What Was the Role of Literature and Art in the Russian Social Life?
Leon Trotsky
The Social Roots and the Social Function of Literature
(1923)
Transcribed for the Philisophy/History Annal, mirrored here with permission.
The quarrels near "pure art" and about "art with a tendency" took place between the liberals and the "populists". They do not get us. Materialistic dialectics are higher up this; from the indicate of view of an objective historical process, art is always a social retainer and historically commonsensical. 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 information technology more than flexible, more responsive, information technology enlarges the volume of thought in advance and not through the personal method of accumulated experience, it educates the individual, the social grouping, the class and the nation. And this information technology does quite independently of whether information technology appears in a given instance under the flag of a 'pure' or of a frankly tendentious art.
In our Russian social development tendentiousness was the banner of the intelligentsia which sought contact with the people. The helpless intelligentsia, crushed by czarism and deprived of a cultural environment, sought support in the lower strata of order and tried to prove to the "people" that it was thinking only of them, living simply for them and that it loved them "terribly." And just as the populists who went to the people were ready to practice without clean linen and without a rummage and without a toothbrush, so the intelligentsia was ready to sacrifice the subtleties" of class in its art, in guild to give the near direct and spontaneous expression to the sufferings and hopes of the oppressed. On the other manus, "pure" fine art was the banner of the rising bourgeoisie, which could non openly declare its bourgeois character, and which at the same fourth dimension tried to keep the intelligentsia in its service.
The Marxist point of view is far removed from these tendencies, which were historically necessary, but which take get historically passe. Keeping on the airplane of scientific investigation, Marxism seeks with the same assurance the social roots of the "pure" as well every bit of the tendentious art. It does not at all "incriminate" a poet with the thoughts and feelings which he expresses, but raises questions of a much more profound significance, namely, to which order of feelings does a given creative piece of work stand for in all its peculiarities? What are the social weather condition of these thoughts and feelings? What place do they occupy in the historic development of a society and of a class? And, further, what literary heritage has entered into the elaboration of the new form? Under the influence of what historic impulse have the new complexes of feelings and thoughts broken through the shell which divides them from the sphere of poetic consciousness? The investigation may go complicated, detailed or individualised, but its fundamental thought volition be that of the subsidiary role which art plays in the social procedure.
Each class has its own policy in fine art, that is, a organization of presenting demands on art, which changes with time; for instance, the Maecenas-like protection of court and grand seigneur, the automatic relationship of supply and demand which is supplemented by complex methods of influencing the individual, and so forth, and then on. The social and fifty-fifty the personal dependence of fine art was not concealed, just was openly appear as long as fine art retained its courtroom grapheme. The wider, more than popular, anonymous character of the rising bourgeoisie led, on the whole, to the theory of "pure fine art," though at that place were many deviations from this theory. As indicated above, the tendentious literature of the "populist" intelligentsia was imbued with a class interest; the intelligentsia could non strengthen itself and could not conquer for itself a right to play a office in history without the back up of the people. Only in the revolutionary struggle, the course egotism of the intelligentsia was turned inside out, and in its left wing, information technology assumed the form of highest self-sacrifice. That is why the intelligentsia not merely did not muffle fine art with a tendency, but proclaimed information technology, thus sacrificing art, just every bit it sacrificed many other things.
Our Marxist formulation of the objective social dependence and social utility of fine art, when translated into the language of politics, does not at all hateful a desire to dominate art past ways of decrees and orders. It is not truthful that we regard only that fine art every bit new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker, and information technology is nonsense to say that we demand that the poets should describe inevitably a factory chimney, or the uprising confronting uppercase! Of grade the new art cannot simply place the struggle of the proletariat in the center of its attention. Merely the plough of the new art is not express to numbered strips. On the contrary, it must plow the entire field in all directions. Personal lyrics of the very smallest scope have an absolute correct to exist within the new fine art. Moreover, the new man cannot exist formed without a new lyric poetry. Only to create it, the poet himself must feel the globe in a new fashion. If Christ alone or Sabaoth himself bends over the poet'due south embraces (as in the example of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Shkapskaya and others), then this simply goes to prove how much backside the times his lyrics are and how socially and aesthetically inadequate they are for the new man. Fifty-fifty where such terminology is not a survival of feel so much every bit of words, it shows psychological inertia and therefore stands in contradiction to the consciousness of the new man.
No one is going to prescribe themes to a poet or intends to prescribe them. Delight write near anything yous tin think ofttimes But allow the new class which considers itself, and with reason, called upon to build a new world, to say to y'all in any given case: It does not make new poets of yous to translate the philosophy of life of the seventeenth century into the linguistic communication of the acmeists. The course of fine art is, to a certain and very large degree, contained, but the artist who creates this grade, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines, one for creating class and the other for appreciating it. They are living people, with a crystallised psychology representing a certain unity, even if non entirely harmonious. This psychology is the effect of social conditions. The creation and perception of fine art forms is one of the functions of this psychology. And no affair how wise the formalists, try to exist, their whole conception is simply based upon the fact that they ignore the psychological unity of the social human being, who creates and who consumes what has been created.
The proletariat has to accept in art the expression of the new spiritual point of view which is simply offset to exist formulated inside him, and to which art must help him give form. This is not a land order, merely a historic demand. Its forcefulness lies in the objectivity of historic necessity. You lot cannot pass this by, nor escape its force ...
Victor Shklovsky, who flits lightly from verbal formalism to the most subjective valuations, assumes a very uncompromising attitude towards the historico-materialistic theory of art. In a booklet which he published in Berlin, under the championship of The March of the Equus caballus, he formulates in the course of three small pages – brevity is a cardinal and, at whatever rate, an undoubted merit of Shklovsky – 5 (non four and not six, but 5) exhaustive arguments against the materialist conception of art. Let united states examine these arguments, because it won't harm us to take a wait and see what kind of crust is handed out as the last word in scientific thought (with the greatest multifariousness of scientific references on these same three microscopic pages).
"If the surround and the relations of product," says Shklovsky, "influenced art, and so would not the themes of art exist tied to the places which would correspond to these relations? But themes are homeless." Well, and how about butterflies? According to Darwin, they as well 'correspond' to definite relations, and yet they flit from place to place, only like an unweighted litterateur.
It is non easy to sympathise why Marxism should exist supposed to condemn themes to a condition of serfdom. The fact that different peoples and dissimilar classes of the same people brand use of the aforementioned themes merely shows how express the human imagination is, and how man tries to maintain an economic system of energy in every kind of creation, even in the artistic. Every course tries to utilise, to the greatest possible degree, the cloth and spiritual heritage of another class.
Shklovsky's argument could exist easily transferred into the field of productive technique. From ancient times on, the wagon has been based on i and the same theme, namely, axles, wheels, and a shaft. Notwithstanding, the chariot of the Roman patrician was just as well adapted to his tastes and needs as was the railroad vehicle of Count Orlov, fitted out with inner comforts, to the tastes of this favourite of Catherine the Great. The wagon of the Russian peasant is adapted to the needs of his household, to the forcefulness of his little horse, and to the peculiarities of the country route. The machine, which is undoubtedly a product of the new technique, shows, nevertheless, the same 'theme,' namely, four wheels on two axles. However every time peasant'south horse shies in terror before the blinding lights of an automobile on the Russian road at night, a conflict of ii cultures is reflected in the episode.
"If surround expressed itself in novels," so runs the second argument, "European science would not be breaking its head over the question of where the stories of A Thousand and Ane Nights were fabricated, whether in Egypt, Bharat, or Persia." To say that homo's environment, including the artist's, that is, the conditions of his education and life, detect expression in his art also, does not mean to say that such expression has a precise geographic, ethnographic and statistical graphic symbol. It is not at all surprising that information technology is difficult to decide whether certain novels were made in Arab republic of egypt, Republic of india or Persia, because the social conditions of these countries take much in common. But the very fact that European science is "breaking its caput" trying to solve this question from these novels themselves shows that these novels reflect an environment, even though unevenly. No ane can spring across himself. Fifty-fifty the ravings of an insane person contain nothing that the sick human had not received before from the outside world. Only it would be an insanity of another club to regard his ravings as the accurate reflection of an external earth. Only an experienced and thoughtful psychiatrist, who knows the past of the patient, volition exist able to find the reflected and distorted $.25 of reality in the contents of his ravings.
Artistic creation, of class, is not a raving, though it is also a deflection, a changing and a transformation of reality, in accordance with the peculiar laws of art. Yet fantastic fine art may be, it cannot accept at its disposal whatever other material except that which is given to information technology past the world of three dimensions and past the narrower world of form gild. Even when the artist creates sky and hell, he merely transforms the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to the indicate of his landlady's unpaid bill.
"If the features of class and caste are deposited in art," continues Shklovsky, "then how does information technology come that the various tales of the Not bad Russians near their nobleman are the same as their fairy tales nearly their priest?"
In essence, this is merely a paraphrase of the starting time argument. Why cannot the fairy tales near the nobleman and about the priest be the same, and how does this contradict Marxism? The proclamations which are written by well-known Marxists not infrequently speak of landlords, capitalists, priests, generals and other exploiters. The landlord undoubtedly differs from the backer, just at that place are cases when they are considered nether one caput. Why, then, cannot folk art in certain cases care for the nobleman and the priest together, as the representatives of the classes which stand up in a higher place the people and which plunder them? In the cartoons of Moor and of Deni, the priest often stands next with the landlord, without any damage to Marxism.
"If ethnographic traits were reflected in art," Shklovsky goes on, "the folklore about the peoples across the edge would non be interchangeable and could not exist told by any one folk about another."
As you meet, in that location is no letting up here. Marxism does non maintain at all that ethnographic traits have an independent character. On the contrary, information technology emphasises the all-determining significance of natural and economic weather condition in the germination of folklore. The similarity of weather in the development of the herding and agricultural and primarily peasant peoples, and the similarity in the character of their mutual influence upon one another, cannot but lead to the cosmos of a similar folklore. And from the bespeak of view of the question that interests united states of america hither, information technology makes absolutely no divergence whether these homogeneous themes arose independently amongst different peoples, equally the reflection of a life feel which was homogeneous in its cardinal traits and which was reflected through the homogeneous prism of a peasant imagination, or whether the seeds of these fairy tales were carried by a favourable current of air from place to place, striking root wherever the ground turned out to be favourable. Information technology is very likely that, in reality, these methods were combined.
And finally, as a separate argument – "The reason (Marxism) is incorrect in the 5th place" – Shklovsky points to the theme of abduction which goes through Greek comedy and reaches Ostrovsky. In other words, our critic repeats, in a special form, his very first argument (as we see, even insofar every bit formal logic is concerned, all is not well with our formalist). Yeah, themes migrate from people to people, from form to class, and even from author to author. This means but that the human imagination is economic. A new class does not begin to create all of culture from the first, only enters into possession of the past, assorts it, touches it upwardly, rearranges information technology, and builds on it further. If there were no such utilisation of the 'secondhand' wardrobe of the ages, historic processes would have no progress at all. If the theme of Ostrovsky's drama came to him through the Egyptians and through Greece, so the paper on which Ostrovsky adult his theme came to him as a development of the Egyptian papyrus through the Greek parchment. Let us take some other and closer analogy: the fact that the critical methods of the Greek Sophists, who were the pure formalists of their day, have penetrated the theoretic consciousness of Shklovsky, does not in the least alter the fact that Shklovsky himself is a very picturesque product of a definite social environment and of a definite historic period.
Shklovsky's destruction of Marxism in five points reminds united states of america very much of those articles which were published against Darwinism in the magazine The Orthodox Review in the expert old days. If the doctrine of the origin of man from the monkey were truthful, wrote the learned Bishop Nikanor of Odessa thirty or forty years ago, then our grandfathers would have had distinct signs of a tail, or would accept noticed such a characteristic in their grandfathers and grandmothers. Second, every bit everybody knows, monkeys can merely give birth to monkeys ... Fifth, Darwinism is incorrect, because information technology contradicts ceremonial – I beg your pardon, I meant to say, the formal decisions of the universal church conferences. The advantage of the learned monk consisted, however, in the fact that he was a frank passéist and took his cue from the Campaigner Paul and not from physics, chemical science or mathematics, as the futurist Shklovsky does.
It is unquestionably true that the need for art is non created by economic weather. Merely neither is the need for food created by economic science. On the opposite, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It is very true that ane cannot always get by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a work of fine art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged past its own law, that is, past the law of art. But Marxism lonely can explain why and how a given trend in fine art has originated in a given catamenia of history; in other words, who information technology was who fabricated a demand for such an artistic class and not for another, and why.
It would exist childish to think that every course can entirely and fully create its own art from within itself, and, specially, that the proletariat is capable of creating a new art by means of closed art guilds or circles, or by the Organisation for Proletarian Culture, etc. More often than not speaking, the artistic piece of work of man is continuous. Each new rising class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. Only this continuity is dialectic, that is, information technology finds itself by ways of internal repulsions and breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new literary and artistic points of view are stimulated by economic science, 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 a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli which originate outside of art. In this large sense of the give-and-take, fine art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied chemical element feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to -his life and environment. And how feature it is – if one were to reduce every social superstition to its absurdity – that Shklovsky has come to the idea of art'southward accented independence from the social surroundings at a menstruation of Russian history when art has revealed with such utter frankness its spiritual, ecology and material dependence upon definite social classes, subclasses and groups!
Materialism does non deny the significance of the element of course, either in logic, jurisprudence or art. But as a system of jurisprudence can and must exist judged past its internal logic and consistency, so art can and must be judged from the betoken of view of its achievements in form, because there tin can be no art without them. However, a juridical theory which attempted to establish the independence of law from social weather would be defective at its very base. Its moving force lies in economics-in class contradictions. The law gives only a formal and an internally harmonised expression of these phenomena, not of their individual peculiarities, only of their general character, that is, of the elements that are repetitive and permanent in them. We tin see now with a clarity which is rare in history how new law is made. Information technology is non done past logical deduction, merely by empirical measurement and by adjustment to the economic needs of the new ruling class.
Literature, whose methods and processes have their roots far dorsum in the nearly distant past and represent the accumulated experience of verbal craftsmanship, expresses the thoughts, feelings, moods, points of view and hopes of the new epoch and of its new form. One cannot jump beyond this. And there is no demand of making the jump, at least, for those who are not serving an epoch already past nor a class which has already outlived itself.
The methods of formal analysis are necessary, merely insufficient. You lot may count up the alliterations in pop proverbs, classify metaphors, count upwardly the number of vowels and consonants in a wedding song. It volition undoubtedly enrich our noesis of folk art, in one way or another; but if you don't know the peasant system of sowing, and the life that is based on it, if you don't know the part the scythe plays, and if you have non mastered the meaning of the church calendar to the peasant, of the fourth dimension when the peasant marries, or when the peasant women requite birth, you will have simply understood the outer shell of folk fine art, but the kernel will non accept been reached.
The architectural scheme of the Cologne cathedral can be established by measuring the base and the height of its arches, by determining the iii dimensions of its naves, the dimensions and the placement of the columns, etc. But without knowing what a medieval city was like, what a guild was, or what was the Catholic Church building of the Middle Ages, the Cologne cathedral will never exist understood. The endeavor to set art free from life, to declare it a craft sufficient unto itself, devitalises and kills fine art. The very need of such an operation is an unmistakable symptom of intellectual reject.
The analogy with the theological arguments confronting Darwinism which was made above may announced to the reader external and anecdotal. That may be truthful, to some extent. Only a much deeper connection exists. The formalist theory inevitably reminds a Marxist who has done whatsoever reading at all of the familiar tunes of a very quondam philosophic melody. The jurists and the moralists (to recall at random the German language Stammler, and our own subjectivist Mikhailovsky) tried to prove that morality and constabulary could not be determined by economics, because economic life was unthinkable outside of juridical and ethical norms. True, the formalists of police force and morals did non go so far equally to affirm the complete independence of law and ideals from economics. They recognised a certain complex common human relationship of "factors," and these "factors," while influencing ane some other, retained the qualities of independent substances, coming no one knew whence. The assertion of complete independence of the aesthetic "factor" from the influence of social conditions, as is made by Shklovsky, is an instance of specific hyperbole whose roots, by the way, prevarication in social weather too; it is the megalomania of aesthetics turning our hard reality on its head. Apart from this peculiarity, the constructions of the formalists have the same kind of defective methodology that every other kind of idealism has.
To a materialist, organized religion, police, morals and art stand for separate aspects of one and the same process of social evolution. Though they differentiate themselves from their industrial basis, become circuitous, strengthen and develop their special characteristics in detail, politics, religion, law, ethics and aesthetics remain, still, functions of social human and obey the laws of his social system. The idealist, on the other hand, does not meet a unified process of historic development which evolves the necessary organs and functions from within itself, but a crossing or combining and interacting of sure independent principles-the religious, political, juridical, aesthetic and ethical substances, which find their origin and caption in themselves.
The (dialectic) idealism of Hegel arranges these substances (which are the eternal categories) in some sequence past reducing them to a genetic unity. Regardless of the fact that this unity with Hegel is the absolute spirit, which divides itself in the process of its dialectic manifestation into various "factors," Hegel's system, considering of its dialectic grapheme, not because of its idealism, gives an idea of historic reality which is only as good as the idea of a man'due south hand that a glove gives when turned inside out.
But the formalists (and their greatest genius was Kant) do not look at the dynamics of development, but at a cantankerous section of it, on the 24-hour interval and at the 60 minutes of their own philosophic revelation. At the crossing of the line they reveal the complexity and multiplicity of the object (not of the procedure, considering they do non think of processes). This complexity they analyse and allocate. They give names to the elements, which are at in one case transformed into essences, into sub-absolutes, without father or mother; to wit, religion, politics, morals, police force, art. Hither we no longer have a glove of history turned inside out, but the skin torn from the split up fingers, dried out to a degree of consummate abstraction, and this mitt of history turns out to exist the product of the "interaction" of the pollex, the alphabetize, the middle finger, and all the other "factors." The aesthetic "factor" is the pinkie, the smallest, but not the least honey.
In biology, vitalism is a variation of the aforementioned fetish of presenting the split up aspects of the earth process, without understanding its inner relation. A creator is all that is lacking for a supersocial, accented morality or aesthetics, or for a superphysical absolute "vital strength." The multiplicity of contained factors, "factors" without commencement or end, is naught but a masked polytheism. Just equally Kantian idealism represents historically a translation of Christianity into the language of rationalistic philosophy, so all the varieties of idealistic formalisation, either openly or secretly, pb to a god, as the cause of all causes. In comparing with the oligarchy of a dozen sub-absolutes of the idealistic philosophy, a single personal creator is already an element of gild. Herein lies the deeper connectedness betwixt the formalist refutations of Marxism and the theological refutations of Darwinism.
The formalist school represents an bootless idealism applied to the question of art. The formalists show a fast ripening religiousness. They are followers of St. John. They believe that "in the beginning was the Word." But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed, as its phonetic shadow.
Last updated on: 6.i.2007
Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/art/tia23b.htm
Post a Comment for "What Was the Role of Literature and Art in the Russian Social Life?"