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From International Socialism, No.44, July/August 1970, p.39.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Art Against Ideology
Ernst Fischer
Alan Lane The Penguin Press 42s 1969
(first published 1966 in Austria and Germany)
The Necessity of Art
Ernst Fischer
Penguin 1963
(first published 1959)
Both translated by Anna Bostock.
Fischer’s new book is a collection of five essays; some are uneven, partly because of the looseness of theme (Coexistence and Ideology for example) but collectively they represent an important statement. The material and discussion is shaped by pressures exclusively of this century, in contrast with the more general and wide ranging approach of his earlier work, The Necessity of Art. Fischer’s departure from the Austrian Communist Party took place late in 1969; Art Against Ideology was published in Germany and Austria in 1966, and section after section attempts to chart aspects of the crippling legacy of Stalinism in the arts and society of Russia and Eastern Europe, and to seek some way forward to a more flexible and open situation. It is the tension between the two conflicting pulls that gives Fischer’s writing great force and urgency. In the essay, In Praise of the Imagination, he says:
‘It is necessary to abjure both caution and lenience in criticising the “arts policy” of certain socialist countries, with their regimented aesthetics, misinterpreted “party mindedness” and the bureaucratic dictatorship of amateurishness over the creative imagination ... During the brief “inter-glacial periods”, literature and art in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia have unfrozen with astonishing speed, almost equalling the West in their means of expression and, sometimes, surpassing it in their subject-matter. That is why a socialist can only speak with sorrow and anger of the boots and hooves which, again and again, trample upon the green wheat.’ (p.182)
While Fischer is Austrian, and separate from the general pressures of party interference within Russia and East Europe on literature, he knows well the artists and literature produced in these areas, and examples in the book reveal his involvement in particular attempts to challenge the arbitrary decisions by Party officials on which books should be published. He gives an account of a conference in Prague in 1963 on Kafka, held while Khruschev was attacking modern art in Moscow, and the debate stressed Kafka’s significance for the socialist and capitalist world:
‘For the first time, communists discussed in open debate the problem of alienation within a socialism which was inadequate and had been distorted by a system of rule of which Stalin was the incarnation but not the sole cause.’ (p.68)
In The Necessity of Art, the section on socialist realism attacked ‘all doctrinaire clinging to particular methods’ and optimistically asserted
‘art that is socialist in its content will – of this I am sure – become richer, bolder, more all-embracing in its themes and forms, its endeavours, and the variety of its movements, than any art of the past. Do not be discouraged by obstinacy and mistakes, checks and reversals’, (pp.114-115)
This was written around 1959 – Khrushchev’s coercion, the cases of Ginsburg, Daniel and Sin-yavsky, and much more, helped to severely modify this view. Art Against Ideology (in an essay like Endgame and Ivan Denisovitch) shows how the divide between socialist and capitalist art has dissolved for him, how Beckett’s Endgame and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch ‘invite comparison because the problems they deal with are the same’ – not from the point of view of treatment or technique, but subject matter: the negation of human dignity, the feeling of disorientation, and so on. The idea of the Absurd has a sound context, when placed by such works as One Day – it certainly had for the hero Shukhov while spending his 3,653 days in the ‘Socialist Way of Life’ settlement – a context of history, a respect for suffering and its uselessness. Of course, Fischer’s insight is not new – a reading of Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulyaev brings out this feature and emphasis during the Purges in Stalin’s Russia of the thirties.
Since Fischer’s reading in literature, history and politics is very wide, and his access to books is not restricted, it’s not unreasonable to mention one theme missing from his account of the development of Party control over the arts and literature in Russia. He puts it like this: by the end of the 1920s
‘there was a growing tendency to control the arts, to administer and manipulate them, to drive out the spirit of criticism and free imagination, and to transform artists into officials, into illustrators of resolutions.’
He makes some sensible points on the abuse of quotations, the way Lenin’s works were used to justify party control, and places such articles as Party Organisation and Party Literature in their proper context. However, there is no mention of Trotsky’s numerous writings and speeches during the middle 1920s, and after – his unequivocal formulations on the essential independence of art and literature from Party control would have added weight to Fischer’s statements, and also directed his readers to an important area of writing on Marxism and the arts. Another small point: part of the un-evenness of some of Fischer’s writing comes from his desire to make orthodox noises – thus, Pope John XXIII becomes ‘one of the most moving and admirable figures of this century’ and Khrushchev comes a poor third after John F Kennedy because he ‘proved unequal to his task’.
Yet, taking the book as a whole these are partial, incidental points. As a testimony to an insightful and principled literary critic who worked for years within the framework of Stalinism and its aftermath, it deserves reading and consideration. I don’t know why Fischer left the Austrian Communist Party – the Russian action over Czechoslovakia may have been the prime cause – but certainly within the book there is the sense of the beleaguered writer and critic, desperately trying to balance loyalties between the twin demands of the battered and discredited politics of Stalinism, and the needs and preconditions for a creative art and literature, something patently irreconcilable within the politics of a movement he was with from 1934.
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