THIS speech was delivered on May 9, 1924 during discussions at the Press Department of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) on Party Policy in the Field of Imaginative Literature. The issue was the cultural hot potato of the day, with sections of the party leadership insisting that since the working class was the ruling class it would produce its own proletarian culture and that the party must support this. These ‘Proletkult’ factions poured scorn and were bitterly hostile to petit bourgeois ‘fellow travellers’ many of whom put themselves at the disposal of the revolution and sought to assist its struggle for culture. Note the free and robust nature of the discussion, with no worship of the ‘great leaders’ that was to be a feature of the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
YOU remember, of course, Novoye Slovo, the best of the old legal Marxist periodicals, in which many Marxists of the older generation collaborated including Vladimir Ilyich. This periodical, as everyone knows, was friendly with the Decadents. What was the reason for that? It was because the Decadents were then a young and persecuted tendency in bourgeois literature. And this persecuted situation of theirs impelled them to take sides with our attitude of opposition, though the latter, of course, was quite different in character, in spite of which the Decadents were temporarily fellow-travellers with us. And later Marxist periodicals (and the semi-Marxist ones, it goes without saying), right down to Prosveshcheniye, had no sort of “monolithic” fiction section, but set aside considerable space for the “fellow-travellers”. Some might be either more severe or more indulgent in this respect, but it was impossible to carry on a “monolithic” policy in the field of art, because the artistic elements needed for such a policy were lacking.
But Raskolnikov at bottom doesn’t want this. In works of art he ignores that which makes them works of art. This was most vividly shown in his remarkable judgement on Dante’s Divine Comedy, which in his opinion is valuable to us just because it enables us to understand the psychology of a certain class at a certain time.
To put the matter that way means simply to strike out the Divine Comedy – from the realm of art. Perhaps the time has come to do that, but if so we must understand the essence of the question and not shrink from the conclusions. If I say that the importance of the Divine Comedy lies in the fact that it gives me an understanding of the state of mind of certain classes in a certain epoch, this means that I transform it into a mere historical document, for, as a work of art, the Divine Comedy must speak in some way to my feelings and moods. Dante’s work may act on me in a depressing way, fostering pessimism and despondency in me, or, on the contrary, it may rouse, inspire, encourage me. This is the fundamental relationship between a reader and a work of art.
Nobody, of course, forbids a reader to assume the role of a researcher and approach the Divine Comedy as merely an historical document. It is clear, though, that these two approaches are on two different levels, which, though connected, do not overlap. How is it thinkable that there should be not an historical but a directly aesthetic relationship between us and a medieval Italian book? This is explained by the fact that in class society, in spite of all its changeability, there are certain common features. Works of art developed in a medieval Italian city can, we find, affect us too.
What does this require? A small thing: it requires that these feelings and moods shall have received such broad, intense, powerful expression as to have raised them above the limitations of the life of those days. Dante was, of course, the product of a certain social milieu. But Dante was a genius. He raised the experience of his epoch to a tremendous artistic height. And if we, while today approaching other works of medieval literature merely as objects of study, approach the Divine Comedy as a source of artistic perception, this happens not because Dante was a Florentine petty bourgeois of the 13th century but, to a considerable extent, in spite of that circumstance. Let us take, for instance, such an elementary psychological feeling as fear of death. This feeling is characteristic not only of man but also of animals. In man it first found simple articulate expression, and later also artistic expression.
In different ages, in different social milieux, this expression has changed, that is to say, men have feared death in different ways. And nevertheless what was said on this score not only by Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, but also by the Psalmist, can move us. (Exclamation by Comrade Libedinsky.) Yes, yes, I came in at the very moment when you, Comrade Libedinsky, were explaining to Comrade Voronsky in the terms of elementary political instruction (you yourself put it like that) about the variation in feelings and states of mind in different classes. In that general form it is indisputable. However, for all that, you won’t deny that Shakespeare and Byron somehow speak to your soul and mine. (Libedinsky: “They will soon stop speaking.”) Whether it will be soon, I don’t know, but undoubtedly a time will come when people will approach the works of Shakespeare and Byron in the same way as we approach most poets of the Middle Ages, that is, exclusively from the standpoint of scientific-historical analysis.
Even sooner, however, will come the time when people will stop seeking in Marx’s Capital for precepts for their practical activity, and Capital will have become merely an historical document, together with the program of our party. But at present we do not yet intend to put Shakespeare, Byron, Pushkin in the archives, and we will continue to recommend them to the workers. Comrade Sosnovsky, for instance, strongly recommends Pushkin, declaring that he will undoubtedly last another fifty years. Let us not speak of periods of time. But in what sense can we recommend Pushkin to a worker? There is no proletarian class viewpoint in Pushkin, not to speak of a monolithic expression of Communist feelings.
Of course, Pushkin’s language is magnificent – that cannot be denied – but, after all, this language is used by him for expressing the world-outlook of the nobility. Shall we say to the worker: read Pushkin in order to understand how a nobleman, a serf-owner and gentleman of the bed chamber, encountered Spring and experienced Autumn? This element is, of course, present in Pushkin, for Pushkin grew up on a particular social basis.
But the expression that Pushkin gave his feelings is so saturated with the artistic, and generally with the psychological, experience of centuries, is so crystallised, that it has lasted down to our times and, according to Comrade Sosnovsky, will last another fifty years. And when people tell me that the artistic significance of Dante for us consists in his expressing the way of life of a certain epoch, that only makes one spread one’s hands in helplessness.
I am sure that many, like me, would, after reading Dante, have to strain their memories to remember the date and place of his birth, and yet none the less, this would not have prevented us from getting artistic delight, if not from the whole of the Divine Comedy then at least from some parts of it. Since I am not a historian of the Middle Ages, my attitude to Dante is predominantly artistic. (Ryazanov: “That’s an exaggeration. ‘To read Dante is to take a bath in the sea’, said Shevyryev, who was also against history, replying to Byelinsky”.) I don’t doubt that Shevyryev did express himself as Comrade Ryazanov says, but I am not against history – that’s pointless. Of course the historical approach to Dante is legitimate and necessary and affects our aesthetic attitude to him, but one can’t substitute one for the other.
I remember what Kareyev wrote on this point, in a polemic with the Marxists: let them, the Marxides (that was how they ironically spoke of the Marxists in those days) tell us, for instance, what class interests dictated the Divine Comedy. And from the other side, the Italian Marxist, old Antonio Labriola, wrote something like this: “Only fools could try to interpret the text of the Divine Comedy as though it were made of the cloth that Florentine merchants provided for their customers.” I remember this expression almost word for word because in the polemic with the subjectivists I had occasion to quote these words more than once, in the old days. I think that Comrade Raskolnikov’s attitude not only to Dante but to art in general proceeds not from the Marxist criterion but from that of the late Shulyatikov, who provided a caricature of Marxism in this connection. Antonio Labriola also made his vigorous comment on this sort of caricature.
