We publish here an excerpt from Literature and Revolution (1932) by Victor Serge. Serge joined the Bolshevik Party in 1919, at the height of the Russian Civil War, and later joined the Left Opposition against Stalin’s regime. For this he was imprisoned twice throughout his life. Still, he managed to write many works of fiction, poetry, history, and—as seen here—literary criticism. This excerpt, which constitutes part of Serge’s struggle against Stalinist falsification, stands as a testament to the genuine Marxist interpretation of art.
The Marxist view of art was one of the many aspects of Marxism that was mangled by the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. The Stalinists justified a frenzy of artistic censorship with the argument that art can only be valuable to the working class if it promotes communism. In other words, art’s only purpose is to serve as political propaganda.
Genuine Marxists have always defended the idea that art has much more to offer humanity than that. This is why Leon Trotsky, a key Marxist theoretician, argued that “a work of art should in the first place be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art.”
In the below excerpt—written while the Stalinist bureaucracy was consolidating its power in the Soviet Union—Victor Serge defends the true Marxist view of the role of the artist and art.
Excerpt from Victor Serge, Literature and Revolution
Writers play an ideological role. One could say there are two types of writers: those who entertain the rich and those who speak for the masses. Because real life is always contradictory, the two often inhabit the same writer, but then one of them has to prevail. It would be entirely false to conclude that politics then permeates or has to permeate every literary work, which would lead us almost directly to exalting the problem play (a work of art composed for the purpose of illustrating and defending a philosophical, moral, or political idea – Ed.). “Thesis-driven works”, in the usual sense of the word, are often, by definition, works of inferior quality and therefore inadequate for their purpose. Confusing agitation, propaganda, and literature is detrimental—to an equal extent—to all three of these modes of intellectual activity and social action (although they can be powerfully combined in various ways in specific cases). The novel’s unique value lies in the fact that it offers something other than political slogans or demands: ways of feeling, of living one’s interior life, of understanding others, of understanding oneself, of loving, of pursuing one’s passion; it goes without saying, let us repeat, that these ways of living, which, when elevated to consciousness, take the form of ideology, necessarily correspond to the written or unwritten creed of certain social classes; but this is in an indirect and distant way, seemingly vague, invisible to anyone other than the analyst. The Russians have a somewhat cursory saying, but it is striking: “The writer is an organizer of the psyche.” Poor organizer indeed is he who announces: “Come now, I will teach you how to think and feel!” First of all, it’s a bit pretentious; and then, leaving aside the question of self-esteem, you would have to be quite deprived of critical thinking faculties for this little statement not to make you suspicious. Inferiority of thesis-driven literature.
Another aspect of this inferiority concerns the writer himself. Bound by his thesis, he knows where he must lead you, and therefore where he must go. He is no longer free to unleash his creative faculties and follow them with his eyes closed—closed to the political contingencies of the day, for example, but open, wonderfully open to the vast universe, like the eyes of Rimbaud! The mechanism of artistic creation is far from being perfectly understood. It is certain that, for many artists at least, the effort to completely subordinate creative activity, in which a number of unconscious and subconscious factors come into play, to a rigorously conscious direction would result in an unfortunate impoverishment of both the work and the personality. Would the book regain in clarity of ideas that which it loses in spontaneity, human complexity, profound sincerity, and rich contradictions? In some cases, perhaps. But the charm and effectiveness of literary works come precisely from an intimate connection between the reader and the author, a connection on a level where the purely intellectual language of ideas is no longer sufficient, a kind of communion that can only be achieved through works of art. By weakening the means of this communion, we have weakened everything; I do not see what is gained, although I understand why a politician prefers novels based on the points of his political platform to all others. Such politicians are very short-sighted, characterized by their inability to subordinate their interests to broader and more lasting ones; I would gladly contrast with him the proletarian politician, for whom a powerful and living work, imbued with a revolutionary spirit, even if diffuse, a work even tainted with everything that petty doctrinaires so bitterly denounce as “ideological deviations,” is worth more, is more useful to us than another that conforms to all the requirements of propaganda but is deprived of that inexpressible, that indefinable element that grips you, stirs you to your core, and ignites within you the small, beneficial flame of deep feeling.
One example: Helen Grace Carlisle’s novel Mother’s Cry, translated into French by Magdeleine Paz as Chair de ma chair. I know of few recent works cast in such pure metal; it reminds me of the tragic bronzes of Constantin Meunier, when you follow her step by step, expressed in language that is all the more compelling because it has all the clumsiness and poverty of the real language of a poor woman in New York, when you follow the unfolding of her destiny to the end, you feel something of the inhuman weight of skyscrapers on your shoulders. I showed this book to a young doctrinaire who, alas, was something of a politician, and he replied, in essence: “Note that this book is petty bourgeois in spirit; American capitalism is not condemned in it; a tone of resignation mixed with hope prevails at the end, attesting that the author has not shed all her illusions about American democracy; nor have her characters found their way to the party… etc., etc.” One must be very narrow-minded not to see that, by refraining from explicitly condemning American capitalism, and even showing that this system succeeds in shaping the soul of the exploited so perfectly that they can no longer conceive of anything outside it, the writer reveals—perhaps in spite of her very real democratic illusions—with unparalleled force the hold that American civilization has over the exploited.
