16
PARTISAN REVIEW
the special vision of a work of art.
Literature and Revolution
is a
study of Soviet literature right after the Revolution, of its schools,
its problems, its individual talents.
The Soviet Union was in a period of transition from a semi-
feudal, bourgeois society to a socialist one, and Trotsky was able to
observe how writers, in the chaos of adjustment, reflected their shift-
ing social bases in the very texture of their work. According to Trotsky,
the Revolution ushered in a more conscious and more direct struggle
between the values of the city and those of the country, and, where lit-
erature had formerly expressed it') opposition to society from the point
of view of a peasant nihilism, it was now poised between the peasantry
and the proletariat. Unable to identify themselves completely with
the philosophy of the proletariat, Soviet writers reflected the an-
tagonism as well as the longing of the village for the city, some veer-
ing toward one pole, some tqward the other. Thus Trotsky showed
the roots of the Russian variety of imagism in the static and discon-
nected image of the world bred by the peasant way of life. Russian
futurism, on the other hand, Trotsky regarded as the most revolu-
tionary literary movement; this was due to the fact that futurism was
the most extreme, bohemian-urban-reaction to the old society, and
the Revolution had cut off the inevitable retreat of such a movement
back to the bourgeoisie. In the poetry of Yessenin, however, there was
an attempt, largely unconscious, to merge both of the dominant forces
of the Soviet regime, for while Yessenin was filled with the sensibility
of the city, it was the anarchy of color and sounds, the mechanized
hysteria, rather than the order of purpose which he saw in the city.
Much of Trotsky's book, perhaps the most important part, is a
polemic against those critics who were impatient with history and
wanted to establish by decree a proletarian art. "It is fundamentally
incorrect," says Trotsky, "to contrast bourgeois culture and bourgeois
art with proletarian culture and proletarian art. The latter will never
exist, because the proletarian regime is temporary and transient. The
historic significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolu-
tion consist in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture
which is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly
human." It was this idea which was denounced for years by the Com-
munist Party as a heresy and a slander to boot, yet the facts cannot
be concealed, and the recent history of Soviet art has obviously borne
out Trotsky's prediction.
It would obviously take an extended study to do justice to Trot-
sky's remarkable amplitude and variety of insights into literature and
to track down his basic methods and premises. In the meantime, how-
ever, we have no reason to assume that Trotsky's work is the classic
