24
PARTISAN REVIEW
as a specifically literary slogan, as long as it is not translated into the
language of art and literature, Dialectical Materialism is. merely a high
sounding phrase. It is not concrete. To be a master of dialectics does
not yet imply the ability to create a work of art. As a revolutionary
philosophy, however, it helped the Soviet writers to orientate themselves
in the complex labyrinth of Soviet reality. It formed their revolutionary
Weltanschaung.
This, I believe, was one of the RAPP's most important
contribution to revolutionary literature.
In 1932, largely due to Gorki's influence, the RAPP was dissolved.
Events move swiftly in the Soviet Union, and the RAPP, too, has out–
lived its usefulness.
I happened to be present in Moscow at the first meeting of the
organization committee of Soviet writers shortly after the RAPP was
dissolved. It was one of the most inspiring meetings I have ever at–
tended. The hall was packed with the best representatives of Soviet
literature. V. Gronski, then editor of the
izvestia,
opened the meeting.
"This is the first Plenum of an organization," he said, "which re–
presents all Soviet writers. The creation of such an organization was
made possible by the fact that the great majority of the old intelligentsia,
brought up under the influence of bourgeois culture, turned towards the
Soviet Government, towards the"socialist revolution. . .. The old intel–
ligentsia became convinced of the validity of the Bolshevik viewpoint by
such facts as the acute economic crisis in the capitalist country ... and
the widespread movement of cultural construction in the U.S.S.R... . "
He then criticised the RAPP for not having understqod this impor–
tant change. "The fundamental mistake of the RAPP was that they
were unable to notice in time, and draw the proper conclusions from,
the changing state of Soviet literature. Thus, from an organization that
helped to develop Soviet literature, RAPP became an organization thaL
only impeded its progress . . . "
Here one would think that Eastman would have at least the
honesty to admit that while in most of the countries of the world, creative
expression is being stifled, in Russia it was given a new lease on life.
Not at all. Up to page 170 he sheds crocodile tears over the fate of the
real Russian artists. But on page 171, speaking of the dissolution of the
RAPP, he exclaims: "Trotsky is banished. . . . But Andrey Biely and
Alexei Tolstoy [two real artists whose fate he bemoaned up to page 170],
proscribed two years before as not even 'fellow traveIIers'-are part of
a 'great united front of Soviet writers'."
But this isn't the only place where the author contradicts himself.
