ANDRE MALRAUX
27
pathies. Trotsky now became "a moment in the past," and those who
continued to uphold revolutionary principles became so many utopian
moralists. It was now clear that Malraux had merely projected his
own dilemma into Marxism; and that the concept of "will" or
"action" had no genuine political content but tended, on the contrary,
to be synonymous with power politics, with adventurous bids for an
ephemeral "success," in a word, with class collaboration. The irony
is that by equating success with class collaboration, and identifying
himself with the spectacular but ill-starred Comintern, Malraux has
in reality written "the epic of defeat."
In 1935 Drieu la Rochelle, the French novelist, made some intel-
ligent observations on Malraux in his relation to the Comintern. The
Communist epic of Malraux, he said, is an epic of defeat. Beginning
with the disquieting victory of Chiang Kai-shek, it has ended for the
present in the devastating passivity of the German Communists. And
now, by order of Stalin, the Communist Party "renounces its exotic
dream of extremist violence" and proclaims the people's front against
fascism. Will Malraux alter the content of his novels? One awaits,
Rochelle concluded, the first Communist novel of the democratic
defense.
Days of Wrath
was not precisely this novel, but it was a product
of the transition. Directly inspired by the events of 1933-34-Hitler,
the concentration camps, the Reichstag fire trial,
Dimitrov-Days of
Wrath
was a lyric novel of the communist
agonistes.
Once more a
change has taken place in the conception of the hero. While Kyo
combined in himself the sense of mortality and the will to action,
Kassner embodies the will alone. To all the characters in
Man's Fate
death possessed a metaphysical reality-a kind of substitute for orig-
inal sin, it was the common property of mankind, providing the basic
motivation for the behavior of individuals, imposing a pattern of
human destiny on the pattern of the class struggle. But now, in
Days
of Wrath,
death is centered in the purely secular image of the prison
where Kassner is confined; life in the fellowship of the anti-fascists.
The characters are no longer preoccupied with death as a fatality;
they are trying to escape death as a political penalty. And it is no
longer their intense, atomic individuality which isolates them from
one another, but the walls of their prisons.
Days of Wrath
was thus
the incarnation of a new idea: that abortive Stalinist humanism which
flourished, full of fresh hope for mankind, brief and bright as a dream,
in the years of change: 1934-35-after the close of the third period
and before the full flowering of the fourth, after the dark night of
sectarianism and before the hard and disillusioning glare of the peo-
