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From International Socialism (1st series), No.58, May 1973, p.26.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 1917-1953
Gleb Struve
Routledge & Kegan Paul, £3.75.
It should be possible now to write a book on Soviet literature which acknowledges and explains the real literary and artistic innovations emanating from Russia in the great experiment of the post-revolutionary period. Also, following the critical period of 1929-1932, some account of the way Stalinism blighted the creative seeds within literature – tragically it doesn’t have to be a long account – would highlight the links between theories of ‘social command’ and ‘socialist realism’ imposed on writers and the parallel control developed in every other sphere of social, economic and cultural life under Stalinism.
What is said about Gleb Struve’s book, for all its accumulated detail of the literary scene up to 1953, is the failure to distinguish, or give explanations for, such changes. Partly it’s a question of approach shaped by the author’s hostility to the fact of the revolution – ‘the Bolshevik coup d’etat’ as he calls it. Time and again one wishes he had wandered slightly from his grimly determined task of getting down details of every writer, major or minor, who put pen to paper, because what one ends up reading is a dessicated commentary without any sense of a meaningful relation between writer and society.
Only rarely are the people, and their hopes and fears, suggested – the kulak, the NEP man, the party member, the factory worker, the peasants who according to one newspaper, Bednota in 1928, believed the fumes from the tractors poisoned the soil and saw the prophecy that the anti-christ would return to earth on an iron horse being fulfilled. Yet it was in this very groundwork that the themes and links between Soviet literature and society lay.
Also in the early 1920s, when the divisions between writing and painting, ‘fine’ and applied arts, education and propaganda, were being broken down Struve stays with, his blinkered, selective approach to literature when describing the period. Above all the book lacks any sense of the involvement of men or women – workers, peasants or writers – in the revolution of 1917 and its developments.
Trotsky talked about the revolution as the ‘awakening of the personality in the masses who were previously thought to have no personality’ but somehow Struve manages to make the reflection of this in literature a very thin and grudging affair indeed.
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Last updated on 10.3.2008