THE FOUNDING FATHERS
15
poetic compressions which Mayakovski inherited from European
symbolism.
Who, then, were the trail-blazers of Marxist criticism? Three
other figures, Stalin, Trotsky and Plechanov, have been cited in the
past
as
having made important contributions to the Marxist study of
literature. In fact, a few speeches of Stalin on the national question
have been appended to a French collection of Lenin's "\'fitings on
literature; but Stalin's. entire theoretical contribution to Marxist
criticismis contained in his observation that "the writer is the engineer
of the human soul." One of his few direct literary judgments is his
warning to the Russian masses
(Pravda,
1935) that "indifference
to the memory and to the works of Mayakovski is a crime"; but for
themost part, Stalin's intervention in the arts is limited to adminis-
trative orders which seal the fate of artistic groups that happen to
have the wrong political connecti9ns within the bureaucratic camp.
To Plechanov is given all the veneration due an ancestor--an
important branch of the family tree-yet no specific ideas of his have
beenofficially accepted by our twentieth century Marxists. It is his
name, rather than his ideas, which has been taken seriously. Never-
theless,Plechanov did undertake a study of the history and problems
of art. His erudition was wide; his sensibility, though not rooted in
anycreative movement, was at least that of a cultivated connoisseur;
and his interest in the laws and mutations of art itself, apart from
the social forces which ultimately affect it, enabled him to pose, if
notto solve, some of the problems of Marxist esthetics. But he regarded
art, fundamentally, as ideology, with the result that, as in his essay
onIbsen, he reduced works of literature to their philosophical equiva-
lent. His method is perhaps best summed up in his famous law:
"Whena work of art is based upon a fallacious idea, inherent conflicts
causea degeneration of its esthetic quality" -a law which obviously
sanctions the condemnation of all literature based on nOI}-Marxist
ideas.Besides, Plechanov had a flair for iron-clad laws, and he was
at heart a utilitarian, so that he worked out a bewildering array of
formula:which are closer to the spirit of Calvinism than to Marxism.
"Only that which is useful," says Plechanov, for example, "will seem
beautiful."
As for Trotsky, despite the rhapsodic review of
Literature and
Revolution
by Michael Gold in 1926, the docile writers associated
with the Communist Party have sought to wipe out even Trotsky's
literary criticism from left-wing thought. Yet Trotsky, of all the
Marxian theorists, is the only one to have written literary criticism,
forTrotsky not only saw in literature a mirror of society but he was
acutelyconscious of those qualities, which, taken together, make up
