TWILIGHT OF THE THIRTIES
11
technical and spiritual culture, which is their only real property,
the intellectuals make their liveliho9(1 by preserving the old and by
producing the new forms of consciousness. Now Marxist criticism,
in discussing the social base of literature, has always laid too much
stress on such terms as "bourgeois" and "proletarian." This is an
error, I think, because literature is not
linked
directly to the polar
classes, but associates itself with (or dissociates itself from) the
life of society as a whole as well as the different classes within it
by
giving expression to the given bias, the given moods and ideas .
of the intellectuals.
An
examination of the special role and chang·
ing status of the intelligentsia is, therefore, essential to any social
examination of modern literature.
Trotsky is, I believe, the only Marxist critic who develops his
analysis of writers and literary trends largely around this concept.
Thus
he connects the symbolist schools that flourished in Russia
before the October revolution with the growing self.determination,
in
that period, of the intelligentsia, which proclaimed that "it had
its
own value, regardless of its relation to the people." But Trotsky
does
not credit this· factor with sufficient power. This self-deter–
mination occurred also in other countries and it was directed not
Cllly against the masses but against the ruling strata as well. Mate–
rially and politically it was an illusion, of course, since the intel–
lectuals remained at bottom as dependent as ever; yet in other
respects
it encouraged the creation of moral and esthetic values
running counter to and often violently critical of the bourgeois
Bpirit.
Regardless of their specific historical meanings, most of the
typically modern literary tendencies, such as romanticism, natural–
ism,
symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, etc., could not have
llecome articulate save through the support, through the necessary
10eial framework, provided by this relative detachment of the intel–
lectuals from a society intrinsically hostile, and at best indifferent,
to
the rights of the human personality and to everything imagina–
tive,
gratuitous, natural, and commercially devoid of advantages.
In
American literature, for instance, the typically modern did not
~ppear
until late, until the years before the World War in fact; and
ae
reason seems to be that in America, because of the concentra-
tim
on the physical mastery of the continent, it was not until the
fwmtieth century that a separate intellectual class emerged con-
