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remained fixed at the point he had reached at the end of the thirties.
He continued to write brilliantly about modern literature and the
literary scene, but he never undertook the re-examination of his
political commitments-or of his literary commitments, for that
matter-that would have taken him beyond anti-Stalinism to a more
consistently antiauthoritarian position. After his break with Stalinism,
he showed no further inclination to reconsider previously held opin–
ions. Neither his "autopsy" on proletarian literature nor his "Twilight
of the Thirties," both written in 1939 and ostensibly devoted to a
reassessment of recent political experience, called into question the
underlying assumptions of Leninism. In the first of these revealing
pieces, Rahv criticized proletarian literature as " the literature of a party
disguised as a class" but upheld the Leninist reasoning which justified
the supremacy of the party on the grounds that the proletariat can
never generate a revolutionary ideology of its own. Much of Rahv's
analysis seemed to show that Leninism leads
to
Stalinism just as easily
in literature as in politics; yet he condemned the cultural policies of the
Communist party in the thirties not because the party had tried to set
up a cultural and political dictatorship over the American working–
class movement but merely because it had embraced the reactionary
policies of the Popular Front. Proletarian literature " is withering
away," Rahv complained, "because the party no longer needs it. " The
question of whether anyone else needed it was left hanging in the air.
The second of these essays grew directly out of the omissions of the
first. Having failed
to
explain what was valuable in proletarian
literature-on Rahv's own account a party "mystification" yet at the
same time a promising "social impulse" allegedly "frustrated" by
Stalinism-Rahv in his continuing search for "a new vanguard group"
had to turn to the "modern artist," whose long-standing feud with the
bourgeoisie he now tried to construe into the advance guard of a
revolutionary culture. Rahv's commitment to modernism thus grew
out of his unexamined commitment to Leninism. Both rested on the
assumption that literary and political vanguards alone can lead the
masses to the promised land.
Rahv 's attempts to analyze the relationship between Leninism and
Stalinism remained evasive and inconsistent. In a 1940 symposium not
reprinted here, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Marxism," he
criticized Marxists for refusing to "re-examine the problem of leader–
ship" and for clinging to "Lenin's theory of a 'vanguard' of profes–
sional revolutionaries. " He himself conceded, however, only that
Leninism was "not immune"
to
totalitarianism, or as he put it
