Leon Trotsky is undoubtedly one of the towering figures of the Twentieth Century. Theorist of the Permanent Revolution, leader of the October Revolution 1917, the architect of the victorious Red Army in the ensuing civil war, Trotsky fought at the vanguard of the workers' movement as a committed Marxist for practically his entire life. Above all a man of action, Trotsky was also one of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, and this broad intellectual legacy remains as relevant as ever, especially in the theoretical desert which characterises the post-Stalinist landscape.'Literature and Revolution', written in 1923 (and this edition with an insightful introduction by Lindsey German), constitutes an important part of both Trotsky's theoretical heritage and to the Marxist cultural debate in general. It provides a dialectical materialist conception of, amongst other things, the literature around the time of the October Revolution, its connection to the social fabric of contemporaneous Russian life, the affect of that great event on art ("he who is outside of the October perspective is utterly an hopelessly reduced to nothing"), the problems which October forced the artist to confront and the paradox of attempts to build a proletarian culture.
"Marxism...raises questions of a much more profound significance, namely, to which order of feelings does a given artistic work correspond in all its peculiarities? What are the social conditions of these thoughts and feelings? What place do they occupy in the historical development of society and a class?"
Much of the book consists of a fairly detailed analysis of the now undeservedly obscure poets of, in particular, the Russian Futurist school (quite distinct from the Italian movement), most notably Mayakovsky, and also sections on Andrei Beily, Alexsandr Blok and the anti-Marxist Formalist School. However, these analysis and polemics are interspersed with quite profound generalisations which elaborate a classical Marxist position, at all times employing a dynamic use of the key Marxist conception of the relationship between base and superstructure. For example, in The Formalist School, on the question of pure art:
"The effort to set art free from life, to declare it a craft self-sufficient unto itself devitalizes and kills art. The very need of such an operation is an unmistakable symptom of intellectual decline"
or
"To a materialist, religion, law, morals and art represent separate aspects of one and the same process of social reality. Though they differentiate themselves from their industrial basis, become complex,
strengthen and develop their special characteristics in detail, politics, religion, law, ethics and aesthetics remain, nonetheless, functions of social man and obey the laws of his social organisation".
Another important question raised by the book is the question of "proletarian culture". The nature of the workers' revolution and state is unlike the rise and rule of the bourgeois, particularly in relation to the development of culture.
"Can the proletariat in this time create a new culture? It is legitimate to doubt this, because the years of social revolution will be years of fierce class struggles in which destruction will occupy more room than new construction."
The working class will reach its apotheosis in the revolutionary struggle and dictatorship. This period will inevitably be characterised by a most bitter and difficult struggle for survival and yield conditions unfavourable for the flowering of culture. And yet, as the regime becomes more stable and conditions for the creation of a new literature, culture etc. avail themselves, more and more will the successful transformation to Communist society be underway and the proletariat will lose its distinct class character. Thus Trotsky expounds the dialectic of the paradox of proletarian culture, its inevitable failure or even desirability.
Trotsky of course states all this infinitely more eloquently and clearly and anyone buying this fascinating book will not be disappointed. Trotsky was clearly very widely-read (not really much else to do in Siberian jails I suppose) and a real lover of literature, and his expert grasp of the scathingly sarcastic put-down and his frequent humour (" 'Attention! This is irony!' ") make 'Literature and Revolution' a pleasure to read. The proximity of the book's publication to real revolutionary events, along with Trotsky's accessible writing, means it escapes the dryness of much 'Western Marxism' and results in Marxist Cultural Theory Not Boring Shock. I recommend 'Literature and Revolution' to anyone at all interested in literary theory or Trotsky's work in general, and it deserves to take its rightful place among Bloch, Brecht and Lukacs in the great history of Marxist cultural debate.
