Original Bolshevik and Lenin’s personal secretary, Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich recalls conversations with him over art.

‘Recollections of Lenin and Art’ by V. Bonch-Bruyevitch from International Literature. No. 2. 1934.

Vladimir Ilyich had no free time to give to the theatre. His political, social, and scientific activities so occupied him that when he did have even a little time to rest he usually preferred to go off on walks, somewhere or other in the mountains or fields.

When we lived in Geneva, I remember one instance when Vladimir Ilyich went very willingly to a workers’ theatre. It was the first of May. The Weavers by Hauptmann was being presented in the workers’ district. It should be added that this play of the German dramatist had been translated in 1895 by Anna Ilyinichna Elizarova-Ulyanova, (Lenin’s sister-Ed.) and edited by Vladimir Ilyich, and given to print in the illegal People’s Will printing house which had published his pamphlet On Fines, and from which had issued his Working Day and King Hunger.

Extremely interesting to note that considering the comparatively small output of this illegal publishing house where every line of type and every page of print had to be carefully economized, Vladimir Ilyich insisted that they put out in separate booklets of about 100 pages copies of this play about the life of the German weavers. Such tremendous importance Vladimir Ilyich attributed to the artistic voice of the stage…This play he particularly recommended to be reprinted many times, as was done by us in 1905, and after the revolution in 1917.

“A preface to Hauptmann’s Weavers,” Vladimir Ilyich once said, “should be added in order to give the proper perspective to the conditions of the weavers among us before the revolution and after.”

“We must take advantage,” he added, “of every opportunity to emphasize the social meaning of our revolution.”

Therefore, Vladimir Ilyich willingly went to see the play in the workers’ theatre in Geneva.

Vladimir Ilyich loved, particularly when he was living in Paris during his second immigration, to attend the concerts in the workers’ districts, and to listen to the favorite singers of the working class in the workers’ cafes. They knew how to reflect in their songs the most keen political incidents of contemporary life, which at that time incensed the French proletariat. And not infrequently they sang the songs of the old poets of the working class who had created their powerful hymns to the accompaniment of the salvos of the Paris commune.

When Vladimir Ilyich, after the February revolution, returned to Russia, he gladly took part often in every kind of demonstration, in the city folk festivals and celebrations. But he rarely managed to get much time to visit the theatre. Nevertheless, several times he visited the Art Theatre, to whose creative activity he attached great importance.

Occasionally, Vladimir Ilyich went to concerts, to which different organizations invited him. He was very critical of the programs which were being presented to the broad masses, and pointed out the worthlessness of certain numbers included in the program which he considered unsuitable for presentation. He could not tolerate at all the cracked decadents, separated from life, as he termed that type of art, be it in sculpture,—where he positively denounced the cubistic inventions of Bakunin,—or a reading from the stage, or even in painting, depicting people in unnatural poses, incorrect figures, and florid colors.

“What the devil is it!,” indignantly exclaimed Vladimir Ilyich, looking at a picture of some modern artist in which was presented an episode from the life of the workers at a large plant—a group of workers performing some complicated manipulations with hot steel dummies.

“Look at those thick necks; they are positively not normal, at least three times longer than the neck of the usual man! And on this neck you see a little head, slanted back like a monkey’s, and a skull with the narrow dimensions of a lion. Look at those hands reaching below the knees, and the tremendous fingers, and at those twisted legs with enormous feet, and at all those other incorrect impossible parts of the body. All is out of proportion, inharmonious, repellent! Can you not see in this description of the working masses, the degradation of the artist himself? Perhaps he does not want to, or perhaps he cannot picture workers differently.”

“In reality, it is nothing like this. Go to the factory. When I am there, I always admire,” said Vladimir Ilyich with increasing intensity, “I always admire the magnificent sturdiness, the special manliness of those who have just come from behind the machines or the lathes. Notice their intelligent, fine, and expressive faces, their particular assurance, that steadfastness of glance, that determination to achieve whatever they have once decided to undertake. What a firm, assured walk in these strong people! Among this tremendous mass, which infects you when you look at them, say, when delivering a talk, you feel there are none of those depolarized people. Here are only those who have mastered with pride the full seriousness of the new class, definitely creating a new world. Why is not this phase represented on canvas or in marble? Why is it necessary to mutilate him and present him in such a manner that it becomes heavy, horrible and often disgraceful to look at it? Is it really only because the artist cannot and! is not able to draw the real, beautiful body at the representatives of this powerful class, and must conceal his inability in angularity?

“At the same time, observe: alongside of the decadent reed piping, which we will not take into account, you will see that the representatives of the bourgeois classes, no matter how dull their eyes, no matter what the expression on their faces, always draw the so-called full image of a man. The artist dare not appear on the market with canvasses which present the bourgeoisie as he presents the workers. Against this we must seriously fight. We need no sweet pictures. We want the truth of life. The kind of truth Kasatkin gave us in his ‘Coal Diggers.’ The kind of stuff they are drawing now, one can hardly look at.

“I think there will come a time when a new generation of the young will grow up, brave, proud, developed, and knowing. They will not stand for these kind of pictures; they will go to the expositions and as in ancient Greece and Rome will demand the removing of those pictures and sculptures which will not be of great dimensions, which will not answer the insistent demands of a developing taste. Then the artist will feel at once the influence of the broad social masses looking at his works. Our shortcoming now is that the masses keep quiet. Looking at the works of art, they do not give vent to their opinions.”

There once came to my apartment in the Kremlin the now well known artist Deni, whose caricatures at that time were just beginning to appear and which I at once recognized as talented. Talking things over with him intimately, I began to like him all the more, as I saw in him great possibilities, and realized that the difficult economic position in which he was, interfered with the development of his undoubted genius. He had brought many of his drawings. I asked him to leave them with me so that I could show them to Vladimir Ilyich. With great joy, he left the portfolio with me.

At our first meeting, I told Vladimir Ilyich all I knew about Deni, and about his difficult circumstances. I said that he was just beginning to be printed. Vladimir Ilyich answered that he had noticed his caricatures. I then showed him the entire set. Looking over the drawings very carefully, Vladimir Ilyich said:

“Good, quite unusual…”

When he came to one of Deni’s large drawings in which the representatives of capitalism were breathing heavily, crushing one another in the fight for the dollar, Vladimir Ilyich said:

“It is done very well, but the idea is not his. I remember…” and as Vladimir Ilyich tried to recall where, he placed his hand over his right eye, as he always did in such instances. “I remember this drawing. It was done by some artist in England, only I cannot recall his name. This picture aroused the fury of the bourgeois press. It is a good caricature. Excellent that Deni copied it, and perhaps changed the subject somewhat. Only, you see they are not our types. It is too much a European drawing. If he had only drawn it in our shades, if he had only pictured our merchants, nobility, and clergy, it would have made marvelous propaganda for the broad masses. We could then have issued many copies; it would undoubtedly have had a large circulation among us. That would be interesting, a contemporary drawing which for many would supplant the cheap print. Such a picture of Deni’s drawn for the masses would be in painting what the poetry of Demyan Bedny is in literature. And we badly need both of them.”

“By the way,” Vladimir Ilyich asked me, “have you been following the growth of the contemporary political drawing…We must not let it escape our attention and our influence. It is an important political means of mass education—a good drawing done by such an artist as Deni, with a caption by some good satirist like Demyan Bedny, would produce a decided effect. We must immediately eliminate from everywhere the kind of stuff that Silinov does, which not only he, but many others, issue in tens of millions.”

I told Vladimir Ilyich that the political drawing had already made its appearance, but rarely, and at the not too successfully. The distribution, of course, was not as great as we should have liked. But more attention was already paid to it. K.C. Eremeev had been put in charge of it and one could rely on him to carry it out successfully.

I related to Vladimir Ilyich how, when doing ethnological research, I had come across a peasant’s trunk in which all sorts of pictures had been collected and pasted on the cover. Candy labels, clippings from the papers, soap ads, all had been carefully pasted on. It would have been interesting to see how the peasant women and their children were in delight at these “exhibitions of art.”

Vladimir Ilyich was very much interested in my tale.

“You see,” he said, “what a tremendous demand, even among the most common readers, there is for artistic creation and artistic drawings. It is an interesting fact, it emphasizes how great is the need for artistic literature, for artistic representation in painting, sculpture, on the stage, in art in general, for the broadest masses. Just imagine what will be when our schools expand and develop. It will be necessary to reproduce the Tretyakovsky Gallery in millions of copies, and we must do it. We must organize a commission to be on the lookout for the best works of our artists, and we should reproduce them in color. Why is it that I have seen nowhere the portraits of our writers which our artists have done so well? And why do we see nowhere the plastic arts, which as you know are issued abroad in black and white? And do not forget that the next step is the world famous picture galleries. We must show Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Murillo, Rubens, and the other great world classics to the broad masses of the people. It should be done in the best reproductions in color and be widely distributed everywhere.”

Again and again he emphasized the necessity of art—of painting, sculpture, the theatre—in the education of the masses, and in the understanding of the highest level of that culture, which is sure to flourish in the socialist fatherland more magnificently than anywhere else in the world.

Translated From the Russian by Albert Lewis

Literature of the World Revolution/International Literature was the journal of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, founded in 1927, that began publishing in the aftermath of 1931’s international conference of revolutionary writers held in Kharkov, Ukraine. Produced in Moscow in Russian, German, English, and French, the name changed to International Literature in 1932. In 1935 and the Popular Front, the Writers for the Defense of Culture became the sponsoring organization. It published until 1945 and hosted the most important Communist writers and critics of the time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/international-literature/1934-n02-IL.pdf