Translated material
“Herzen went further than Hegel”
Lenin on the global significance of Russian literature, the machinations of liberals and libraries
“Gorky” continues a series of materials dedicated to Lenin. Historian Alexander Shubin spoke about the evolution of the biographies of the leader of the Russian revolution, and today we selected Lenin’s own thoughts about party literature, the distortion of the Russian language and why Leo Tolstoy is funny, from the anthology “Lenin on Culture and Art,” prepared in 1938 by Mikhail Lifshitz.About the working intelligentsia
Every vital working-class movement has put forward such leaders of the workers, its Proudhons and Vaillants, Weitlings and Bebels. And our Russian labor movement promises not to lag behind the European one in this regard. At a time when educated society is losing interest in honest, illegal literature, a passionate desire for knowledge and for socialism is growing among the workers, real heroes stand out among the workers, who - despite the ugly conditions of their lives, despite the stultifying hard labor in the factory - they find in themselves so much character and willpower to study, study and study and develop themselves into conscious social democrats, “working intelligentsia”.
About the kulaks
“We do not consider, of course, the influence of literature to be completely powerless [writes the anonymous author of the article “New shoots in the folk field” in volume CCXLII of “Domestic Notes”], but for this it must: firstly, better understand its purpose and not limit ourselves to just (sic!!!) educating the kulaks, but also awaken public opinion.”
Here you have petit bourgeois in its purest form! If literature educates the kulaks, it is because it poorly understands its purpose!! And these gentlemen are still surprised when they are called naive, when they say about them that they are romantics!
About liberals
A Russian liberal, even when he speaks to the public in a free foreign publication with a direct and open protest against the autocracy, still does not cease to feel most of all a culturalist [i.e., according to Lenin’s definition, “a supporter of legal progress without political struggle, progress on the basis of autocracy" - approx. ed.] and no, no, but he will begin to reason like a slave, or, if you want, like a legal, loyal, loyal subject.
About the party
The role of an advanced fighter can only be fulfilled by a party guided by advanced theory . And in order to at least somewhat concretely imagine what this means, let the reader remember such predecessors of Russian Social Democracy as Herzen, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and the brilliant galaxy of revolutionaries of the 70s; let him think about the worldwide significance that Russian literature is now acquiring; let... yes, that's enough!
About Herzen
In serf Russia in the 40s of the 19th century, he managed to rise to such a height that he stood on a level with the greatest thinkers of his time. He mastered Hegel's dialectic. He realized that it was the “algebra of revolution.” He went further than Hegel, to materialism, following Feuerbach. The first of the “Letters on the Study of Nature,” “Empirics and Idealism,” written in 1844, shows us a thinker who, even now, is head and shoulders above the abyss of modern empiricist naturalists and the darkness of the topics of modern philosophers, idealists and semi-idealists. Herzen came close to dialectical materialism and stopped short of historical materialism.
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When news arrived that a serf had killed a landowner for an attempt on the bride’s honor, Herzen added in “The Bell”: “And he did it superbly!”
About Chernyshevsky
It was precisely the genius of Chernyshevsky that was needed in order then, in the era of the very accomplishment of the peasant reform (when it had not yet been sufficiently illuminated even in the West), to understand with such clarity its basic bourgeois character - in order to understand that even then in Russian “society” and The “state” was dominated and ruled by social classes that were irrevocably hostile to the working people and certainly predetermined the ruin and expropriation of the peasantry. And at the same time, Chernyshevsky understood that the existence of a government covering up our antagonistic social relations is a terrible evil, especially worsening the situation of the working people.
About the literary magazine “Russian wealth”
The devil knows what it is! Some kind of penny opportunism and acts with such self-admiration! The task of literature is to collect salon gossip about evil Marxists, to bow to the government for saving the people from final ruin, to welcome people who are tired of sitting at green tables, to teach the “public” not to shun even such positions as the position of zemstvo chief... But what? am I reading? “Week” or “New Time” No, this is “Russian Wealth”, the organ of advanced Russian democrats...
About party literature
Damned time of Aesopian speeches, literary servility, slave language, ideological serfdom! The proletariat put an end to this vileness, which suffocated everything living and fresh in Rus'. <...> Literature can now, even “legally,” be 9/10 party. Literature must become party literature. In contrast to bourgeois mores, in contrast to the bourgeois entrepreneurial, merchant press, in contrast to bourgeois literary careerism and individualism, “lordly anarchism” and the pursuit of profit, the socialist proletariat must put forward the principle of party literature .
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Down with non-party writers! Down with the superhuman writers! The literary cause must become part of the general proletarian cause, the “wheel and cog” of one single, great social-democratic mechanism, set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the entire working class. Literary work must become an integral part of organized, systematic, united Social Democratic party work.
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Newspapers should become organs of various party organizations. Writers must certainly join party organizations. Publishing houses and warehouses, shops and reading rooms, libraries and various book trades - all this should become party-owned and accountable. The organized socialist proletariat must monitor all this work, control it all, and introduce into all this work, without a single exception, a living stream of living proletarian cause, thus taking away all ground from the ancient, semi-Oblomov, semi-merchant Russian principle: the writer writes, the reader reads.
About freedom
Gentlemen, bourgeois individualists, we must tell you that your talk about absolute freedom is nothing but hypocrisy. In a society based on the power of money, in a society where the masses of working people are begging and a handful of rich people are parasitizing, there cannot be real and valid “freedom”. Are you free from your bourgeois publisher, Mr. Writer? from your bourgeois public, who demand from you pornography in frames and pictures, prostitution as an “addition” to the “sacred” performing art? After all, this absolute freedom is a bourgeois or anarchist phrase (for, as a worldview, anarchism is bourgeoisism turned inside out). It is impossible to live in society and be free from society. The freedom of a bourgeois writer, artist, actress is only a disguised (or hypocritically disguised) dependence on the money bag, on bribery, on maintenance.
And we, socialists, expose this hypocrisy, tear down false signs - not in order to get non-class literature and art (this will be possible only in a socialist non-class society), but in order to hypocritically free, but in fact associated with the bourgeoisie, Literature must be contrasted with truly free literature openly associated with the proletariat.
About Tolstoy
Tolstoy is ridiculous, like a prophet who discovered new recipes for the salvation of mankind - and therefore the foreign and Russian “Tolstoyites” who wanted to turn into dogma precisely the weakest side of his teaching are completely miserable. Tolstoy is great as an exponent of those ideas and those sentiments that had developed among millions of the Russian peasantry at the time of the onset of the bourgeois revolution in Russia. Tolstoy is original, because the totality of his views, harmful as a whole, express precisely the features of our revolution, as a peasant bourgeois revolution.
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Leo Tolstoy said shortly before his death, and said with regret characteristic of the worst sides of “Tolstoyism,” that the Russian people unusually quickly “learned to make a revolution.” Our only regret is that the Russian people did not study this science.
About libraries
If the French bourgeois, even before the war, learned, in order to make money, to publish novels for the people not for 3 ½ francs in the form of a lord's little book, but for 10 centimes (i.e. 35 times cheaper, 4 kopecks at the pre-war exchange rate) in the form of a proletarian newspaper , then why don’t we - on the second step from capitalism to communism - learn to do the same? Why don't we learn, by doing the same, to achieve in one year - even with the current poverty - to give the people 2 copies for each of the 50,000 libraries and reading rooms, all the necessary textbooks and all the necessary classics of world literature and modern science , modern technology?
Let's learn.
About Russian language
I confess that if the use of foreign words unnecessarily embitters me (because it hinders our influence on the masses), then some mistakes of those writing in newspapers can completely infuriate me. For example, they use the word “wake up” in the sense of exciting, disturbing, waking up. But the French word “bouder” means to be angry, to sulk. Therefore, to wake up actually means “to be angry”, “to sulk”. To adopt the French-Nizhny Novgorod word usage means to adopt the worst from the worst representatives of the Russian landowner class, who studied in French, but, firstly, did not complete their studies, and, secondly, distorted the Russian language.
Isn't it time to declare war on the distortion of the Russian language?