192pp GENE -THE 23.00 23.30 90p 23.90 23.00 £2.40 in ancient times'.
E3.00 22.50 disinters a Western £2.75 worms'. 11.50 21.50 £1,80 (1.50 and many more Soviet Writers Congress 1934 Lawrence & Wishart E2.75 The first Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, so the blurb tells us, was the 'culmination' of one of the richest periods of Soviet literary debate. Destruction" would be a more appropriate term. As the Soviet Union swung from its ultra-leftist "Third Period' towards Popular Frontism. it became necessary 1o cool "proletarian zeal" in literature in the name of a broader cultural alliance -not least because the Five Year Plan meant wooing the petty-bourgeois technicians and intelligentsia. In any case, so Stalin had decided, Russia was now entering upon 'full socialism", so talk of 'proletarian literature' was becoming redundant. On the other hand, as the Stalinist thumbscrews tightened, all critical and "psychological' clements in literature needed to be cradicated in the name of slavishly uncritical celebration of the beroic Fatherland, yoking turgid "realism' to euphoric revolutionary romanticism. All independent terary bodies were accordingly dissolved into the Writers Congress, membership of which was compulsory for publication. And out of it grew the disastrous literary doctrine of so-called "socialist realism", which was to stifle the least flicker of cultural criticism for decades.
This book lines up the speeches of the Congress of Stalin's literary thugs: Zhdanov, Gorky, Radek and Bukharin. It would make amusing reading if it weren't so grisly. Zhdanov gets things off to a rousing start by informing the Congress that they have the richest kharin sees the importance of examining the formal elements of literature, and their complex relations Criticising that "purely nihilistic attitude to the problem of form' which can frequently be observed in our own Marxian ranks', he finds between literature and history in lang uage itself. Another shadowy influence may well lurk behind this position that of V.N. Voloshinos, whose Marxis and the Philosophy of Language is one of the greatest cultural works of the period. peared around the date of the Congress (presuming he wasn't a pseudonym for someone elsc). so it isn't entirely surprising that Bukharin makes no reference to him.
Bukharin's other strength is his candid declaration that the level of Soviet cultural development is dismally low; Refusing the Zhdanos, he has the courage 1o admit that, compared to the literary knowledge ol a Pushkin, the contemporary Soviet achievement 'could be put under a threepenny bit. Lindeterred by this stricture, the Congress went formally resolve that 'Soviet literature has grown into a mighty force for socialist culture". It was this mixture of beginner. to history.
the link COITTICS Voloshinov, however, disapoptimisma of burn fails on to TERRY EAGLETON basic concepts to be useful to a real The articles are all substantial and worth reprinting and although we car pick out particular favourites pleased to see a key section of Norman Geras" book reprinted — and query one or two — Nairn is a bit outdated - the real criticisms are political. Most of the authors share Blackburn's original ussumption that "Something like a third of the world's population now lives in where, there has socialist revolution." The genuine Marxist tradition often appears there fore as a critical variant of orthodox Communism.
This is one strand within Trotskyism and revolutionary Marxism today, but it is not the only one, or perhaps the most valid, In failing to show more of the alternatives within revolutionary politics today, or of the practical terrain in which they have been developed, Blackdespite the real contributions of the articles in this book - in his most important aim, "to make available a contemporary restaternent and appraisal of the classical marxist political tradition"
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