A marvelous essay from Henriette Roland-Holst on Gorky’s critique of middle-class literature and why his perspective was so powerful.

‘Gorky as a Proletarian Literary Critic’ by Henrietta Roland-Holst from International Socialist Review. Vol. 6 No. 12. June, 1906.

THE literature of Russia has attracted great attention in other than Russian countries during the last decade. This is partially due to purely esthetic reasons: it has a freshness and youth, and directness and simplicity of expression, which is seldom found in the same degree in the modern literature of other people. This interest is also partially due to the fact that it more directly reflects social life than the literature of other peoples. This interest is also partially due to the which in Western Europe are discussed only in special technical writings, in Russia find their expression in art,–in the lyric, in drama, in romance, in novels as well as in literary criticism. The political reasons for these phenomena are well known.

This fact offers the great advantage to the foreigner of enabling him to follow in literature (in so far as this is accessible through translation) the social conditions of Russia, and, to a certain degree, the psychological effects of those conditions. For example, the works of Tscheckoff’s reflect clearly the universal mental condition of the intellectuals in the ’80’s; the discouragement and pessimism which at that time accompanied the downfall of the “Will of the People” movement.

The translations from Russian literature however, are taken principally from the field of the romance and the novel, and only to a very slight degree from that of literary history and criticism. Consequently we have almost no knowledge of how the Russian critics–of whom there are many important ones–have looked upon their own literature. Now we are very fortunate in that two works of prominent Russian writers have appeared, which report and pass judgment upon the literature of their country.

To be sure there is a great difference between these two works. One, called “Russian literature,” is written by the well-known essayist and sociologist, Kropotkin. It is an enlargement of a number of addresses delivered by him in the year 1901 at the Lowell institute in Boston, and contains a short summary of Russian literature from the time of the primitive folk songs until today, with special consideration of the modern writers, under which he includes the whole literature of the 19th Century. During this time if we disregard the old folk tales there has arisen for the first time a national literature with its own style.

The work by Gorky is of a wholly different character. This is entitled simply “Political Discussions” and is occupied largely with the psychology of the Russian middle class (Kleinbitrgertum). Through some twenty pages he treats upon Russian literature and its relations to social conditions.

The manner, however, in which he does this makes it very significant. This hastily prepared writing brings more instruction and deeper insight into the essence of Russian literature than the industriously and carefully prepared and interesting work of Kropotkin. The latter supplies us with a mass of important details, and gives much information concerning the activities, peculiarities and biographies of many writers. What it lacks is a general view of the distinctive, peculiar essence of Russian literature.

There is a good reason for this. The writer lacks that cosmical view furnished by Marxism, which would enable him to distinguish the universal in the many writers to which he introduces us; he has no common ground from which to judge life and reflect it back. He fails to see that the inmost essence, the peculiar spirit of the literature of any epoch is but the living reflection of that class to whose views and conceptions, hopes and aspirations the author gives expression. Kropotkin has not clearly grasped this inner essence, this spirit, this class character.

Turn now to the work of Gorky.

There is an old saying that the poet knows nothing of politics; and for him to take part in them only brings him misfortune, and does evil to the political field as well. This may well be true–for bourgeois politics and bourgeois poets. It is certainly true that the idealistic aspirations of the poet would necessarily come in conflict with the bald selfishness, the cold cruelty, and the calculating hypocrisy that dominates the world of bourgeois politics. Bourgeois politics consists of disreputable generalities carefully hidden under the threadbare covering of “eternal truths.” The poet who enters this sort of politics is compelled to choose between becoming a confused ideologist and a hypocritical phraseur–either to betray himself or others. In either case he ceases to exist as a poet.

It is wholly different when the poet sings of proletarian class consciousness and proletarian politics.  Here principles and practice are in harmony; deeds and ideals agree. Here there is no hypocrisy about the “general welfare” with which to cover up actual class interests; here there is the uplifting consciousness that the battle for class interests is identical with the battle for social progress, for the onward uplift of mankind. Nowhere today is this so completely true as in Russia, for nowhere else is it so plain that the proletariat represents the interests of all society. Nowhere else has the comprehension of the proletarian socialist position and the great ideas of Marxism by the intellectuals given such an impulse to their power and courage, and so filled them with new life as there. The writings of comrade Gorky give a striking example of this. They illustrate how taking part in proletarian politics, how becoming a socialist, so far from injuring a writer, raise him above his earlier self.

Gorky’s writing, which we are discussing, was first published as an article in a Russian Socialist paper, which appeared in the heat of the battle, during that brief, quickly darkened, but never­-to-be-forgotten dawn of freedom, which followed the great victory of the working-class last October. For a brief period the atmosphere was filled with the pride of battle and the joy of victory, as the air of a winter day is filled with tingling particles of frost.

Consequently it bears the traces of its origin. It is the work of an author at a time when he desired only to be a fighter, and felt only as a fighter. No attempt is made to explain why Russian literature is what it is; he does not attempt to explain what are its relations to social conditions, however clearly he may perceive these. He seeks only to judge its character and to express how this Russian literature appears to him through his new eyes; how it seems to him from the point of view of a new heart and a new brain–from the new class standpoint: the attitude and point of view of the revolutionary proletariat. This is what Gorky’s writing means and only this. This is the significant, the new, the peculiar and the important thing, that for the first time an important Russian author looks upon the whole Russian literature with new eyes. For the first time he bravely, firmly, relentlessly expresses what his eyes see. For the first time, through him, a new class looks upon this old, venerated, sacred structure of Russian literature, without awe, without timidity, without veneration. For the first time this new class tosses aside the old critical estimates of this material and creates for itself new standards. For the first time the proletariat judges this national literature, as it judges all else on earth–according to the degree of its needs, its hopes, its loves and its hates.

The essence, the spirit of a literature is found in its comprehension of the relation of mankind to life, to society.  The one dominating fact of Russian social life however, was, and is the frightful misery of the oppressed; the dehumanizing of the masses and the inhumanity of the rulers. The way in which art has comprehended this fact and its attitude towards it—this is its essence.

What is the attitude of Russian art to the relation between thee martyred and the martyrers? This is the question which Gorky raises, and proceeds to answer from his new standpoint, the standpoint of the revolutionary proletariat.

“Our whole literature,” he writes “is an obstinate preaching of passive relations toward life–the apology of passiveness.”

To constitute an apology for passivity is certainly not the whole essence of Russian literature, but it is the phase of it with which the present fighting proletariat first meets, and which must make it hate that literature. This phase turns the Russian laborer away from the literature of his native land, since it can neither inspire nor strengthen him; because it places as the highest ideal of humanity, the very thing which he is making superhuman exertions to overcome–patient submission.

Gorky gives expression to this feeling with all the passion of the fighter, and it is this new proletarian truth concerning Russian literature that he for the first time expresses.

“No other literature beside the Russian,” he writes bitterly, “has described its people with such mawkish repulsiveness, and described its sorrows with such a strangely suspicious resignation.” It has “consciously or unconsciously, but always obstinately, painted the following picture of the people: patiently indifferent as to the nature of their lives; always occupied with thought of God and their souls; filled with a desire for inner peace; dominated by middle-class distrustfulness towards everything new; disgustingly good-natured; ready to excuse any and everything–a flat-nosed idealist, who long, long ago reconciled himself to being oppressed by whomever might desire it.” Gentle and soft-hearted, strong only in his patience, dreaming of a heavenly paradise, silently enduring all things on earth–so popular literature has always represented him. It made a hero of him, but only a hero of suffering. This poetry moaned its gentle enchantment to him, singing hymns of praise to his patience–but it never told of the outbreaks of his rage, and his spirit of violent revolt against misery; the spirit of heroism is not in it. And yet this spirit lives in Russia.  Gorky refers to the fallen heroes of the “People’s Movement,” and to a fragment of Neckrassoff, who, as the best poet of the people at that time, could wish them nothing better than resignation,–“Good Night.” And this even “in those days when many were already sounding the alarm bells and striving to awaken the people! In the days when heroes were falling alone in their battle for freedom!”

Not alone in Russian literature do the people become mere “living models,” from which “with more or less talent beautiful highly colored pictures are painted for the satisfaction of the creative instinct and the aesthetic taste of the middle-class.” This is a universal picture of middle-class literature, and especially of the modern realism, which everywhere seeks to make the misery, burdens, ignorance and degradation of the masses serve as objects for artistic presentation.¹

Nowhere however, is this feature so glaringly evident as in Russia. Nowhere else is it so closely connected with the subjection of the masses, through their patient endurance of suffering, their acquiescence in their own bestialization. This is self-evidently a result of the fact that Russia has no strong, active hopeful, politically influential class of large and small capitalists such as are to be found in western Europe, and which are reflected in their literatures. Because of this, in spite of all its deep and delicate beauty, its tender touch of nature feeling, its psychological depth and humanity, it lacks the brave high spirited note, the victorious uplift of mind, the courage and joy of life–in short all the features of a literature which are brought to view through a class that has felt the victorious joy of conflict or tasted the sweets of power.

Because of this “Apology of the Passive,” because of this dominating feature, Gorky designates the whole Russian literature as middle-class. In so doing he implies no undervaluation of such great Russian writers as Tolstoi, Dostoiewsky or Turgenieff, but simply gives a general estimate of the essence of Russian literature. The middle-class–at least the Russian middle­-class–knows no other relation to life than that of passiveness. The literature of the middle-class, therefore can consist of nothing more than an apology for submission, “even when the middle-class artist is good-natured.”

Gorky is well aware of the fact that all the narrow ideologists will misunderstand and abuse him, he knows that the middle-class look upon literature as something sacred and divine, standing above society, to which the general standards of political life cannot be applied. He is also fully aware of the deadly enmity of the middle-class views to revolutionary activity. He knows how middle-class thought, even in its transcendental form as beauty and art “seeks to reconcile the martyr and the martyrer;” he knows how impossible it is for this thought to avoid seeking for proofs of the impossibility of changing the relations between the possessors and the propertyless,–that it cannot avoid preaching patience, resignation and forgiveness to the oppressed; and that this must hinder the work of liberation. And in order to counteract this “criminal work” Gorky resolutely and fearlessly proceeds to uncover the middle-class and its art, which has been reflected in the magic mirror of beauty as gentle, love­able and alluring.

No socialist work is ever purely critical and negative; there is always something creative and constructive in it; something comprehended of the germ of the proletarian socialist world. This could not fail to be present in Gorky’s work. Everywhere in it the new life bursts forth, and the consecrated fire of the revolution slumbers in its depths. A great current flows through these pages: the current of the measureless sense of power of a proletariat just awakening to a consciousness of its self and its power. So it is that Gorky’s work is not simply a chronicle of the old, but an anticipation of the new Russia in art. The new Russia, that is no longer the “Home of Patience,” but rather the home of the greatest struggle of our age; no longer the place “where heroes are lonely;” but rather the place where the greatest hero of modern times, the proletariat, bleeding at a thousand wounds, but still unconquered and undismayed, fights on.

“Fighting prevents my becoming a poet; the songs will not let me fight”–so sang once a Russian poet, but a bourgeois poet: Russia’s liberator, the proletariat, was at that time unborn. How different today, and how much more fortunate is the lot of the proletarian author, as Gorky shows us! In this little work, in which it is the revolutionary fighter exclusively who speaks; his thoughts, ideas and words rise to a proud, powerful, glowing beauty that he has attained in no earlier work. To realize this one has only to read the memorial to the fighters of the “Will of the People” days, the description of the dying capitalism, and above all the magnificent passage on “Heroic individuality,” where he sets forth the proletarian conception of the relation of the individual to the world. He has wiped out all trace of the element of weakness which has here and there affected the thoughts and conceptions of Gorky’s previous writings–and which was due to the fact that the individual rebellion of those vagabonds and gypsies, who, however much they might need and desire freedom, were absolutely incapable of altering the world, were the highest type of rebels which he knew and celebrated. His vision now sees a new power arose out of the depths, the power of intelligent organized rebellion and the glory of this vision and the consciousness of proletarian victory inspires him. His world has been transformed into a new and more joyous one, and this change must just as certainly express itself in his later writings, as the water must reflect the change in the heavens when the clouds roll away and the stars burst out of the depths.

This first proletarian survey of the old Russian literature, is therefore, at the same time the first view of the new–of that Russian art which is filled with the proletarian socialist’ spirit. May it be given to Comrade Gorky to create many an “Epic of the Heroic Individual,” in that literature which shall be dominated by the new spirit, for which the world is ripe; and which shall reflect the relation of the proletariat to life, and whose beauty shall be to that of middle-class beauty as the glow of the all-illuminating god of day is to the pale shimmer of the moonlight.

HENRIETTA ROLAND-HOLST in Die Neue Zeit. Translated by A. M. Simons.

Note

1. This fact is expressed in many striking phenomena. In Holland, for example, where the impressionist painters have bought up the peasant houses, (with which the American millionaires so delight to adorn the walls of their homes) the miserable, dirty, airless and sunless huts of the domestic workers and the small farmers; they have forbidden the dwellers in these houses to alter them in the slightest, lest thereby the “poetry of poverty” be lost.

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v06n12-jun-1906-ISR-gog.pdf