Introduction
[….] Great works are never cast in the partisan mold of a single class; they express the relationships of various classes within society as a whole, enabling their authors Thus a writer may very well prove to be a political conservative as an individual, and the author of a progressive work as an artist. As a man, he belongs entirely to his class, whose ideology he shares completely, whereas as an artist or a writer who has become aware of the dialectic of history, he brings to light the objective elements, the real dynamic forces underlying social evolution.
[….] this truth inherent in literary praxis that Engels never ceases to admire in Balzac’s novels. Since he was an ardent supporter of the old social order, why is it that Balzac offers us such a grim picture of the aristocracy of his time in his works? “The fact that Balzac was forced to act contrary to his own class sympathies and contrary to his own political biases,” Engels writes in his famous 1888 letter to Miss Harkness, “the fact that he recognized the irreversible nature of the decline of his beloved aristocrats and depicted them as men who do not deserve a better fate, the fact that he glimpsed the real men of the future in the only place where it was possible to find them in my opinion constitute one of the greatest triumphs of realism and one of the most magnificent traits of old Balzac.”
Chapter 3: Form and Content
[….] It is during the second phase, which Hegel calls the classical period, that a living unity between form and content is achieved: interiority, having become more concrete, cries out for exteriorization, in a manner of speaking.
By stressing the dialectical relationship of form and content within a reality that is again comprehensible, Marxist esthetics safeguards art against a twofold danger: that of a naturalism in which content is shorn of form, and that of a formalism which gives up all concern for content in order to engage in all manner of experiments with pure form, which then develops completely independently.
[….] Dobrolyubov (1836-1865), the creator of so called “apropos” criticism, that is to say criticism for which the literary work is only a pretext for dealing with the most diverse sorts of problems, also discusses the national or popular elements(navodnost) that have played a role in the evolution of Russian literature.
[….] Insofar as Marxist esthetics seeks to restore the fundamental unity between the essence and phenomena, does it not risk regressing to the level of classical esthetics and returning to the hypothesis that there is such a thing as absolute Beauty? We know that Aristotle regarded beauty as the product of the structural ordering of a world that art progressively reveals; his esthetic is based on an ordering of the whole that is complete and organic, “resembling a living being.” When we read certain of George Lukacs’ pronouncements with regard to esthetics, we realize that this convergence between classical esthetics and Marxist esthetics is so complete at times that the two become totally fused and perhaps even totally confused. “The essential determinations of this world represented by a literary work of art,” Lukacs writes at one point for instance, “are revealed . . . through an artistic succession and an artistic gradation. But this gradation must be achieved within the inseparable unity of the phenomenon and the essence, a unity that exists immediately, from the very outset; it must make this unity more and more intimate and obvious by making it more and more concrete.”
[….] Marxist esthetics limited itself to pointing out the a priori existence of a unity between the essence and phenomena and if its sole mission were to remove the screen that conceals such a unity from us, it would continually run the risk of falling back into the sort of passive contemplation that is the hallmark of classical esthetics. In that case it would not differ in any essential way from Kantian esthetics, in which “taste is the faculty of judging an object or a mode of representation on the basis of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in a completely disinterested wa§r,” or from the “pure gaze of art on the world” which in Schopenhauer’s philosophy momentarily delivers man from the will to live, the source of all his pain.
[….] it is precisely because Marxist esthetics never loses sight of the real richness of the world, that is to say its totality, the mastery of which will be the end-result of an evolutionary process that mankind has been involved in from the beginning of its history, precisely because it is conscious of the totality of human life, that this esthetics feels called upon to stress the unfinished nature of the world we live in, offering us, we might say, the image of the possibilities inherent in the existing state of affairs. Marxist esthetics must foster hope for a world that is at peace with itself, and therefore it must foster our firm determination to contribute to the realization of such a world. Like the philosophers discussed in the eleventh of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, artists and writers “have merely interpreted the world in different ways when what is needed is to transform it.”
[….] In order for art to be able to carry out this investigation that Marxist esthetics assigns it, it is necessary to give it a privileged status. Art must not only somehow find a way around the obstacle put in its path by the notion of consciousness-as-a-reflection which makes it totally dependent on the object; that obstacle itself must be removed.
[….] The very first step in that direction would be to determine exactly what Lenin meant by his statement that matter exists independently of consciousness. In point of fact, his real purpose was not so much to reduce the role of consciousness as to re-establish the importance of matter in the face of the empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius, which made matter quite secondary as compared to sensations. However thoroughgoing this materialism might appear to be, it successfully avoids the mechanist temptation and remains dialectical, that is to say it leaves a place for the reciprocal action of the elements that determine reality. Far from being reduced to a slavish dependence on matter, consciousness in fact is given back its rightful place at the very heart of the dialectical process.
Chapter 4. Revolutionary Art
[….] when Party doctrinaires who are up in arms against such heresy back him into a corner, he haughtily declares: “We are not Marxists, but if some day we were to have a need for such an implement, we would not eat with our hands out of sheer pride.”
[….] Marxism for Shklovsky is what God was for the astronomer Laplace: “a hypothesis that thus far [he] had had no need of.”
[….] Thus Bukharin willingly admits that the “Opoyaz” has fulfilled a certain propaedeutic role as a school of literary criticism insofar as it has attempted to draw up a “catalogue” of Poetic devices.
[….] “Only Marxism can explain why and how a certain orientation has arisen in art in any given historical period,” he states. Hence the attempt of the Formalists to shed light on the particular artistic features of literary form is justifiable, but they are wrong when they attempt to reduce the whole of literature to its style of verbal expression; the task of the literary critic is not limited to an essentially descriptive, quasi-statistical analysis of the etymology and the syntax of a poem, and certainly not to a simple inventorying of its vowels and consonants. “The Formalists are disciples of Saint John. They believe that ‘in the beginning was the Word.’ But we believe: ‘in the beginning was the Act. The Word came after, as its phonetic shadow,’ ” Trotsky writes.
[….] Lunacharsky regards the literary criticism of Formalism as a type of “escapism,” that is to say a way of avoiding real human problems and a sterile product of the decadent ruling class.
[….] after 1925, reaction sets in against the modernist tendencies unleashed and given broader scope by the October Revolution.
[….] Once the opposition of the left is eliminated, Stalin and the Communist bureaucracy, of which he is the supreme representative, use the end of the First Five-Year Plan, which in their eyes is the first step toward the building of Socialism in a single country, as a pretext to enlist all Soviet writers beneath the same banner and make them entirely subservient to the Party: the associations of independent writers are dissolved and their members summarily enrolled in the Union of Soviet Writers
[….] The intriguing prospects of a revolutionary literature become a thing of the past. Esthetic judgment becomes subservient to the most primitive sort of Manichaeanism: the pure and simple glorification of Party decisions is accorded the pompous title of Socialist Realism and celebrated as a triumphant new step forward, while the writer who shows the slightest sign of independence, even of the most harmless sort, immediately by the political powers that be.
[….] Meyerhold, shorn now of all his functions, makes one last appearance at the Congress of Theater Directors in 1939. The Party had hoped to force him back into its ranks after the long penance it had imposed upon him. The speech he delivered on this occasion proved, however, that his loyalties could not be co-opted. “This pitiable and sterile thing that claims to be Socialist Realism,” he had the courage to state publicly, “has nothing to do with art. Theater belongs to the realm of art, and without art there is no theater. Go to Moscow theaters and have a look at the dull and boring performances, which differ only in their degree of proximity to absolute worthlessness. . . . In the great circles in which once upon a time there was only fervent and constantly renewed artistic life, in which men devoted to art engaged in research, conducted experiments, lost their way and found new paths for achieving mises-en-scéne that sometimes were bad and sometimes marvelous, one now finds only a depressing mediocrity, [men] possessed of the greatest good will but overcome with despair and displaying a terrible lack of talent.” The day after this expldsive speech, Meyerhold is arrested and dies not long after, either as a result of the interrogations he is made to undergo or because he is mistreated in an internment camp. His wife, the famous actress Zinaida Reich, is murdered a few weeks after her husband’s arrest.
[….] Bertolt Brecht’s great and exceptional merit lies in his having been able to preserve the revolutionary fervor of his theater long after the revolutionary impetus of theater had died out in the Soviet Union. In a certain sense he is the only Communist writer whose creative genius was not paralyzed by the iron collar of Socialist Realism. This is unquestionable proof of Brecht’s enormous adaptability and perhaps proof also of a talent for theater which, far from being snuffed out by exterior constraints, reacts to outside pressures by overcoming its own limitations.
In Brecht’s case there is a continual dialectical interplay between Marxist reflection, or at least reflection that is meant to be Marxist, and creative activity that keeps this theorizing from being too abstract. Marxist esthetics, which shares the extreme intellectualism of Marxist doctrine as a whole and thus tends to be very stiff and wooden, takes on an unexpected, unpredictable, almost impulsive quality when Brecht writes on the subject. Marxist esthetics is too often stripped to a bare skeleton, a procedure that is very helpful in anatomical studies but is not at all appropriate for the study of any sort of living reality. In certain characters in Brecht’s theater, Mother Courage or Mr. Puntila or Galileo for example, this skeleton is draped in living flesh that palpitates and quivers with sensations and appetites that are usually ignored and condemned by the deadly dull exponents of Socialist puritanism.
[….] Pleasure and education must go hand in hand. “Theater should not merely be called upon to produce a body of knowledge, images that teach us what reality is like. Our theater must arouse a fervent desire to know, and take care to provide the pleasure the spectator feels when reality is transformed. Our audiences must not only learn how Prometheus bound is freed of his chains, but also be induced to feel the pleasure that results from his liberation. All the desires and all the pleasures of inventors and discoverers and the feelings of triumph of liberators must be taught by our theater,” he writes.
Chapter 6: Socialist Realism
[….] “Socialist Realism” is adopted as the official watchword at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934. At this juncture the phrase does not refer to a special style that the writer is to employ; it is used, rather, as a definition of the artistic principle underlying all works that win the official stamp of approval.
[….] “Party spirit” (partignost)
becomes the most important element as the regime is consolidated, that is to say as it turns into a rigid and distrustful conservatism. Disguised as literary criticism, Socialist Realism thus represents a bureaucratic and administrative conception of literature notable both for the exceptional vagueness and fuzziness of its notions in the realm of pure esthetics and for the implacable rigor of its judgments, which for the most part have no justification other than the political needs of the moment.
[….] De-Stalinization should have favored the re-establishment of an open Marxist esthetics. But as we know, the new liberalism was cautiously limited to matters of form. Need we recall that this separation of form and content is contrary to Marxist dialectics? If it is true, as Marxist doctrine maintains, that form, being more stable and less labile, always lags behind content, which reflects historical evolution, but eventually always catches up with it, the contrary may also be true: once form is freed of its fetters, content will not long continue to tolerate its chains.
[….] Should Marxist esthetics retrace its steps and set out once again on the road that led to the revolutionary art of the 1920’s in order to speed up this process that is moving ahead all too slowly? Unfortunately, reviving a past period in history does not appear to be possible: a historical climate cannot be artifically recreated. Perhaps Marxist esthetics, a prisoner today of so-called Socialist reality, needs to be quickened by the utopian spirit that Ernst Bloch argues is necessary for Marxism in general in his three-volume book Hope as a Principle, that “myth” which Marx uses as a “mediation” between the base and the superstructure and which Roger Garaudy calls in his Boundless Realism “the concerted and personalized expression of the awareness of what is missing, of what still remains to be done in those areas of nature and society not yet mastered.” In throwing its doors wide open to the visions of a better future and the dreams of freedom that have always comforted mankind throughout the centuries, Marxist esthetics will cease to be the tool of oppression and obscurantism that it has been ever since Socialist Realism became official Soviet policy, and will finally be able to play its real role within a firmly established Socialist society, that of keeping consciences that are drowsy by nature on the alert, of spurring men on toward the ever-widening horizon of the future, of revealing to men the ever-changing and permanent meaning of their existence.
Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PwnU26uQjsQdq_ZEtIh2L2n4tyNCcKKw/view?usp=drivesdk
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