Leon Trotsky: “Literature and
Revolution”
A
revolutionary socialist and a leading force in the Russian Revolution of 1917
Leon Trotsky is a major political figure if the twentieth century. He is
denounced by those who support Tsarsiam for whom the formation of workers state
in Russia were destructing, threatening developments. Also at the same time, as
he opposed Stanlin’s rise to power in the new Soviet Union and saw it in the ruin of everything Russian workers and
peasants fought for, he was denigrated by Stalinists and others who viewed
revolutionary socialism with some other form of state control and dictatorship.
He was born
in 1879 in Ukraine as the son of a Jewish farmer. He was sympathetic to the plight
of farmers and peasants around him, and turned to Marxism in the mid-1890s. He
was sent to exile in 1900 because of his political activities, from where he
escaped and journeyed to London, where he, Vladimir Lenin, and others edited a
journal, The Spark. Having returned to Russia in 1905, he was imprisoned
again. Escaping from there again, he for the next few years works as a
journalist in Vienna , Paris and New York City and returned Russia following
the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917, supported Lenin and joined the
Bolshevik party and won the elections to its central committee. A superb
orator, writer, and agitator, Trotsky first was appointed foreign minister and
then commissar of war. He commanded the Red Army during the civil war that
followed the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, and he believed that he would
be Lenin's successor. But Joseph Stalin was a shrewder, more vicious politician
then him outmanoeuvred him and eventually expelled him from the Comunist Party
in 1927. Having been deported from Russia he lived in Turkey (1929-33), France
(1933-35), Norway (1935-36), and finally Mexico (I 935-40) before being
assassinated by a Spanish Communist named Ramon Mercader in August 1940, in
Mexico City.
Some critics
see the Russian revolution as a misguided or malevolently motivated mistake—a
bloody, conspiratorial revolt against the barbarity of czarism and of
capitalist imperialism (the Revolution grew directly out of World War I) that
led inevitably to the brutality of Stalin’s police state, show trials, and
gulags. The collapse of the Soviet union and its East Bloc satellites at the
end of 1980s created fresh opportunities opportunities for historical and
political analysis outside the confines of a Cold War mindset, a confidently
progressive and open-minded rethinking of the Revolution has been slow to
emerge and take hold. Trotsky in his remarkable “History of the Russian
Revolution”, published in 1931, saw the Revolution as the first great
movement in the self-emancipation of humanity, a movement led by workers
organized through an awareness of their power to transform society.
Trotsky
makes a unique contribution to understanding of cultural conflict and change in
the period of the Russian Revolution. “Literature and Revolution” was
published in 1924. The essays that make up the book are believed to be written
during the summers of 1922 and 1923. Though the Civil War of 1918-1921 had
ended with the Bolshevik-led workers’ state victorious over the forces that
wanted to return Russia to czarism, the country was economically and socially
devastated. Many of the most effective working-class revolutionaries had died
fighting the counter revolutionary White Army. Industrial production had fallen
to catastrophic levels, forcing the government to adopt a series of measures
known as the New Economic Policy (NEP), which permitted a return to small-scale
capitalist trade. The international revolutionary movement, without which a
socialist society in Russia was impossible, had suffered severe defeats—particularly
in Germany in 1918 and again in 1923. In addition, Vladimir Lenin, leader of
the Bolshevik Party and chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, had
suffered debilitating strokes in May 1922 and March 1923, making it easier for
Stalin to consolidate his power base within the bureaucracy and to form his
alliance (or troika) with Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev for the primary
purpose of weakening Trotsky’s influence.
Under such circumstances, it does at first seem surprising that Trotsky would
have turned his attention to questions of culture, art, and literature.
But in fact,
the genesis and argument of “Literature and Revolution” demonstrate some
of the deepest impulses in Trotsky’s political thinking. But in fact, the
genesis and argument of “Literature and Revolution” demonstrate some of
the deepest impulses in Trotsky’s political thinking. As head of the Red Army, he understood as well
as anyone that revolutionary moments in history are most decisively defined and
driven by the material necessities of life. Trotsky argues in his Introduction,
human cultural needs are in their own way as real as any other needs:
…even
a successful solution of the elementary problems of food, clothing, shelter,
and even of literacy, would in no way signify a complete victory of the new
historic principle, that is, of Socialism. Only a movement of scientific
thought on a national scale and the development of a new art would signify that
the historic seed has not only grown into a plant, but has even flowered. In
this sense, the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and
significance of each epoch...
Art, as a distinctive form of culture
understood most broadly as the “sum of knowledge and capacity which
characterizes the entire society” (000), at once follows and completes a
society’s response to the “elementary problems” of human need, production, and
distribution.
Trotsky begins the fifth chapter, The Formalist School of Poetry and
Marxism, of “Literature and Revolution” by saying that art is neither
self contained, separate from politics, nor political, a matter solely of
ideology. Literature then was produced by the elite, the intelligentia who had
a lot of money and tme to spare unlike the industrial workers who had to run
around to make a living. They, the intelligentia were actually the profit
makers of the industrial world hence the working class or the proletariats
could not speak for themselves. Trotsky in the essay asks if it is possible for
the proletariats to produce literature.
While
defining a,”Marxist point of view," he stresses that Marxism does not
require that we "dominate it by means of decrees and orders" or
mandate that we esteem only those works of art that celebrate workers. However
contrary to then political scenario Trotsky does not prescribe how a literary
artist should write. At the same time, Trotsky by no means favours allowing art
to exist independently of; political judgments, as his, adverse, commentary on
formalism and futurism indicates.
Formalism was
an early-twentieth-century movement in literary criticism that emphasized the
analysis of literary language; its formal properties and strategies. The
Formalist school headed by Shlovsky and Jacobson declared form to be the
essence of poetry. Trotsky argues that this analysis which they see as the
essence of poetry is useful and necessary but at the same time it is partial,
scrappy, subsidiary and preparatory in character. But the Formalists are not
content to ascribe to their methods a merely subsidiary serviceable and
technical significance, to them verbal art ends finally and fully with the
word, and deceptive art with colour. For Shklovsky “art was always free of
life, and its colours never reflected the colour of the flag which it waved
over the fortress city. For Russian Formalism form determines content.
The
shift from the agrarian society to the urban industrialised settlements of the
period could be seen in art as well. The new form that originated forced he
poet to seek appropriate materials for representation and pushed him in the
direction of cities. The changes in the social environment transmits the new impulse of life
through the artistic consciousness of the poet. . Language changed and
complicated by urban conditions, gives the poet a new verbal material, and
suggests or facilitates new word combinations for the poetic formulation of new
thoughts or of new feelings, which strive to break through the dark shell of
the subconscious. He argues that if there were no changes in psychology according
to the changes in the social environment, there would be no movement in art:
people would continue to be content, from generation to generation, with the
poetry of the Bible or of the old Greek texts.
Art
is always a social servant and historically utilitarian. It finds the necessary
rhythm of words for dark and vague moods, it brings thought and feeling closer
or cOntrasts them with one another, it enriches the spiritual experience of the
individual and of the community, it refines feeling, makes it more flexible,
more responsive, it enlarges the
volume of thought in advance and not through the personal method of accumulated
experience, it educates the individual, the social group, the class and the
nation. And art performed these tasks irrespective of whether it was ‘pure’ or
tendencious.
Each
class has its own policy in art, that is, a system of presenting demands on
art, which changes with time. He further explains Marxist conception of art. He
says that the Marxist view of objective social dependence and social utility of
art, when translated into the language of politics does not at all mean to
dominate art by means of decrees and orders but as a new and revolutionary
which speaks of the workers. He stands for the complete freedom in the creation
of art. However he requests the writers to consider the new class and call them
in the process of creation of a new world. He says that the proletariat too
needs to have an expression of the new spiritual point of view which is just
beginning to be formulated in him, which woulf need the help of art to give it
a form. It is a historic necessity not a state order.
He
criticizes the Formalists school for not having al logical conclusion for their
idea of art. If one is to regard
the process of poetic creation only as a combination of sounds or words, and to
seek the solution of all the problems of poetry along these lines, then the
only perfect formula of "poetics" will be this: Arm yourself with a
dictionary and create by means of algebraic combinations and permutations of
words, all the poetic works of the world which have been created and which have
not yet been created.”
He then destructs Shklovsky’s attempt to destroy Marxism
in five points. And says that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism
in deciding whether to reject or accept a piece of art, but, he adds, Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency
in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was
who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why. He
says, the artistic work of man is continuous. Each new rising,
class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. But this continuity
is dialectic, that is it finds itself by means of internal repulsions and
breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new literary and artistic points of
view are stimulated by economics, through the development of a new class, and
minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the position of the class, under the
influence of the growth of its wealth and cultural power. Artistic creation is
always complicated. Turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new
stimuli which originate
outside of art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element
feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied
to his life and environment.
He
concludes by saying that the formalist methods are necessary but insufficient.
One may count up the alliterations in popular proverbs, classify metaphors, and
count up the number of vowels and consonants in a wedding song. It will
undoubtedly enrich ones knowledge of folk art, in one way or another; but if he
do not know the peasant system of
sowing, and the life that is based on it, then he does not know the part the
scythe plays, and if he has not mastered the meaning of the church calendar to
the peasant, of the time when the peasant marries, or when the peasant women
give birth, then he has only understood
the outer shell of
folk art, but the kernel will not have been reached. The effort is to set art
free from life, to declare it a craft self-sufficient unto itself, devitalizes
and kills art. The very need of such an operation is an unmistakable symptom of
intellectual decline.
Bibliography
·
Literature and Revolution, ed. Keach,
William. Illinos, Chicago. Haymart Books, 2005
·
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed.
Vincent B. Leitch (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001)
·
A History of Russian Literary History and
Criticism”Soviet Age and Beyond. Ed.Dobrenko, Eygeny and Tihanov,
Galin. Pittsburg,University of Pittsburg
Press, 2011.
·
The Arts in Russia Under
Stalin, Berlin, Isaiah. The New York Review of Books. October
issue, 2000
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