*Artist's Corner- The Political Art Of Jacques-Louis David

Click on title to link To Wikipedia's entry for the great French political artist, Jacques-Louis David. Like Tallyrand and a few others he seemed to have been able to twist and turn with the winds as they shifted throughout the revolutionary period. The book reviewed on this date by Professor Lynn Hunt, "Politics, Culture,and Class in the French Revolution", has much to say about Citizen David's influence of the political imagery of the times.

***Alright Miss Lonelyhearts- The Life And Times Of Nathanael West And Eileen McKenney- A Guest Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Sunday Globe" article, dated April 11, 2010, concerning the American novelist Nathanael West and his wife, Eileen McKenney.

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/04/11/reversal_of_fortune/

Markin comment:

I have always held Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts", and more so, "Day Of The Locust" in very high regard. That last scene in the movie version, starring Donald Sunderland, still haunts my memory of what the "mob" can do when it gets its head up. More on this important member of the American literary canon later.

*Artist's Corner- The Work Of John Singer Sargent

Click On Title To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For John Singer Sargent. His work represented something of a high water mark for the Brahmin wing of the "robber barons" of the late 19th century early 20th century before they ran out of steam as anything other than a greedy, corrupt and vicious section of the American ruling class. Their previous intellectual pretensions (and the positive good work, of at least some of them, in such things as the pre-Civil War slavery abolition movement) had the virtue of a certain social and cultural naivete. Sargent does his utmost, as the bulk of his portrait work testifies to, in keeping that image in play (whatever his personal views of the matter).

*Writer's Corner-Less than zero: Bret Easton Ellis’s sequel misses- A Guest Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a Sunday Boston Globe, dated July 4, 2010, guest book review of Bret Eason Ellis' latest novel.


Markin comment:

The reason that I am posting this guest review is that the reviewer's (Jay Atkinson) first paragraph hits the nail right on the head about the dearth of sympathetic (or even likable) characters that populate most contemporary literature:

"Sometime in the 1970s, when money and power became mixed up in the counterculture, it all went horribly wrong, in literature and in life. The primary books that celebrate this intriguing aspect of Americana, works by writers like Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Jim Carroll — even Whitman and Thoreau — often featured charismatic quasi-hoboes as their protagonists, enlightened seekers in pursuit of “joy, kicks, darkness, music,’’ in Kerouac’s famous expression. These penniless hipsters were not looking for freedom from authority so much as freedom from oppression; for the most part, they were willing to live, and let live."

Does anyone else have that same sense? Or sense of the decline of "hobo" sensibility.
Neal Cassady from Kerouac Denver, "The Brown Buffalo", Oscar Acosta, from Thompson California, Duane from McMurtry Texas, McMurphy from Kesey Oregon, Hell, even Faulkner crazies from Mississippi and Tennessee Williams misfit from all over the South. I could go on. Where have they gone in techno-America? At least they could have left an e-mail address. Right?

*From The "HistoMat" Blog- From The Pen Of George Bernard Shaw

Click on the title to link to an "HistoMat" blog entry concerning George Bernard Shaw's views on communism.

Markin comment:

I will, and gladly, go see any play that George Bernard Shaw wrote, but I am still waiting, impatiently, for he and his Fabian associates', the Webbs, Cole, Brailsford, Wells, etc., vision of the slow, very slow and methodical road to socialism (never) to occur. Hurry along now, better yet, let's talk Bolshevik to take our communist birthright sooner.

From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Art And The Bolshevik Revolution

Click on the headline to link to a “Wikipedia” entry for the Russian Constructivists.

March Is Women’s History Month

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.

The Russian Avant-Garde:
Art and the Bolshevik Revolution
by Vladimir Zelinski

Two recent American exhibitions—"The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930—New Perspectives" 1980 national tour, and this winter's Guggenheim Museum show in New York City, part of the George Costakis collection—reveal an incredibly vital and heterogeneous movement. In the period from roughly 1916-17 to 1924, the paintings, constructions and industrial designs of a host of talented artists placed Russian art, before (and thereafter) a derivative and provincial backwater, at the leading edge of 20th century creativity in the arts. The whole Bauhaus school, in particular, is incomprehensible without the influence of the Russian Constructivists and "production artists," transmitted by such figures as Kandinsky and El Lissitzky.

This movement was largely ignored in the West for almost half a century until its first major Western exhibit in London in 1971. Today such exhibits are promoted and armed with a mendacious anti-Communist "message": the bourgeois media disappear the social relation of this art to the October Revolution and pretend that it was repressed in revolutionary Russia under Lenin and Trotsky. In fact the avant-garde was literally disappeared—but only under triumphant Stalinism. During the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule, the revolutionary artists were transformed into non-persons and then plucked from obscurity and subjected to frenzied attacks on their supposed degenerate "bourgeois formalism" by Stalin's culture boss Zhdanov.

The reason is simple: though art is not "political" in a direct sense, this art in its own way is political dynamite. It gives the lie to the equation of Leninism with Stalinism, connived at by capitalist ideologues and Stalinist hacks alike ever since the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky was smashed. Time has not defused the political impact of these fine works. Their exhibition in the USSR today would reveal the stunning mediocrity of "official art" (as well as the sorry state of "dissident" and "non-conformist" artistic production). It would also inevitably raise deeply embarrassing and (for the usurping bureaucrats) unanswerable questions. What happened to these artists? Why was genuinely great art possible in Russia in the early '20s, in the midst of incredible backwardness and massive poverty, but not now, under conditions of relative material plenty and technological progress?

Art and Society

Since bourgeois patrons were obviously lacking, clearly the government and cultural institutions of the infant Soviet workers state had to play a central role in supporting this art, an art whose abstractness and aura of airiness and radiant optimism place it at far remove from the dogmas and products of Stalinist "socialist realism."

Russian " revolutionary" art did not, of course, spring from the head of Lenin. The bourgeois media would like to suggest that there is little if any relationship between the Bolsheviks' successful October Revolution and the cultural explosion of 1917-25. But there are in fact numerous ties, going back all the way to the 1850s artistic revolt against the hitherto dominant neo¬classical tradition. This is not to say that Russian painters and writers were necessarily Marxist. Rather they inevitably mirrored the travail of a society groaning beneath the yoke of a tsarist autocracy incapable of effecting Russia's passage into the mainstream of bourgeois economic, political and cultural development.

The author of the main work leading to the founding of the Russian realist school, The Aesthetic Relation of An to Reality, was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, better known among revolutionaries for his seminal novel What Is To Be Done?, which so profoundly moved and influenced a generation of Russian revolutionaries, Lenin among them. Chernyshevsky's belief that it was necessary to forestall "the accusation that art is an empty diversion" through imbuing it with social content was characteristic of the radical intelligentsia.

Thus the "Wanderers" grouping of artists founded under Chernyshevsky's influence in 1870grew along lines strikingly similar to those of overtly political groupings. Many of its members, like the Populists, "went to the people" and elevated the Russian peasant, mired in his immemorial priest-ridden backwardness, as hero of the new art. Wealthy Slavophile merchants supported artistic colonies (Abramtsevo and Talashkino) whose residents sought inspiration in a William Morris-ish arts-and-craftsy revival of moribund Byzantine tradition or the primitive folk art of lubok (chapbook) woodcuts.
Around the turn of the century a symbolist school arose influenced by the fin-du-siecle "decadents" of the West. Although reflecting the increasing cultural sophistication of their patrons, such artists as Viktor Borrisov-Mussatov succeeded only in producing yet paler copies of the already effete Puvis de Chavannes, elegiac paintings of abandoned country mansions and empty-gazed demoiselles—works which with hindsight one is tempted to assert expressed (like much of Chekhov) the consciousness of a merchant/ landholding gentry lacking an historic future. And art-for-art's-sake withdrawal from social concerns also arose, partly reflecting Russian artists' sense of futility at the intelligentsia's failure to transform society by literary means.

This "World of Art," centered around the multi-talented Aleksandr Benois, nonetheless laid the foundations for future developments, mounting a series of exhibitions that introduced contemporary European art to Russian painters and young Russian artists to a wider public.

The Great Experiment

The first expressions of the coming breakthrough appeared between 1905-1917, with the rise of a gifted and innovative younger generation of painters. Their openness to experimentation, derived partly from the German expressionists and French cubists, arose also from the sudden sense of release generated even in defeat by the great proletarian upsurge of the 1905 Revolution. (See "Before 'Socialist Realism' in the Soviet Union," W&R No. 13, Winter 1976-77, for a discussion of this burst of creativity in other artistic areas, notably dance and theater.)

This feeling that the whole anachronistic edifice of tsarism was crumbling inspired in these artists a will to radically reshape art and its relation to society. Seeking through scientific inquiry into the interaction of planes, volumes, color, overall structuring of the canvas and their effects on the viewer to discover laws inherent to art, they rejected the naturalistic tradition (in which even cubism remained based). This was the program that, despite factional differences, united the Russian avant-garde right down to their repression by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Hence the rationalism of this art, its tendency toward a radical geometricizing simplification.
The art of the Russian avant-garde thus to an extent anticipated the revolution to whose ideals it lent expression: a fundamental faith in man's capacity to rationally reshape society, doing away with the material and intellectual compulsion springing from the anarchy and inequality of capitalist class rule. Nor is this so strange as it might seem: tsarism had only gotten away by the skin of its teeth. And successful revolutions, just because they are so deeply rooted in the needs of
society, tend to cast their shadow before them. Thus that severe archetype of French revolutionary art, David's Oath of the Horatii with its celebration of stoic bourgeois civic morality, was painted in 1784-85, a period in which a whole crop of masterpieces in fact appeared.

New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer commented on the Guggenheim show (New York Times Magazine, 11 October 1981):

"In Popova's oeuve, as in that of many other members of the Russian avant-garde, we first encounter a Cubist vocabulary that looks more or less familiar But then
something happens. A vision—mystical or political or, as was more often the case, some combination of the two—intervenes to alter the inherited vocabulary and set it on a new course, and we are suddenly confronted with forms, textures, ideas that owe little or nothing to the styles that set them on their way."

Unlike the anti-communist Kramer, whose puzzlement results from ideological blinders, we Trotskyists know what the "something" was that seemingly just "happened." It was the October Revolution. Kramer cannot admit its profoundly liberating effect upon society from top to bottom, because to do so would dispel the assiduously cultivated bourgeois myth that the proletarian triumph of 1917 was a Bolshevik putsch from above. But indeed this cultural explosion affected not just Popova but a host of young artists, all of whom just "happened" to make their creative breakthroughs in the crucial years 1917-18. One must look to the great bourgeois upheavals—the Italian Renaissance, the French Revolution—for a parallel to this sort of artistic and societal self-confidence.

The Guggenheim Exhibition

One came away from the powerful Guggenheim exhibit convinced of the viability of modernist "abstract" art. What is it about these paintings that produces so marked an effect? First there is the overwhelming vitality. This was a cultural explosion in the making, with an incredible variety of styles and techniques. Times critic Kramer has difficulty reining in his incredulity in the face of these artists' prescience: "Her" [Olga Rozanova's]untitled abstract painting of a vertical green stripe, dating from 1917, was produced more than 30 years before the American painter Barnett Newman began work on the paintings of a very similar design that won him a place of renown— Ivan Kliun
.vividly anticipated more recent developments—in this case, the kind of Minimal Art...that enjoyed a great vogue in the 1960s."

The problems being confronted here are those which non-objectivist painters have faced right up to the present, while the solutions advanced by the Russians are both elegant and convincing. These paintings really work. They convey a sense of life and vitality, the result of a concern for painterly texture and the most subtle color gradations. Virtually all these artists cultivated a bright palette that, along with the sheer elegance of their works, their clarity and subtlety of structure, the sense of artistic problems being met and solved, makes them the tangible conveyors across 60 years of the vigor, hope and optimism of revolutionary Russia.

The large number of women artists in the Guggenheim exhibit is itself a powerful index. Kramer comments:

"The Russian avant-garde was the only art movement of its kind in which the achievements of women were unquestionably equal to those of their male colleagues, a circumstance that appears to owe more to the enlightened attitudes of the pre-Revolutionary liberal intelligentsia than to any measures initiated by the Soviet regime after the Revolution."

Kramer's liberal banalities beg the question. But the fact remains: the only artistic movement in which women were, in Kramer's words, "unquestionably equal" was associated with the only proletarian revolution in history. In the atmosphere of the triumphant Revolution women, many of whom might have remained Sunday painters, their art an ornament on their role as dutiful mothers, had the confidence to devote themselves wholly to art. For every Natalia Goncharova, well-known before the Revolution, there are a half dozen who were unknown at its outset and who would, without its liberating effect, in all likelihood have remained so.

The Bolsheviks and Art

What the Bolsheviks did after 1917 was basically to provide the material/organizational framework and then leave artists and writers to work out artistic problems on their own. In the face of decades of bourgeois propaganda to the contrary, it cannot be sufficiently stressed that this was the standpoint of literally all authoritative Party leaders. Trotsky's "Communist Policy Toward Art" thus simply voices the standard attitude:

"Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the proletariat but not the historic processes of history. There are domains in which the party leads, directly and imperatively. There are domains in which it only cooperates. There are, finally, domains in which it only orients itself. The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can lead it only indirectly...."

Anatoly Lunacharsky, head of Narkompros, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment, and thus directly in charge of cultural affairs, held identical views: "Of course the state does not have the intention of imposing revolutionary ideas and tastes upon artists. Such compulsion could result only in fake-revolutionary art, since the prime requisite of genuine art is the honesty/sincerity of the artist" ("Revolution and Art," October 1920).

Lunacharsky sought to prevent the dominance of any one artistic clique, which meant above all in post-1919 Russia combatting the influence of the "Proletkult," led by one-time God-seeker and now arch-workerist Bogdanov. Against the Proletkult insistence that art be immediately relevant and comprehensible to Russia's incredibly backward masses (a movement which fed straight into Stalinist "socialist realism"), Lunacharsky insisted "... we cannot adapt our literature to the low cultural level of the broad masses of peasants or even to that of the workers themselves. This would be a mammoth error." Like Trotsky, he refused to accede to the workerists' obscurantist rejection of all past art as simply "bourgeois' insisting that "new proletarian and socialist art can be built only on the foundation of all our acquisitions from the past." This debate mirrored the crucial battle being waged by Lenin and Trotsky, in war-ravaged and starving Russia, for the need to learn to develop and wield the techniques of advanced capitalist production, as against the primitive and Utopian sloganeering of groups like the "Workers Opposition."

Of course, for many members of the Russian avant-garde, such was the attractive power of the Bolshevik-led transformation of society that pure art was not enough. Many became Agitprop artists, creators of revolutionary posters and decorators of the brightly-painted propaganda trains that brought the message of liberation to the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union. Essentially these artists' task was political propaganda, attempting first of all to raise the political, and not primarily the artistic, consciousness of their viewers. Another group of artists, at the Institute of Artistic Culture founded by Kandinsky sought to create an overall environment in which the most everyday objects (the ubiquitous Russian tea service, textiles, chairs, clothing, Popova's elegant designs for cigar and cigarette cases) would have worked along with a new architecture and constructivist theater to educate and raise the taste and perceptiveness of Russia's culturally deprived masses. The intention was not a debased "proletarian" art a la Proletkult, but to create the conditions for a classless art, as the workers overcame their decades of material and cultural want, and the achievement of plenty allowed the attainment of socialism.Still many avant-garde artists in post-Revolution

Russia eschewed any effort at direct political relevance. In the scant decade from the October Revolution to the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule in the late '20s, many Russian artists felt themselves, for the only time in their history, free to devote themselves to art pure and simple, without the imperative need to voice an overt social message. Yet in the manner that great art captures the social matrix from which it springs/ the works of these artists are imbued with optimism and are animated by the hopes of an entire society.

Stalinist Degeneration

What happened instead was the bitter disappointment of those hopes: Stalinist degeneration, the result of the conjuncture of Russian backwardness with the devastation first of World War I and then the civil war, plus—critically—the failure to extend the revolution to advanced Europe, as in Germany in 1923. The work of the avant-garde artists began to disappear from public view, just as the Bolshevik opposition to Stalin disappeared from view. The artists were fortunate even to survive.

That supreme genius of abstraction, Kasimir Malevich, was reduced in the '30s to painting sacchar¬ine landscapes and insipid portraits of smiling village maidens. One can imagine the despair and self-loathing with which this artist must have had to contend. Such surviving members of the Russian avant-garde as Costakis was able to meet in the late '40s and '50s were then either bitter or demoralized. This is not the least of the crimes of the Stalinists: the deliberate destruction of a whole generation of outstanding painters and writers, the transformation of "socialist" (as in "socialist realism") into a term of opprobrium among artists. Under tsarism Russian art and literature had suffered profoundly from the compulsion to make social, not artistic, concerns central. Today, in the deformed and degenerated workers states under the rule of a parasitic bureaucratic caste, any work of art or literature that does not confront this central problem—the need to oust the usurping bureaucracy— is felt to be inherently mendacious. It lies by omission, the artist knows this, and it shows in his work. For literature this has meant that virtually the sole genre open to serious Soviet writers is satire, for which the opportunities certainly are legion. But even here the works, with a few exceptions like Voinovich, tend to be heavy-handed and obvious, like Aleksandr Zinoviev's aptly named The Yawning Heights. They too are massively deformed, presenting a black-and-white view of society profoundly at odds with the multivalent complexity of great art: socialist realism with the plus and minus signs reversed.

Polish film director Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron, currently being shown in the U.S., is a striking case in point. As a piece of hack propaganda for the clerical-reactionary Solidarnos'c', Man of Iron necessarily lies at its heart. It falsely portrays the movement which led to Solidarnos': as the continuation of previous working-class struggles against the Stalinist regime and celebrates the marriage of the workers and intellectuals as presided over by the Catholic church. Unlike the talented director's Man of Marble, a serious work of art probing the contradictions of post-war Polish society, Man of Iron expresses simply the anti-Communist lies of Solidarnos"— and not surprisingly, this has also severely hurt Wajda's art. As we said in Workers Vanguard: "Wajda rejected what Stalinism has done to truth and art, but Man of Iron embraces the lies of anti-Communism and of the church. Of Polish youth, he has said, 'People who are 20 today need to know, and to understand, why their parents are lying.' That is so. They also need to know why one of their leading artists cannot tell the truth" ("Man of Iron: The Gospel According to Solidarnos's"," WV No. 297, 22 January).

The Struggle for Socialism

It is essential to understand that something precious remains of the social gains, the great inspiring goals, which made the explosive, if brief, flowering of art in the Soviet Union possible. Despite its Stalinist degeneration and the line drawn in blood of revolutionaries and workers that separates it from the Soviet Union of Lenin, the USSR today still rests on the foundations of socialized property established by the working class when it took state power. That these foundations are in every sphere massively undermined by the Stalinist usurpers only heightens the urgency of the international working class taking up the defense and extension of this historic victory. To truly defend the socialized property forms of the USSR, and to drive the liberating force of authentic communism forward, it, is necessary to forge an international vanguard party of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism worldwide through socialist revolution and oust the Stalinist bureaucracies of the deformed workers states through political revolution.

It is of course impossible to say what forms art would take in a genuinely socialist society, one freed of bureaucratic misrule and building on the foundations of technological plenty, not the generalized want of Russia in the '20s—and not in a few countries surrounded by hostile imperialism, but in a world socialist order. Nonetheless it seems safe to predict that whatever its form, the art of a triumphant socialism will partake of the radiance and optimism so triumphantly captured by the Russian avant-garde in the short time granted it."

*Writer's Corner- From The Pen Of Dostoevsky- "The Possessed"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Dostoevsky's novel "The Possessed" that this film under review today, Jean Luc-Godard's " La Chiniose" is based on.

Book Review

The Possessed, Fyodor Dostovesky, Barnes & Noble, New York, 2004

Dostoevsky was a central figure in the great Russian literary revival of the 19th century, spurred on by the clearly foreseen, and necessary coming revolution that was on every radical intellectuals mind. The Russian novel, in a sense, reflected, in one way or another, the propaganda written for that event. This novel, moreover, forms the intellectual backdrop for a review that I have recently done on Jean Luc-Godard's "La Chinoise" from 1967. That film used the story line of the novel as the script for a modern day version of the struggle of a group of young middle class intellectuals driven to despair by the political/cultural/social and existential circumstances of their lives, yet were unable to fight effectively for their vision of the future, mainly due to their devotion to the "circle" spirit and distance from the class struggles of their times.

Thus from different centuries and responding to different sets of circumstances the film and novel come to the same basic conclusion about the futility of struggle against authority, or the fear that the "new order" will be just a rehash of the old led to both director and author to some very unrevolutionary conclusions. Nevertheless, I always liked this novel, despite, or maybe, because of Dostoevsky's past and its service as a cautionary tale of the futility, at best, of fighting against authority. Of course, Dostoevsky came within a ready hangman's noose for his own radical activity so that might color his approach, at least a little. Right? But Godard, who knows.

*Photographer's Corner- The Great Depression Photographs Of Dorothea Lange

Click on title to link to "Wikipedia's" entry for the great photographer Dorothea Lange.

Photographer's Corner- The Great Depression Era Photographs of Dorothea Lange- A Book Review

Click on title to link to Jonathan Raban's "The New York Review Of Books" article reviewing Linda Gordon's "Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits".

*Poet’s Corner- Early Soviet Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky

Click on title to link to the Vladimir Mayakovsky Internet Archive to read some of his poems, especially from the famous "The Bedbug" volume.

Vladimir Mayakovsky 1922

You

Source: The Bedbug and selected poetry, translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey. Meridian Books, New York, 1960;Transcribed: by Mitchell Abidor.

You came –
determined, because I was large,
because I was roaring,
but on close inspectionyou saw a mere boy.
You seized and snatched away my heartand
beganto play with it –
like a girl with a bouncing ball.
And before this miracle
every womanwas either a lady astounded
or a maiden inquiring:
“Love such a fellow?
Why, he'll pounce on you!
She must be a lion tamer,a girl from the zoo!”
But I was triumphant.I didn’t feel it –the yoke!
Oblivious with joy,
I jumped and leapt about,
a bride-happy redskin,
I felt so elated and light.

*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky- On Russian Poet Mayakovsky

Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.

*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky- Early Soviet Writer Pavel Bessalko

Click on title to link to early Bolshevik Culture and Education Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky's profile of early Soviet writer Pavel Bessalko from his 1923"Revolutionary Silhouettes". Lunarcharsky may have been a "soft" Bolshevik but he had insights into the early Soviet "cultural wars" that are always interesting and thoughtful.

* Studs Terkel Potpourri

Click On Title To Link To Studs Terkel's Web Site.

BOOK REVIEW

My American Century, Studs Terkel, The New Press, New York, 1997

As I have done on other occasions when I am reviewing more than one work by an author I am using some of the same comments, where they are pertinent, here as I did in earlier reviews. In this series the first Studs Terkel book reviewed was that of his “The Good War”: an Oral History of World War II".

Strangely, as I found out about the recent death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in America and elsewhere, for review in this space. As with other authors once I get started I tend to like to review several works that are relevant to see where their work goes. I have thus read and reviewed individually the six oral histories that make up this book elsewhere. In the present case My Century serves rather nicely to put in one place the best of Terkel’s interviews, or at lest the ones of continuing interest. Thus from the approximately one thousand interviews that have seen the light of day in those six books here we have about fifty to marvel at again.

As part of my reflecting what to write for this review I was struck by the range of subjects, although in some places tied together and repeated, that interested Studs. Most famously, that of the what makes people tick and get out of bed each day of “Working”; the strong sense of social solidarity that binds those who fought World War II in “The Good War”; that same sense of solidarity and grit for those who survived the Great Depression in” Hard Times”; the unstated but ever present sense of class that animates “Division Street”; the not so unstated sense of race that clouds the fight for a just society in “Race”; and, the sense of longing and lost of his fellow survivors of the Depression and World War II expressed in “Coming Of Age”. What a mix and what a masterful job of having the ear and eye to put it together.

As always, the one thing that I noticed immediately after reading this book, and as is true of the majority of Terkel’s interview books, is that he is not the dominant presence but is a rather light, if intensely interested, interloper in these stories. For better or worse the interviewees get to tell their stories, unchained. In this age of 24/7 media coverage with every half-baked journalist or wannabe interjecting his or her personality into somebody else’s story this was, and is, rather refreshing. Of course this journalistic virtue does not mean that Studs did not have control over who got to tell their stories and who didn’t to fit his preoccupations and sense of order. He has a point he wants to make and that is that although most “ordinary” people do not make the history books they certainly make history, if not always of their own accord or to their own liking. Again, kudos and adieu Studs.

*Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art- A Book Review

Click On Title To Link To Leon Trotsky Archive 1938 Article "Art And Politics In Our Epoch". The Points Made There By Trotsky Are Still Relevant Today.

BOOK REVIEW

Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, Leon Trotsky, ed. By Paul N. Siegel, Pathfinder Press, Inc. New York, 1970

Some of the points made here are taken from a review of Trotsky’s other compilation on this subject "Literature and Revolution". The first part of the book under review book draws from that work in discussing the question of ‘proletarian culture’ and its probabilities

Trotsky reputedly once wrote that of the three great tragedies of life- hunger, sex and death- revolutionary Marxism, which was the driving force behind his life and work, mainly concerned itself with the struggle against hunger. That observation contains an essential truth about the central thrust of the Marxist tradition. However, as Trotsky demonstrates here, Marxist methodology cannot and should not be reduced to an analysis of and prescription for that single struggle. Here Trotsky takes on an aspect of the struggle for mass cultural development.

In a healthy post-capitalist society mass cultural development would be greatly expanded and encouraged. If the task of socialism were merely to vastly expand economic equality, in a sense, it would be a relativity simple task for a healthy socialist society in concert with other like-minded societies to provide general economic equality with a little tweaking after vanquishing the capitalism mode of production. What Marxism aimed for, and Trotsky defends here, is a prospect that with the end of class society and economic and social injustice the capacity of individual human beings to reach new heights of intellectual and creative development would flourish.

The most important and lasting polemic that Trotsky raised here, however, was the fight against the proponents of ‘proletarian culture’ inside the Russian Communist Party. The argument put forth by this trend maintained that since the Soviet Union was a workers state those who wrote about working class themes or were workers themselves should in the interest of cultural development be given special status and encouragement (read: a monopoly on the literary front). Trotsky makes short shrift of this argument by noting that, in theory at least as its turned out, the proletarian state was only a transitional state and therefore no lasting ‘proletarian culture’ would have time to develop. Although history did not turn out to prove Trotsky correct the polemic is still relevant to any theory of mass cultural development.

The second half of the book is made up of commentaries, using the Marxist method, to discuss various cultural and political figures. These include an incisive essay on Tolstoy, acerbic comment on Winston Churchill, fair eulogies of the Russian poets Essessin and Mayakovsky and a polemical article reviewing Andre Malraux's fictional work on the Chinese revolution of the 1920's. Not a bad combination to show the power of Trotsky’s thought and the range of his interests. Also, to some extend, this is a study on his progression as a writer from the somewhat florid early Tolstoy pieces to the solid polemic of the Malraux article. Read on.