PARTISAN
REVIEW
23
HUELSENBECK: It will
be
a shock course. Things irrational, things so
far concealed, things never before defined in words and symbols shall
find expression.
TROTSKY: But not in an ecstatic, mystical way. Art must help to change
the world. An art freed from the clutches of agents, speculators, pro–
fiteers. The new art which belongs to all must serve the revolution.
HUELSENBECK: And return to captivity? Art must belong to nobody but
itself.
LENIN: Art has no right to absolute freedom. Art must take sides. We
shall come down heavily against artistic self-sufficiency. Against any
sort of ridicule, vulgarity, cynicism, hate directed against us under
the
cloak
of creative genius.
HUELSENBECK: You take art much too seriously. You still believe in
the great works.
TROTSKY: One single great work. Produced collectively. It will come.
First in a vast muddle of stylistic experiments, exaggerations, aberra–
tions. Much of it formless, flat, rough, inexpert. Echoes of the past.
Utopian dreams. Most of it worthless, quickly thrown aside. But within
it we shall see the path along which new man is progressing.
INESSA: But who's
to
judge whether it is revolutionary art? Who decides
what is harmed and what is helped by it? Where is the limit? Who
decides where to intervene?
LENIN: The proletariat will fix the standards.
RAKOVSKY: And what will the proletariat say to our progressives?
Have you seen the pictures of Malevich, Kandinsky, Chagall, Tatlin,
Lissitzky? Do you know the poems of Blok, of Mayakovsky? And
all the things happening in the theater? Meyerhold, Vachtangov, Tai–
rov. Will the workers see that as revolutionary art?
LENIN: Once libraries, museums, schools, universities are in the hands
of the people, a proletarian culture will emerge, and with it proletar–
ian
art.
And since the workers will want to study, to learn, to ex–
plore, to educate themselves, they will expect a lot from their artists.
They will have no taste for empty magic. Their art will be realistic
and scientific.
TROTSKY: What we are visualizing, what is already beginning to emerge,
will
that ever be proletarian culture? Can there be a proletarian cul–
ture at all? Before us years of revolution, civil war, bitter class war–
fare. Art will join in the fight, yes. But the proletariat, it will need
all its strength to seize power, to maintain it and use it. Culture will
mean to start with hundreds of millions of people learning to read
and write and do their sums. In a socialist society the proletariat will
