LITERATURE IN TWO WORLDS
17
that the German Fascist literature is too young for us to be able to pass
judgment upon it as yet (although certain of the best Soviet works date
from the period of wartime Communism), we have but to reflect on the
long years under Fascism in Italy, whose literature causes us to doubt
very much the existence of a totalitarian civilization in the peninsula.
But there is, after all, a totalitarian art among
us;
there is one artist
who, if he were present in this auditorium, might say, as any Soviet artist
at Moscow: "You alllcnow me, and you all admire me, each in his fashion."
For that artist is Charley Chaplin. Men of the Occident, as they stand
before a work of art, no longer feel a sense of unity save in the domain of
the comic, and the only real communion that we know is in laughing at
ourselvr.s.
•
• •
Within the Soviet civilization, the fact of first and capital importance
is the d:iminution of the artist as an object of interest in his own eyes.
The world to him is more interesting than himself, for the reason that a
world is there to discover. Let us make careful note of the fact that the
bourgeois world, already sufficiently advanced in age, is a world that is
relati~ely
known, and that the discoveries of a Zola by comparison with
the world of a Balzac, are very slight; since for a Western artist, to
look at the world of society means to recopy it or to transform it through
his own vision. It may be stated that the bourgeois world's inventory
IS
over. On the other hand, stoclc-talcing in the Soviet world is yet
to be done.
To beging with, take the matter of facts. The passion for secretive–
ness having disappeared, the writer finds himself confronted in all fields
with a limitless documentation, faced with a world in process of perpetual
discovery, as a psychologist would be with us, whose researches had sud–
denly opened to him a vast and unexplored realm of facts; for by his
position with reference to the universe, the Soviet artist bears a good deal
more resemblance to a Freud in the early stages than he does to a French
writer of today.
One result of this is the quest of
types,
which is a very important
one in Russian literature; seeing that it is through types that the reader
becomes conscious of the new world. As I see it, the appearance of a new
class or collective group in the life of a country at once connotes the pos–
sibility or the necessity of a great artist's expressing himself through types;
for nearly everything that I have just said of the Soviet artist might have
been said of Balzac,
who socially had the same situation to confront.
A second point: the inventory of mankind.
.
Much has been said and written of Soviet man, and numerous attempts
have been made to delimit his psychology. Theories here, it seems to me,
