Maurice Parijanine: Interview on "Proletarian Literature"

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While visiting Leon Trotsky at Prinkipo, I asked his opinion on "proletarian literature," after acquainting him with the debates provoked by certain quarrelsome writers in the West It would, I trust, be absurd and inappropriate to have to insist upon Trotsky's right to represent the revolutionary tradition. Like it or not, his place in history is established. As a participant in the great Russian Revolution, he remains triumphant even when banished. As a writer he fulfills his task as a representative of the proletariat with rare clarity and firmness.

He began by telling me that his work scarcely left him time to keep abreast of literary movements, even those calling themselves "proletarian." Consequently he didn't feel qualified to take a position on the matter. But later, having taken sufficient time to reflect upon it, he gave me a series of documents, both long and short. All that remains for me is to present them scrupulously. The reader will find here an interview that was spread out over two weeks. It came into my hands from the second floor, where Trotsky lives, to the ground floor where he had lodged me.

The following is Leon Trotsky's text:

"My attitude toward proletarian culture is expressed in my book Literature and Revolution. To counterpose proletarian culture to bourgeois culture is incorrect or only partially correct The bourgeois regime, and, consequently, bourgeois culture, developed over the course of several centuries. The proletarian regime is only a short-lived regime, in transition to socialism. So long as this transitional regime (the dictatorship of the proletariat) continues to exist, the proletariat cannot create a class culture that is to any degree complete. It can only fashion the elements of a socialist culture. The task of the proletariat is not to create a proletarian culture, but to produce a socialist culture on the basis of a classless society."

I reply to Trotsky that while he is certainly correct to dissociate the notion of culture from class attitudes, this distinction is only useful in reference to an as-yet-undetermined date in the future Meanwhile it is conceivable that the working class, in its period of struggle for the conquest of power and the emancipation of all categories of workers, could concern itself with creating, even with insufficient means, a distinctive provisional culture precisely suited to the needs of the revolutionary struggle. It would be a culture of undefined duration, strictly limited to contemporary societies — but is this culture not necessary?

"Yes," replies Trotsky, "and please emphasize that I would be the last to scorn the creative attempts of an artistic or more generally cultural nature that happen to arise within the revolutionary movement. I only meant to say that the results of these attempts cannot be definitive. … I will try to provide you with a more precise formulation."

I receive another document from Trotsky. It is an excerpt from a letter dated November 24, 1928, that he wrote to a friend from a deportation center. The fact that Trotsky gave me a copy of this document more than three years after it was written shows that he adheres rigorously to an opinion which our French "proletarian" writers will not accept without bitterness.

Let us read it:

"Dear friend, I received the very interesting wall newspaper and the issue of Oktyabr containing the article of Serafimovich These curiosities of bourgeois belles lettres believe that they are called upon to create a 'proletarian' literature. What they mean by that, very obviously, is a second- or third-rate petty-bourgeois forgery. One would be just as correct in saying that margarine is 'proletarian butter.' Good old Engels perfectly characterized these gentlemen, especially in commenting on the French 'proletarian' writer Vallès. Engels wrote to Bernstein, August 17, 1884: "There is no reason for you to be so complimentary about Vallès He is a deplorable literary windbag, or rather one with literary pretensions, who represents absolutely nothing in himself. For lack of talent he has gone over to the most extremist elements and has become a writer "with a cause" in order to put over his rotten literature’ [the emphasis here is Trotsky's — M. P.]. Our classics were ruthless in such matters, but the epigones make 'proletarian literature' a beggar's knapsack in which they gather crumbs from the bourgeois table. And whoever is unwilling to accept these scraps for proletarian literature is called a 'capitulator.' Ah! Those vulgar personages! Those windbags! Those disgusting people! This literature is even worse than the malaria that's beginning to run rampant here again. …"

This outburst will scandalize the good souls in the revolutionary circles where the author of L'Insurgé passes for a literary saint But what can I do? It so happens that Engels, one of our classics, actually wields the cudgel. His disciple and continuator simply seizes it to destroy the reputation of an anarchist writer whose unsoundness we suspected without being too willing to admit it.

A little later I use this written conversation as a pretext to question Trotsky on the manufacturers of the propaganda plays that furnish our soirées ouvrières [workers' evenings]. He tells me he knows nothing about them.

I also ask him about Mr. Henri Barbusse and Le Monde. In Trotsky's eyes, Mr. Barbusse and his literary entourage simply don't exist. I had hoped so.

Suddenly, Leon Davidovich, still seeking to clarify his thinking, informs me that some curious works of Engels concerning Ibsen, never before published, have just been released.

Two mediocre German writers who once belonged to the extreme left wing of the Social Democracy and later became conservatives and fascists had initiated a polemic on the social value of Ibsen, whom they declared a reactionary petty bourgeois. Engels, invited to take part in the polemic, began by stating that lack of time and the complexity of the question made it impossible for him to go to the heart of the matter. Nonetheless, he wished to indicate that in his opinion Ibsen, a bourgeois writer, had exercised a progressive influence. In our epoch, declared Engels, we have learned nothing from literature if not from Ibsen and the great Russian novelists. The German writers are philistines, cowardly wretches, and mediocrities because German bourgeois society has been late in developing. However, Ibsen, a spokesman for the Norwegian bourgeoisie (which for the moment is a progressive element outstripping even the evolution of its own small country) has an enormous historical importance, both in and outside his country. For one thing, he shows Europe and the world the necessity of the social emancipation of women. As Marxists we cannot ignore that. We must make a distinction between the progressive bourgeois thinking of Ibsen and the reactionary, cowardly thinking of the German bourgeoisie. The dialectic obliges us to do so.

It was more or less in those terms that Trotsky passed Engels's reflections on to me. I was unable to take notes at the time. We were eating dinner.

On April 2, communicating from his rooms to the ground floor, Trotsky sent me this message:

"Comrade Parijanine — to avoid misunderstandings on the question of literature and proletarian culture, I would like to emphasize a point that is substantially understood by any Marxist but carefully blurred by the Stalinist bureaucracy and many others. Even under capitalism we must of course do everything to raise the cultural level of the working masses. And that includes, in particular, concern for their literary level. The party of the proletariat must consider the artistic needs of young workers with the greatest attention, sustaining and guiding their efforts. The creation of circles of promising worker writers can, if well conducted, give entirely profitable results. But important as this area of work is, it will inevitably remain confined within narrow limits. A new literature and culture cannot be created by isolated individuals arising from the oppressed classes. It can only be created by the whole class, the entire people, once they have freed themselves from oppression. To violate historical proportions — which in the present case would mean to overestimate the possibilities of proletarian culture and proletarian literature — tends to distract attention from revolutionary problems in order to bring it to bear on cultural problems. It detaches young worker writers or 'apprentice' writers from their own class. It corrupts them morally, all too often making them second-class imitators with pretensions to an illusory calling. It is against this, and only this, in my opinion, that we must lead a relentless struggle."

In short, Trotsky calls for an authentic culture and rejects mediocre imitation — the flat, tasteless bread of the spirit, that bankrupt caricature of art, that miserable music-hall propaganda, that "prole" theater, those countless sentimental and "philosophical" horrors that the workers' organizations poison themselves with. Trotsky feels equally hostile toward the experimenters in "revolutionary art" — kindly sent our way by a "sympathizing" bourgeoisie irreparably satisfied or distracted by small eccentricities of style and staging. In a word, Trotsky scorns fugitives from the proletariat who, as artists living by their craft, pretend to remain "of the people," claiming to scorn and transform the bourgeois culture that celebrates them, if only for its own distraction.

Culture, the general disposition of societies to work and bear fruit in a certain way, is not improvised. Marxist doctrine holds that the new society will take in everything of value that remains from the old society; the revolutionary is far from denying the rights and duties of succession. It is always the task of a victorious class to impose a new culture, enriched and completed in its detail with the passage of time. But if new is truly new, if the present is the future, it nevertheless contains an enormous admixture of the past A collaboration of all the popular forces awakened by the revolution is needed, Trotsky thinks, to create the new while preserving the heritage.

In Trotsky's view, as faithfully as I can interpret it, culture is the unified expression of the development of the working class, of the collective power that has already crystallized but which reveals itself only through the revolution. Marxists recognize the stability and the constitution of the species, the continuity of its responses to daily needs which is so constant and consequently so changing. This is what permanent revolution means. The two contradictory sides of this term affirm the highest law of nature that we know.

Trotsky, however, still worried that I might misrepresent his thinking. Along with the preceding letter, he sent me the following communication:

"It is necessary to define what is understood by proletarian literature. Works dealing with the life of the working class constitute a certain part of bourgeois literature. It is sufficient to recall Germinal The same considerations apply even if such works are imbued with socialist tendencies and their authors happen to have arisen from a working-class milieu. Those who speak of proletarian literature, counterposing it to bourgeois literature, evidently have in mind not several works but a totality of artistic creation that, to their way of thinking, constitutes an element of a new, 'proletarian' culture This implies that in capitalist society the proletariat would be capable of creating a new proletarian culture and a new proletarian literature. Unless the proletariat experiences a spectacular cultural upsurge, it is impossible to speak of a proletarian culture and literature, for in the last analysis culture is created by the masses and not by individuals. If capitalism offered such possibilities to the proletariat, it would no longer be capitalism. There would no longer be any reason to overthrow it.

"To portray a new, proletarian culture within the confines of capitalism is to be a reformist utopian, to believe that capitalism offers an unlimited perspective of improvement.

"The task of the proletariat is not to create a new culture within capitalism, but rather to overthrow capitalism for a new culture Of course certain artistic works can contribute to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. Talented workers can enter the ranks of distinguished writers. But there is still a great distance between this and 'proletarian literature'

"Under capitalism the essential task of the proletariat is the revolutionary struggle for the conquest of power. After this conquest, the task is to build a socialist society and a socialist culture I remember a short conversation with Lenin — one of our last — on these topics. Lenin demanded insistently that I come out in the press against Bukharin and other theoreticians of a 'proletarian culture.' In this exchange he expressed himself almost precisely as follows: 'To the extent that a culture is proletarian, it is not yet a culture To the extent that a culture exists, it is already no longer proletarian.' His thinking is completely clear: once the proletariat has come to power, the higher it raises its own culture, the more this culture ceases to be proletarian, dissolving itself into socialist culture

"In the USSR, the creation of a proletarian literature is proclaimed an official task. On the other hand, we are told that in the course of the next five-year period the USSR will be transformed into a classless society. But in a classless society it is obvious that only a literature without a class character — therefore not proletarian — can exist. Clearly, there is a qualitative difference between the terms.

"The leading role of the 'fellow travelers' in literature corresponds, to a certain degree, to the transitional regime in the USSR. The preponderance of the 'fellow travelers' is also facilitated by the fact that the bureaucratic regime stifles the autonomous creative tendencies of the proletariat The works of less gifted 'fellow travelers' who distinguish themselves by the flexibility of their spines are presented as models of proletarian literature. Among the 'fellow travelers' there are a certain number of real talents, though they still drain needed resources. But the sole talent of the Serafimoviches is mimicry.

"The crude mechanical tutelage exercised by the Stalinist bureaucracy on all forms of spiritual creation must be liquidated. This is the indispensable condition for raising the literary and cultural level of the young proletarian elements in the USSR to the path of socialist culture."

It was a question of literary technique that brought me to Prinkipo. Trotsky knew how much I respected him as a fighter for the proletarian cause and the illustrious organizer of the victories of October. He knew that I considered him one of the greatest men of our time. He had no need of crudely flattering confidences, and we didn't even discuss his politics. If my thought and feeling had obliged me to give him my full views, I would have done so, and I would so testify. My declaration would, I know, have no importance for the revolutionary movement. This I consider one of the reasons to abstain from reflections along those lines.

The specific purpose of my visit and stay was to clear up a translation of considerable length over which a difference had arisen between the author and me.

As one can easily imagine, during the long hours of work together we were led to discussions of which some record is worth preserving because of the historic position of my partner in conversation.

I believe that Leon Trotsky, as a writer, uses methods whose yield is very uneven. He acknowledges having edited or dictated certain of his numerous works with the sole concern of expressing his thought as rapidly and clearly as possible. If his temperament explodes with images or surprising metaphors that "correct" Russian does not always easily render, he is unconcerned. Above all, he deliberately uses current political terminology and doesn't worry about repetitions. He cares indifferently for this or that version, judging that the end is attained if his ideas have hit the point aimed at. I know of a book that he insisted be published immediately despite unquestionable imperfections in the translation — and he told me: "It must appear thus. The style, in this case, is unimportant."

But when Leon Trotsky, this man of action, wishes to erect his literary monument, he is quite different. He has written and he has said that he hesitated a long time between the careers of engineer and writer before becoming the revolutionary we know. In several periods of his life he has demonstrated a calling as a "man of letters." With the greatest care he constructs books whose high artistic quality no one would deny: 1905, Lenin, My Life, and now, his History of the Russian Revolution.

"Ah, but it is difficult to write!" he told me.

Trotsky's manuscripts are immense sheets filled with as much paste as ink.

"My work is not advancing rapidly … no more rapidly than yours. …"

Worth noting here is the extreme tact of Leon Trotsky. He comes to see me: "You may have thought that I was reproaching you for working slowly. No. That was not at all my intention. I know what you are doing. …"

But he sometimes becomes indignant when I claim to defend our French syntax against flagrant violations.

I had written a sentence whose construction was schematically shaped as follows: "Comme il m'avait dit ceci, que d'autre part il agissait de telle manière et qu'enfin l’idée qu'il se faisait. …" ("Since he had told me this, since on the other hand he was acting in such a way, and, finally, since the idea that he was developing. …")

"Ah! Comrade Parijanine, why all those que's?"

"Que is regularly substituted for comme in a series of subordinate clauses. …"

"Ah! comrade, comrade! … look for something else! … take away these que's!”

"The syntax. …"

"Yes, the syntax! The Académie!… But it is pure pedantry," cries Trotsky. (He fidgets in his chair, his irritation unfeigned, his expressive fingers warning me.) "Your que's! Don't you know that Flaubert detested the que's? Just wait! When we make the revolution in your country, your que's…

I lowered my head: "Yes, perhaps. … But the revolution has not yet taken place…

Trotsky, good-natured and discouraged: "Well, let's not mention it any more. … Leave them, your que's. … But I'll make up for it soon. … You'll see! ”

And the battle continues.

Trotsky admires the writing of Flaubert and … of Pascal. Yes, Blaise Pascal, author of apologetics for Christianity. The materialist writer relished Pascal's quick and crisp formulas, the explosive strength that breaks the copious and methodical flow of French prose Trotsky does not like the oratorical flourish, the "padded” (according to him) development; skill in this seems to him a weakness.

He teases me somewhat ironically:

"You write like Bossuet, comrade' …"

"Ha, ha, that wouldn't be bad at all, if I could believe you! …"

But did he not then become impatient when he senses the rhythmic recitation of Flaubert? No, probably not, because he found in Flaubert, independent of the rhythm, the extreme vigor of contrasts.

These preferences characterize not Pascal and Flaubert, but Trotsky himself. They indicate his affinities as a writer. What is more, in revealing his temperament, they in no way indicate his competence as a critic. They demonstrate only his originality as a man made for battle and the surprise of impulsive formulations.

It is nonetheless true that Trotsky's opinion of socialist culture in general and so-called proletarian literature in particular is of the first importance. For it determines exactly the relations between incomplete elements: on the one hand, artists of necessity bound in the pay of the bourgeoisie; on the other hand, the miserable cultural level of the proletariat, a level that the works of the so-called proletarian writers do not even attain.

There lies the tragic aspect of a situation that will change only with the revolution. And it is this aspect that Leon Trotsky has sharply and clearly raised.