BOOKS
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The writers of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s thought that
by representing their world in a bold, formally experimental style they
were in fact furthering the revolution. "Our thinking," Ehrenburg
wrote in the Constructivist magazine
Object,
which he edited with the
architect El Lissitsky in Berlin in 1921 and 1922, "is characterized by
the attempt to turn away from the old subjective, mystical conception
of the world and
to
create an attitude of universality-darity-reality."
Constructivism is one of a number of variations that have been played
on the modernist instrument. Though its views are often hard
to
distinguish from those of Futurism or, for that matter, of certain other
modernist stances, constructivism stresses the political and attempts,
like the revolution which inspired it, to represent the world in its
concrete material essence. The reality of the world is to be found, first
and foremost, in its material objects, which are, for the Constructivist
writer, the great subject. Modernism in literature and the visual arts
generally have been infatuated with the found object and with the
poetry of technology, but Constructivism proposes that these changes
in material reality are the stuff of social change, and the Constructivist
treatment of objects daims to reveal the way the world really works.
For all his distance from Marxist ideology at the time he wrote
The
Life of the Automobile,
what Ehrenburg attempted there was to write
not a Futurist but a materialist novel: one in which life proceeds, in its
orthodox Marxist way, from material conditions.
It
is no accident,
given the convergence between certain modernist presuppositions and
Marxist first principles, that many modernists tried
to
be Communists.
It
is no accident, also, that the modernist writers who became Com–
munists entirely ruined their talents-whether or not they lived under
Communist governments. The difference in literary achievement
between
Julio Jurenito
and
The Life of the Automobile
and such later
novels as
The Fall of Paris, The Storm,
and
The Thaw
is huge, but it is
no more appalling than the gap between Aragon's brilliant early novel,
Le Paysan de Paris
(1926, translated by Frederick Brown in 1970 as
Nightwalker),
and his Popular Front kitsch like
Aurelien
(1946). In the
end, modernism-outcast from the Left-became an aesthete's position
and still remains so. Perhaps this is why
The Life of the Automobile,
although it seems
to
have little relevance to the direction of current
Russian literature, has much for ours. The nonfiction or documentary
novel is one of the forms attracting American writers these days-think
of Doctorow 's
Ragtime
or Coover's
The Public Burning-and The
Life of the Automobile
is among the first and one of the most
successful examples of the form.
DAVID RIEFF
