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PARTISAN REVIEW
torical solution for the future of the conflict which he describes." In
fact, many of the statements of the founding fathers on literature read
like direct polemics against the kind of "Marxist criticism" advocated
by Michael Gold and Granville Hicks until the People's Front blurred
the very class distinctions on which their esthetic rested.
It was in the interest of orthodoxy, too, that Lenin, whose
political genius was sufficiently great to be excused some lapses in
esthetic insight, and who himself never pretended to be more than an
amateur in the field of art, was constantly quoted in Communist Party
journals as an authority on literature, painting, music---even dancing.
Soon we were reading about the enormous contributions of Lenin to
Marxist criticism. Yet Lenin had even less to say about the relation
of art to society than Marx and Engels, for he took for granted what
they were at so much pains to stress: that literature reflected, no mat-
ter how indirectly, the material development of society, and it was
the development of society rather than that of literature in which
Lenin was interested. Nor did Lenin seek to conceal this fact. In an
article in
Pravda
(1922) on Mayakovski, Lenin wrote: "Today, I
noticed by chance in
Isvestia
a poem by Mayakovski on a political
theme. I am not qualified to praise his poetic talent, since I am well
aware of my incompetence in this field. But it is a long time since I
have experienced such pleasure, from the point of view of politics
and administration. In his poem, he savagely ridicules meetings, and
he mocks those communists who do nothing but go from one meeting
to another. I do not know what to think of the poetry, but as for its
politics, I can vouch for it, it is absolutely true."
From this point of view, almost purely social and ideological,
Lenin examined such writers as Herzen, Chernishevski, Tolstoy, Gorki,
in an effort to trace the impact of democratic and revolutionary ten-
dencies on Russian literature and thought. Even his selection bore
testimony to his purposes, for his few references to Turgenev are
limited to criticism of his reactionary sympathies, and Lenin scarcely
ever mentioned Dostoyevski, presumably because he was not, in any
literal sense at least, a part of the great tradition of revolutionary ideas
in Russia. If Lenin's insights into the social philosophies of Russian
writers are of value as a background for any actual literary criticism,
still Lenin himself can hardly be credited with even a groping in that
direction. He was not only academic in his apparent indifference to
the sensibility of writers, but his own sensibility was, on the whole,
academic. He had no feeling and little understanding of the esthetic
currents which shaped so much of contemporary literature. He is re-
ported, for example, to have been completely unresponsive to those
