Anatoly Lunacharsky’s On Literature and Art gathers essays, lectures and polemics written across the first decades of Soviet power by the Bolshevik regime’s first People’s Commissar of Education. The pieces range from programmatic statements on Marxist criticism to long studies of individual writers — Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Blok, Gorky, Mayakovsky — alongside essays on foreign figures such as Shakespeare, Swift, Heine and Proust. Written from the vantage of a working revolutionary who was also a working critic, they argue about what literature is for, and how a society building socialism should judge it.
“No matter how much slag and mistakes there are in what we have done, we are proud of our role in history and face the judgement of future generations without fear, without a shadow of doubt as to their verdict.”
The book’s central claim is that criticism cannot be a neutral science of texts. Lunacharsky inherits Plekhanov’s insistence that art be explained sociologically — through class structure and class psychology, with content weighed before form — but he refuses to stop at explanation. A Marxist critic, in his account, is a fighter and a builder, and evaluation is part of the job: what aids the proletariat’s development is good, what harms it is evil. The essays keep returning to the question of how much conscious direction a new culture may legitimately receive, and how far the critic may speak of what literature should be.
From the Theses to the Poets
The Volume and Its Editor’s Frame
Progress Publishers issued this collection in Moscow, translated by Avril Pyman and Fainna Glagoleva and edited by K. M. Cook—a second, revised edition following a 1965 first printing. The contents map three territories: theoretical and ideological writings, among them the “Theses on the Problems of Marxist Criticism” and a contemporary evaluation of Chernyshevsky’s ethics and aesthetics; essays on Russian art from Pushkin and Dostoyevsky through Blok, Gorky and Mayakovsky; and essays on foreign art reaching from Bacon and Shakespeare’s characters to Swift, Heine, Wagner, Proust and Shaw. The compiler presents Lunacharsky (1873–1933) as the Soviet Republic’s first People’s Commissar of Education, a friend of Lenin, ideologist, journalist and orator—the last great critic of pre-revolutionary Russian culture and the first of socialist culture, a bridge between two worlds. Of some fifteen hundred articles only a fraction appears here, chosen for the cultural weight of the figures discussed and for what they reveal of the critic; nothing is abridged, and dates of writing or first publication are supplied.
The Theses: Criticism as a Fighting Discipline
The “Theses” open on a decisive moment: a new life is being built, literature increasingly reflects it, and may yet come to shape it morally. Class contrasts have narrowed but the country is not classless—peasant and proletarian differences persist, old attitudes and European influence linger, remnants of the ruling classes survive, and a bourgeoisie flourishes under the New Economic Policy. More dangerous than openly hostile currents is the petty-bourgeois attitude to daily life, which has seeped into the proletariat and even into Communists; the class struggle therefore takes subtler forms, and literature becomes correspondingly important, emitting hostile tendencies both conscious and unconscious—passive, pessimistic, individualist. Marxist criticism bears a heavy charge: forming the new man.
Criticism must be sociological in the spirit of Marx and Lenin, and the old line between critic and literary historian loses its force, though evaluation remains the critic’s work. Social life is an organic whole with economic relationships and forms of labour decisive; for a single writer, Plekhanov’s principle holds—art depends only insignificantly on production, and then through intermediate links, class structure and class psychology. Content chiefly determines a work’s class connection, since literature, the art of the word nearest to thought, is marked by the primacy of content over form; the critic analyses content and social essence first, then form as serving expressiveness. Yet form cannot be ignored: it is shaped by a class’s style of living, by material culture, by neighbours’ influence, by inertia or renovation, by schools and epochs; it may contradict content or break from it altogether—verbal gymnastics hiding from life—and must be socially interpreted.
Plekhanov set the Marxist as scientific sociologist against the enlightener who assigns literature aims and judges by ideals, opposing subjectivism and the aesthete’s caprice. But Marxism is also an active programme of building: the critic needs objective analysis and definite influence, for he is a fighter and builder, and evaluation matters. The criterion for content is plain—what aids the proletariat’s development and victory is good, what harms it is evil; the critic finds the work’s fundamental social trend and judges by it. This demands skill, sensitivity, talent. Works on remote-seeming questions must not be ignored, since abstract science can prove fruitful; writers cultivating virgin soil are valuable; correct judgement may emerge only through the clash of critical and reader opinion. A “second judgement” on alien or hostile works matters—knowing the foe’s attitudes and eyewitness accounts enriches knowledge, and such works should not be dismissed but assessed for their potential use in construction. Poisonous counter-revolutionary propaganda, however, calls for Marxist censorship, not criticism.
For form, it must correspond to content and yield maximum expressiveness and impact. Plekhanov’s rule—literature is the art of images, and naked ideas or propaganda harm a work—is not absolute; Saltykov-Shchedrin, Uspensky and Furmanov sin against it, and hybrid works can exist, though publicistic lumps generally leave readers cold. Originality means form merging indivisibly with idea; new content demands new form. Against it stand stereotyped form, weak form lacking language, construction or rhythm, and over-ornamentation camouflaging empty content—the formalists, representatives of bourgeois decadence. Universality, advocated by Tolstoi, matters for a mass-addressed literature; reticence, isolation, art for small circles of aesthetes should
Chernyshevsky Against the Dry Nihilist Portrait
The essay on Chernyshevsky opens by challenging the familiar image of him as a dry, prosaic nihilist. Herzen called him a bilious man; Turgenev reportedly told him, “
The Leap from Necessity to Freedom
Lunacharsky opens with Engels’s image of the leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom: once human will is organised, it gains tremendous power over mankind’s fate. Marx had stressed that man believes in gods because of confused social relationships; once society is organised, man’s destiny will be subordinate to reason. We stand at that turning-point, with the beginnings of socialist society and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Organised consciousness gains increasing, though not limitless, power—phenomena must first be analysed and correctly evaluated. Morals fall within this sphere: one can no longer say with Plekhanov that morals depend on upbringing; since society now educates through schools, press and economy, the content and method of instilling proletarian morality must be defined, transforming good into instinct. He agrees nine-tenths with Plekhanov but reaches over his head to the utopian socialists who stressed human reason and will; Marxism showed these are subject to objective laws, yet as the proletariat organises, the sphere of will and reason widens in reality. Hence Chernyshevsky’s ethics and aesthetics seem close to us, and much of Plekhanov’s criticism is no longer valid. He disagrees with Comrade Steklov that Chernyshevsky was not a utopian, and with Plekhanov that his whole system was useless; Chernyshevsky’s ideas matter to those certain of victory. He recalls Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya asking what he was doing; he mentioned preparing a lecture on Chernyshevsky at the Communist Academy. She said Vladimir Ilyich loved Chernyshevsky deeply and saw much in common with him. Lunacharsky is unsure of the commonality but affirms their closeness in calibre and character.
Pushkin’s Day
The passage then lists titles—Dostoyevsky’s “Plurality of Voices”, Taneyev and Scriabin, Alexander Blok, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Innovator—and begins “ALEXANDER PUSHKIN”: the annual “Pushkin’s Day” is excellent, Pushkin’s significance beyond assessment. He paraphrases the proverb: be born a genius, but most important is to be born at the right time. Taine held literature conditioned by race, climate and moment; Goethe said being born twenty years earlier or later would have made him different; Marxists contend personality largely reflects its time. A significant moment needs a significant individual; an epoch may fail to produce one (rare, since average artistic potential varies little), yielding interesting content but imperfect form; a great talent in an uneventful epoch yields perfect form with insignificant content. Pushkin’s epoch was dull—early spring with mist and disease—yet his predecessors were too early for the sun, and successors found the most important words already said. The classic age is not always politically brilliant; it is the first stirrings of youthful maturity of educated classes, when language is malleable and one takes from popular speech as Adam named phenomena. No one had yet expressed live, complex feeling; its natural freshness marks the classic. Later writers become epigoni, using language now ordinary, or fall into mannerism, impressionism, deformation, symbolism. Epigonous art is fearful; its giants may equal classics, yet people look back to Goethe, Mozart, Homer, Kalidasa for true beauty. Social revolution and the proletariat may refresh art, but the question is in the balance; the proletariat must renew culture in dependence on past culture—a Faustian renewal retaining memory without drag. Pushkin was the Russian spring, morning, Adam; he did for Russia what Dante and Petrarch did for Italy, the seventeenth-century giants for France, Lessing, Schiller and Goethe for Germany. He suffered because he was first, his genius blossoming in harsh climate; he had the “start” and took possession of literature’s treasures with sovereign hand, expressing the Russian soul so as to overwhelm with gratitude. Compared with Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, Pushkin’s absolute originality stands out—different from expectation. Russian literature later was marked by emotional, almost pathological pathos, devoted to ideas because of the abyss between intelligentsia and life; yet Pushkin’s work strikes one by freedom, lucidity, dancing grace, youthfulness bordering on levity—Mozart’s minuets, Raphael’s brush. Critics saying he is not Shakespeare or Goethe are not altogether right: beneath his grace lie deeps foreshadowing later literature—Mozart and Salieri, The Feast in the Time of Plague, scenes from Boris Godunov, lyrical outbursts in Yevgeny Onegin, the enigmatic Bronze Horseman—like a wide ocean with vertiginous depths. These treasures come almost by accident, like a master running over piano keys. His felicity amid unhappy life is not purely personal; he was part of Russian literature’s organic growth.
Blok the Musician
Lunacharsky’s study of Alexander Blok turns on a single claim: the poet was a musician through and through, not in any technical sense but in an emotional-dynamic apparatus of extraordinary responsiveness. Music stirred great waves of feeling in him even when no music was playing, and with no tonal outlet those waves poured into words. Goethe’s observation serves here—people with a strong inner need for art who lack plastic or musical talent become poets, describing in words the images or sounds they would rather recreate directly. Blok was more than a poet-musician: artist, sculptor, playwright, thinker. Yet his visual imagery, his thought, his renderings of passion all lag behind the musical impact of his verse, which is to some degree a substitute for music; he would likely have been happier with a composer’s gift. The musical element governs the word as the name of a specific object, dissolving sharp outlines into fluid shadows that obey the lyrical impulse.
Blok knew this himself. Recalling Verlaine’s demand for “de la musique avant toutes choses” and his advice to wring the neck of eloquence, Blok described his “prehistoric” beginnings in his mother’s family, where the word was loved and traditional literary values ruled—in Verlaine’s terms, preference went to éloquence. Only his mother, perpetually rebellious and hungry for the new, backed his leanings toward musique. To “dear, old-fashioned éloquence” he remained grateful till death, glad his literature did not begin with Verlaine or decadence.
Symbolism as Music
The heart of the matter, the author insists, is that Blok apprehended the world in terms of music. His class and epoch demanded a poet who reflected reality with blurred contours, admitting no genuine realism, emptying it of true content—seeking symbolic clues to a world beyond, or seeing reality as an opaque veil over ideal substance. That beyond offered feeble but real hope of appeal against the injustices done to a disintegrating class. Blok’s symbolism had power because his symbols were above all musical, unlike dry allegory or Steiner’s artificial system, which tyrannized the more rational, metaphysical Bely. No single Blok image stands as a complete cultural coin usable as social currency; woven into the musical torrent of his melodies, they gained extraordinary charm, hypnotic power, an illusory charge of profound significance—especially for readers seeking significance beyond real life. His meeting with Vladimir Solovyov and his followers poured oil on an already blazing fire. For the young, Bely wrote, the Blok of the first volume was unique; the “Blokites” saw a turning point in the Russian Muse’s fate—Blok raised a corner of the veil covering her face, revealed as Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of the ancient Gnostics, earthly love interwoven with religious-philosophical themes.
The Music of Being
Throughout life Blok held that the inmost essence of being is musical—not tonal but emotional and dynamic, subject to its own laws. The universe was a crust beneath which raged the fire of the musical principle controlling the outer world’s fate; human history was governed by that inner burning. From time to time the flame wavers, the crust thickens and freezes, producing a-musical epochs Blok thought empty of talent, sombre, hateful. The author notes these ideas were not exceptional: Spengler maintained something similar, elements appear in Nietzsche’s Dionysius, and similar notions pervade Scriabin and Bely. In a letter to Bely about the latter’s article “Formy Iskusstva” in Mir iskusstva (1902), which he called a revelation, Blok first clearly expounded his theory of music as the fundamental principle of being.
This philosophy, key to Blok as man and poet, is set out in his diary for spring 1919, when he was absorbed in the problem of the intelligentsia and humanism. He felt humanism was dead and the intelligentsia had outlived its time; circumstances constrained him to place hopes in the masses’ ability to build a new culture. The entry for March 27 reads: the summit of humanism is Schiller—a broad dusty sunbeam through a rose window illumining an enormous baroque cathedral, the Europe of the Enlightenment; Schiller is close to us because he last united art with life and science, and man with music. Immediately after him man and music parted: mankind, of whom the Marquis of Posa sang, went the ways of statecraft, politics, ethics, law, science. Art and music flowed on along a course of their own; “Kant the Terrible established the limits of cognition,” and in response come licking the first flaming tongues of music which in another hundred years will consume the whole European world with fire.
The Double and the Metal Poet
Mayakovsky’s inner struggle, the argument runs, was characteristic of transitional times; it would have been a miracle had he not fought his way forward and killed the “inner soft petty bourgeois,” the sentimental lyric. A true proletarian poet—a “Lenin in poetry”—might follow that road, but Mayakovsky was not such a poet, which is why his battles and self-overcoming mattered so much. He succeeded in poetry: stepping “on the throat of my own song” meant stepping on the throat of the songs his double wanted to sing, a need he felt especially after joining RAPP. He liked his double, sometimes wondered whether he himself was the double, yet stepped on his throat anyway; the double killed him in revenge, being apparently stronger in private life, though it had only mixed “a certain amount of slag” into him. Asked why Mayakovsky took his life, the author declines to explain, citing the poet’s request not to rummage about in his life. Only a general approach is possible: Mayakovsky feared the double neither in politics, nor poetry, nor on the high seas where he spoke by megaphone to the ship Mette, but was shipwrecked on “a little sentimental lake where the nightingale sings, the moon shines down and the boat of love sails.” There the double overcame him, and rather than live as a broken man he ended his life in his prime.
The philistines around Mayakovsky made a pact with that double, claiming it conquered him in open battle, politically and poetically; Trotsky is now the comrade of these philistines and of the double, not of the “metal Mayakovsky.” Trotsky writes that Mayakovsky’s drama lay in loving the revolution “as best he could,” but since the revolution was not a true one, his love and road were not true either—which the author mocks: how could the revolution be true if Trotsky had no part in it? Trotsky claims Mayakovsky killed himself because the revolution did not proceed according to Trotsky; had it done so, it would have blossomed in dazzling fireworks. Thus Trotsky, for his squalid, bankrupt political shop, embraces everything hostile to progressive elements of the socialist world. The immortal Mayakovsky lives on, unafraid of his double; the double died because it was very personal in nature, and even its best works will have only historical interest, while “metal” Mayakovsky’s will mark the greatest era in human history. Contemporaries must not disgrace that era by weakness; they must work at self-improvement to be worthy of it. Mayakovsky’s allies are first his books, which sing loudly, light and warm us, so that owls and bats must hide; secondly “we”—not the author and his friends, not the Communist Academy or RAPP, but the creative revolutionary vanguard of humanity, the “we” of the twenties, thirties and forties, fighting in the U.S.S.R. and spreading worldwide—allies of the Mayakovsky in whom his socio-political personality crystallised, who perhaps fell short of the dreamed-of poet but covered a tremendous distance toward him.
Hercules, the Toiler of Olympus
The greatest hero of action was the Greek Hercules, almost idolised toil, whose adoration exceeded that accorded many of the twelve gods of Olympus and peaked at the beginning of our era; many cultured people believed senile Jupiter would hand over government and thunderbolts to his favourite son, the great toiler, fighter and sufferer who twice triumphed over death. Around him clustered all conceivable great feats, coloured by everyday reality and by heavenly phenomena—the drama of the Sun’s daily and yearly journeys; the Sun’s struggle with darkness, clouds and autumn, its defeat, death, victory and resurrection were clothed in earthly vestments of the tragic sufferings of toilers and fighters, and the Sun deified endows its images with superhuman scope, rhythm and light—faith in eternal victory. His mother was mortal, his father a god, symbol of royal order; wrathful fate pursued him through superhuman and social forces, and his own ungovernable powers were his enemies. As a babe he strangled two serpents meant to kill him, as the morning sun disperses mists. Had Zeus-Order ruled, his right as first-born would be incontestable, but vain fortune—a woman’s wiles, evil duplicity, as Pythagoras called it—decreed that the weakling Eurystheus was born first and Hercules must serve him for years: the myth explains the subservience of great labouring forces to pitiful individuals crowned by chance of birth, as madness of fortune, a stupid plot hostile to nature. Equally significant is the slavery of love: Queen Omphale made him dress in female clothes and spin; the spinning queens of Aryan myths are “cloud maidens”
Heine’s Gallows Humour and the Limits of Irony
Lunacharsky closes his essay on Heine by weighing the laughter that runs through his verse. In Heine’s lifetime reaction was strong enough to strike heavy blows, so his wit often hardened into gallows humour: the world is disgusting, stupidity triumphs, one cannot reconcile oneself to it and lacks the strength to defeat it—so laugh at the repulsive spectacle. Old English criminals joked on the way to the scaffold to show fearlessness; the joke eased the journey but did not stop the hangman. Social satire of this kind carries more weight, since it displays the laugher’s moral superiority and calls others to keep fighting, yet it yields no victory, only a substitute for one, and risks decaying into mere guffawing that removes the last incentive for real struggle. This fluidity of outlook is exactly what Hennequin stressed in his recently published study of Heine, tracing every feeling back to a single spiritual source until unbroken sad thoughtfulness—Verdruss, depression—sounds above all and carries the poet toward pessimism. Scriabin, too, wondered whether the world was made by a god who is an artist; Heine had asked the same in The Book Le Grand, calling the world the dream of a wine-drunken god. Such contortions came from the absence of a real social perspective. The social will of an individualist amounts to nothing, yet in humour this superb mind was victor, his laughter profound and socially significant because it wore black mourning and knew it stood opposed to the triumph of absurdity. Marx understood this. When Liebknecht boasted of refusing to see Heine in Paris because the poet took a pension from Louis Philippe and Guizot, Marx angrily dressed him down: only a petty-bourgeois philistine could reason so, and Liebknecht had punished himself by depriving himself of one of the wisest men of his age. Marx never attacked the poet with petty reproaches; Heine was his brilliant ally, like cavalry transferred from the enemy—not fully to be relied on, but dashing and effective. Heine supplied a huge arsenal of arguments and victorious characteristics, showed the development of German social thought, and at times became the revolution’s brilliant representative despite tottering on the brink of pessimism and empty laughter. He called himself a clown; he was an outstanding fighter who served the revolution of 1848 and “our” revolution. Pushkin’s lines about his name being honoured, about singing freedom in a cruel age and proclaiming mercy for the fallen, are quoted; Gerschenzon tried to prove the poem ironic, but Pushkin laughed only at people like Gerschenzon, whom he called fools. Enfant Perdu is quoted to show what Heine claimed for his poetry’s social aspect—standing a lost post in the war for freedom for thirty years without hope of victory, falling unconquered though his heart broke. Praising Heine as an outstanding poet of inner freedom, Lunacharsky inducts him into the pantheon of great precursors of the genuine proletarian revolution.
The Wagner Problem
The Wagner problem, Lunacharsky insists, cannot be settled from the standpoint of “contemporary mankind,” which does not exist as an integral whole; it must be re-evaluated from the standpoint of a victorious proletariat and the socialist culture it creates. Wagner’s music has a hypnotising, enchanting power; no composer before him burst on listeners with such a cascade of sound, such a broad river of harmony and poignant melody. He called his music “endless melody,” creating an invisible magnetic field that penetrates the listener’s soul. His thunder, cymbals, colossal ensembles and whirlwind of sound stagger the ear, yet he is nearly as powerful when he wins his way creeping into the subconscious with delicate skeleton keys. A man of iron will craving power, he marshalled music like an assembly of spirits to win millions of souls. Nietzsche reproached him for being not a musician but a mime, a man of the theatre; his urge to conquer, teach, lead and prophesy found expression in histrionics. A Wagnerian symphony is magnificent in concert but acquires true significance only on stage, which perhaps cannot yet meet his demands. Tolstoy, ridiculing opera’s conventions—painted men in cardboard armour singing, make-believe dragons—is obviously wrong to attack theatrical conventionality as such, since it remains an open question whether an exalted person should speak, sing or dance, but he is undoubtedly right about the artistic squalor of the contemporary operatic stage beside Wagner’s grandiose conceptions. Wagner’s music is unimaginable without action and words. Under his influence Nietzsche wrote of the Dionysian element—music, churning forces, passions, dynamics, pathos—and the Apollonian—images condensing into human shapes, thoughts, actions, fates—and thus tragedy and theatre are born.
The Critic as Builder
Lunacharsky’s theoretical essays set the terms for everything that follows. Sociological analysis treats social life as an organic whole in which economic relationships and forms of labour are decisive, but for a single writer it works through intermediate links — class structure, then class psychology — so that literature reflects the psychology of a class or a mixture of classes and demands close reading rather than mechanical labelling. Content chiefly determines a work’s class connection, since literature, the art of the word, stands closest to thought; form is analysed afterwards, as serving expressiveness, yet it cannot be skipped, because form is shaped by a class’s style of living, by the influence of neighbours, by schools and epochs, and can contradict its content or break away from it altogether in verbal gymnastics that hide from life. Against the “enlightener” who hands literature aims and judges it by ideals, Plekhanov defended the scientific sociologist; Lunacharsky accepts the warning against subjectivism and aesthete’s caprice, then steps past it. Marxism is also a programme of building. The critic needs objective analysis and definite influence both, and a “second judgement” on hostile works — knowing the enemy’s attitude, weighing what might be used in construction — matters as much as praise of friends, with censorship, not criticism, reserved for outright counter-revolutionary propaganda. On form he is equally flexible: Plekhanov’s rule that literature is the art of images, and that naked ideas harm a work, is not absolute — Saltykov-Shchedrin, Uspensky and Furmanov all sin against it — but publicistic lumps generally leave readers cold, and originality means form merging indivisibly with idea, as against stereotyped form, weak form, or the over-ornamentation that camouflages emptiness.
Chernyshevsky Against the Aesthetes
The long reckoning with Chernyshevsky is the book’s intellectual hinge. Lunacharsky sets out to break the image, fixed by Herzen’s “bilious man” and by Plekhanov’s brilliant but misleading portrait, of a dry nihilist governed entirely by intellect — a Bazarov of the eighteen-sixties who knew only rational egoism and let the unconscious slip past him. Plekhanov was right that Chernyshevsky, a Feuerbachian materialist, lapsed into idealism on social questions, treating opinions as the engine of history and the educated critic as the world’s transformer. But the youthful diary, with its meticulous record of conversations with his future wife, reveals a man of powerful feeling, “a man of the heart,” fervently in love with life. From that love, Lunacharsky argues, spring both the ethics and the aesthetics. The famous treatise on art’s aesthetic relationship to reality is no attack on art as such: it is an assault on genteel aesthetes who, from a class beginning to die, discredited living reality and the struggle in favour of an artificial paradise, an artistic narcotic offered to the young. Chernyshevsky defended reality because he loved it, and hated whatever retarded its growth; art that evaluates life, stirs a definite emotional reaction and exerts moral influence is exactly what a rising class needs. The class angle is sharpened by the raznochinets background — the seminarian who counted the cost of a new pair of boots before proposing marriage, whom Turgenev sneered at as a seminarist and Nekrasov defended as steel against the intelligentsia’s shattered men.
The Active Minority
Running beneath the literary judgements is a political argument about will and history. The Mensheviks read Marx’s letter to Mikhailovsky as a verdict: Russia had let slip its unique chance, the moment had passed, and one must wait for capitalism to mature and produce its gravedigger. Lunacharsky sides with Lenin’s “old” idea — that a conscious minority could seize the historical situation and risk the revolution — and he insists the distinction between Menshevik fatalism and Bolshevik action must be remembered in every discussion of literature. Hence his sympathy for the utopian socialist he reaches “over Plekhanov’s head”: once the proletariat organises, the sphere of reason and will genuinely widens, and morals, like art, can be consciously cultivated rather than left to upbringing and accident. The proletariat, he writes, cannot allow literature to grow like mushrooms in a wood; a gardener’s attitude to life is characteristic of the new rising class.
The Religion of Reconciliation
The essays on Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoi form the book’s darkest sequence. Religion, Lunacharsky argues, served Russian literature as a means of reconciling minds to earthly injustice by promising heavenly justice, paralysing the conscience at the sight of social evil so that it need not clash with the powers that be. Gogol is the straightforward case: Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends advises landowners to read the Gospel to their peasants so they serve their masters more selflessly. Tolstoi stands at the opposite pole, discarding Orthodoxy and detesting the Church as an apparatus for stabilising slavery, yet retaining exactly as much religion as his doctrine of non-resistance requires. Dostoyevsky occupies the middle: less naively Orthodox than Gogol, his doubts undeniable, he seeks an inner Church that might one day overcome the state and private property and build an almost unearthly socialism — a “ecclesiastical revolution” more humble even than Tolstoi’s, deferred by hundreds of years, perhaps realised only in eternity. This construction let him anathematise materialist socialism while remaining profoundly loyal to the tsar. Yet the genius of fathomless profundity was tormented by his conscience: he had buried the “damnable, self-assured materialism” in his own soul, but it was no corpse, and in The Possessed he loses all self-control in trampling it down.
Polyphony and Its Master
Against Bakhtin’s claim that Dostoyevsky invented the polyphonic novel, Lunacharsky sets Shakespeare and Balzac. Shakespeare, supposedly the most impersonal of authors, grants his characters a life of their own, yet a personality — many-faceted and titanic — can be felt behind the plays, and Hamlet’s “The time is out of joint” carries the author’s own lyrical impulse to set it right. Balzac goes further still: his greatness owes almost everything to an extraordinary objectivity, a protean ability to inhabit the most diverse social types, and his own opinions drift from one chance-found position to another. Dostoyevsky, by contrast, is no neutral host. His art lies in not expressing his views directly, but the reader always knows whose side his sympathies are on; he listens to his novels’ disputes with intense excitement, love and hatred. Bakhtin’s insight survives, stripped of its exaggeration: the polyphony is real, but there is a master in the house.
The Two Musicians
The paired essays on Scriabin and Taneyev give Lunacharsky’s aesthetic its most lyrical statement. Scriabin, drawn to the tempo of a chaotic imperialist era, craved order but approached serenity revolutionarily — through self-incineration, a “mystery” of wild frenzy in which soul and universe disintegrate before a new calm dawns. He was not mad; shortly before his death clear diary entries destroyed his solipsism, and he settled for a Preliminary Act instead of the world-transforming mystery. Taneyev is the architect, for whom music is a self-sufficient element with inner laws, and the closer the artist conforms to them the greater his freedom; his outlook lies closest to Hegel, the universe already a symphony passing through stages that remove it from its essence. If Scriabin portrayed the passions without which no revolution is possible, Taneyev revealed its constructive side — the elimination of contradictions, harmony, the highest order. The revolution, Lunacharsky notes, is not only romantic but classical in its constructive nature, and in 1925 both men are equally close to the heart.
Blok and the Music of Revolution
Blok, in these pages, is a musician through and through — not of tones but of emotional dynamics, so that his poetry is in part a substitute for music, the word fading into fluid shadow under the lyrical impulse. His symbolism had power because his symbols were musical rather than allegorical; woven into the torrent of his melodies they gained hypnotic force for readers seeking significance beyond real life. His philosophy held that the inmost essence of being is musical, that history is governed by an inner musical burning, and that a-musical epochs are empty and hateful. A déclassé landowner who watched the estates of the nobility sink under doom, he detested the triumphant bourgeoisie almost physiologically, called Europe a bedraggled cocotte, and met the war with revulsion. Yet the revolution of 1905 he greeted with a red flag in his hand, and 1917 found him ready and waiting; politics were dear to him because they were “musical.” The chapter’s close is unsparing: a poet of erratic personality, his social position unstable and tormenting, he was a suitable vehicle for the moods of a moribund intelligentsia — and still he woke from dreams of Shakhmatovo with his face bathed in tears.
A Beginning, Not a Monument
The essays collected here were written by a man who believed he stood at the turning-point between the kingdom of necessity and the kingdom of freedom, and they carry that conviction openly, including its costs. Lunacharsky’s Pushkin essay shows what he thought a beginning could be: the first representative of the Russian people to greet life, an Adam naming phenomena, whose grace conceals vertiginous depths, and through whose lips a nation attained self-expression. The same generosity, and the same insistence on judging by social trend, runs through his treatment of Gorky and Mayakovsky and of the foreign writers he admired. Later readers will find the evaluative confidence dated, the formulas about class psychology blunt. What survives is the double demand he never dropped — that a work be understood before it is judged, and that judgement, once made, commit the critic to the struggle of his time.
