Anatoly Lunacharsky 1928
Written: 1928
First published: 21 September 1928 in Krasnaya Gazeta, evening edition. Leningrad, No. 261
Source: Lunacharsky Archive
Translated by: Anton P.
At one time, I proposed a scheme that has not yet been rejected by anyone and which somewhat helps to understand – in the most general terms, of course – the interdependence of the main trends in art and literature and of the social classes they express. This scheme is as follows.
In the general change of social structures, each class can occupy four positions.
Firstly, it can be the ruling class, full of strength, self-confidence, having broad prospects before it and expressing in this case, at least in the economic-exploitative form, the interests of the whole society according to the principle “everything that is real is reasonable.” This principle is just true for its activity: juicy, brightly affirming itself. Once in any society a given class rules, once it calmly and easily embraces the progressive forces of the economy with its directives, this means that the economic reality of a given society requires exactly the same power that this class exercises.
Second, a class may be in decline. This means that the new economic forces no longer fit into the directives of this class, their development runs counter to its interests and at the same time undermines the foundations of its power. Ideologically, a class in such a position should feel anxiety for its existence. It should develop now inertly conservative direction, hostile to the interests of the entire social whole, then decadent, defeatist.
Third, the class may be in a promoted state. This happens when the ruling class is eroded by the growing forces of production, and these new forces begin to push up from the depths another class, which is destined to raise its sails to the new wind and become, after a revolutionary upheaval, the new master of the situation.
Fourthly, the class may be in a state of complete depression, when any attempts to rise from the social bottom are hopeless.
In accordance with this, various types of what can be called Classicism and Romanticism are grown.
By Classicism I mean such ideological forms, primarily artistic ones (as this is expressed especially clearly in art), in which the form embraces the content, that is, where skill has mastered all the problems that the artist can pose for himself. It goes without saying that various nuances are possible within classical art, which I will not discuss in this article devoted to the analysis of Romanticism.
By Romanticism, I mean those cultural, and especially artistic, forms in which the form does not embrace the content, that is, the skill lags behind the problems posed by life, or the form remains empty due to the absence of such nourishing problems. In a word, the general definition of Romanticism for me lies in the gap between the art form (the artist’s skill) and the socio-psychological material, the material to which this skill is applied.
It is quite obvious that classical art is possible only when the class is, on the one hand, in a state of some immobility or slow harmonious movement forward, and on the other hand, at the apogee of its social significance. That is why classical art is developed exclusively by the ruling classes or by the ideologists of such classes in their heyday. All other positions are more or less infected with Romanticism. Thus, the decadent class, the degenerate aristocracy, ceases to believe in itself, loses its understanding of the growing reality. From here, anxiety begins, sometimes turning into despair. Such a class begins to lose its very connection with reality, begins to despise this reality to a certain extent. The future seems dark and undesirable to them. Insofar as such a class, in its separate individuals and groups, does not fall under the power of the complete and destructive force of pessimism, insofar as it seeks salvation in mysticism, in the hope of otherworldly forces – in a word, as I once said, pushed out of reality by reality, it fumbles with one foot a place behind the grave. To a large extent, the Christian Romanticism of the time of the collapse of the ancient world is explained precisely by such phenomena. Especially the Christian aristocratic sects – for example, Gnosticism – and the parallel “pagan” schools of the Neoplatonists and Neo-Pythagoreans, and religions such as Mithraism, were the result of the same process. The same can be said about the decadent Romanticism of the aristocracy in modern times, after it was dealt a merciless blow by the bourgeoisie. The most typical figures of this kind of Romanticism are Joseph de Maistre, Chateaubriand, Disraeli, Carlyle and many others.
Romanticism appears to us in a completely different form when it is the spokesman for a rapidly rising revolutionary class. Here the content is new. It has not yet been fully expressed. It breaks the artistic boundaries, so to speak. The master has not yet been able to saddle it. After all, the new social forces have not yet taken shape, and they themselves still represent something as fluid as lava, and are reflected in consciousness more as programs than as ready-made facts. Revolutionary epochs create especially striking types of this kind of Romanticism.
At the same time, if the revolutionary progressive movement stumbles upon insurmountable resistance, then as a result, militant, optimistic Romanticism takes on the character of despondency or stormy despair. In this case, there may even be direct jumpers between the Romanticism of the first and the second type.
So, for example, Hugo at the beginning of his career was a typical Romantic of aristocratic decline, and then moved to the position of stormy, militant Romanticism. But even in this second period, very noticeable pessimistic notes slipped from time to time, since the middle and petty republican bourgeoisie, to which Hugo joined, suffered serious defeats during his life. The music of Wagner is also characteristic, whose Romanticism was at first offensively revolutionary, young bourgeois, and in the end, expressing the disappointment of various sections of the bourgeoisie, acquired the character of pessimism, which was very favorably treated by the pessimists of aristocratic decline.
Nevertheless, the most characteristic feature of the Romanticism of a progressively developing class is its titanism, its theomachism, its juiciness in life, often barbaric and clumsy.
Classes immobile or inactive, but at the bottom of the social ladder, pressed down by all sorts of life’s sorrows and at the same time deprived of hopes for a real improvement in their situation, also fall into mysticism and religious dream. This is often characteristic of the embryonic ideologies and artistic manifestations of folk art, the art of the oppressed masses. This is highly characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie, especially at the moment when they are mentally awakening. In the light of this ignited mind, they only see the darkness surrounding them more clearly and, perhaps, after several convulsions of protest, they are sometimes forced to admit their impotence. Artistry often develops on this basis, proclaiming art to be “another world” and running into it or into various forms of mysticism. Extremely characteristic forms of such Romanticism are the artistic and musical production of the German cultured petty bourgeoisie (during the entire era of its humiliation, that is, from the end of the 18th century to the fifties and sixties of the last century) and Polish Romanticism, especially the era of its giants – Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Krasinsky, and others. However, we see almost the same forms of pessimistic Romanticism later in Poland crushed by Russia, for example, among the great writers of the recent past – Wyspiansky, Zeromsky.
All the arts, sometimes with some degree of delay, reflect each given epoch, its character, and the dominant note for each given epoch is the class that imposes the main stamp on it, whether it be the dominant class or the one powerfully approaching domination and already pressing in all positions its still formally ruling enemy.
The same took place in music. From my point of view, one cannot deny the Romantic beginnings in Beethoven’s work, but only Beethoven’s Romanticism is militantly offensive Romanticism. It feeds on the same roots that fed the French Revolution and all those revolutionary currents that surrounded or supplemented it. The Romanticism of subsequent composers – Schubert, and even more so of Schumann and Chopin – represented a transition to the Romanticism of despondency and pessimism. There was no more powerful impulse forward. Individuality was left to itself. It was the loneliness of this individuality that made it often seek refuge and salvation in folklore in order to find for itself the roots of the national, tribal order. Such a junction with the sources of folk poetry, folk music often gave a certain freshness to the individualistic Romanticism of charmlessness. But the further process had to lead more and more to artistic sophistication, not supported by any vivid feelings or based on various forms of mysticism.
Wagner in the first part of his work reflects the high rise of the revolution of 1848 (as Berlioz reflected in France the revolutionary spurs of the Great French Revolution, together with Delacroix and others). We have already spoken of the later Wagner as the Romanticism of decadence. It is very characteristic that Wagner associates himself with Schopenhauer. Nietzsche, who was, as it were, a not entirely successful herald of shoots towards a new classicism, the classicism of self-affirming banksters and the big bourgeoisie in general, entered into a struggle with his teachers, Schopenhauer and Wagner, precisely because he felt the decadent in them and he himself wanted to defeat this decadent by going over – partly unconsciously for himself – to the point of view of the ruling elite.
In Russian music, we had a tremendous upswing in creativity, coinciding with the development of the bourgeoisie and with the acquisition of enormous influence on this basis by the outposts of the petty bourgeoisie, in its best representatives even came to socialist populism. Hence the Romanticism of The Mighty Handful, successfully based on folklore, and the cheerful, self-affirming opera of Rimsky-Korsakov, sometimes charged with a certain radicalism. The mystical opera of the later Rimsky-Korsakov marks that decline in hopes, that disappointment, which manifested itself most vividly in the eighties.
It must be recognized as extremely characteristic that Scriabin, although he shrouded his hopes in a mystical fog, nevertheless considered his art directed towards the restructuring of the world and, in this sense, mighty, conquering. It is even more characteristic – this is subtracted by everyone, getting acquainted with the literary heritage of Scriabin – that towards the end of his life Scriabin completely abandoned the mystical idea of transforming the world by some purely musical means and began to recognize that such a transformation is a huge human task, in which the master, the musician should take only a certain place.
I will note one more thing. The more a given class believes in itself, the more it inclines towards realism; the less it believes in itself, the more mystical elements appear in its work. Elements of a purely formal nature, that is, the predominance of external completeness and constructive theoretical and virtuoso problems over genuine feeling and thought, are also a sign of decadence and testify to the complete internal emptyness of the class that puts them forward. What is characteristic of modern bourgeois art is precisely the absence of serious feelings. At the basis of such art lies the extreme lack of content and, at the same time, the sometimes very lively and even, as it were, arrogantly cheeky fun of the culture of the bourgeoisie, which is leaning towards its decline. Mysticism is easily combined with all sorts of jazz-band-futuristic motifs, since it, very powerful in its means and very insignificant in its cultural content, tends to strive for a type of virtuosity that should dazzle society, swirl it and distract it from setting serious problems. At the present time, typical bourgeois art is not capable of more.
The proletariat will introduce a strong romantic-realist current into all art. Romantic, because it is full of aspirations and is not yet a complete class, so that the mighty content of its culture cannot yet find an appropriate framework for itself; realistic insofar as Plekhanov noted, insofar as the class that intends to build here on earth and is imbued with deep faith in such construction is intimately connected with reality as it is.
Here are a few general thoughts that can help explain the phenomena of Romanticism in art, in particular musical Romanticism. With P. N. Sakulin’s position that the word “Romanticism” should mean some underdetermined period in art and that a relatively large variety of phenomena cannot be summed up under one term, I cannot agree at all. All qualifications rest on a certain hierarchy of concepts. We can therefore establish, first of all, the concept of Romanticism in general, then its concrete manifestation in individual epochs, and in these epochs create specific definitions for individual trends, groups, and even works.