LITERATURE OF THE PROLETARIAT

Southland Times, Issue 23047, 14 November 1936, Page 13

LITERATURE OF THE PROLETARIAT

Authorship In Russia ■

(Specially Written for The Southland Times.)

(By

MONTE HOLCROFT.)

Russian authors are increasingly envied in the west. It is reported that they live securely and comfortably in communal dwellings, and are among the highest paid workers in the Soviet Union. Lifted beyond the reach of material considerations, they are free to cultivate their talents in the service of the state. They are not without their problems, however. In the writer’s world have been heard the inevitable slogans. The cry is for “Art on the Class Front” and “Liquidation of the Bourgeois Ideology”; all writers must be organized against the “class enemy on the literary sector.” These slogans cease to be amusing when we remember that beneath them lurk the antennae of the Gay-Pay-00, and that a tinge of scepticism in novel or play may be a first step towards imprisonment and exile. Add to this the ever-present danger from fanaticism of fellow-writers, and you will begin to see that the intellectuals have lived precariously through the years of consolidation. “Proletarian authors,” writes William Henry Chamberlain, “were always quick to denounce fellow authors in whom they detected any taint of heresy.” So that sincere artists who strove to make what they could of their limited materials were faced also with a militant jealousy which could warm up beyond fulmination and slander into active persecution. Smoke in the Streets. It is unwise, however, to see these things exclusively from a western viewpoint The present-day position of Russian authors is inseparable from facts of racial and historic significance which are sometimes overlooked or misinterpreted by foreign observers. Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution” is the best approach to the Soviet mind I have yet been able to discover. Like all great books, it contains the essence of many other writings. Trotsky played a leading part in the events of 1917; he knew the men who have since written their versions of the crisis, and he took what he needed from them with an instinctive judgment for essential values. I do not know if he was strictly impartial; nor do I see how any English reader can judge him on this score with anything more than the instinct for truth which comes out of careful reading. It is possible, however, to read him with increasing confidence. His sense of history allows him to trace the rise and fall of parties and to see them as an interplay of forces working through the masses and tossing individuals into a prominence that, until the coming of Lenin, was never more than momentary. He disposes of the “ifs” of revolution with the confidence of one whose view of events goes back to the abortive revolution of 1905 and who can understand the processes which had their beginning in the first impact of western civilization on a backward country. It is impossible not to see that Trotsky feels the strange beauty and the grandeur of those irresistible mass movements towards the time of power. Famous men appear on the scene and play their parts in the guidance of events; but the true hero of the history is the unknown worker coming out with his fellows from the Vyborg district in those fateful five days of February: the “sacrificial element” which falls under machine-gun fire in the streets or comes boldly to the front ranks of those who argue and plead with the wavering soldiers. Trotsky resists all impulse to an empty enthusiasm; but when he writes of the masses and their surging movements there comes into his prose the unmistakable notes of poetry. Consider these words at the end of an account of the first Executive Committee meeting in the Tauride Palace: That was one of the most moving scenes of the revolution, now first feeling its power, feeling the unnumbered masses it has aroused, the colossal tasks, the pride in success, the joyful failings of the heart at the thought of the morrow which is to be still more beautiful than to-day. The revolution still has not ritual, the streets are in smoke, the masses have not yet learned the new songs. The meeting flows on without order, without shores, like a river at flood. The Soviet chokes in its own enthusiasm. The revolution is mighty but still naive, with a child’s naiveness. It is not often that Trotsky lets himself go in this way; but when such passages are encountered they leave an impression similar to that taken from the rare lyricism interspersed in the dry tracts of Kant’s philosophy. You come upon them with a shock of surprise, and of a sudden are in communication, not with an intellect grinding out facts and theories, but a living heart which has known aspiration and hope and the passion of faith. These moments are memorable. The Writer’s Background. It is necessary to remember that the present-day writer in Russia contains the essence of these events in his consciousness. The older ones saw something of the streets in February 1917, and were able to feel the inner conflict which brought the Bolsheviks into power under the leadership of Lenin. They lived under Kerensky’s Government and the dual-power regime; they heard the first mutterings of the storm which broke in October; and in the following years they fought in the civil war and were in the surge of events which led to the final establishment of the Soviet Union. If they were too young for this, they were at least old enough to feel the aftermath of a nation’s excitement; they were bom to the years of hunger and hard work, and would seek to identify themselves

witn some impulse of the spirit wmcn could explain or justify to them the apparent bleakness of life. There is a poem called “The Beardless Enthusiast,” very popular at the frequent verse recitals, which expresses through the mind of a Young Communist a regret for the unknown fields of action during the civil war, on any of which he could have given his life with a joyful sense of sacrifice. This must appeal to a good many young men who grow weary of the endless epics of industrial development: the landscape dominated by power stations and tractor depots, the themes swollen grossly with sabotage trials and the heroisms of Young Communist contingents hurrying off with songs toward the newest breach in the labour front.

For those who feel themselves in harmony with the existing regime there are no doubt subjects enough for poetry and fiction. The unceasing flow of propaganda has created a special mental climate against which only minds of unusual strength and originality could hope to struggle. But truth works in through the chinks and cracks of the most weather-proof social system, and where it is withheld forcibly by censorship it can be replaced in the minds of the people by exaggerated and grotesque versions that are infinitely more harmful than facts unadorned. Ido not know how sensitive artists, striving to direct their enthusiasm for dialectical materialism into the forms and moods of the arts, responded a few years ago to news of the wholesale “liquidation” of kulaks. At its worst it was a famine, deliberately enclosed like a smouldering tussock country within safety belts of ploughed land, so that there could be stamped out the final resistance of a peasantry clinging to its patch of soil, its horses and cows, and its mite of independence in a world organized beyond its understanding. No doubt there were uncomfortable thoughts breaking into creative moods when news crept in of hundreds of thousands of human creatures carried off in cattle trucks to the labour camps of the far north, of children dying like flies and men and women swollen with hunger and falling like neglected beasts across a countryside which could have been saved by a few consignments of grain. Harvest These are not things to be dismissed lightly, or to be believed without a struggle. No doubt it was helpful to look beyond the momentary pangs and to see the vision of new collective farms rising orderly and productive where formerly had been miserable holdings and the thin cultivation of a free peasantry. The creative mind, possessed by the dream of a nation in the making, could look here for its songs and stories. The countryside is clean now, and the tractors move one after another across the wide dark fields. Back falls the shining furrows, and soon the grain will be sown, and the golden crops will rustle and tremble in the sunlight of warm Ukrainian summers. And the new people will come—the young women and the men with brown healthy faces and eager eyes—and the days of harvest will pass like a slow song across a regenerated land. Who could think now of the kulaks, the ignorant and stubborn souls, trampled long since into a soil they were not worthy to possess? Yet the memory of these Things does not pass with the seasons, and although the state goes triumphantly forward there will be strange new difficulties in the future that may seem to come externally, like disturbances on a far frontier, but which must have their invisible connection with the sufferings of a despised people, dying unwillingly for the good of the nation. And it is in the minds of authors, expressing unknown to themselves the conscience of the masses, that these events may yet return unexpectedly and obscurely, striving in the blind certainty of elementals towards that correlation of forces which is a kind of justice in nature.

It is now known that authors are being granted a., greater liberty of theme and characterization. Will this mean that Russian novelists, obeying a racial unrest which seems to live on among them like the undefeated impulse of the old steppe wanderers, will venture once again toward the forbidden dreams of revolution? Or will they turn back, like Mikhail Sholokhov, towards the years of tremendous change, and add each one his contribution to what has already been called the mythology of Communism? Perhaps the important fact is not the kind of writing now being done in Russia but the discipline in co-operation which has been and is being imposed on authors as a class. They are learning to share themes that are inseparable from the life of the nation. For good or evil, there is with them a shared conception of the state which looms beyond everything that is written. And what is more, it is decidedly a positive conception, -making demands on the writer, insisting on service, and opening a way into a future that for western writers is heavy with doubt and uncertainty. The Russians believe that they know where they are going. Perhaps they are wrong. The future may bring new revolutions and destructive wars and the collapse of an Asiatic empire into a wasteland delivered once more to the nomads. These things are not to be known. But they do not trouble the Soviet writer He feels behind him the dynamic purpose of a nation; and, like Trotsky in his monumental history, he makes the nation the subject of his work and is able increasingly to attain a totality of conception. It may be that in stages of world history now opening before us there will be a need for just this kind of intellectual activity. Was it not a communal authorship which produced the Iliad!