92
PARTISAN REPIEW
resign
from responsible
action, is
too strong for this poet haunted by nos–
talgia
for desert and prairie, for the imagined simplicity
of
mountain
life.
Alone and confused in the bewildering labyrinth of times that have grown
beyond him, he regrets the missing scenes of
his
nativity.
For his confusion and terror Macleod blames the frenzied tempo
of the "age of machines," and looks \ to the golden desert of Tajikistan
not with the glance of an inspired builder but with defeated eyes of one
eager to escape into the silence and security of tribal life. This feeling
may be justifiable as a momentary impulse of a poet hemmed in by the
feeling of living in a commercial civilization, but it is hardly a healthy
content for a book by a young writer who professes adherence to Marxism–
Leninism. I fear that Macleod is one fellow traveller who has not as
yet packed his baggage.
WILLIAM PILLIN
MAGAZINE REVIEW
INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE,
organ of the International Union
of Revolutionary Writers, Nos.
1-4, 1934.
Moscow, U.S.S.R. Amer–
ican Representatives, International Publishers,
381
Fourth Ave., New
York, N.Y.
It
is heartening to note that
International Literature
does not seek to
define itself from bourgeois magazines by superficial experimentation in
literary forms, and that it has dropped for good the trick format which
made the reading of the first issues so difEcult. Formal distinctions be–
tween a revolutionary journal and a bourgeois magazine are not necessary
when the difference in content and intention is so great. l\1ost bourgeois
literary magazines, however "advanced," do not play a creative role in
culture. They may encourage or reflect a literary trend, but they remain
sectarian and minor, because they are individual ventures, and not the
weapon of a dynamic mass group.
International Literature,
on the other
hand, does not merely present the end-product, proletarian fiction, but it
creates and directs this fiction by funct ioning as a forum for revolutionary
writers, throughout the world, by furni shing, in its critical reportage,
articles, letters from writers, autobiographies and chronicles, the soil on
which this fiction may nourish itself.
While it is not directly a magazine of polemic between the proletarian
and the bourgeois world, there is material on every page to refute the
common misconceptions of bourgeois critics. Those who confuse an art
of propaganda with the art of falsifying detail and seeing through rose–
colored glasses, are referred to the fiction in
International Literature.
They will not find here the pretty-pretty pict ures of Soviet li fe such as
they expect from writers who have, in their opinion, abnegated their
powers of observation in favor of a political allegiance. These stories
reflect all the terror and confusion of a society in upheaval and re-creation.
The Soviet writer, like the writer of any period, is committed to a political
