to muster the proletariat into one phalanx for struggle on a
united front, and to find allies among the proletarianized petty bourgeoisie, of whom the
intellectuals form only a part.

What does this mean in the field of literature? “You, proletarian writer, fortify your
ranks, strengthen your skill, but help the wavering writers, who are breaking with the
bourgeoisie, to find their way to us, and at the same time learn from them.” If we speak
of the war danger, then the task of that struggle, in which a great part should he played
by literature, is not only to create Communist works of art which expose the
preparations for war, but also to help those writers, who are coming, through pacifism,
to side with us, to fight against these war preparations of the bourgeoisie, to bring them
closer to us, and, through the medium of these writers, to reach Wat section of the
masses to which we our proletarian writers – do not yet penetrate.

This represents the new factor about which I, as deliverer of a report at this congress,
deemed it my duty to speak. Such was my task, and not to sing anthems about the
achievements of proletarian literature.

Permit me now, comrades, to sum up the results of this most interesting discussion –
though not all the points in it were formulated with complete clearness. It has revealed
some very important points important in two ways. In the first speeches made by a
number of our comrades, one did not feel that they had yet grasped the importance of
looking for allies, of stretching out their hands to those writers who are coming over to
us and have reached various stages of departure from the bourgeoisie. In the speeches
delivered today by Becher and Plivier, this matter was handled fittingly – a fact which is
to be welcomed.

I am profoundly convinced that our friends, who thought at first that they had
encountered a tendency to underrate proletarian literature here, will understand that it is
not a question. of underrating proletarian literature at all, but of striving to strengthen
proletarian literature by means of an alliance, by enlisting in our ranks those masters of
literature who are coming over to the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, and even
by rapprochement with those writers who will not join us but who will help us at a
certain stage of the struggle.

3. Artists Coming to Join the Proletariat

We have heard other speeches here. One of them, the declaration of André Malraux,
was very brief, only a few sentences; another, the speech of Jean-Richard Bloch, was
filled with deep sincerity.

What did Malraux say? We must note, by the way, that our wider reading public does
not know Malraux. Excerpts from his works have been printed in the
magazine, International Literature, which is not circulated widely enough in our
country, although it is a source from which one can get acquainted with several
phenomena in international literature. Malraux is a brilliant writer. I do not want to give
him a testimonial here – he is recognized even by our enemies. It is enough to read the
article published in the Echo de Paris, organ of the French general staff, by the French
academician, Mauriac.

What does Mauriac say of Malraux in this article? It is a very sharply worded article,
but I refer to it because it will help Malraux to see the danger, and us to see the
significance of that sincere declaration which this writer made at our congress: “The
fact that I am here means that I am with you.”

The academician Mauriac says in his article: “You, Malraux, are a rebel. You,
Malraux, attack bourgeois culture; you think that it is perishing. But your brilliant talent
is a proof of the greatness of this culture. Will the Chinese barbarians, about whom you
write, read your books? We – the French bourgeoisie, whom you attack – we read your
books and say: see, we have created such a culture that even when our rebels abuse us,
they do so with such talent that the whole of French culture is reflected in their abuse.”

And Mauriac goes on to say: “See, Malraux, we have awarded you the Goncourt
prize. Why did we do this? We are wise men. We have already seen how rebels can be
taken in hand: there was Millerand, there was Briand – we gave them a little power, and
they served us. We shall see how you, Malraux, will stand the test of our praise, of our
award. Is it not better for you to live with people who have such respect for freedom of
thought that they permit you to sing the glory of fallen Chinese Communists, than with
the Communists who, in the first place, have not found time to translate your books into
Russian, and who, in the second place, captiously tell you: ‘Here you have one
deviation, here another deviation. You must write just so and not otherwise ...

And what was Malraux’s answer? He is here, with us. He is a very intelligent man,
and he has had to listen not only to words of praise from us Soviet Communists but also
to severe questions and unpleasant cautionings. It would have been easy for such a great
writer to take offence and say. “Leave me in peace! I will write as I please – I am a
freelance. Keep your clumsy paws off me, and learn to write as well as I do.”

Malraux did not do this. Often his face contorted when he thought that things were
being put too drastically. But Malraux stood the test and said: “The fact that I defended
Dimitrov, the fact that I went to Berlin in his defence, the fact that I have come here
means that I am with you.”

And we warmly shake him by the hand and tell him: “Those artists who join the
militant army of the proletariat must expect a hard time. It will be enough for Malraux
to write a book about the struggle of the French proletarians, and France’s whole
bourgeois press will declare: ‘Malraux has lost his talent.”

But this is not the only hardship awaiting the artist who comes over to us. Such an
artist must expect to take part in the struggle, which is not always a mere struggle at
congresses, where one friend says disagreeable things to another. The struggle is a cruel
one, it will be an ordeal by fire and sword, and we are profoundly desirous, profoundly
convinced that Malraux, as a fighter of the proletariat, will stand this ordeal in a manner
fitting to his great talent.

Comrades, Jean-Richard Bloch spoke here – a great French writer, a great thinker and
artist, an artist who not only possesses mastery of imagery but one, too, whose brain
works to some purpose.

I quoted passages from his old books, which characterize stages of his development
when he – an enemy of capitalism – feared that the proletarian revolution would lead to
dictatorship in literature, to oppression, to stereotyping. Yesterday Bloch gave me his
latest book, Sibilla, which I did not know previously and which I read last night. I was
profoundly moved by it. In this book he shows how a woman artist becomes a
Communist, shows, too, how many of his old doubts have vanished during the course of
his evolution.

And what did Bloch say here? He said: “Don’t confuse individualism with the
individual. Fight against individualism, against the artist being a cat who just goes his
own way. But treasure individuality, treasure the human being. If you are not able to do
this, you will repel many of those in the countries of old culture who might have come
over to your side.”

Comrades, what Bloch said is true. We must distinguish individualism,

“unsociability,” inability to go with the community, from respect for personality. The
young revolution, which is an army, has to live in barracks at a certain stage in its
advance – and it cannot be otherwise, for armies live in barracks. The revolution, which
is an army of labour, cannot busy itself with personality, devote much time to
personality, at all stages of its march, but after its victory the revolution is a soil on
which personality can bloom in all its richness. We – the army of Communism – do not
consist of mere ciphers. Communist society will be a million times richer in great
personalities than any other type of society could be. It is enough to look, at our country
as it is even today. Where else in the world have we seen shepherds growing up into
philosophers, brigade commanders, university professors in the space of fifteen or
sixteen years?

We have managers of factories, with all the intricacies of technique at their fingers’
ends, who were once unskilled labourers in the factories they now manage. I know of
one factory the site of which was a lake three and a half years ago, and the wild ducks,
who remember this lake, still look for it when they come flying home in spring. YCLers
from the collective farms have built giant factories, and in one of them, at Gorky, I saw
a worker of forty years’ standing who is working as head of a shop, while his two sons
are engineers in this factory. And in all these factories there are tens of thousands of
new personalities created out of the collective farm YCLers of yesterday. All these are
rich new personalities whom we have created. The stronger we become. the easier will
it be for us to do this.

Men we mentally approach such countries as France, we should always remember the
feeling that Alexander Herzen had when he first visited Cologne. He said that every
stone of this ancient city contained a greater history of culture than all the buildings in
tsarist Russia of the fifties. We should bear this in mind. And, comrades French writers,
you are right when you draw our attention to this past, which has created more
individualities in your country than tsarist Russia ever knew, but, you will be wrong if
you do not tell your readers in your country: “Individualities, fall in and march! A battle
has begun for the future of the human race.”
 4. Where to Direct the Eyes of Literature

Permit me, comrades, to revert once more to the problems of form, which have been
raised here by Comrade Herzfelde in his very important and very dangerous speech.

Herzfelde did not argue that it is worth while reading Joyce; I do not know any more
or less considerable writer from whom there is nothing to be learned. Herzfelde gave an
appraisal of Joyce which cuts right across the high road of our literature – socialist
realism.

What did Herzfelde say? Joyce is a great artist. I am not disposed to deny that at all.
If a man writes a book of eight hundred pages without stops or commas, where all the
parts are mixed up, and this book is nevertheless read with avidity by thousands of
writers, who see in it some new methods of expressing the feelings, this is something
out of the ordinary. And it stands to reason that there would be no harm, but rather the
opposite, if our writers were to get to know Joyce and find out what he is like. It is not
merely a question of reading; the point is – what is Joyce’s work, what is the relation of
form to content in it?

“Radek says that Joyce photographs a heap of dung with a cinema apparatus through
a microscope,” complains Herzfelde. He is offended by the “heap of dung,” although a
heap of dung is just as much a part of reality as the sun, or as the dewdrop in which the
sun is reflected. A heap of dung may form a component part of a great picture.
Herzfelde thought he expressed Joyce better when he said: “No, he does not photograph
a heap of dung – he photographs his inside.”

I am not an anatomist, but I will venture to guess that the human inside also contains
the various component parts of a heap of dung. This correction is not an essential one,
but it reveals one danger not stressed by Herzfelde. Should we really tell the artist at the
present time – the revolutionary artist here or abroad: “Look at your inside”?

No! We must tell him: “Look – they are making ready for a world war! Look – the
fascists are trying to stamp out the remnants of culture and rob the workers of their last
rights! Look – the dying capitalist world wants to throttle the Soviet Union!” This is
what we must say to the artist. We must turn the art ist away from his “inside,” turn his
eyes to these great facts of reality which threaten to crash down upon our heads.

Does this mean, however, that the artist should sketch some kind of abstract banks
and abstract monopoly capitalism, with Deterding wearing a face like all other
capitalists, that he should not be able to clothe these great events in the concrete images
of living, typical people, representing classes? If it is a question of being able to present
the typical in the individual, we do not need Joyce for that. As teachers, Balzac, Tolstoy
are enough for us.

Joyce’s specific character, his historical role is not to be sought for in any irrational
invention of literary technique. Joyce’s form is in keeping with bis content, and the
content of Joyce is a reflection of that which is most reactionary in the petty
bourgeoisie. “Joyce can curse at god and curse at imperialist England, but he does not
lead artists the right way. Joyce does not choose as the object of his observations the
whole world with its mighty contradictions.

Herzfelde says: “There are some writers who handle their images as a man handles a
letter box. He takes out the letters, opens them, and lays aside those he wants. Joyce, on
the other hand, takes all the letters.”

This is a profound mistake. If Joyce did not turn his eyes towards the Irish uprising
that was preparing, this was not because it took ten years to come, but because all that
appealed to Joyce was the medieval, the mystical, the reactionary in the petty
bourgeoisie – lust, aberrations; everything capable of impelling the – petty bourgeoisie
to join the side of revolution was alien to him.

Incidentally, what is China suffering from? From the Chinese alphabet, in which
there are 40,000 signs. The Chinese coolies cannot learn to read, our comrades are
obliged to communicate with them by means of pictures. Joyce is trying to teach you
writers to create some kind of Chinese alphabet without commas so that it cannot reach
the masses of the people.

We will give battle to these tendencies. We regard them as reactionary.

Herzfelde has mentioned Dos Passos, who is under the influence of Joyce. Dos
Passos is a great revolutionary artist. But if he has not yet reached those heights to
which he might have risen, and to which we hope he will rise, that is because he is not
under the influence of Marx and the great artists of realism, but under the influence of
Joyce.

Some of our writers have read Dos Passos and said: “How interesting! At the
beginning there are some newspaper cuttings, and then in the middle there are
biographies of people.”
 Dos Passos’ form is his weakness – a weakness not only of a formal character. What
is the source of this weakness? The young American intellectual went to the war. There
he became a revolutionary; he began to hate war. He saw the spectacle of ruin, but he
lacked an integral view of life. For this reason he writes the biographies of his heroes
one after the other, so that these biographies may compose a general picture. But he
feels that these biographies are taking place against the background of history; and he
cannot present this background of history, for he cannot generalize. He therefore puts in
insertions and excerpts from newspapers in order to glue together that background
which his inability to generalize prevents him from portraying.

What distinguishes socialist realism from all these experiments? In the first place, the
fact that we do not take all the letters out of the box and rate them all alike. We read the
letters, and throw some into the waste paper basket, while others we give to the masses
to read.

We do not photograph life. In the totality of phenomena we seek out the main
phenomenon. Giving everything without discrimination is not realism. That would be
the most vulgar kind of naturalism. We should select phenomena. Realism means that
we make a selection from the point of view of what is essential, from the. point of view
of guiding principles. And as for what is essential – the very name of socialist realism
tells us this. Select all phenomena which show how the system of capitalism is being
smashed, how social. ism is growing, not embellishing socialism but showing that it is
growing in battle, in hard toil, in sweat. Show how it is growing in deeds, in human
beings. Do not represent each and every capitalist as he has been represented by
“agitprop” brigades. No, show the typical in the individual. Do this, basing yourself on
the criterions of the laws of historical development. That is what socialist realism
means.

Joyce is on the other side of the barricades. I do not, of course, mean to say by this
that Herzfelde is a counter-revolutionary writer. That is not what I mean. I mean that
nothing essential can be learned from Joyce. If you say that you learn technique from
Joyce, I do not dispute this. I have not written novels, but I think that if I were to write
novels, I would learn how to write them from Tolstoy and Balzac, not from Joyce.

I wish to say to Soviet and foreign writers: “Our way does not lie through Joyce, but
along the high-road of socialist realism.”

By speaking against Herzfelde, I do not want in any way to diminish interest in those
works which may be interesting to the writer from the point of view of the writer’s
technique. I deemed it my duty to dwell on this question because some of our writers
are prone to show a morbid interest in Joyce. What this means is – don’t come near me
with your Kuznetskstroys and Magnitostroys, your Red Army men and shock brigaders.
My speciality is little things, but done very subtly, originally, cleverly.

Permit me to conclude my speech in answer to the discussion by expressing the

assurance that our two days’ discussion with our comrades-in-arms, the foreign writers,
will bring nearer that day when we shall be able to convene the first international
congress of the Union of Soviet Writers.

Permit me to express the hope that at this first international congress of Soviet
revolutionary writers we shall be able to say that since the time of our present congress
a great socialist literature has arisen, based on the consummation of the building of
socialism in the USSR, on the victory of the socialist revolution in a number of
countries, on the alliance of the best writers of dying capitalism with the proletarian
writers into one family of those who create the images of the new life – of life in the
epoch of victorious socialism.
Bujarin: Poesía,poética y los problemas de la poesía en la
URSS.

It seems to me, comrades, that in considering the great problems of our Soviet poetry,
we must have before us that picture of our life and that picture of world affairs which
presents itself to our eyes at the present time. Our country now occupies a position of
world-wide importance, a position of tremendous power. Our country is on the brink of
mighty battles. Within the country, we have achieved enormous success, both in
technical and economic respects and in the class struggle, thanks to that wise leadership
which is embodied in our Central Committee with Comrade Stalin at its head. There has
been a tremendous growth of culture in our country both extensive, in breadth, when
vast sub-strata of new human beings are rising up to genuine cultural life, and an
intensive growth of this culture in depth; - this is accompanied by an enrichment of all
elements that go to make human working personality, which, contrary to all the slanders
of our enemies, is much more highly differentiated at the present moment than it ever
was before, and which is now entering the arena of world affairs as the embodiment of
the hopes of all mankind, confronted by the great menace which capitalism is preparing
for it.

This gives rise to a peculiar complication of those problems which we have to tackle
on our literary front in general and on our poetic front in particular.

It is no accident that in our time, understood in the narrow sense of this word - I mean
the period through which we are passing at present - the problem of quality on all fronts
should have been stressed with extreme sharpness.

The problem of quality is the problem of diversity, of a multitude of different

approaches to a question, of individualization, of attaining greater depth, etc. Such is the
problem of quality in technique, the problem of quality in the sphere of economics, the
problem of quality in the sphere of leadership, the problem of quality in the sphere of
ideas.

And if we understand - as we all unquestionably dothat poetic creation is one of the

forms of ideological creation, that poetic "production" is also a peculiar form of
production, that poetry, no matter whether the poet thinks about this or not, is one of the
most powerful factors in social development as a whole (we may note in passing that
even the ancients, let us say the Greeks, perfectly well understood what some
professional literary theorists of our time fail to understand - namely, the socially
educative, the educationally militant role of all literature as a whole and of poetry in
particular) - if, I say, we bear in mind this problem of quality, then for our poetic
creation, too, the problem of quality, the problem of mastering the technique of poetic
creation, the problem of craftsmanship, the problem of assimilating the heritage of past
literature and culture is now being set in the forefront.

This is connected with those general problems which confront our country at the
present time. While the capitalist world, stimulated by the growth of its contradictions,
is pregnant with monstrous catastrophes, and all its social barometers point to storm and
tempest, in our country the process of the maturing of the new, socialist man is going on
at an almost fabulous speed, and all the problems involved in the building of socialism -
including its cultural problems too - shoot up to new and much greater heights.

The worker of today is not the same as the worker of five or six years ago. The
peasant of today, converted into a collective farmer, is already quite different in his
mentality from the former peasant. That historical necessity which is leading us forward
and onward, which is complicating, enriching, filling with fresh content the enormous
human reservoir - those people who are now claiming their place on the historical arena
with ever greater energy, with ever greater passion, with ever greater intelligence - these
demand higher quality in all spheres and a more subtle approach to all kinds of literary
production, poetry included.

The day is past when we could advance under the semiironical slogan of "A poor
thing, but mine own." Today we must have the daring, the audacity to set genuine,
universal standards for our art and poetic creation. We have to catch up and outstrip
Europe and America in craftsmanship. This is what we must aspire to do.

Just because of this, the time has come for a general analysis in the field of literature,
for summarizing experience, for defining orientations more exactly, for the statement of
new problems commensurate with the great position held by the victorious proletariat in
world history, and with the whole rhythm of this most interesting era in the life of
mankind.

1. Poetry

The final subject of this report is that of the problems of poetic creation in the
U.S.S.R. But before proceeding to an analysis of these problems, it will be worth our
while critically to examine a number of general questions connected with poetic
creation - the more so since there is still a great deal that is not clear here, and this lack
of clarity is reflected above all in our literary criticism, which has a great task to
perform and does not always perform it well.
 Here I must ask my hearers to excuse me. For a certain period of time they may find
it rather boring, but boredom, like evil, will the better set off the good that will follow in
the latter part of my report, where it will not be so boring, and where I shall, perhaps,
encounter violent objections. Here I may invoke the authority of the blessed Augustine,
who said that evil exists only in order to set off the good. Having cited such a powerful
authority as this, let me ask you to have patience for a little.

Let us first consider poetry as such. The Encyclopædia Britannica says: "Absolute
poetry is the concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and
rhythmical language."

It is easy to see that this definition suffers from the fundamental defect that it defines
poetry, that is, a concrete form of art, by means of artistic activity, which itself must be
defined from the point of view of the specific character of art. The definition is therefore
tautological. Moreover, it is obviously necessary somehow to differentiate the special
properties of poetic speech, of poetic language and of the corresponding poetic thought,
because thought is firmly and indissolubly linked up with language. Ancient Hindu
poetics had already developed the Anandavardhana doctrine (tenth century B.C.) of the
twofold, "hidden" meaning of poetic speech. According to this doctrine, language in
which words are used solely anal exclusively in their direct, "customary" sense cannot
be called poetic speech. Whatever such speech may convey, it will .be prose. Only when
the words, by various associations, evoke other "pictures, images, feelings," when
"poetic thoughts glimmer, radiate, as it were, through the words of the poet, but are not
expressed directly by him," do we have authentic poetry. Such is the doctrine of the
"dhvana," of the poetic innuendo, of the hidden meaning of poetic speech. Similar
theories have often been associated with a mystic interpretation of poetry and poetic
experience, as of something touching the fringe of "other worlds." In ancient China we
find, for example, a whole brilliant poetic treatise, the poem Categories of Verse by Ssû
- K'ung T'u (837 - 908 A.D.), on the theme of divine poetic inspiration, where the "True
Lord," the "Prime Ancestor," the "Creator of Transformations," the "Spirit - like
Transmogrifier," the "Heavenly Loom," the "Wondrous Mechanism," the "Highest
Harmony" and, finally, the "Black Nothing" - the Great Tao - lives in a state of
inexpressible poetic "inspiration." Having their roots deep in the idea of the magic of
the word, such ideas often led to the direct deification of the word, which became a
mystic essence. Thus, we find in one Arab philosopher the interpretation of the "Word"
with a capital W, the Greek Logos, not as reason raised to the degree of the world's
Demiurge, but as the embodiment of volition creating the world. Yet strange as it may
seem, it is a highly characteristic fact that this magical or semi-magical interpretation of
the art of words and the art of poetry, after a long cycle of ages, has once more gained
currency in our own era; it was comparatively recently that we had a similar
interpretation of poetry in bourgeois literary theory and bourgeois poetics.

In our own times Gumilev1) has expressed this idea in poetic form:

In days of yore, when o'er a world still new

God leaned his head, it was a Word

Which made the sun stop in his course,And towns were ruined by a word.

But we forgot the word alone is blessed

'Mid terrors that are sent us for a rod

And in the Gospel that was writ by John

'Tis said the word - is God.

In his day Balmont,2) an unquestioned master of language, attempted to provide a

"theoretical" basis for this fetishization of speech - reflexes in his book, Poetry as
Magic, the very title of which clearly indicates the author's trend of ideas. "The world
needs the creation of images," he declared. "The world has its magicians, who broaden
and enrich the circle of existence by the magic of their will arid the music of their
words." This poet, who was organically incapable of logical thinking, produces nothing
to "prove" his argument but a long succession of carefully chosen and impressive
images, which are intended to take the place of thought. Andrey Biely3), on the other
hand, once made an attempt to give philosophic depth to the same subject, and word
fetishism with him reached truly Himalayan heights. "If there were no words, there
would be no world," he wrote. "My Ego, apart from its surroundings, does not exist at
all. The world, apart from me, does not exist either. 'I' and 'the world' spring to life only
in the process of their union in sound."

Thus, authors of various theories have lapsed into pure mysticism in their attempts to
approach the problems of poetic speech. This, of course, had its causes - causes of a
social and historical nature which ate not far to seek. But at present this does not
concern us. We only want to point out the existence of such a way of putting the
question, and that at different periods and in different countries.

Such points of view, inasmuch as they are idealistic and mystical, are of course
unacceptable to us. They are a sort of refined barbarism, crudely contradictory to all
scientific experience. But their very existence emphasizes the problem of the specific
character of poetic thought and poetic speech, of that "mystery," "sorcery," and "magic,"
in which the mystics seek to envelop their readers' minds as in a veil, locking all the
doors of rational perception.

But there is nothing mystic in phenomena themselves. The process of life, taken as
"experience," has its intellectual, emotional and volitional sides. We make a
conventional distinction between logical thought, thought in terms of concepts, and
"thought in terms of images," the so-called "realm of emotion." True, in actual life the
stream of experience is integral and undivided; nevertheless, in this very unity, we have
the intellectual pole and the emotional pole, even though they may not exist in their
"pure form," even though they may merge into one another. But it would be entirely and
essentially wrong to make an absolute mechanical subdivision of the so-called "spiritual
life" into water-tight compartments of feeling and intellect, or of the conscious and the
unconscious, or of the directly sensory and the logical. These are not separate domains
of abstract categories. They are dialectical magnitudes composing a unity. At one and
the same time we are confronted with differences and even with opposites, though these
opposites also merge into one another. This likewise gives rise to a certain difference in
types of thinking.

Logical thinking employs concepts, which range themselves into a whole ladder of
thought, with various rungs, or degrees, of abstraction. Even when we are dealing with
the highest type of logical thought - dialectical logic - where the abstract concept
includes its concrete attributes, the very concept, as such, causes sensory colours,
sounds and tones to lose their vividness. Moreover, perceptive action oversteps the
bounds of the senses, although it has its source in them; in summarizing human
experience, it perceives, for instance,. the subjectivity of colour, and coming closer to a
real perception of the world, of its objective nature, independent of the subject, it
"replaces" colour by a light wave of definite length. In science, the entire qualitative
diversity and multiformity of the world take on other forms, quite distinct from
immediate sensation, but giving a much more adequate reflection of reality - that is,
more true.

On the other hand, the entire world of emotions - love, joy, terror, grief, rage, and so
on to infinity - the entire world of desire and passion, not as the object of research, but
as experience, as well as the whole world of immediate sensations, also have their
points of condensation - thought in terms of images. Here there is no abstraction from
what is directly experienced. Here the process of generalization does not take us beyond
its limits (as is the case in logical thought and in its highest product, scientific thought).
Here this very sensory experience - doubly concrete and doubly "alive" - is itself
condensed. Here we have, not a scientific reflection of real existence, but a sensorily
generalized picture of a phenomenological series, not of the "essence," but of the
"phenomenon." This does not by any means signify that we are dealing with an illusion
or a dream. Nothing of the sort! This essence appears in the phenomenon. The essence
merges into the phenomenon. The senses do not fence us off from the world.

But objective reality is here "reflected" differently. In science, it is reflected as a

world of qualitatively diverse forms of matter; in art, as a world of sensory images; in
science, as electrons, atoms, species, value, etc.; in art, as colours, odours, hues, sounds,
images. The type of thinking here is not the same as in logical thought. Here
generalization is achieved not by extinguishing the sensory, but by substituting one
complex of sense symbols for a great multitude of other complexes. This "substitute"
becomes a "symbol," an "image," a type, an emotionally coloured unity, behind which
and in the folds of whose garments thousand's of other sensory elements are concealed.
Every such unity is sensorily concrete. To the extent that such unities are selected and
fixated, i.e., that these experiences are constructively, creatively reproduced, to this
extent we have art.

The word itself is a highly complex magnitude. Being the product of many thousands
of years of development, it embraces, like some cell of a "spiritual organism," all the
problems of thought with both its principles - image and concept. In scientific
terminology, it grows as a symbol of the "pure concept"; in poetical speech; it is
imagery first and foremost. Consequently, the laws governing both the selection of
words and their combination will differ, or, to express it otherwise, poetical speech will
inevitably have its specific peculiarities. That remarkable investigator of these
problems, Potebnia4), who while essentially developing the theory of Humboldt5),"
arrived at a number of most original solutions, formulates the polarity of art and science
as follows:

"Alike in the .broad and in the strict sense, all that pertains to
thought is subjective; that is to say that, even though conditioned by
the external world, it is yet the product of personal creation. But
within this all-embracing subjectivity, we can distinguish the objective
and the subjective, and refer science to the first ands art to the second.
The basis for this is as follows: in art, only the image is the common
property of all; it Is understood differently by everyone, and' the
understanding of it can consist only of unanalysed (real and wholly
personal) feeling, such as is evoked by the menage; in science,
however, there is no image, and feeling cannot enter save as a subject
of research; the sole building material of science is the concept,
composed of symbols of the image already objectivized in the word. If
art is a process of objectivized primary data of spiritual life, then
 science is a process of objectivizing art. The difference in degree of
objectivity of thought ins identical with the difference in the degree of
its abstractness: the most abstract of sciences, mathematics, is at the
same time the most unquestionable one in its principles, the one that
least of all admits the possibility oaf personal views.

It is easy to see that these formulations contain a number of errors. The author does
not present any clearly defined ideas on the truthfulness, the objectivity of perception,
and a loophole is left open for idealism; he obviously underestimates the social
character of language, of the entire creative process, etc.; he draws too sharp a line of
demarcation, metaphysically separating different aspects of thought. In consequence
there is little that is dialectic here. At the same time there is much that is true and
unquestionably deserving of attention. To continue the broken thread of our argument,
we may say that the system of concepts proceeds outward through science: taking the
sensations as our starting point, we advance further and further beyond their borders,
where we perceive the objective character of the world, continually studying new facts
and perfecting science, moving along the endless path of converting relative truth into
absolute truth, destroying antiquated systems of science as we proceed on our way. In
the field of art we do not go beyond the limits of the phenomenological series; here, as
we said before, the objective world is reflected differently; here emotions are not made
the object of scientific research; here even nature is "humanized." Here, therefore, the
"warm," emotional, vivid! and metaphorical principle is placed in relative contrast to the
"cold," intellectual, logical principle:

Water and stone,

Verse and rose,
Ice and fire. (Pushkin.)

Poetry is understood both in the broad and in the narrow sense of the word. All
speech in terms of images is poetical speech; from this point of view Gogol's Dead
Souls or Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter are poetical works. By poetry in the narrow
sense is understood not simply the fixation of sensory images in words, but, in addition,
rhythmical speech and even rhymed speech. It must not be thought, however, that there
are any hard and fast lines of demarcation. The rhymed, rhythmical rules of arithmetic
in India have only the sound image; they thus possess one element of poetry, but that
does not make them poetry. The philosophical treatise of Lucretius, De Rerum
Natura (On the Nature of Things), presents not only sound images but many others
besides, and is therefore poetry. Here too, then, one element merges into the other.

Poetic creation and its product - poetry - represent a definite form of social activity,
and are governed in their development, regardless of the specific nature of poetic
creation, by the laws of social development. As we shall see later, when we go into this
question in detail, the "verbal" character of poetic creation is no argument whatever
against the sociological treatment of poetry. On the contrary: only by a Marxian analysis
of poetry can we understand it in its full scale, in all the totality of its attributes. True,
the Marxists have paid but little attention to the specific problems of language. But a
deeper analysis of its phenomena inevitably leads to a sociological treatment of the
word itself. And indeed it could not 'be otherwise. Examine a word, and you discover
the palaeontology of language. Words are the depository of the whole previous life of
mankind, which has passed through various social-economic structures, with diverse
classes and groupings, different spheres of experience, labour, social struggle, culture.
That which Potebnia calls "the heredity of words," and which can be developed into the
evolution of language (or languages), is the reflection of actual social-historical life.
Within the microcosm of the word is embedded the macrocosm of history. The word,
like the concept, is abridged history, an "abbreviature," or epitome, of social-historical
life. It is a product of this life, not a Demiurge of history, not a Logos creating a world
out of nothing.

We have seen how poetry, as the fixation of sensory images in words, summarizes the
world of emotion in its own peculiar way. But these emotions, these experiences are in
themselves experiences of the social-historical man, and in a class society, of the class
man. For even such emotions as have their roots in the fathomless biological depths of
man, like emotions of an erotic nature, are modified in the course of the historical
process. Fixated, selected images therefore cannot but come within the spheres of
sociological analysis; they are social phenomena, phenomena of social life. Finally,
thinking in terms of imagery is none the less thinking. The emotional element here
merges with its opposite. On the other hand, a tremendous wealth of ideas, concepts,
standards, ideologies, systems of philosophy enters bodily into poetic unity as an
inseparable part of it. Here the intellectual merges with the emotional, that is, with its
opposite. The poetic image, as an integral unity, is therefore not "purely" emotional;
much less is the unified system of images purely emotional. Hence it follows that
poetry, when considered from this angle, is a social product; it is one of the functions of
a concrete historical society, reflecting and expressing in a specific form the specific
features of its time and - in so far as we are dealing with a class society - of its class.

It is highly ridiculous how certain bourgeois theoreticians, giving a re-hash of

idealist, philosophical æsthetics or æsthetic philosophy, which has been represented by
very great names, by such giants of bourgeois thought as Kant, Schopenhauer and
Hegel, keep reiterating surprisingly vapid and tedious arguments to the effect that art in
general and poetry in particular have no relation at all to practice, to "interest," to will.
Kant, for example, in his Kritik der Urteilskraft, asserted this principle with all his
force. Schopenhauer contrasts "disinterested" artistic contemplation to the ancillary
character of science.6) According to Hegel, "the object of art should be contemplated in
itself, in its independent objectivity, which, though existing for the subject, does so only
in a theoretical, intellectual way, not practically, and without any reference whatever to
desire or will."7) All this is utter nonsense. Take the art of ancient Greece. The comedies
of Aristophanes are political journalism, but at the same time admirable works of art.
There you will find the struggle of parties, definite political tendencies, ridicule of
political opponents, etc. And the tragedians - Sophocles, Æschylus Euripides?

Everyone will understand the significance of the poetic contests that were held there,
when the poets were awarded crowns by the crowd. If we went a step further, and if the
crowd in the Park of Culture and Rest were to crown with laurels, let us say, Sasha
Bezymensky, as the best popular bard, that would be something taken right out of the
ancient Greek world.

The objective, and also active, significance of the social function of poetry - if we are
to give it a more general formulation - is to assimilate and transmit experience and to
educate character, to reproduce definite ;group psychologies. This peculiarly perceptive,
peculiarly educative and peculiarly effectual function of poetry is truly tremendous, and
at times it turns into that of an extraordinarily active militant force.

Here we must emphasize once again that the subjective experience even of a "purely
scientific" worker may be just as completely disinterested, in the sense of its remoteness
from all practice, as that of the creative artist; that "contemplation" of the astronomical
map may, subjectively, be void of any element of self-interest or practicality. But
objectively, in the total social relation, i.e., when regarded as a social function, both
science and art in general and poetry in particular play, as has been pointed out, a
tremendously vital and at the same time a practical role.

The cosmogonies of ancient India, the Gilgamesh Epic of Babylon, the

Greek Iliad and Odyssey, the Chinese fables, Vergil's Æneid the works of the great
Greek tragedians, the Song of Roland, the Russian folk-tales, etc. - were they not all
mighty levers of a peculiar social pedagogy, forming people in accordance with their
own commandments and canons? The ancient cosmogonies were veritable poetical
encyclopædias. Homer was a fundamental subject of so-called "school" tuition. In
Rome the verses of Vergil were crammed and scanned by no means as an empty
pastime. The society of those times and its social leaders were thereby reproducing
themselves in the realm of ideas, in an idealized form, inculcating their ideas, thoughts,
conceptions, feelings, characters, ambitions, ideals, virtues. Even the
Aristotelian catharsis (purging of the emotions) is a method of peculiar moral and
intellectual hygiene (cf. Lessing's arguments in his Hamburgische
Dramaturgie regarding the ultimate moral aim of tragedy). Horace knew what he was
doing when he wrote that the aim of poetry was to mingle the useful with the pleasant
"miscere utile dulci." The well-known Arab philosopher, Averrhoes, spoke of tragedy as
the "art of praising" and comedy as the "art of censure."8) Contrary to idealist
philosophy, Chernyshevsky,9) in his famous Dissertation, upheld the principle: "What is
of general interest in life forms the content of art," and this somewhat crude formula is
nevertheless infinitely closer to reality than are the pale shades of "disinterested"
idealistic definitions, whose metaphysics carry us away into the almost airless void of
an a-social "stratosphere."

The fact that words play a tremendous part in poetic creation, that the specific
character of poetry is thought in terms of images, does not in any way run counter to a
sociological treatment of poetry, because even the word itself is the product of social
development and represents a definite condensing point in which a whole series of
social factors find their expression. And for this reason we Marxists are faced with the
task of subjecting this side of the matter, too, to a Marxist study, viz., the question of
language, the question of words, the question of word creation, of the evolution of
language, etc.; and it seems to me that quite a considerable theoretical foundation for
such a study has been laid in our Marxist and near-Marxist literature.

Notes
1) Gulimev. Nikolai Stepanovich (1888 - 1921). Russian poet, prose writer and critic.
Shot in 1921 for participation in a whiteguard plot. The verses here quoted are from his
last book, The Pillar of Fire. - Ed.
2) Balmont, Constantine Dmitrievich (b. 1887). Well - known Russian poet. One of
the foul chief representatives of Russian symbolism - Bryussov, Blok, Balmont and
Biely. Emigrated after the October Revolution of 1917. - Ed.
3) Russian poet, prose writer and critic (1880 - 1934). The passage quoted is from an
article entitled "The Magic of Words" in his book Symbolism. - Ed.
4) Potebnia, Alexander Aphamasyevich (1835 - 1891). Russian linguist, philologist
and writer on the theory of poetry. The passage here quoted is from a work by him
entitled Thought and Language. - Ed.
 5)
Humboldt, ,Karl Wilhelm von (1767 - 1835). German philologist. Author of The
Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of
Mankind. - Ed.
6) Schopenhauer: World as Will and Idea, Section 36.
7)
Hegel: Werke, Æsthetik Dritter Teil: Das System der einzelnen Künste, Berlin,
1843, Vol. X(2), pp. 253-4.
8)
Cf. Ign. Kratschkovsky "Die Arabische Poetik im IX Jahrhundert" in Le Monde
Oriental, No. XXIII, 1929. Upsala.
9)
Chernyshevsky, Nikolni Gavrilovich (1829 - 99). Great
Russian scholar and critic, publicist and revolutionary. -
Ed.

2. Poetics as the Technology of Poetic Craftmanship

Here again we shall have to settle some theoretical scores with the formalists, at the
same time assigning them to the place they have merited among researchers in art
theory, and also with those in the sociological (including the Marxian) camp of literary
theory who tend to over-simplify the question. We shall take our examples from
comparatively early works written when the formalists were still such in the genuine
sense of the word. The formalists were - guided by considerations of the following
nature: Poetic language, i.e., in the final analysis, the word, is a constituent principle of
poetry. It is therefore necessary to elucidate the laws of poetic word combinations (from
various angles). Since "poetry is language in its aesthetic function," "language methods"
represent "the sole hero" in the science of literature.1) In other words: the specific nature
of poetry requires the study of these methods, which constitute the only object of
literary theory. From this point of view the Marxian way of putting the question
becomes sheer nonsense - an irrelevant intrusion of alien problems and utterly
inadequate methods. The question has been much more subtly dealt with by
Zhirmunsky,2) but in the final analysis even he did not deviate very widely from his
colleagues. "Poetics," we read, "is a science which studies poetry as an art. ...What is
now the subject of the most animated scientific interest is not the evolution of a
philosophical view of life or of the 'feeling of life' in the great monuments of literature,
not historical development, and the changing of social psychology in its interaction with
the individual psychology of the poetcreator, but the study of the poetic art-poetics,
historical and theoretical."
 The theoretical basis for this conclusion is provided by the author's argument
regarding the real coalescence of so-called "form" and "content" in art. "In actual fact,
such a division of the what and the how in art represents only a conventional
abstraction. Love, grief, tragic struggles of the soul, philosophical ideas, etc., exist in
poetry not by themselves, but in that concrete form in which they have been expressed
in the given work." "All facts of 'content' also become phenomena of form." This is both
true and not true. Not true, because the author sees only the unity, but does not see the
contrariety; he regards the entire complex only from the angle of formal logic, and not
dialectically. This is the first point. Secondly - and this is much more important in the
present case - the author's reasoning is vicious at the root. In reality, we are here dealing
with a science whose duty is to understand poetry (historically and theoretically - we
will not here discuss the question of the arbitrariness of this antithesis) as an art. This
vital ands original unity, which is developing and evolving, contains elements of "love,
grief...philosophical ideas." They are put into definite (poetic) form, but in their
transformed aspect, they have entered into the "whole." How is this "whole" to be
understood without touching on the genesis, origin, development, etc., of all these
elements?

Evidently we must draw just the opposite conclusion to that arrived at by

Zhirmunsky, namely, that since all the elements enumerated have entered into some
synthetic whole - a work of art - then, in order to understand this whole in all its aspects,
we must go beyond its borders and reveal the sources of the entire morphological
process. One cannot understand law without going beyond the borders of legal
formulae. One cannot understand religion without going beyond the borders of
dogmatic theology. One cannot understand art without analysing its connections with
the entire life- activity of society, because art must not be transformed into a
metaphysical "thing - in - itself." Furthermore, as we have seen above, the very "form"
of the word itself "possesses content," and that not only as the morphological factor in
every new poetic work. It "possesses content" in another sense as well-namely, as the
condenser of socialhistorical experience. The selection of metaphors in their concrete
form "comes" not as a result of the immanent logic of words: it is taken from the
surroundings of life, just as is the genre, the style and a thousand other things.

The narrowness and one-sidedness of "pure formalism" compel Zhirmunsky to

criticize, quite rightly, the theoretical structure of Eichenbaum's3) arguments. However,
he lapses from his position and inevitably begins to contradict himself. In another work,
analysing tile presence of "extraneous elements" in art, he concludes: "All these
examples raise the question of the limits of historical (and, we may add, not only
historical. - N.B.) poetics and the delimitation of its problems within the bounds of a
broader science of literature." Very good. But in that case we are faced with the
following conclusion: either this "broader science" deals with art - in which case the
whole fundamental structure of the author's argument collapses; or it is a science whose
object is much broader than art - in which case the author's argument regarding the
coalescence of the so-called form with the so-called content falls to the ground, that is,
the author's conception collapses at the other end.

Finally, Zhirmunsky makes a desperate attempt of a dualistic nature. He subdivides

art into two sorts: 1) "pure, formal, objectless arts, like ornaments, music, dancing,"
where "the very material of which they are built is conventional to the core, abstract,
æsthetic, not burdened (!! - N.B.) with meaning, material significance, practical tasks,"
and 2) arts "with an object or theme," "like painting, sculpture, poetry, theatrical art,"
"burdened with meaning" where "the material of art is not especially æsthetic . . . ." This
attempt, however, is doubly fatal to the author. It is fatal because such a subdivision
simply does not fit the facts. The ornament is an image of things, people, plants and
animals, symbolized to a very high degree, or else it is directly and intimately connected
with "practical life" in another way (e.g., pictures on clay vessels). Music, as such, is by
no means "objectless" - it is enough to mention Beethoven, Wagner, church music;
there is even such a thing as philosophical music-Scriabine, for instance. The dance
possesses a very great vital significance (and even a purely practical one) - war dances,
erotic dances, etc. Secondly, this attempt is fatal to the author because it derisively
contradicts his ideas, for this time he quite inequitably tears away a number of elements
from the æsthetic whole on the grounds that they are "burdensome" and unartistic.

We have selected Zhirmunsky because he is one of the subtlest art critics of the
formalist or "near-formalist" camp. His spiritual confrère beyond our borders, Professor
O. Walzel, flounders in the toils of approximately the same contradictions in his search
for "synthetic literary research" (synthetische Literaturforschung).4)

The foregoing analysis gives us the clue to the positive solution of the problem. An
integral science of literature must include the elucidation of the laws of literature as a
whole, as an active function in the life of society, as a "superstructure" of a peculiar
kind, and this should include the laws, conditionally speaking, of the "formal elements"
as well.

As a sub-species of such a literary science, as a conditionally specialized branch, we

may have also a science of these formal elements, which must likewise have its
sociological basis. Allthis does not preclude the possibility of special researches within
limited and perhaps even narrower bounds. Hence valuable results can also be derived,
for example, from work done to elucidate the special laws governing the technique of
verse construction, or work devoted exclusively to the problem of imagery, or to the
problems of sound in its relation to the image, etc., etc. These would all be special
"branches," furnishing material for an integral science of literature. The tendency,
therefore, which can frequently be observed in our own Marxian ranksnamely, a purely
nihilistic attitude to the problem of form as such - is entirely wrong. In such an event
literary research resolves itself into nothing but a superficial social-class
characterization of the so-called ideological content of the poetic work, which, in its
bare, rudimentary and over-simplified form, is carried over into the characterization of
the poet as a poet. As we have seen above, however, form and content constitute a unity,
but a unity of contradictions. Moreover, such an attitude leads people to understand by
"content" what is, properly speaking, the ideological source of the content, and not its
artistic transformation. Needless to say, this leads to quite incorrect conclusions.

It should be clearly and distinctly understood: that there is a tremendous difference

between formalism in art, which must be emphatically rejected, formalism in literary
criticism, which is equally unacceptable, and the analysis of the formal elements in art
(which is not formalism at all) - an analysis which is exceedingly useful and which at
the present time, when we have to "master technique" in all fields, is absolutely
indispensable.

Formalism in art denotes the self-emasculation of the art in question, the utter
impoverishment of its component parts - a phenomenon connected with the extreme
contraction of the circle upon which such soi-disant art exercises its influence. It is
individualism bordering on solipsism, where sound almost ceases to be a form
possessing any "content."

In poetry we have such a phenomenon in the shape of "irrational language." When

one reads:

Lulla, lolla, lalla - goo,

Leeza,, lolla, lulla - lee,
Pines, shoo - yat, shoo - yat.
Gee - ee, Gee - ee - oo - oo -

then the purely sound content (the musical melody of the verse) is in direct contrast to
individual "human" words. The word ceases to be a word, because it is devoid of all
meaning. All the living wealth of poetry disappears. Shklovsky5) concluded his article
"On Poetry and Irrational Language" with the "prophecy" of Slowacki6) that: "A time
will come when only the sounds in poetry will interest poets." This hope, expressed by
one of the foremost theoreticians of formalism, fully explains why he has played such a
negative role in regard to poetry as an art. When Paul Verlaine, that brilliant master of
verse, poet of the subtlest and most delicate moods, demanded "de la musique avant
toute chose" ("music before all else"), he never even dreamed of adopting the language
of "Dyr bull shirr - ubeshur" à la Kruchenykh.7)

The formalists have a peculiar logic of development. If the so-called "content" is to

be considered as an "extraneous element," if all "meaning" is nothing 'but a
"burdensome magnitude," if this meaning "blocks the road" of æsthetic emotion, then,
of course, poetry's main line of development can be expressed in the slogan: "Down
with Faust and long live 'Dyr bull shirr'! " Thus, the theoretical "emancipation" from
"meaning" leads in practice to "irrationality." It must be borne in mind that we are not
here speaking of "wordbuilding" and that our standpoint is by no means that of the
notorious Admiral Shishkov.8) What we are discussing is a tendency to do away with
the word as such, to destroy all concepts, to debase imagery - in other words, to
annihilate poetry as a verbal art. The dialectics of formalism develop as follows: they
begin their "Gospel according to St. John" by promulgating the thesis: "In the beginning
was the word," and define the essence of poetry by the word and the word alone - only
to end by doing away with that word altogether, and thus demolishing their central
principal. The extreme individualism of these arguments is also indicative of their social
roots. They have their origin in abject fear of the flood of new "content" accompanying
the revolution, which overturned the tea-tables in so many drawing-rooms, in the going
into hermitage of "proud" bourgeois-intellectual "individuals," who want to creep away
into the burrow of the professional anchorite ("And we, the poets wise"...).

It is interesting to trace the evolution of formalism in art as the evolution of

decadence in bourgeois art. I have already had occasion to show once in print how in
the epoch of universal decadence in which all bourgeois humanity is now living, the
latter casts away the element of content from all art, i.e., in the last resort, destroys art
itself.

So it was with painting, when bourgeois artists, continually impoverishing the

elements of "content," brought painting to the verge of a "pure," "decorative spot"; all
that remains is the "spot" as a principle, and further progress is barred. The same thing
happened in sculpture, through expressionism, when nothing was left but a curved
lineand that was all. In architecture they began to be afraid of superfluous "content,"
reduced themselves to absolutely simple geometrical forms, and here too ended up in a
blind alley.
 The impoverishment of the elements of content brings its nemesis in the suicide of
the given form of art. When the decadence of art reaches its last limits, there begins a
process of frenzied casting around in different directions, and this will continue until the
other half of mankind - the proletariat, the toiling population - succeeds in creating a
synthetic art, which will gather together all the riches of human society and will create
masterpieces of integral humanity; and this will have nothing in common with either
physical or spiritual eunuchs, but will regard them with contempt and abhorrence.

Formalism in literary theory, as we have seen, is closely linked up with formalism in

art itself. Its most glaring error is that it attempts, on principle, to tear art from its vital
social context. It creates the illusion, or the fiction, of an entirely independent "series"
of phenomena in art. The specific nature of art it confuses with its complete autonomy.
As for the laws of art's development, it sees them only in the immanent laws of its
morphology, quite avoid of any connection with the most important morphological
problems of social life in general. This dry, vapid, lifeless conception must emphatically
be rejected.

All this must not be confused with the task of analysing the formal elements in art.
The latter, as we have seen above, is necessary and useful in the highest degree. The
formalists considered this partial work to be everything; they deduced general principles
from this material. This is wrong and harmful. But an analysis of the formal elements in
art, a profound study of all problems of the structure of poetical speech, is an
indispensable part of the broader field of work. And in this respect there is something to
be learned even from the formalists, who investigated these problems, while Marxist
literary critics have regarded them with complete disdain.

This question acquires a special importance and actuality just now, when the problem
of the cultural heritage in general and the problem of mastering the technique of art in
particular have been raised anew and in a serious light. But before discussing this
question, it is first necessary to say a few words about the general problem, viz., to
answer the question of how, in general, it is possible to learn from the "old masters," the
"classics," the "predecessors," etc.

This question is by no means an idle one, and clarity here will obviate many
mistakes. The essence of the whole matter can be briefly summarized as follows: Every
poetical work is an integral unity, in which sound, ideas, imagery, etc., are component
parts synthetically united. On the other hand, it is also a unity from the sociological
viewpoint, since all the component parts and their synthesis, taken together, are
"ideological reflexes" of a definite period and a definite class. How, then, under such
circumstances, is it possible to learn? :Should we not, on the contrary, utterly reject all
previous "contents," "forms," "methods," etc.? As is well known, such conclusions have
actually been drawn, although their absurdity is self-evident. The general answer to this
question has been given by materialist dialectics, according to which "negation" is not
sheer destruction, but a new phase in which "the old" exists in aufgehobener Form,9) to
use Hegel's terminology. In such a type of "movement" we have the possibility of a
succession which will dialectically combine both a rupture with the old and a peculiar
continuation of it. A number of elements, when carried over into another combination,
into another context, begin to live a new life, and thus a new "unity" is obtained. The
reason for this is that a unity is not a monolithic magnitude, but contains inner
contradictions. We may observe similar things in the field of material life: when we
import a new machine, we introduce it into a new complex of technicaleconomic
organization, and the "meaning" of the machine thereby becomes different.
Approximately the same thing happens in the realm of ideas - mutatis mutandis, of
course.

There is another and quite different side to this question. Is it possible to learn to be a
poet at all?

A perfectly correct answer, as it seems to us, was given to this question by Valery
Bryussov. "Ability for artistic creation," he said, "is an inborn gift, like beauty of face or
a powerful voice; this ability can and should be developed, but by no amount of effort
or study can it be acquired. Poetae nascuntur (poets are barn)." The development of
poetic ability is achieved with difficulty. "Truly great poets, endowed with a genius for
creation, achieved technical mastery only by means of slow probation and long, patient
labour." We are thus brought face to face with the problem of poetics, as the technology
of poetic creation. In other words: elucidation of the laws governing the so-called
formal elements can be presented in the form of definite standards. Poetics then appears
not only as a part of the theory of literature but, when transposed to another logical key,
acquires the significance of a system of rules. What we have in mind is not, of course, a
school-book exposition of the subject, although even this is useful with a view to raising
the general level of poetic culture, but a conscious understanding of the full importance
of this factor too. Without a study of the technology of poetic creation, one cannot learn
the specific "craftsmanship," "the poet's trade," as Bryussov expresses it, not very
accurately, in his Experiments. Of course - and this seems to us axiomatic, - the
"studies" cannot and should not on any account be limited to this "technology." Even
that part of the studies which relates to the problem of the "cultural heritage" cannot be
confined within such limits. For the wider our horizons are in all directions, the more
fruitful will be the process of making this heritage our own. Nevertheless a solution of
this most elementary problem is quite indispensable, and this must be stressed with
especial force, because the problem in question somehow or other has not and does not
come within the range of vision of our poets and - which is also extremely important -
of our duly impanelled critics. Problems of rhythm and metre, problems of verbal
scoring, of stanza construction, etc. - all these must enter into the sphere of careful
study, and the poet really must not resemble that character in Dmitryev10) who

"Forgets his lack of knowledge when he passes into raptures."

Such, in our opinion, is the problem of poetics, as the technology of poetic creation.

It seems to me that our most serious attention must now be turned to this side of the
matter. And this applies to criticism, too.

At the present time one of the main tasks of criticism is not only to give an exact
social-economic and social-political equivalent for the various poets, poetic tendencies,
etc., but also to analyse these carefully from the viewpoint of the specific character of
poetic creation, from the viewpoint of language, imagery, stanza construction, verbal
scoring, etc.

Without such an analysis, literary criticism at the present time is not of full value. In
the days when we were vanquishing bourgeois society, our criticism was a battering ram
which smashed the enemy. We picked out the main thing, the sharpest point, viz., the
social-political factor, and this, in our hands, was a shaft which we shot against the
bourgeois antagonist.

But when we ourselves are building, when we need to learn craftsmanship, when we
know that a definite number of poets have already taken their stand on a definite
political platform, when we know perfectly well that, ideologically, they are already
close to us (of course, there will be backsliders, and we must be ruthless towards all
enemies, nor must we relax our vigilance for an instant) - this, of course, is not
everything. We must at the same time raise the problem of craftsmanship as never
before, and criticism, in analysing the objects of its critical attention, must lay this very
important and essential side of the matter under the microscope.

Such criticism, unfortunately, has not as yet grown up among us in its full stature.
But this is one of the tasks confronting us at the present time on the literary front.
 3. The Turning Point

We shall now consider poetry in our country. First, however, I must make one
reservation. I cannot here present a full picture (it should really be put more strongly) of
the poetic work of our country as a whole. I am not considering here our tremendous
and growing national literatures, our poetry in the languages of national minorities. I am
considering only Russian poetry. I do so, not because I underrate the importance of
poetry in the languages of our national minorities - one could hardly suspect me of
doing this. But I am here following a certain rule laid down by Kozma Prutkov,1) who
says among other things: "Not knowing the Iroquois language, how can you express an
opinion of it which will not be superficial and stupid?" I know there are some amateurs
who pass judgments on everything. But if, as is said, the translations of Tajik and
Ukrainian poets into our language are bad translations, how can I judge the work of
these poets? I can only say of them that they have a Soviet outlook, that they fight
against nationalist deviations, but to pass judgment on their verbal scoring is beyond my
powers.

I repeat once again: An all-Soviet literature is growing up in our country, in which the
literature of national minorities possesses enormous significance. This significance will
grow greater and greater. I had the honour to submit a proposal on this question at a
special conference with Comrade Gorky, but I will not be so rash as to express any
opinions on poetry in the languages of national minorities, because, not knowing these
languages, I cannot study such poetry. It is easier for me to express opinions on German
or French poetry, or even on English poetry, than, let us say, on the poetry of
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, because, as a curse of the historical past, I have not studied
these languages. We shall have to learn them, and this, most certainly, will be a very
good thing.

There can be no doubt that the giant nature of the revolution was bound to cause and
did cause radical changes in the psychology and mentality of all sections, classes and
groups, as well as tremendous emotional shocks and. new growths. Of the remarkable
"old" poets who were touched, in one way or another, by the wings of the genius of
revolution, we must name three, entirely different and unequal in value. They are -
Blok, Yessenin and Bryussov.

In Alexander Blok we, of course, have a poet of tremendous power. His verse
achieves a chiselled monumentality, rising as it does to the scintillating heights of
"Retribution," whose rich images envelop the whole period of the crisis, with the
foreboding of the crash and all its tragedy. "The Twelve" will forever remain a
monument of the revolutionary chaos of the first years of seething rebellion, and the
very fabric of the verse, with its changing rhythm, serves to convey this kaleidoscopic
picture, unified by an invisible inner logic. His "Scythians" is written with an acme of
expressive power and embraces a tremendous sphere of ideas and images. Blok is for
the revolution, and with his "yes," proclaimed to the whole world, he has earned this
right to stand on our side of the barricades in history. And for all that, we can never say
of him that he is the standard-bearer of the new world. A skilled son of the old culture,
he wanted to emblazon alien symbols on the gates of the new era. He is a poet
profoundly philosophical and at the same time profoundly emotional. But his
philosophy is descended from Vladimir Solovyev,2) from religious-erotic mysticism,
from purified Greek orthodoxy with a Catholic tinge. There is something, too, of the old
Slavophile spirit, to which the huckster's trade has become repugnant, and which has
acquired a touch of Populism.3) From the evening's gory sunset and the tense
atmosphere of gathering storm, Blok sensed the impending catastrophe with pain and
anguish, and hoped that the font of revolution would, perhaps, asperge mankind with
new and brotherly unction. And that is why he "blessed" the revolution, and Katka, and
the "Twelve," and made the tender image of Christ march at the head of the
revolutionary torrent with "stormladen tread." But can we say that this poetized
ideology, these images, these searchings for an inner, mystic sense of the revolution, are
on its plane? Is the "hidden meaning," the "dhvana" of Blok's poetic speech in the least
akin to the proletariat? Is this a prelude to the new world? Of course not: it is rather the
swan song of the best members of the old, who had torn themselves away from the
sombre shores of the past, but who did not in the least understand, did not see the new
ways. The heroics of his "Scythians," where the sinewy strength of the images and the
music of the verse blend into the measured tread of history, express in fact a fictitious
history, the history which Blok awaited. This incantation of a new race, of the Asiatic,
of the primitive and the original, of a Scythian Messianism, very closely akin to Blok's
philosophic position - does it not in some of its tones and odours remind one of the
flowers of Eurasianism?

We love the flesh - its taste, and hue, and smell,

Like to the stifling, deathly odour of flowers....
Are we to blame if your frail bones as well
Crunch in these heavy, tender paws of ours?

We do not know how Blok's work would have developed further. It is clear he took
the revolution tragically, but it is a big question whether this tragedy was revealed to
him as an optimistic one. Blok had his roots in the life of the landed noble's estate, and
the filigree pinnacles of this culture, with its roses and crosses, had a fairly strong inner
hold on him. Socialist machinism and the flourishing of a new culture on this basis did
not arise before his mind's eye. Rather he thought that with the sign of the cross he
could bless and at the same time exorcize the image of the unfolding revolution, and he
perished at that stage without having spoken his final word.

More of the soil, considerably less cultured, with the nature of a peasant-kulak,
Sergey Yessenin, a full-throated singer and minstrel, a talented lyrical poet, strode
across the fields of the revolution. He "accepted" the revolution in an entirely different
way. He accepted only the first stages, or, to be more exact, the first stage, when the
power of the landlords crashed to the ground. The song structure of his poetical speech,
his harking back to the folksong rhythms of the countryside, to the patchwork quilt of
village imagery, the profoundly lyrical and at the same time the boisterous dare-
devil timbre of his poetic voice were combined in him with the most backward shreds of
ideas - enmity to the city, mysticism, the cult of provincial bigotry and the knout. His
fitful impulses in favour of the proletariat were to a great extent external reflexes. In his
heart of hearts as a poet, he was filled with the poison of despair when confronted with
the new phases of the great revolution. But deep within him there also lurked a hope
that history would take another course. The "confession of faith," the real credo of his
poetical work, is contained in leis pamphlet, The Keys of Mary - a work remarkable in
its own way. We shall find "socialism" here too. But what sort of socialism? It is
"socialism" or heaven, for in peasant lore heaven is a state where there are no taxes to
be paid, where "huts are new and covered with cypress hoards," where "decrepit time,
wandering over the meadows, invites all tribes and peoples to the world's great table and
serves each with mellow homebrew out of a golden ladle." This "socialism" is directly
hostile to proletarian socialism. "The raised hands of Marxian guardianship over the
essential ideology of art are repugnant to us. With the hands of the workers they build a
monument to Marx; the peasants want to build one to the cow." Yessenin raises a
veritable rebellion against the "persecutors of the Holy Spirit - Inysticism," and
prophesies the fate of the coming culture in the poetic speech of the biblical prophet:
"That which now appears before our eyes in the building of proletarian culture, we call:
'Noah sending forth a crow.' We know that the wings of the crow are heavy, its way is
not long, it will fall, not only without reaching the land, but without even having seen it;
we know that it will not return, know that the olive branch will be brought back only by
the dove, whose wings are knit of human faith, not of classconsciousness but of the
consciousness of the temple of eternity which surrounds it." The prophecy proved false
in all its component parts. It was the "dove" which became entangled in the toils of its
eternal spiritual clashes, while the "crow" has turned into a mighty eagle and watches
alert from its stupendous world-historical tower....

Nearest, in fact very close, to the proletarian revolution came Valery Bryussov, once
"king of symbolists," the ideologist of the upper circles of the radical industrial
bourgeoisie, crowned with all the laurels and chrysanthemums of fame in the Mæcenas
salons of the cultured bourgeois aristocracy - perhaps the only real man in that literary
world, to judge by Andrey Biely's last works with their deadly character studies. How
are we to explain the historical paradox that precisely this commanding figure of
bourgeois literature should have come over to us and died a member of the Communist
Party, upon which all the powers of the old world lavished their abuse? Why was it he
and no other who, at a time of devastating social crisis, broke away from his class and
came over to the camp of the triumphant "rabble"? This is to be explained by the
profound intellectuality of the poet, his subtle sense of the period, thinking in categories
of continents, centuries and millions. He was himself a colossus of culture. He was
interested'' in Cretan culture, in the Middle Ages, in the lost Atlantis, in the later Latin
poets. He listened eagerly to the iron tread of history, exulted in the heroics of great
events, and the drama of the rugged heights of humanity was forever fanning the cold
blue flame of his remarkable and. avid mind. That is why he could not but perceive the
rift in the bourgeois world, and, while singing of this world and still believing in its
permanence, in its lasting strength, he nevertheless wrote about the coming Communist
"Huns," whose "cast-iron tramp" "over still undiscovered Pamirs" was already audible
to his sensitive ear. His "Coming Huns," for which the epigraph was written: "Trample
their Eden, Attilal" ended with the pathetic lines:

And you, who are to destroy me,

I meet you with welcoming anthem!

It is also not by chance that it was Bryussov and no other who introduced into our
literature such a mighty revolutionary poet as Emile Verhaeren with his Uprising, his
"octopus-cities," his Blacksmith, Tribune, Dawns, with his wrath and thought, his
prophetic glimpses of the manycoloured revolutionary spring-floods, his rebellious
spurts into the future, girt around with a precious woof of brilliant images and rhythms.
Bryussov was attracted by all that was majestic and grandiose, historically splendid,
universally significant. And as soon as the helm of history turned, and the triumphant
avalanche of the revolution began to rumble over all the plains of the former empire,
Bryussov abruptly broke with the old and lived to the end of his days with the
revolution, suffering stoically through the grimmest, most agonizing years, when we
were being buffeted from all sides by the deathly storm-winds of intervention, famine,
conspiracies, cold, diseases - woeful, barbaric, truly "troglodyte" poverty. Earlier yet,
when the intelligentsia turned its back on October, Bryussov wrote a bitingly sarcastic
"invective" addressed to the "comrades intellectuals"

You were in love with doom and drama,

And dreamed of the Deluge coming back,
Conjectured whether old Europa
Would perish in fire or on the rack.

That which you glimpsed in dream from afar

Has leapt to life in smoke and thunder....
Why then do your false eyes gleam with fear,
Like a startled fawn in timorous wonder?

He fully understood the historical necessity of the new order, and how inevitable was
its triumph:

Though losses drive us for a little

To darkness, cold, defeat and dearth:
No, not in vain the Hammer and Sickle
Blazons its emblem o'er the earth.

Through the powerful lens of his keen mind he saw this victory coming, and, with a
premonition of his own death, he wrote:

Days will shine forth with matchless May-time lustre,

Life will be song; a red and golden cluster
Of flowers will bloom on all the graves that be.
Though black the furrow, though the wind be stinging,
Deep in the earth the sacred roots are singing -
But you the harvest will not live to see.

The poetic thread leading from "Coming Huns" winds itself into a compact hall in
"The Torch of Thought," where Bryussov, in terse lines, tries to present a picture of the
fundamental stages of the world's history.

The poet's purely socialist glimpses of the future are scattered with a lavish hand over
the pages of his works.
 His "Central Palace of Machines" is tremendous:

From gloom, from chasm of other ages,

Like Titan rises from those scenes,
Majestic in the unquivering æther,
The Central Palace of Machines.

Remarkable is the picture of the coming change in the countryside - a change not
consummated until many, many years after the death of this tirelessly searching poetic
mind. ßryussov bewails the inevitable doom of the old, but raises his goblet to pledge
the glory of the future:

What then? The future will lovelier render

Earth renascent in living attire.
New men will come - they whose strength and skill
Will force the stormclouds to rain at will,
Compel the ploughland its yield to tender,
And ocean's bosom span at desire.

A man of encyclopedic knowledge, of tremendous culture, who had imbibed all the
sap of its vital springs, Bryussov suffered not a little from eclecticism. But he was
dominated by one central idea :the idea of an inherent law in everything - a law which
he sought for everywhere, in all directions, drawing upon his astounding store of
erudition. This splendid stranger from alien shores contributed a vast heritage of choice
ideas and imagery to socialism's common treasury of poetry and thought. An assiduous
master of culture, he is now undeservedly forgotten, and we have deemed it our duty to
rescue this remarkable figure from oblivion.

Quite different in aspect are the two other poets whom we shall now deal with; both,
again, are entirely dissimilar, and each has had an enormous influence on the entire
development of poetic culture in our country. These are Demyan Bedny and Vladimir
Mayakovsky.

Demyan Bedny is a genuine proletarian poet. The fundamental principle of his poetic
work is its mass appeal, its profoundly popular character, its influence on the millions.
In this respect the position he holds in Soviet poetry is quite unique. His popular
character has no ideological connection whatever with the "populism" of the Narodniki,
in which classes are essentially indistinguishable, being, merged in the general concept
of "the people." To adopt a political terminology, one can speak here of a "union of the
working class with the peasantry under the hegemony of the proletariat." This is the
intellectual axis, the dominant key, the regulating principle or "social meaning" of his
poetry. But his wide influence among the masses is the result of the whole diverse
complexity of component elements in his work. He takes as his material the "latest
news." The forms he employs are those suited to the level of the millions - the song, the
fable, the short repartee, the satire, the poem. His imagery does not suffer from
ornateness; it is simple and at the same time keen, readily understandable, taken from
the thick of life, breathing its flavour. His language, indissolubly linked with it, is strong
popular language, that spoken by the millions, the apt language of the proverb and
adage, striking hard at the opponent, having its roots in folklore. In comparison with so-
called literary language, it is, if you wish, primitive. But this is not the studied, artificial
primitiveness affected by the refined and spiritless representatives of a tired culture,
which, from wearisome complexity and the pretentiousness of hypertrophied
artificiality, is attracted to a caricature-like reproduction of bushmen drawings, Negro
dances, etc., reminding one of the idiotic lispings of grown-ups in the presence of
babies. It is the healthy, relative primitiveness of the mass itself which finds its
expression in the poetic works of Demyan Bedny. His rhythm, the lilt of his verse, has
its roots in the heart of the people, and that is why many of his poems have become
folksongs and are sung in town and country, in the army and navy, in the great centres
as well as in the most outlying regions. His somewhat crude, simple humour, always a
little sly, evokes an involuntary smile. Charged with a healthy inner cheerfulness, strong
as oak, his verses, which wing their way like swallows to all ends of our vast country,
acquire the force of keen suggestion and of faith in the lasting strength and invincibility
of the revolution. Demyan rises at times to great heights of poetic generalization.
Remarkable and unforgettable is his "Main Street," where the story of the struggle and
victory of the working class is woven around the theme of the Nevsky Prospect in full-
blooded and stirring imagery. But even here there is no literariness: the expressive
simplicity of the poem stands out as a model of mature and self-assured craftsmanship.
The work of Demyan Bedny is a living refutation of the prejudices against so-called
"tendencious" poetry - prejudices which were once widely held, notwithstanding
Freiligrath and Heine, Barbier and Béranger.

At the same time, we must make one critical remark, which, in its turn, will probably
call forth a critical remark from my friend, Demyan Bedny. It seems to us that the poet
is not now taking into account all the tremendous changes, the incredible growth of
culture, its growing complexity, its richer content, the heightened tone, the changed
dimensions of all our social life. He takes new subjects, but everything else remains
almost as of old. For this reason he is becoming out-of-date, and here lies a manifest
danger for him.
 Another great - and from a poetic viewpoint, strikingly innovational - figure of our
poetry is Vladimir Mayakovsky. This turbulent, thorny and tremendous talent, with his
thunder-like voice, broke through to the proletariat from the Bohemia of the semi-
bourgeois literary world, and, through futuristic revolt against all rules and canons,
against the dry commandments of the past, crashed his way with mighty fists into the
camp of proletarian poetry, achieving one of the first places in it. In the seething
cauldron of the revolution, when the masses came out on the city squares, when all the
ancient bastions crashed to the ground., when all customary conceptions went by the
board, and the roar of the millions filled the whole country, Mayakovsky stood out as
the mighty voice of the street. "Headstrong turbulence," the tense drama of destruction,
the semi-anarchist fringe of the revolutionary process, unrestrained as yet by the iron
disciplining will of the proletarian vanguard, were native to this impetuous nature which
- with all its passions - broke out to freedom from the prison cage of bourgeois society.
Angular and ungainly, this roaring poetic lion of the revolution began, lo the crackle of
the machine-guns in the Civil War, to pour out the lines of his stanzas, which
themselves sounded like volleys of machine-gun fire. Their rapid strokes rained down
like real blows, and his whole ebullient, choppy, short-worded system of rhythms, bold
and self-assured, which seemed brazen and almost ruffian rudeness to the admirers of
classical musical melody, was really an apt reflection of the rhythm of the street and the
square, of the headstrong dynamics of the revolutionary semi-chaos, within whose
womb was gradually maturing the chiselled, organized force of the new-born society.
His imagery and metaphors surprised one with their unexpectedness and novelty. His
great, long, hairy arm reached down to the very depths of shattered life, and dragged up
from thence paradoxical prosaic details, which suddenly started to poetic life in his
audacious verse. He was not afraid to exalt and glorify that which sober minds
considered to be "the end of creation." His "street" muse thundered forth the triumphant
"Left March," which will stand forever as a splendid poetic monument to this heroic
period. Everyone knows it, and everyone can feel in it the menacing beat of the pulse of
revolution:

Fall in in column of march!

No place for quibbling this...
Silence, you speakers!
Comrade
Mouser,
You have the floor, sir!
Enough of the laws of the bosses
Adam and Eve have left.
History, hustle your horses!
Left!
 Left!
Left!

The poetry of Mayakovsky is poetry in action. It is poles asunder from the

"contemplative" and "disinterested" concepts contained in the æsthetics of idealist
philosophers. It is a hailstorm of sharp arrows shot against the enemy. It is devastating,
fire-belching lava. It is a trumpet call that summons to battle.

During the war of intervention Mayakovsky became famous for his "agitational"
poems, and in proportion as construction work was developed, the notes of construction
began to resound ever more clearly in his mighty voice. The poetry of labour became
the basic content of his work. While toiling untiringly at problems of language
("spendthrift and squanderer of priceless words"), Mayakovsky let loose all the dramatic
power of his indignation against the life of the philistine, against the "canary," which in
his hands grew into a veritable symbol of yellowness in life, against the suffocating
mustiness of bureaucracy, against the mental muzzle of the respectable citizen. Enemies
fled headlong before him, and he pressed grimly on; his poetry thundered and mocked
at them, raising still higher the pyramid of the creative efforts of this mighty,
stupendous poet, the drummer of the proletarian revolution. Mayakovsky gave Soviet
poetry so much that he has become a Soviet "classic." Such are the dictates of historic
"fate." He "lives on" in almost every young poet, and his poetic method's have become a
permanent part of our literature.

4. Our Contemporaries

The development of Soviet poetry has already revealed aspects in itself which cannot
but be considered as great achievements of our era. Against the background of capitalist
decrepitude, hypertrophied and morbid eroticism, pessimistic licence and cynicism, or
the sordid lucubrations of the poetic "race theorists" à la Horst Wessel, our poetry
stands out as a poetry of gladness, profoundly buoyant and optimistic, essentially linked
with the triumphant march of the millions and reflecting the tremendous creative
impulses, the struggle, the building of a new world. Here we find no fog of mysticism,
no poetry of the blind, no tragic loneliness of a lost personality, no inconsolable grief of
individualism nor its aimless anarchistic mutiny. This is not the restful repose of well-
fed respectability, passing its manicured hands caressingly over things and people, the
elegant bric-à-brac of the boudoir or the drawing-room. Nor do we find the unbridled
passions of a zoological chauvinism, rabid hymns of subjugation or odes to the golden
calf. Our Soviet poetry has its own heroes, its own themes. It has already become the
ideological reflex of a different world, which is marching forward - through the
triumphant Civil War, through mighty class battles, through a tremendous labour
intensity of numberless muscles and nerves, minds, feelings and passionsto ever more
clear-cut forms of the new socialist culture.

It need hardly be said that the genesis of new themes, of new forms and methods of
poetic craftsmanship, which attended the taking shape of poetry in our country, was not
by any means a painless process. The class struggle, developing in the most diverse
forms, found its expression in this sphere as well, and the clash of swords was
accompanied by a clash of ideas. The numerous literary groupings, which were striving
to gain sanction and acknowledgment, had their equivalents in society as a whole. Here,
however, the connection between form and content is inevitably much more intricate,
because the new class and the new period, while turning the former social pyramid
upside down, do not destroy the old language or the laws of its development. The
process of change in this case cannot, by its very nature, be as radical as the process of
change in production relations or in the political superstructure. Hence, changes in the
elements of content (subject matter) in art are not and cannot be in exact proportion to
changes in the elements of artistic form.

It would be historically unjust to ignore those first proletarian poets who, leaving grown
up in the atmosphere of gathering storm that preceded the revolution, were the first to
make a name for themselves in our literature. That was a time of declaratory poetical
heroics - heroics in the abstract, if one can speak at all of abstraction in art. It must he
said, however, that the notes of Kirillov's "Iron Messiah" still resound today, perhaps
even more loudly than they did in the turbulent spring years of the revolution. The poets
of the "Smithy" group cannot be slighted "as Mendelssohn slighted Spinoza" (Marx),
even if they were no Spinozas in the domain of poetry. Ideologically, theirs was already
the real voice of the revolution - a voice, moreover, which attained a certain level in
respect of technique. It sang of an almost cosmic overturn, it universalized the
revolution, but in this historically one-sided form it expressed the mighty explosion of
the revolution.

A whole galaxy of "Komsomol1) poets" has grown up, all of them strongly influenced
by Mayakovsky. Among the most prominent of these is Alexander Bezymensky. This
poet's popularity, especially among the youth, is not in any way a matter of chance.
Bezymensky found vivid subjectmatter: he depicted the new man of his era ("Peter
Smorodin") ; he sometimes rose to considerable heights of generalization
("Komsomoldom") ; he took the unexpected and new and turned it into poetry ("The
Party Card"). His imagery was in sharp contrast to that of the traditionally tuneful
chamber-lyric style. From Mayakovsky he had' learned to refashion prosaic details of
the revolution, and even of the working day, into poetic song. He was undoubtedly the
poetic mouthpiece of the new generation of the Komsomol, and gave expression to the
still unsifted elemental forces of the Communist youth of that time, with their militant
fervour. He is the poet, primarily, of the "light cavalry" in struggle and labour. He began
to .give place, however, when the heavy artillery of the literary front had to be called on,
when life grew more intricate, when a more intensive survey, greater depth, greater
variety, complexity and mastery of poetic expression were needed. Something similar to
what happened to Demyan Bedny happened also to him: unable to divert his attention to
the more complex problems, he became elementary, began to get "antiquated," and he
was directly faced with the danger of simply repeating the slogan of the day in rhyme
and thus losing the poetic zest of his work.

Fresher and more profound proved Eduard Bagritsky, who died such an untimely death.
Ideologically, he went considerably astray at times:

We are rusty leaves

On rusty oak trees....
The youthful trumpeters trample upon us,
The strange star-clusters circle above us -
Strange banners wave and belly above us....

But this is not typical of him. He wins one over by the breadth of his themes, by the
ardour of his poetry, combined with a certain cultural romanticism, by a depth of feeling
in which there is much thought, vividness and imagery, by the resonance of his verse.

The heroics of the Civil War lent themselves well to the treatment of this great
romanticist, and it is greatly to be regretted that our literary critics of that time should
have attemped to muffle the poet's notes on this chord. His "Ballad of Opanas" will live
long. It is keen - this ballad; its tense drama, its imagefulness and the beautiful
simplicity of the verse weld it into a great artistic whole.

Mikhail Svetlov is also primarily a romanticist of the Civil War. At the beginning of
the period of the New Economic Policy, he experienced a great spiritual and ideological
crisis, which laid its stamp on his work ("To Nikolai Kuznetsov," "Kolka"), but he
overcame it later and even acquired a bit too much self-assurance, considering himself
on a par withyes, yes - Pushkin and Tolstoy ("You and I are tired, dear, it seems").
Typical of Svetlov's poetry is "The Twain"

Beside the watch-fire, still as stone,

They lay outstretched together,
 And the bullet that pierced the temple of one
Had embedded itself in the other.

Their hands still fastened like a vice

On the Hotchkiss gun, as though welded;
Nor blizzard nor snow, congealed to ice,
Could loosen the grip that held it....

Up strode to them an officer

And roughly seized by the shoulder;
With a glance at the sights, he ordered them
The Hotchkiss gun to surrender.

But the face of the dead did not twitch with fear,
And bliss had lulled their pain;
And a shudder passed through the officer
At the grisly joy of the Twain.

Most popular of Svetlov's works is his "Granada," dealing with a somewhat artificial
subject. Svetlov's work clearly reflects the influence of Heine, both in his ironical and,
romantic aspects. This is of course an entirely insufficient reason for putting Svetlov on
a par with the "last king of romanticism," as some of our more incontinently
enthusiastic critics have done. Like many of our poets, he is still provincial. The breadth
of - his mental horizons and the fineness of his craftsmanship will not bear any
comparison with those of the poet who created The Book of Songs. Nevertheless, he is a
good Soviet romantic poet, who can achieve much if he will work.

Here I want to make a brief digression of the following kind. I have heard that many
comrades, including Comrade Svetlov, are not - to put it mildly - particularly well
satisfied with such restrained appreciation. But I must say that in my opinion the
standards which we customarily apply have already become out of date. I consider that
Svetlov is one of our very best Soviet poets, but it must be argued that now, in the
period of reconstruction, when we are triumphantly carrying out the Second Five-Year
Plan and setting ourselves tasks of .gigantic scope, it is no good at all trying to measure
poetry by the standards employed, let us say, somewhere in the provinces of our
country, or by those in use among apothecaries. We must take world standards.

This, then, is what I wanted to say in regard to Svetlov. Svetlov is a very good Soviet
poet, but can one compare him with Heine? Take Heine and weigh him in the balance.
What does he represent in the sphere of philosophy? Take his well-known essays on the
history of German philosophy, which won him tremendous fame in France. Take
his Lutetia. Consider his stupendous knowledge of the culture of his time, and his
extraordinary penetrating insight into a whole series of historical periods, in almost
every direction - Greece, Rome, the East. What a tremendous wealth of ideas, what a
wealth of imagery, subject-matter and so forthl And compare Svetlov with him. Can one
find in Svetlov's works such things as Lutetia, the history of German philosophy, etc.?

I do not say this in order to lower Svetlov's level but in order to raise him higher,
because my whole report calls for altered standards. The day is past when we could say:
"A poor thing but mine own." We must apply world scales of measurement. And I
measure all by other scales. This may give rise to a certain difference in the appraisals
made. But it is my fervent wish that our poetry as a whole and each one of our poets in
particular pass more quickly into the next class, when we shall be able to say: Not only
in our subject-matter, purpose, platform, etc., but also in respect of craftsmanship, we
may serve as a model to all. Such is the standard by which I want to measure
everything. I beg that this basic principle of mine be borne in mind, so as to avoid
misunderstandings in the future.

The trio of "lyricists" of the same generation - Zharov, Utkin, Ushakov - differ among
themselves considerably, although they are often spoken of together. The one who, in
all respects, has the greatest command of culture among them is in our opinion
Ushakov, and he is also the most talented. This is a poet of fine nuances; he feels and
thinks profoundly, and his imagery is delicately subtle. Even when handling industrial,
mechanical, "gasoline" themes, he weaves into his subject a multitude of associations,
which do not violate the inner logic of the theme, and do not dumbfound the reader with
paradoxical comparisons and metaphors.

Spring-time,
The hedgerows glimmering,
The robins chirping in the prime -
Over the garden fences peals
The cherry petals' rosy chime.
But in this dream-blue,And in this blue dream,
And caressing apple-blossom snow,
Who can conceive
of gasoline
Not as a friend
but as a foe.

Zharov and Utkin, regrettably, suffer from inordinate self-admiration and from an
extreme poetical levity, verging on the frivolous. Zharov is not ungifted, but his work
does not show signs of adequate labour, by which simplicity is finally attained as the
complex result of a creative process. This not infrequently gives rise to mere rant.
Hence also a certain slogan-like elementariness, very little relieved by poetic imagery:
 With steadfastness
Full armed
In pit and factory yard;
We,
Like soldiers,
Always must
Stand guard!

It would, however, be wrong to "negate" this "Komsomol" poet. He was one of the
first to put forward the problem of lyrics. In regard to subject matter, he has broken
away from the constricted circle of puritanic ideas, and a sunny joy of life, the song of
revolutionary youthfulness, the unresting turbulence of spring blood, the warble of the
revolutionary accordion in the village and the suburbs, the singing lilt of his poetic
speech - these are all great assets, which should grow.

If Zharov represents the gay outskirts of Soviet poetry, languid Joseph Utkin
represents not the accordion but the guitar. His is an artificial gesture, due perhaps to a
certain inner strain, which has even, by some link or other, attached him to Yessenin.
Utkin is more reflective, less simple than Zharov. He labours more over his image, his
poetical speech is more melodious and his poetry breathes a certain sadness. But he, too,
gives evidence of naive simplification and superficiality of both form and content. Is it
not naïve to address such sententious stuff to a "beautiful woman" as:

Languishing with tenderness,

Not the rich and not the beauteous
Choose to joy with your embrace,
But the man of labour duteous.

Where does such a "philosophy" come from? Why are all those "not rich" ugly? How
can one influence a "beautiful woman" with such arguments? Who is this beauty in
reality? Why must labour and beauty lead a separate existence? And so forth.

Or take the form:

Years fly by like cold-shy titmice,

As a horse flies under the lash....

Why are titmice "cold-shy," when as a matter of fact they can stand almost any
degree of frost? Why does a titmouse fly like a "horse under the lash," when it really
flutters about in small spaces? The simile is obviously worthless, not properly thought
out, made "to scan." Such unfortunate poetic "misprints," slips of the poetic tongue, can
be found in quite large numbers in the works of this poet, from whom, as also from
Zharov, one can with especial propriety demand a higher standard of poetic culture.

Among young "Komsomol" poets, Boris Kornilov deserves special mention. He has a
strong grasp of poetic image and rhythm, a firm poetic tread, vivid and pregnant
metaphors, and genuine passion. The class hatred generated in the grandchild of the
poor peasant, who had to crawl like a dog before the "pot-bellied rosy - cheeked squire,"
has settled like a rich decoction in his verse:

This spite of the grandchild,

This wolfish hatred
My grandsire in my blood did saw,
Crawling on empty belly before a scoundrel
"God's pity on a dog I beg you show..."
I'll pour it forth in terrible song,
Thick upon the sodden fields,
Into the black bread and kvass,
That from his knees may rise up,
All covered with dust,
My slovenly grandsire,
Kornilov, Tarass.

He has a well-knit world - philosophy and a rock - like assurance of victory. The
"ego," disappearing as such, finds its "continuation of life" ("Life Continued") in a new
cycle of men and deeds. The tramp of iron steps is caught in the piled up strata of word-
masses.

Kornilov is especially successful in portraying the negative types of the kulak, in

describing the bestial fury of the enemy; here his palette is vivid and multi-coloured, his
brush is broad and sure, the images sculpture - like and deeply expressive ("Family
Council," "Murderer"). His "Three-Fields" rises at times to great power. For example,
the description of the kulak's son loading rifles:

His cap over one ear cocking,

Canny and deft and easy,

He swung aloft an armful

Of rifles oiled and greasy.

Or the kulak "god" portrayed "at home":

 Crunching sugar, swizzling
Tea in sweat anal heat,
Goose's rump a-guzzling,
Golden-brown and sizzling,
Succulent with fat.

Or the flames of civil war in the Russian village:

In Three-Fields now the flames were crackling,

On the roof-trees high the "red cocks" cackling;
Old folks crawled off like worms in a trench,
Into the hay,
Sneezing aloud from the musty stench.

There is a profusion of such colourful passages in this poem, whose rhythm passes
from heavy strophes to light cavalry racing verse, with a ring of hoofs and a dashing
melodious whistle, as in Bagritsky and Selvinsky.

The poets named in this section roughly represent the stream of poetic activity which
flows from the Komsomol and Party circles and is intimately linked up with the life of
the masses. But in their methods of poetic craftsmanship these authors are closely allied
to several poets of a very high calibre, who exercise a decisive influence over them. We
refer to Boris Pasternak, Nikolai Tikhonov, Ilya Selvinsky and, in some degree, to N. A.
Aseyev. Not in vain did Bagritsky write about himself:

Matches and tobacco

In my haversack -
With Tikhonov,
Sedvinsky,
Pasternak.

These are all remarkable poetic personalities, and each one of them must be dealt
with separately.

Boris Pasternak is a poet most remote from current affairs, even in the broadest sense
of the term. This poet is a singer of the old intelligentsia, which has now become a
Soviet intelligentsia. He unquestionably accepts the revolution, but he is far removed
from the peculiar technicism of the period, from the din of battle, from the passions of
the struggle. As early as at the time of the imperialist war, he had intellectually broken
away from the old world (or, to speak more precisely, had begun to sever connections
with it) and had consciously risen "above the barriers." The bloody hash, the
huckstering barter of the bourgeois world were profoundly loathsome to him, and he
"seceded," retired from the world, shut himself up in the mother-of-pearl shell of
individual experiences, delicate and subtle, of the frail trepidations of a wounded and
easily vulnerable soul. He is the embodiment of chaste but self-absorbed laboratory
craftsmanship, persistent and painstaking labour over verbal form, the material for
which is afforded by the precious things of the "heritage of the past," by profoundly
personal - and hence, of necessity, constricted - associations, interwoven with inward
stirrings of the mind.

In muffler wrapt, I peep through the pane,

With palm outstretched my eyes to screen:
"Say, youngsters, playing there in the rain,
What century are we living in?

Who wore that path to the wicketgate,

To the slop-hole where the nettles grow,
While I with Byron smoking sat,
And drank with Edgar Allan Poe?"

Pasternak also tries to give a theoretical justification of such poetry. Take, for instance,
his "Definition of Poetry":

It is a jet of vibrant sound,

It is the crackle of crushed ice,
It is the night that nips the leaves,
It is a duel of two nightingales.

Or take his lines "To Bryussov," or the poem "To a Friend"

'Twere vain, in days when councils great convene,

When highest passions run in flooding tide,
A place to seek for poets on the scene:
'Tis dangerous, if not unoccupied

This is hardly the place to argue against such a conception. What would have become
of the great Greek tragedians without "highest passions"? What would have become of
Aristophanes? How would Shakespeare have been possible? Or Heine? Or even Byron,
the "Carbonaro lord"?

It is Pasternak's good fortune that he is far from being consistent. Right after his
message to Bryussov he has a beautiful panegyric dedicated to the memory of Larissa
Reissner; he sings of the "mad year 1905" in a whole series of poems; he writes his
"Lieutenant Schmidt," his "January 9th," and all this in the fine stanzas of authentic
poetry. He has given us a very salient image of Lenin:.
 ...I recollect those words of his
With sparklets in my hair did prickle,
Like the globe lightning's shivering hiss.
All rose and peered, their eyesight straining
Towards the distant table green,
When lo! he loomed upon the rostrum,
His presence felt before 'twas seen.
He glided on, too swift for vision,
'Twixt obstacles and helpers all,
Like ball compact by thunder hurtled
Into the mighty meeting hall.
Followed the crash of loud ovations
Relief from tenseness, like the split
Of atom forced to burst asunder
The props and bars that circle it.

And nevertheless, even in his revolutionary poetry - revolutionary in its ideas and
meaning - one can find cases where the approach to this meaning lies through
associations which are completely unexpected and often narrowly individual. Pasternak
is original. This is at once both his strength and his weakness. His strength, because he
is infinitely far from the trite, from the hackneyed, from rhymed prose. His weakness,
because this originality of his sometimes verges on the egocentric, and then his images
cease to be intelligible, the quiver of his throbbing rhythm and the windings of his
super-subtle verbal scoring become, beyond a certain point, mere convolutions of
unintelligible image combinations - so subjective and so intimately subtle are they. You
may find in his work an endless number of beautiful metaphors, and the breath of his
poetry is fresh and fragrant. Take his picture of a garden "sprayed and drenched with a
million azure tears"; or of a boat putting in to shore:

Scorching heat, arid high the strand.

From the incoming boat the chain fell clinking
Like rattlesnake upon the sand,
Its rust-gnawed coils in the sedges sinking.

Or the sense of passing time: "The year guttered out like a lamp-drawn moth." Or "The
Steppe"

How good those paths that led out to the steppe!

The boundless steppe, like a seascape looming,
With the sigh of the grass, the rustle of ants,
And the sobbing drone of the midges swarming.
 Then there is the picture of the rain in "Close Night," with the dust which "swallows
the rain in pills," and hundreds of other images, admirably fine and subtle.

But what are we to make of "The Return" or "Our Tempest"? 2) The play on the "ts" in
the first example and on the "1" and "b" in the second is combined with images that are
linked up with associations inaccessible to "socialized perception." And this violates the
laws of complex simplicity.

Such is Boris Pasternak, one of the most remarkable masters of verse of our time - a
poet who has not only gemmed his work with a whole string of lyrical pearls, but who
has also given us a number of profoundly sincere revolutionary pieces.

Ilya Selvinsky is to a certain extent the polar opposite of Pasternak. He is a poet with
a great poetic voice, that reaches out to the wide spaces of the open highway, to mass
scenes where shouts resound, where horses stamp, where songs of daring ring out,
where enemies are fighting, where living life is seething, where history is kneading its
crude dough.

...Mere craftsmanship is all too poor

To breathe the era's hurricane....

he says on the one hand. And on the other:

You cry aloud: "To hell with song!

Give us a sanitary sewerl"
Poetry then will be plentiful
As aircraft in an elevator.

His slogan is:

Comrades, enough! Cast your eyes wider!

This is perfectly just. But it is a pity that the poet - not without the influence of the
critics - does not always practise What he preaches, and his attempts, noteworthy as
they are, to.work on a larger canvas sometimes succumb to the style of the rhymed
factory wall-newspaper. Selvinsky can write a fine song, based on folksong in the exact
sense of the word. Its broad sweep and fluent rhythm are admirable. It is a song that
really seems to pour out of its own accord.

Basing his work on songs and on various dialects, and by most careful attention to
language, its sound and sense features, Selvinsky has produced notable things in his
"Ulalyaevshchina" and "Army Commander," which will go down in the history of our
poetry as some of its greatest achievements. But now, when the "agitational piece" in
the style of Mayakovsky has already outlived its day, it seems to us that the poet unduly
stresses this note in his work. It obviously cramps his style. When he writes as follows
in the Electricity Plant Newspaper:

Think above all, you women workers,

One thousand five hundred women,
Resonant as sleigh-bells loud
And as the noble Cenci proud....

it sounds discordant, unconvincing and even - if the author will excuse us - a little
ludicrous, because one is at once struck by the entire artificiality of this attempt to
squeeze the broader associations, innuendoes and images by main force into the
Procrustean abed of the factory newspaper, which must inevitably have its own specific
character. Selvinsky, however, is a very ;great and genuine master of verse,
unquestionably revolutionary and moreover possessing a great command of culture.

Nikolai Tikhonov is interesting from a number of different view-points. He

persistently enlarges the scope of our subject-matter by penetrating into the most
outlying parts of the Soviet Union and introducing into our poetry national motifs of the
Caucasus, Central Asia and elsewhere. He labours incessantly over problems of poetic
form, and his wonderfully melodious ballads will remain in the memory forever. He
thinks profoundly, ponders out his philosophy to the very foundations, inseparably
combining intellect and emotion in one poetic unity. He is a "poet of the understanding"
first and foremost.

Tikhonov's "Twelve Ballads" contain within themselves a tremendous, restrained and

grim passion. It is romanticism tempered with manly strength and assurance. The poet
seizes as if by the bridle the tragic and solemn chords that threaten to tear away to all
sides, subjugates them to one dominant thought, which resounds like a leitmotif in
music.

The heroism of military duty finds its expression in the "Ballad of the Blue Package,"
brought to its destination by an aeroplane which crashes:

...Earth rushed up like a shattering shot.

Tripping and stumbling, they ran to the spot.
A smashed mouth spake from the smoking wreckage:
"My leg can wait, first thing - the package."
A very powerful piece of writing is the "Ballad of the Soldier on Leave," which contains
a remarkable picture of battle:

The machine gun choked, rasped, sputtered fire,

From the flanks pealed the batteries' carillon;
Eleven times they advanced to attack -
That desperate battalion....
Six score dead were laid in a row
Beneath the limes by noon,
And tobacco stuck to the blood-smeared hands
Of the soldiers, ready to swoon.

The ".Death of the Fighter" and the "Ballad of the Nails" are among the best examples
of Tikhonov's work, and the concluding lines of the latter ballad –

If nails could be made of these people free,

The strongest nails in the world they'd be –

are already gaining currency as an historical aphorism.

In Tikhonov's verse we may find bold and original comparisons, apt interweavings of
words, sounds and meanings:

Sipping tea and lolling discreetly

That the Mauser may not gall your side.

Or:

They are hemmed about with a fiendish night

Of forgotten haunts and magic black,
Sick eyes and ambush-lurking curses...

'Local colour" is conveyed in unexpected form:

And its steely maw the tractor rears

Like a mammoth in Chardjwin melon fields.

Or his description of Tiflis:

Here in, costly fabrics flaunting

Or discoursing on the lute,
Here in sulphur bath of marble
Healing water gushing out -
From the head it pours,
Setting nerves aquiver,
To the polished floor's
Flagstones, like a river.
 Tikhonov's poems are always profound, but in his case also the striving to reveal the
innermost content, to let down the poetic pitcher into the hidden springs of life,
sometimes leads to the interweaving of word and image being made on too subjective a
system of co-ordinates. Evidently afraid of being too superficial or of lapsing into
banality, the poet sometimes oversteps the bounds of general comprehension, and thus
he, too, violates the laws of "complex simplicity."

N. A. Aseyev is the most orthodox "Mayakovskyite," one who toils over problems of
verse form, an untiring poetagitator, very much concerned with current affairs, full of
"actuality." Moreover, despite his theoretical aberrations, he possesses great poetic
culture. His requirements are out of the common:

No
rhymes for you
will not be made
save those that cut
like a razor blade;
for you will ring
no other verse -
this be sung
and throb in your ears.

However, this poet's unquestionable talent is cramped by his theoretical outlook. He

does not see that the "agitational piece" of Mayakovsky can no longer satisfy, that it has
become too elementary, that what is required now is more diversity, more
generalization, that the need is arising for monumental poetic painting, that all the
sources of lyric verse have been opened and that the very conception of "actuality" is
becoming a different one. So that when one now reads, for instance, in his poem "To
Them" (i.e., the enemies of the revolution)

Your weapons -
melinite,
panic
and provocation;
ours
certainty,
Leninism,
literacy,
electrification –
 it seems dry, newspaper stuff, poetically unconvincing.

We may mention also the talented poets, Lugovsky and Prokofyev, and the
exceedingly colourful, "autochthonous" Pavel Vassilyev, who displays exceptional
promise as a poet and will come to occupy a place of honour in our poetry, if he is able
to round off' the rough edges of property-loving barbarism in himself, and to take root
once and for all on socialist soil.

I wish to make one further deviation from my printed report. I have omitted to
mention such an outstanding poetthis is my personal opinion, but I feel obliged to
express it - as Vassily Kamensky, who represents a very great poetic magnitude.

Soviet poetry does not end with poetry in the Russian language. Perhaps the most
noteworthy achievement of the revolution in the field of the fine arts is the flourishing
state of literature among the national minorities of the Soviet Union, the appearance of a
host of talented writers among these peoples. The length and breadth of our mighty
country is blossoming with a multitude of poetic flowers. Such poets as. Tychina and
Sosyura in the Ukraine, Yanka Kupala in White Russia, Akop Akopyan in Armenia, the
outstanding poets of Georgia, Azerbaidjan, Uzbekistan and other countries, the fine
creative work of the Persian emigrant poet, Lahuti - all these represent phenomena of
tremendous cultural significance, whose importance cannot as yet be finally gauged.
Poetry in non-Russian languages is now no longer a mere appendage to Russian Soviet
poetry. It is a very powerful independent force, a remarkable part of the poetry of our
Union, welded together by singleness of purpose socialist in content, national in form. It
should be dealt with separately by comrades who know the respective languages. This is
an important task, and one that is altogether indispensable, for unless this is done, we
cannot envisage our Soviet poetry as a whole.

So much, then, for our achievements. But does this mean that poetry is keeping pace
with our era? Not at all. In this respect we must unequivocally state that we are
"backward," as is being repeated so often and so persistently at the present time.

Notes
1) Komsomol: the Young Communist League. Ed.
2) Here Bukharin quotes two instances where Pasternak has sacrificed sense to sound.
They are omitted, since the play on letters and sounds cannot he conveyed in
translation. Ed.
 5. The Level of Poetic Work in the U.S.S.R. and the Tasks of Poetry

In raising the question of the tasks which confront our poetry, we must begin with the
problem of our epoch
. We are now living at an altogether exceptional time. We, the U.S.S.R., are the watch-
tower of the whole world, the "skeleton army" of future mankind. This fact must be
grasped, thought out, felt. Our vision extends over thousands of years. The great idea for
which we stand is penetrating to all ends of the globe. We are not living an existence on
paper, in a manifesto, nor in the speculative dreamland of great minds and hearts. We
are living as a real force - real if there ever was one. Potentially, we are everything. We
are the heirs of thousands of years, of all culture handed down from age to age. We are
continuing the struggle of hundreds upon hundreds of generations of fighters - those
who have tried to throw off the yoke of exploitation once and for all. We are the
glorious vanguard of the workers who are changing the world, a grim army which is
getting ready for fresh battles. We are the soul of historical reason, the main triumphant
driving force of world history. On the topmost ranges of human will and action, we
build and struggle, suffer and triumph. Our tasks are ones of colossal magnitude. Our
responsibility before history is unbelievably tremendous.

It is from this point of view above all that we must regard the level attained by our
poetry. And when we regard it from this angle, we see that we are exceedingly
backward, that we are only making our first steps towards the creation of a new poetic
culture in world history. The poetic material now collected in the treasury of our poetry
- is it not jejune, is it not squalid when compared with the colossal content of our life?
Do we succeed, even in the slightest degree, in depicting the catastrophic collapse of the
old culture in the East and in the West? Is not the marvellous book of history closed
with seven seals to our poets? Has our own history, the history of late years, been
comprehended in all its diversity' with its heroic working days and its workaday heroics,
in the live dialectics of thousands upon thousands of the most varied problems,
tormenting experiences, joys of creation, collisions and solutions? Have our poets
assimilated to a sufficient degree the splendid heritage bequeathed us by the old masters
of all times and peoples, the right to receive which has been given them by the
triumphant proletariat, whose sons they now are? No, and yet again no! Crude,
uncultured provincialism still prevails among us. Our poetry has not yet risen to an
understanding of the full significance of our era. It does not yet understand where it
stands. It does not yet see that "Roof of the World," those "Pamirs" about which
Bryussov wrote and which have now already been "discovered."
 The poet's business is not to paraphrase a newspaper article or to show a standard
knowledge of political science, in which the general level in our country has now
become very high. What is needed is breadth and depth of knowledge; one must be able
to feel a thing through and through, to bring it out to the light of day, to put it into form.
But for this there is a lack of imagery and means of expression generally. They are
lacking, because the entire level of our poetic culture, when compared with the
problems that face it, is terribly low, both in its content and its "formal" attributes.
Which of our poets has such a feeling for the era we are living in that a great universal
canvas opens before his mind's eye? Which of our poets really feels to the full the
historic place which we hold in the living stream of modern history? There are no such
poets as yet. We have not yet reached that stage. We snatch at scattered fragments, in
which the whole co-exists only in the form of declaration. Hardly any of us even face
the problem in its full scope. It would, of course, .be absurd to demand that these
requirements be immediately and fully met. But that is not the point. The point is that
we must systematically raise the level of poetic self-knowledge. This means that the
poet must study not only the facts of the past and of the present but also the problem of
expressing them in poetry.

There is also another question, closely connected with the above - namely, the
question of synthetic poetry-making, of monumental poetic works. Our era now
demands thisnow above all. If we trace the evolution of our poetry, taking the type of
poetic production as our criterion, it is not hard to distinguish three periods in this
process of evolution.

The first period was a time of new slogans, the first flush of struggle, the
promulgation of new principles of life to the workers of the world, the beginning of a
new era. The poetry of this period was declarative, spacious in its ideas, verging on the
cosmic. All this, however, without flesh and blood, resembling rather a poetical
blueprint. Poetry consisted to a great extent of abstract heroics - in so far as the word
"abstract" can be applied to poetry at all.

The second period. Feverish activity. Construction. The time requires concrete
knowledge and skill, the highest practical ability, attention to detail, the culture of the
small which goes to make the great, specialization. Poetry makes a right-about face
towards portrayal of the minutiae of life.

"To discover the world revolution in every detail" - that was how Bezymensky put it.
"Cosmism," "World Sovnarkoms"1) etc., gave place to the minutiae of empiric
description. Poetry entered the phase of dialectical negation of the previous period.
Universalism passed into its opposite. The minutely concrete, the part of the whole,
analysis - such were now the dominant ideas.

The third period is that upon which we are entering at the present time. Our life has
developed tremendously, grown infinitely more complex. The problems of mastering
the technical side of our work have not yet been solved, but much has already been
done. Cultural requirements have grown to an extraordinary degree, interests have
become immeasurably more diversified. There is a tremendous thirst to know
everything, a tremendous desire to generalize, to rise on a new basis to an understanding
of the process as a whole. Hence the need for synthetic poetry and synthetic literature in
general. This period is the prelude to a phase in which poetry will summarize life, in
which our epoch will be presented not in fragments of the whole, but, in so far as is
possible, in all its connections and settings. This is not a mere return to the starting
point, not a reversion to declarative schematic poetry, but a synthesis which can only
arise on the basis of previous analytical work.

Needless to say, this division into periods must not be taken too literally. The features
noted above do not by any means cover the whole content of each period - to assert this
would be sheer unreason, or denote an elementary ignorance of the facts. In particular,
we are far from having exhausted all the problems of the concrete type. But however
diverse maybe the types of poetic work, certain dominant tendencies nevertheless stand
out above the rest. And it is these tendencies we have in mind. Hence we must draw a
second conclusion (the first was the necessity of raising poetic consciousness to the
level of our era and of doing away with provincialism). And our second conclusion will
be that, while continuing to employ the concrete and the individual as our subject-
matter, we must proceed to the task of summarizing life in poetry; on the basis of the
concrete and individual, we must proceed to the portrayal of the universal, richly
variegated and dissected whole.

Here we come up against a further problem, namely, that of the diversity and unity of
poetic material.

Karl Marx once wrote in biting ridicule of bourgeois political economy that it is the
most moral of sciences, that its ideal is "an ascetic but usurious miser, and an ascetic but
productive slave." "Its main dogma," he wrote, "is selfabnegation, the renunciation of
life and of all human wants. The less you eat, drink, buy books, the more seldom you
attend the theatre; dances, the café, the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fish,
etc., the more you save, the greater grows your fortune which neither moth nor rust can
corrupt - your capital."
 This apt characterization throws light on Marx's positive views. Marxian communism
aims at an infinitely diversified development of human wants. Its aim is a full-blooded
human being with all-round development, not a wretched onesided creature,
emasculated in this respect or that. Loving, theorizing, painting, thinking, fishing - it
was doubtless with intention that Marx placed such incommensurable magnitudes side
by side with one another - are not only no "sin." They are all glorious functions of
vitally active man, to whom labour itself becomes a "prime necessity of life." This is the
goal to which we are advancing - overcoming tremendous difficulties on the way,
battling every step, but advancing nevertheless. From this follows the quite definite
conclusion: The entire diversity of life can and should serve as the material for poetic
creation. Unity does not mean that we must all sing the same song at the same time -
now about sugar beets, now about the "live man," now about the class struggle in the
countryside, now about a Party membership card. Unity does not mean the presentation
of the same ideal types and the same "villains," nor the abolition - on paper - of all
contradictions and evils. Unity consists in a single aspect - that of building socialism.
All the richness of life, all tragedies and conflicts, vacillations, defeats, struggle of
conflicting tendencies - all this must become the material for poetic creation.

The better we are able to show the diversity of this life, the more thoroughly we grasp
these fundamental historical arteries - and this will be achieved by the point of view, not
by impoverishing the content - the better and the higher will be the standing of our
literature and our poetry.

It seems to me that precisely at the present time, when we are faced, let us say, with
the problem of depicting types, it will be possible to take and depict isolated types as
wellsay, the isolated worker of a Political Department, the isolated pilot of the Red
Fleet, and so forth. This tendency is very rapidly gaining ground among us. But I
consider that the pilot must be shown in such a way that he forms a unit of this life. The
Political Department worker must be shown as the focus of this life - in such a way that
all the rays may radiate from this focus and, intersecting one another, show the whole
multiformity of our life. Then we shall obtain a multiform art.

If we do not do this, we shall be threatened with the danger of poetic work becoming
departmentally alienated from life and bureaucratized, orders being issued by the
People's Commissariat of Education, by the People's Commissariat of Ways of
Communication, by the Transport Workers' Trade Union, by the Wood-Working
Industries Trade Union and so on.
 This, of course, is not art at all. In any case there is a very grave danger of this kind of
art ceasing to be art. It is not along these lines that the way forward lies.

I repeat once again: I do not deny that even this kind of portrayal may be possible, but
this is only a starting point. From here we should advance further. Through these figures
we must show the whole mighty flourishing of our onward moving socialist life. We
must show all the vital wealth, all the conflicts, waverings, defeats, struggle of
tendencies, not simply present an elementary portrayal, resembling a beam to which a
red flag is nailed. Down with the beam in the domain of poetry! We must show the
whole struggle of tendencies, the whole multiformity of life.

But no man can "embrace the unembraceable." People approach a problem from
different angles until sufficiently broad generalizations are found. "Prohibitive"
measures are therefore absurd. If, for instance, the idea of "portraying the live man" was
one-sided, it does not follow from this that, with the change of leadership on the
"critical front," this sort of portrayal should be relegated to the scrap-heap and virtually
prohibited.

And so we arrive at our third conclusion: All the diversity of our remarkable era, with
all its contradictions, should serve as material for poetic creation. Unity should be
achieved through the point of view from which this material is handled by the poet, not
by impoverishing the material itself. This point of view is that of the triumphant
struggle of the proletariat.

And if that is so - as it unquestionably is - then the solution of the further problem is

also clear, the problem of the unity and diversity of form. The general problem of form
and content we have already solved in the first part of our report, showing the
correlation of form and content, their dialectic unity on the one hand and their dialectic
contrariety on the other. At present we are dealing with the unity and diversity of form.
It is not hard to see that, if a diversity of poetic material is essential to us, then - by
virtue of the interconnection between form and content - we must also have diversity of
poetic form. The rhythms of an elegy and a war-song cannot be the same, because the
sound aspect of the image is at one and the same time the aspect of its emotional
content. But if we admit and consider desirable the greatest variety of poetic material,
and consequently also the greatest variety of poetic form, what is then the unifying,
"morphological" factor? Indeed, if there is a unity of form and content, then unity of
material (diverse unity) must have its counterpart in unity of form (diverse unity). The
answer to this is that the unity of this diversity is achieved by unity of style or unity of
method.
 We thus arrive at our fourth conclusion: The forms of poetic creation should be the
most diverse, unified by the one great style or method of socialist realism.

But here we come to the problem of socialist realism itself - a problem which must be
analysed separately and in somewhat greater detail.

First of all, we would consider, in this connection, the question of poetic method and
of style. It seems to us that in this field, at any rate, the two coincide. Let us take some
instances. In the field of logical thought we have, for example, the positivism of August
Comte; and this had its counterpart in art in the naturalism of Emile Zola. Comte's
positivism is a method and, if you wish, a scientific-philosophical system at one and the
same time. Zola's naturalism was an æsthetic interpretation, a translation into the
language of art, of the scientific-philosophical methods of positivism. For art, this was
both a method (because in the very process of creative work it provided guiding and
regulating ideas) and a style, because both in the content and in the form, and also in the
whole, that is in their unity, this method, materializing and taking literary shape in the
completed work, became a "morphological," constructive principle, shaping form and
content. In the completed work (or works) unity of method becomes unity of style. In so
far as the poet is guided by a definite method in his work, he selects his material
accordingly (because he can never embrace the whole in the exact sense of the word, he
always "picks and chooses"); he selects images, words, sounds, rhythm, which blend
into a single poetic whole - one thing involving another, in compliance with very
intricate laws. Rut when the work is completed, its structural principles become a
"congealed" method, or, to express it otherwise, the method has found its other form of
existence in the structure of this work. If, then, we have a number of works, united by
common structural principles, that is, a definite trend in art - in this case, in poetry -
the more common (we underline: more common, that is, not all, by far) of these
structural principles are typical for the entire trend. And this is style in the proper sense
of the word.

We have quoted Zola as an example. Another case in point is our own Russian
symbolism. Its philosophical basis, that is, its general trend of thought, was a peculiar
mystic idealism, a cross between Kant and Vladimir Solovyev. Symbolism was the
counterpart of this in poetry. Mystic idealism sought for a mystic other-worldly essence
beyond the world of phenomena and beyond the world of reality generally. Symbolism,
as a method, was a translation of this regulative idea into terms of poetry. It meant that
reality had to be turned into symbols of the beyond; this, in its turn, involved a choice of
images, visual or musical, a selection of components, logical and emotional, such as
would conform to this methodological requirement. But no sooner had this work been
done, no sooner had a poetic trend arisen on this basis, than the method assumed a form,
became a style. Symbolism arose as a literary phenomenon: the poetry of symbolism
became a fact.

Let us now revert to the question of socialist realism. Its philosophical basis is
dialectical materialism. From this point of view, socialist realism is a distinct method in
art, the counterpart of dialectical materialism, the translation of the latter into terms of
art. (Parenthetically, let us note that it does not by any means follow from this that every
good poet must first become a good philosopher; the connection is more complex, but
this is a separate question.) What does this mean? What is socialist realism and what are
its peculiar features? In what respects does it differ from realism generally?

Socialist realism cannot set out to solve the same problems as dialectical materialism
in science - a fact which follows from the very essence of the difference between
science and art. From the analysis given in the opening part of this report, it is clear that
in describing nature, for instance, socialist realism does not set out to think of it only in
terms of electrons, light and heat waves, rays, etc., as against sounds, colours and other
directly sensory elements. In depicting society, it cannot set out to employ categories of
value, basis and superstructure, and so forth. It employs sensory images first and
foremost, and even intellectual elements receive a definite emotional tinge. Without
this, there is no art in general or poetry in particular. But realism generally and socialist
realism in particular, as a method, is the enemy of everything supernatural, mystic, all
other-wordly idealism. This is its principal and definite attribute.

"Omnis determinatio est negatio" - "All definition is negation," said old Spinoza. The
negative definition of realism is that it is not idealism, not mysticism. But this negative
definition is at the same time its positive definition. This means that sensory reality and
its motion, and not its fictitious sublimations, that real feelings and passions, real
history, and not various versions of the "world spirit," provide the material which it
portrays. In conformity with this, the elements of form will also be other than is the
case, let us say, in symbolism. The combination of images, the verbal scoring will serve
not to conjure up the supernatural but to reproduce reality and the real motions of the
feelings with the greatest possible vividness. It does not, however, follow from this that
realism, from the point of view of form, precludes the employment of metaphors,
including personification. Everything that enhances the sensory effect can and does find
a place in the poetic lexicon, because it is perceived as a metaphor. "Terek's stream like
a lioness leaping" does not contradict realism just as the reverse metaphor: "He lay like
a rock," with its transfer of a dead image to the living, does not contradict realism either.
 What distinguishes socialist realism from realism in general? It is distinguished, first
of all, by the artistic material it employs. We have on several occasions pointed out that
unity of form and content does not preclude their contrariety. As old
Trediakovsky2) wrote: "In Poetry generally, it behoves us to note two things. Firstly: the
matter, or thing, which the Poet undertakes to write. Secondly: versification, that is, the
method of composing the Verses." Socialist realism is distinguished from other realism
by the fact that it inevitably focuses attention on the portrayal of the building of
socialism, the struggle of the proletariat, of the new man, and all the manifold
complexities of "connections and settings" of the great historical process of our day. We
must always bear in mind that within poetic unity there co-exist intellectual, emotional
and volitional elements, forming a single indivisible whole. Certain guiding and
evaluating factors - the class token, the aim - form an element which is present in every
work, even if only in a very subtle and sublimated form. The point of view of the
proletariat's victory is, of course, a constituent trait of all works of socialist realism; it
gives them their "social meaning."

Is this distinction, however, the only one? Or are there methodological, and
consequently also stylistic, peculiarities of socialist realism, distinguishing it from
bourgeois realism?

Of course there are such features.

These features are most intimately connected with the content of the material and
with purposefulness of a volitional order, dictated by the class position of the
proletariat. In the socialist society which is coming into being, the difference between
physical labour and brain work is gradually being effaced. A new type of man is arising
in whom intellect and will are not cloven in two: he really knows the world in order to
change it. Mere contemplation, mere portrayal of the objective, without elucidation of
the motive tendencies, without reference to the practical alteration of the objective
world, are here receding into the past. Hence, socialist realism cannot base its views on
the naturalism of Zola, who proposed to describe reality "telle, qu'elle est" ("such as it
is") and nothing more. Neither can it accept his other slogan: "L'imagination n'a plus
d'emploi" ("imagination is no longer needed"). Socialist realism dares to "dream" and
should do so, basing itself on real trends of development.

In connection with this, we must also consider the question of revolutionary

romanticism. If socialist realism is distinguished by its active, operative character; if it
does not give just a dry photograph of a process; if it projects the entire world of passion
and struggle into the future; if it raises the heroic principle to the throne of history - then
revolutionary romanticism is a component part of it. Romanticism has usually been
contrasted to realism. This was because romanticism in the majority of cases has been
connected with idealistic soarings into metaphysical dimensions and "other worlds," and
its exalted emotion of the "sublime and beautiful" led beyond the confines of the
objective world. This was also because realism expressed a narrow and contemplative
so-called "objectivism." Narrow, because it did not educe the tendencies leading to the
future. Contemplative, because it limited itself to registering what exists, though not, of
course, "in its pure form." In our circumstances romanticism is connected above all with
heroic themes; its eyes are turned, not on the heaven of metaphysics, but on the earth, in
all its senses - on triumph over the enemy and triumph over nature. On the other hand,
socialist realism does not merely register what exists, but, catching up the thread of
development in the present, it leads it into the future, and leads it actively. Hence an
antithesis between romanticism and socialist realism is devoid of all meaning.

The old realism was to a certain extent anti-lyrical, while the old lyricism was - also
to a certain extent - anti-realistic. Socialist realism is bound to have its eyes fixed on
man. In the final analysis, socialism means the genesis of new human qualities, the
enrichment of spiritual content, the development of many-sidedness, the end of squalid
misery among people torn asunder into classes, narrow professions, city and country
dwellers.

Here I must make one observation on a point which might perhaps have escaped the
notice of the other comrades here. It relates to the letter from André Gide which was
read out at this congress. In my opinion the wording employed by André Gide is
incorrect. He speaks of Communist individualism. To my mind, Communist
individualism is a contradiction in terms, an "oxymoron," a logical solecism. But Gide's
idea on the portrayal of personality is correct. He is confusing two concepts - the growth
of personality with the growth of individualism, the growth of the individual with the
growth of individualism, the enrichment of the personality's content with the growth of
that which divides one man from another. Individualism in its development has a
tendency to divide people. When, let us say, a decadent poet converses with a
shoemaker, the shoemaker does not understand the poet, and the poet does not
understand the shoemaker. This is an expression of the deepest division of labour, of the
individualism of capitalist society. We, on the other hand, want to understand each other
without any difficulty; at the same time we want each one of us to be, not a blockhead
or a eunuch, but a real good fellow who can do anything, who understands everything,
and who can develop still further, unfolding his inner consciousness to infinity. Here
there are no boundaries, no barriers between the wealth of growing personalities and the
splendid triumphal progress of the common collective wealth of communist society-
economic, technical and cultural wealth.

The new man that is being born and the whole world of his emotions, including even
"new erotics," if one may so express it, are therefore the province of socialist art. Lyric
verse does not conflict with socialist realism, because we are not here speaking of an
anti-realistic form of lyric, seeking for a "world beyond," but of a lyric which gives
poetic shape to the spiritual experiences of the socialist man who is now coming into
being. Socialist realism is not anti-lyrical.

Here we may touch upon yet another question, closely allied to this. Socialist realism
is not anti-lyrical, but it is anti-individualistic. This does not mean that it fails to portray
human personality and that it does not develop it. Socialism, as is well known, means
the flourishing of personality, the enrichment of its content, the growth of its
selfknowledge as a personality. But the growth of individuality is by no means
equivalent to the growth of individualism, i.e., of that which disunites people. On the
contrary, the feeling of a collective bond between people is one of the principal traits of
socialism, and the poetized form of this feeling must inevitably be reflected in the
distinguishing stylistic traits of socialist realism. Thus, socialist realism is
antiindividualistic.

The type of poetic work which presents a period in its more general and universal
attributes, embodying them in peculiar images concretely abstract - images of extreme
generality and at the same time of colossal inner richness - ran counter to the old
conception of realism. Take Goethe's Faust, for example. This, in its form, is not a
portrayal of a concrete historical process, but the struggle of the human spirit. And at
the same time Faust is a philosophic-poetical conception of the bourgeois era
establishing itself. An analogous type of poetry, of another calibre, can be seen, for
instance, in Verhaeren's Dawns, in which he describes the "symbolical" city of
"Oppidomagne," where the socialist revolution is taking place. It seems to us that poetry
of the type of Faust, with a different content and consequently of a different form, but
still maintaining the extreme generality of Faust, must unquestionably find a place as a
component part of socialist realism, and that it will create the most monumental form of
socialism's poetry.

Such are the basic and distinguishing traits of socialist realism. And thus we come to
our fifth conclusion, namely: Socialist realism is a method of poetic creation and a style
of socialist poetry depicting the real world and the world of human feelings, a style
differing from bourgeois realism both in the content of the objects which poetry depicts,
and in its distinguishing stylistic features.

We must now retrace our steps a little. We have seen above that the whole manifold
diversity of our era should serve as material for poetic creation, unity being provided by
the socialist point of view. We have seen that the forms of poetic works may be the
most varied, unity being attained by singleness of style. Hence we may conclude that
this style forms a single inseparable whole with the material. Such is the genesis of the
poetry of socialist realism.

We have seen that the development of our poetry presupposes a much higher level of
poetical culture generally. We must say outright: Our poetry is sometimes
elementaryand this happens all too often in the case of people whose ideas are closest to
ours. Incidentally, one of the distinguishing marks of a significant work is the wealth of
associations and feelings, thoughts and innuendoes which it evokes. If you compare a
number of our poets' works with those of Verhaeren, for example, you will see how
many thoughts, often even philosophical ones, how many problems, comparisons,
images, how much culture the tatter's work contains. Whereas we often accept a rhymed
slogan as poetry. You may men. tion Mayakovsky. But time has set its stamp on him,
too: because life has grown infinitely more complex, and we have to keep moving
forward. Culture, culture and yet again culture; It is time to put a stop once and for all to
Bohemianism and the squabbles of literary cliques. Take the really great masters, even
those who "do it with ease," like our great genius Pushkin, who, "careless" and "light-
minded" as he was reputed to be, was nevertheless an erudite scholar and hard worker,
occupying a commanding position in the culture of his time. It is absurd to require all
poets to be firstrate philosophers and critics. It is no accident that some men become
philosophers and others poets. Academician Pavlov's latest works explain the
physiological side of this phenomenon. But this does not mean that we must abandon
our demand for a marked rise in the general culture of poets and in poetical culture
along the whole front. To stop at the present level is impossible. And those who really
want to create "Magnitostroys of literature," having purified their ideas in regard to art,
must do their best to make themselves masters of all the treasure-houses of the world's
culture.

I wish to make one further observation. I have often had to listen to complaints, from
poets, and from literary men in general, to the effect that someone or other will not let
them y"expand" and so forth. I think this quite absurd, because no One is at any time or
under any circumstances preventing anyone from, let us say, learning languages, with
which our ,poets are almost entirely unacquainted; or from studying foreign literature or
the literature of the national minorities inhabiting our country, with which our poets
again are almost entirely unacquainted; or from knowing our life, and not only ours, but
that of Western Europe too, as it should be known. And if we take as an example such a
man as Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, every one of us knows that even at the age of
fourteen he displayed extraordinary erudition, knowledge of contemporary life both in
Russia and abroad. Whereas ours, comrades, could be put under a threepenny bit! We
must put a stop to this! I will therefore ask you, comrades, not to take offence at any
hard words that I speak to you here. Together let us not only fill ourselves with a sense
of the grandeur of this most mighty epoch in the history of mankind, but let us also
draw the conclusion for ourselves: we must advance towards a great literature, towards
a tremendous literature, towards a literature mighty in its content, towards a literature of
action, towards a liter. ature whose craftsmanship, too, will place it on the mountain
peaks of greatness in the history of mankind and in the history of art!

I conclude my report with the slogan: We must dare, comrades!

 Stetsky: Bajo la bandera de los soviets, bajo la bandera
del socialismo.

THE CONGRESS of Soviet Writers is proceeding with marked success. It has become
the centre of great attention in our country.

Only a few months back there were still people to be met with who doubted whether
this unusual congress should be convened at all, whether anything would come of it.
Such talk was even to be heard on the very eve of the congress.

Well, the congress has opened. It has got under way. It has gathered momentum at
tremendous speed. We have now reached the thirteenth day of this congress, and neither
our esteemed chairman, nor that phlegmatic member of the presidium, Comrade
Demyan Bedny, nor the careworn Boris Pasternak - no one, in fact, now knows how to
stop the congress, such a multitude of literary questions has it raised, such creative
energy has it unfolded in its course.

Without doubt the congress will prove and is already proving today to be a great
event in our literature. All of us, writers in particular, feel that after the congress
literature will somehow become different, that it will rise to a new plane. And the
literary historian of the future will, of course, treat the first Congress of Soviet Writers
as an event marking the beginning of a new era in the history of literature.

Comrades, this congress is being attended by the writers of all peoples inhabiting the
Soviet Union. They have come here, to this congress, with all the problems that are
engrossing their attention. Both in Maxim Gorky’s report at this congress and in the
reports delivered by the representatives of the various republics of the U.S.S.R., we
have been given a vivid idea of all the vast wealth of experience, all the rich cultural
heritage that our republics possess. This congress has practically demonstrated that this
fraternal family of ours includes people who can trace back the history of their culture
for hundreds and thousands of years. Without doubt we shall go away from this
congress enriched.

Prior to the congress much work had already been done in studying the literature of
the peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union. But judging from what we have heard at the
congress itself, we may say that we are only at the beginning of this great work of
making the writers of the Soviet Union more closely acquainted with one another, of
making our writers acquainted with all that manifold wealth of culture which the
peoples of our Soviet country possess and which has been presented in such breadth and
clarity at this first Congress of Soviet Writers.

Representatives of almost all nations inhabiting the Soviet Union, representatives of

different literary tendencies, have spoken here. They have all raised literary problems in
their own way, in their own literary clef. But one thing united all of them: all their
speeches turned on the one thing for which our country is fighting - the cause of
socialism.

We have every right to say that this congress, at which representatives of the best part
of the Soviet Union’s intelligentsia have gathered, possesses, apart from its literary
importance, a tremendous political importance as well, since this congress ratifies and
sets the seal, as it were, on the process, begun long ago, by which the intelligentsia of
the peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union have united under the flag of the Soviets, under
the flag of socialism.

1. Our Guiding Line is That of Socialist Realism

The congress has been marked by animated discussion. All questions of literary
creation have been touched on here. Herein lies the radical difference from those days
when the literary world of our country was being directed by the RAPP. You will recall
that the RAPP had its own “general line,” its own “general secretary,” its own “general
platform,” which it tried to force upon all writers. You will likewise recall the
embittered disputes which raged round every period and every comma of this platform.

The decision of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. of April 23, 1932, “On the
Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations,” put an end to the RAPP, which
had become an obstacle to the further development of Soviet literature; it laid the
foundation for the Union of Soviet Writers and paved the way for that upsurge of
political and creative enthusiasm to which the Congress of Soviet Writers bears such
striking testimony.

The first Congress of Soviet Writers is marked by free, creative discussion of all
literary problems. It is not passing any resolutions on literary questions that are binding
on all writers.

When the congress’s program of work was being discussed and persons were being
nominated to deliver reports at this congress, it need hardly be said that the
organizational committee consulted with our Party before making its decisions. I think
this is no secret to anyone. But this does not mean at all that every report is some kind
of canon, some kind of platform, in which every word and every comma is fixed and
unalterable, in which everything must be carried out to the letter. This is not so,
comrades. This would mean cramping creative initiative.

Nor have our Party and government passed any decisions to give individual writers
official testimonials or appraisals of their talent, to present prose writers and poets with
any special kind of “decorations,” marks of distinction, marks of approval or marks of
blame and censure in varying degrees. I do not know of any decisions of our Party and
government regarding the “canonization” of Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky is a mighty
poet, a poet of the revolution, but we have not passed any decisions to the effect that all
our Soviet poetry must take Mayakovsky as its sole model. And if Comrade Bukharinin
his report gave an appraisal of individual poems and the work of individual poets, he did
so, once again, by way of raising literary problems for discussion. This does not mean at
all that every poet at this congress has received from the Party or the government a mark
of distinction which he must take along with him in leaving this congress. Such a thing
would denote bureaucracy of the worst kind, and you know that there is no more
irreconcilable foe of bureaucracy than our Party.

We have public opinion, we have criticism, we have readers who have greatly
developed during recent years and who are themselves perfectly well able to judge
which work is valuable, worthy of praise, and which work deserves censure.

But if there is free creative competition in our literature, if there is animated

discussion of literary questions, that does not by any means signify that we do not have
any guiding line in literature. No, comrades, we do have a guiding line in literature, and
this fact has been brought out in almost all the speeches delivered here. This fact was
brought out both in Maxim Gorky’s report and in the speech of Comrade Zhdanov,
secretary of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. Our guiding line is that of socialist
realism.

You yourselves have said in your resolution that you want to create works imbued
with the spirit of socialism.

Such is the guiding line of Soviet literature. And in everything else - free, creative
competition.

Many of us try to be too clever about socialist realism. Socialist realism is not some
set of tools that are handed out to the writer for him to make a work of art with. Some
writers demand that they be given a theory of socialist realism complete in all its details.
 You represent the best part of the intelligentsia. “To whom much is given, from him
shall much be exacted.” And when we are told that we must show socialist realism,
there is only one answer which we can give here, at this congress of writers: socialist
realism can best be shown in those works of art which Soviet writers produce.

2. Soviet Writers Are Surrounded by the Love and Attention of the Toilers

A distinguishing feature of the Congress of Soviet Writers is the eager attention with
which it is surrounded by the whole population of our country. It has often been said
that in the Land of Soviets the barriers which once separated the artist from the people
have fallen. But I think that many of our writers have not felt this in its full force until
now, at the Congress of Soviet Writers. Many of you have not felt until now with what
love and attention our people surrounds its Soviet intelligentsia, with what solicitude it
regards them.

You see how the whole country follows the work of the congress, how sensitively it
reacts to every writer’s speech. This has been vividly shown here, at the congress, in the
speeches of numerous delegations - workers, collective farmers, representatives of the
Red Army and Fleet, the youth, workers in other fields of art.

We saw this, too, in the Moscow Park of Culture and Rest, in the Green Theatre,
where tens of thousands of Moscow proletarians gathered to give a warm welcome to
the Congress of Soviet Writers. And when the writers who were attending this festival
saw the tens of thousands of spectators, the vast amphitheatre under the open sky, the
moon above this amphitheatre (and the writers could not help asking whether this moon,
too, had not been hung there by the director of the park), before many of them
involuntarily arose the unforgettable picture of ancient Greece, where art was
indissolubly linked with the people. “It would be good to produce CEdipus on this
stage,” exclaimed Alexey Tolstoy then. “Or to have a contest of poets and singers,”
added someone else.

Does it not seem to you, comrades, that now, at another stage of historical
development, in the age of electricity, of wireless telegraphy, in the age of socialism and
of Soviet power in our country, we are now witnessing the best days of art, when the
people and the artist form one whole? Those literary snobs who shut themselves up in
drawing rooms and deafen one another with verbose tirades are gradually disappearing
from among us. In our country the people knows its writers; it discusses every new
work in factories and collective farms, in the houses and clubs of the Red Army. Every
good song instantly wings it way over the whole of our country-from White Russia to
the shores of the Pacifico

And it is no accident that here, at the congress, both in Maxim Gorky’s report and in
the speeches delivered by writers, so much should have been said about people’s art.
Yes, in our country the people is once again producing its singers, its artists. Every year
sees the rising up of fresh forces, of new writers, who come from the midst of the
workers and collective farmers and who sometimes become well known to the whole
country with their very first work.

Comrade Stavsky has told us today about these young writers, who, as our culture
grows, are every year becoming more numerous. On the other hand, even those artists
who were formerly isolated, have now come to the proletariat, have accepted the
platform of the Soviet power, and have become near and dear to our people.

The representatives of the workers and collective farmers who spoke here told us:
Portray our growth, our struggle for socialism.

Every person who has greeted the congress from this rostrum - beginning with the
woman collective farmer from the Moscow Region, who spoke in such splendidly
graphic language, and ending with the foreman from the Stalin Plant has been created
by the revolution, has grown hardened in stubborn struggle for the triumph of socialism.

I recall certain sapient sayings of our critics, who sometimes evade some of the basic
principles by which our writers are guided and try by the judgments they pass to rob
these principles of all meaning. We all know Engels’ principle that an artist should
depict typical characters in typical circumstances. And if we take as an example the
characters of those representatives of the workers, collective farmers, and Red Army
men who have appeared here on this rostrum, no one so strikingly bears out the truth of
this principle as they do. For these characters were created in the titanic class struggle
which has been raging in our country through out all these years.

There are some who argue as follows: Well, we can agree with the first part of
Engels’ principle - that about typical characters. As regards the second part - that about
typical circumstances - that is really no use to us at all. This, in my opinion, is a big
mistake. We cannot understand and we cannot portray a single character without
showing how this man struggled - with what obstacles, with what enemies and how he
grew hardened in this struggle.
 Our entire Party, the Party of Lenin and Stalin, has grown up and become hardened in
the struggle of socialism. The working class, too, has become hardened in this struggle.

Our artists should let this be felt and understood in their works. They should
sometimes find lesser, slighter traits which set off this basic factor in the coming into
being, in the creation of characters in our country.

3. “Chelyuskin” – Symbol of Proletarian Heroism

Otto Yulevich Schmidt has spoken here. He said something quite simple at first
glance but in reality highly significant something to which our writers, it seems to me,
should pay serious attention. Otto Yulevich said: “In the Arctic, on the ice, in the most
difficult, tragic circumstances, people revealed those qualities which had formerly lain
concealed in them, but which had been fostered by the Land of Soviets.”

I have before me a book which ought to be distributed among the delegates to this
congress - a book which will, I think, attract the attention of all of you. No one,
unfortunately, spoke about this book at the congress. It is called How We Saved the
“Chelyuskin” Expedition.

The heroes of the Soviet Union were not going to wait for our writers to become
inspired and describe their exploits on the ice-fields of the Arctic. They set about doing
it themselves, and within two months they had themselves written this book. Here, in
simple, unadorned language each of the airmen - Lyapidevsky, Levanevsky, Slepnev,
Mololwv, Ramanin, Vodopyanov, Doronin – tells about his life, about how he learned
to fly, how he accomplished his heroic feats.

This is a splendid book. It is a bit of real life. It is one of the most interesting books
that has appeared in recent times. Its appearance is proof of the fact that our people has
produced heroes who not only accomplish feats of heroism but are also able to recount
the story both of themselves and of their feats. This is a new phenomenon in our
literature.

When you read this book, you will see what sort of men these are. One was born in a
village outside Moscow, another near Leningrad, a third in Poltava. Their lives took
different courses. Many of them did not meet till Vankarem and Wellen. But, arrived
there, they began to act together like a steel detachment of the revolution.

Who created them? Reading this book, you will see that it was the revolution which
created these men.
 And when our people honoured the “Chelyuskin” heroes, they were not only
honouring their personal courage and heroism. Perhaps some writer who will set about
describing this exploit will depict it as one more of the many examples of personal
heroism, of personal courage. This would be a great mistake. No, each one of these men
has his history. And what was done on the ice also has its history. And when our
country honoured the heroes of the Arctic, it saw its own image in them; it saw in what
took place on the ice an image of the whole land of Soviets, an image of the heroic
proletariat. Two qualities which distinguish our toiling masses were displayed there:
heroism, which our people revealed under the leadership of the working class when they
paved the way for the first time in history to a new future, and supreme organized
discipline, without which this heroism would be severed from the earth, would be
baseless, without which none of these great deeds could be accomplished.

4. Let Us Produce Works Worthy of Our Epoch

This is of tremendous significance for the artist, for artistic creation. One classical
writer who died long ago, but who has “figured” at the present congress, said that
realism which cannot see further than the end of its own nose is worse than the craziest
fantasy, because it is blind.

The example of the “Chelyuskin” should teach the artist that he cannot confine
himself to mere photography, that he cannot confine himself to a mere chronicling of
events. The artist should find such traits as will reveal the connection between
phenomena, as will show out of what background a man has grown, whence he has
derived those qualities which have enabled him to accomplish marvels of heroism,
marvels of organized discipline which have won the admiration of the whole world.

Much has been said here to the effect that our art must have content. This is perfectly
true. There are now no longer any open upholders of formalism among us. True, there
are still persons to be met with who denounce formalism and at the same time drag it in
either in their works or their criticism. Such cases, unfortunately, still occur. But in our
struggle against art without content, against art which is a reflection of the rottenness
and decay of the bourgeois world, we have already won a decisive victory. And our
artist recognizes that his work should be something more than a beautiful bouquet, that
it should have content, that it should inspire, challenge and lead onward. It seems to me
that an artist is searching when he is creating, when he is fashioning his work, and when
he is exerting all his efforts in order that the images of his work - every thought, every
feeling, every word - may reach the reader’s heart. And in this respect Maxim Gorky
sets us all an example. His works are all so fashioned that the mass reader can
understand them excellently. Here every word and every phrase is sharpened, here every
image is carefully finished off, and everything is directed towards making the work find
an echo in the heart of the reader. This is just what every genuine artist ought to strive
for.

Comrades, many representatives of our new readers have spoken here. They came
from all ends of our Soviet country. They mounted this rostrum and said: We love you,
Soviet writers, and we respect you, but we expect you to give us new songs, new works,
in which a flood of new feelings and thoughts may be outpoured. We want you to
produce works which will inspire, which will beckon forward, in which all our
dazzlingly colourful, manifold, heroic life and work will find their reflection. They
came here, to the rostrum of this congress, and to the Congress of Soviet Writers, to the
best representatives of the intelligentsia, they addressed their hopes and demands.

There can be only one answer: Yes, we will create a new art, the art of a free people.
Yes, we will create the art of socialism.
Resoluciones del primer congreso de escritores soviéticos.
Resolution on the Report of Maxim Gorky, the co-Reports of S. Y. Marshak and
the Report on the Literature of the National Republics

(Adopted at the Morning Session on August 23, 1934)

Having heard and discussed the report of Maxim Gorky on Soviet literature, the
reports on the literatures of the Ukrainian S.S.R, the White Russian. S.S.R., the
Georgian S.S.R, the Armenian S.S.R, the Azerbaijan S.S.R, the Tajik S.S.R., the
Turkmenian S.S.R, the Uzbek S.S.R and the Tatar Autonomous S.S.R, and the co-report
on children’s literature, the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers places on record
that, as a result of the victorious building of socialism and the ’rout of the class enemies
of the proletariat and toilers of the U.S.S.R, the Soviet literature of the peoples of the
Soviet Union has grown into a mighty force for socialist culture and for the education of
the toiling masses in the spirit of socialism. Under the leadership of the heroic
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with Comrade Stalin at its head, and thanks to
the Party’s daily help, the writers of all peoples of the U.S.S.R. have come to their first
congress as a collective body, which, in its ideas, organization and creative work, has
rallied around the Party and the Soviet power into a single union of Soviet writers.

The Congress approves the work of the Organizational Committee, which has
realized the unification of Soviet writers into the Union of Soviet Writers and carried
out the preparations for their first Congress.

The Congress notes the outstanding part taken in this work by the great proletarian
writer, Maxim Gorky. Taking into consideration the reports and the exchange of
opinions at the Congress, the Congress instructs the guiding organs of the Union of
Soviet Writers to lose no time in devising measures for aiding Soviet writers in their
creative work, for helping young writers and strengthening the tie between the writers
and the toiling masses, so that the whole activity of the Union of Soviet Writers may
secure a further growth of creative work in all spheres of Soviet literature and the
creation of works of high quality, infused with the spirit of socialism.

2. Resolution on the Report of Karl Radek on International Literature

(Adopted at the Morning Session of August 26, 1934)

Having heard the report of Comrade Radek on international literature and the
exchange of ideas following this report, the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers
places on record that, despite the cruel repressions that are meted out to the working
class and toiling intelligentsia of foreign countries by the ruling capitalist class; despite
the orgy of fascism and bloody reaction; despite the fact that a number of the best
representatives of revolutionary literature are incarcerated in fascist jails and are being
subjected to direct physical destruction, the forces of revolutionary literature are
growing just as are the forces of the working class, and its militant voice resounds ever
more loudly, rousing the oppressed masses to struggle against capitalist slavery.

The Congress of Soviet Writers calls upon its brothers, the revolutionary writers of
the whole world, to fight with all the force of the writer’s pen against capitalist
oppression, fascist barbarism, colonial slavery, against the preparations for new
imperialist wars, in defense of the U .S.S.R. - the fatherland of toiling humanity. From
the time when a small group of writers, headed’ by Gorky, followed the Party of Lenin,
down to the present period - when, as a rest of the victory - of socialism in the U.S.S.R.,
Soviet literature has turned into a tremendous cultural force, has become a literature of
all peoples, a literature which expresses the great work of the toiling masses of the
Soviet Union in creating a new, socialist system-our writers have traversed a glorious
path. Their example is convincing the best representatives of literature abroad that
literature and art cannot really flourish except where socialism is victorious.

A tremendous growth of culture and creation is going on among the masses of the
people in the Soviet Union. In the countries of capitalism there is economic chaos, the
decline of culture and science, the decay of the literature of the ruling classes. And
genuine works of art are being created only by those masters of language who raise their
voices in protest against the ulcers of capitalism, against the crying contradictions of
capitalist society.

The First Congress of Soviet Writers warmly greets the writers who have come to
attend the Congress from France, England, the U.S.A., China, Germany, Turkey,
Czechoslovakia, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Greece and Holland, who have responded to
the invitation to visit the U.S.S.R. and taken a most active part in the work of the
Congress.

The Congress highly appreciates the sympathies for the U.S.S.R. and for socialist
construction, for the new culture being created by the peoples of the U.S.S.R.,
manifested by the following foreign writers who have spoken at the Congress:
Comrades Martin Andersen Nexö, André Malraux, Jean-Richard Bloch, Yakub Kadri,
Willi Bredel, Theodor Plivier, Hu Lan-chi, Louis Aragon, Johannes Becher, Annabel
Williams Ellis. The Congress sends fraternal greetings to Romain Rolland, André Gide,
Henri Barbusse, Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Heinrich Mann and
Li Sing, who are courageously fulfilling their noble duty as the best friends of toiling
humanity.

The Congress of Writers expresses its profound solidarity with the revolutionary
writers who are held prisoner by international reaction, who are defending the cause of
the toiling masses, the cause of the progress of mankind, and promises to fight with all
its’ might for their release.

The Congress is firmly convinced that the future belongs to international

revolutionary literature, for it is linked up with the struggle of the working class for the
liberation of all mankind.