642
HAROLD ROSEN BEllS
literature not make revolutions, nor, regardless of what historians
say about Rousseau and the Encylopaedists, contribute to them
beyond the "balanced" phrases and slogans that may be equally
useful to the counter-revolution-literature
is
hardly even hospit–
able to revolutions after they have been made.
Dr.
Zhivago
is
but the latest example of how the literary imagination conceives
social upheaval, that
is,
as a landslide of brutal fact by which all
the gay-solemn effects of century-old forms have been crushed.
It was not, as the "Left" fallacy would have it, Stalin who made
the Russian Revolution unpalatable to Russian literature. Trot–
sky, who never hesitated to lay blame at that door, had
this
to
say in 1935: "It takes some time for a complete overturn of
social foundations, customs and assumptions to produce an
artis–
tic crystallization along new axes. How much time? One cannot
say offhand, but a long time. Art is always carried in the bag–
gage train of a new epoch, and great art . . . is an especially
heavy load. . . . The influence of the October Revolution upon
literature is still completely a thing of the future." The longer
the Revolution lasted the farther would it put off the day when
literature could come into being.
In sum, the literature of revolution appears when the revo–
lution can be seen by looking back at it as an event of the not–
too-recent past, when the revolution has stabilized itself, when
it is likely that a new revolution
is
needed. Then literature
be–
comes the voice ("crystallization") of the old revolution and of
the social relations and fantasies it brought into being. In cutting
down the pace of the Revolution, Stalin offended the intellect
but made a Soviet literature of sorts possible.
The sigh of Keats and the logic of Eliot represent art's
willing acceptance of the merger of substance into form-and
the fabled lightheartedness of the artist, his childlike spirit, his
"innocence," have to do with this professional yielding to the
falsification, play-acting, and charmed distortion inherent
in
his
medium. The abnormal thing is not the pressure upon art to
falsify but that art should have come to resist that pressure.
The
