Red letters
TIBOR SZAMUELY
Literature and Revolution: A Critical Study of the Writer and Communism in the Twen- tieth Century Jurgen Riihle (Pall Mall 84s)
The strange relationship between writers and Communism constitutes one of the most im- portant chapters in the cultural history of our times. Most twentieth century writers came into contact with Communism at one stage or another. Some embraced it: others rejected it; a third group tried it and found it wanting. What did the experience add up to? In terms of communist propaganda suc- cesses: quite a good deal, in terms of great literature: nothing.
Jurgen Riihle has set himself the am- bitious task of `exposing the complex con- nections and contradictions between literature and Communism in the first half of the twentieth century'. He has written a huge and highly informative book. Inevitably, perhaps, it is also somewhat clumsy and dis- jointed. For many of the writers he describes—and he has a cast of nearly one hundred—the `connection between literature and Communism' was tenuous in the ex- treme. In the case of the Russian poet Gumilev it was limited to a Bolshevik bullet ending his life; in that of the Frenchman Celine—to Communists being among the innumerable objects of his pathological hatred. Quite a few of the actors (Tagore, the two Manns, France, Hasek, Capek etc) are simply extras—they have no place in the drama.
Riihle seems to have fallen into the not uncommon error of lumping Russian Com- munism with Communism in the rest of the world. Yet in this context the difference is all-important. In the West writers chose the revolution—in Russia revolution came to the writers. They were given no choice: they became prisoners of the revolution. In the West, Communism influenced some writers, even ruined a few—it hardly affected literature as such; in Russia Communism destroyed a great literature. The Bolsheviks made a wilderness and called it Socialist
Realism. • • ' Willynilly, Communism became the determining factor in every Russian writer's life. Ruble treats them as if, for one reason
or another, they had all been more or less Communists or, at the very least, revolu- tionaries. In reality, most of the Comnumist
writers possessed no talent (Furmanov, Serafimovich, Gladkov, Ostrovsky et al)
while most of the gifted writers were
anti-Communist (Gumilev, Mandelshtam, Pasternak. Akhmatova, Pilnyak). Only three writers of stature held genuine Communist beliefs: Mayakovsky, Fadeyev„ Babel (the first two committed suicide, the third was killed in Stalin's purge). Finally, two im- portant writers deliberately sold out to Stalin: Alexei Tolstoy and Ehrenburg. It is a tragic story, which should have been told in a different fashion.
The book conies to life when it gets down to Communism and literature in the non- Soviet world- especially the German scene. which Rutile knows extensively and at first hand. He gives convincing answers to the crucial questions. What made them do it? A variety of reasons: some, like Gidc or Silone or Malraux. were moved to accept Com- munism through a deep compassion for the sufferings of their fellow-men. Others, like Aragon or Becher, arrived sia avant-garde literary movements. It was, as Riihle shows, a blend of manifold illusions: 'Classless society and rule of the elite, industrialisation and rural paradise, protection in the col- lective and unfolding of the individual, the dethroning of God and rebirth of Chris- tianity. everlasting peace and just wars—all these blended in the Red glow of utopia.'
What happened to them in the new faith? Some were destroyed by their ruthless god. ending up either as suicides or as cultural commissars (much the same as far as literature is concerned). For others the god failed. The essential question is: how many of them were genuine Communists? I do not refer here to the carrying of party cards—some of the fellow-travellers were even more dedicated than the party members. But how many writers really understood the nature of Communism and used literature as a means for expounding their comprehension? After reading Ruble's numerous individual case-histories. I am left with the impression that this can apply to only one writer: Bertolt Brecht.
The long chapter on Brecht is outstanding. Ruble speaks of Brecht's 'eerie and disconcerting prophetic quality', which enabled him to lay bare the terrible and inexorable workings of the bloody law of totalitarianism'. True—but almost the same thing can be, and is said of Orwell (to whom Ruffle mistakenly attributes early communist sympathies). Orwell and Brecht were the two great writers who fully understood the nature of totalitarianism; the vital difference was that Orwell loathed Communism and fought it all his life, while Brecht loved the totalitarian system and served it slavishly to the end of his days. He revelled in Com- munist immorality: 'Who fights for Com- munism must be also able to fight and not to fight; to speak the truth and not to speak the truth . . . keep promises and not keep pro- mises . . . Who fights for Communism has only one of all the virtues: that he fights for Communism,'
Unlike the other pathetic figures in this volume, Brecht did not become a Com- munist through a misunderstanding: he felt no compassion, no love, no pity for human beings (as becomes clear when con-naring his play about the Chinese Revolution with Malrawes tient] on the- same subieet): this warped genius was the conscious hard of naked totalitarianism, the evangelist of 1984. - No wonder the Communist leaders took a dim view of Brecht: they preferred hack writers With a moralistic, heroic and cloy- ingly sentimental message. Rutile describes Brecht's constant troubles with the East German authorities—he omits the even more significant fact that Brecht's plays were neither published nor performed in the USSR in his lifetime.
Ruble, like so many other decent ex-Com- munists, expresses nostalgia for a mythical golden past : 'the heroic period of Bolshevism', 'the revolutionary twenties' etc—though he states quite explicitly that Communism in its later phase became even more evil than Nazism. Yet he believes the encounter between Communism and literature to have been fruitful in one re- spect: the ex-Communist writers, who have 'remained the Socialists they had been . . . became a new type of liberal, and they also arrived at a new understanding of democracy'. And Russia? Here. too, Ruble is optimistic: 'The more brutally man is pressed into a mould the sooner will he burst out ... The liberation of art and literature in tne Soviet Union is inseparably bound up with the transition of Communist societs from a closed (i.e. totalitarian) to an open (i.e. democratic or at least enlightened liberal) system.' The prospect for this. I am afraid, is distinctly unpromising.
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