[BEGIN]
__AUTHOR__
BORIS SUCHKOV
*
__TITLE__ A HISTORY OF REALISM __TEXTFILE_BORN__ 2007-03-30T05:41:28-0800 __TRANSMARKUP__ "Y. Sverdlov"*
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
[1]Translated from the Russian
Designed by G. Dauman
E. C Y H K 0 B. HCTOPHHECKHE CyflbBfal PEAJIH3MA Ha __COPYRIGHT__ First printing 1973The creative process in art, that most important of man's intellectual activities, involves thinking in terms of images. It is in the very nature of our perception that these images are engendered in the artist's mind by the outside world.
Even where the artist contrives something which he feels to be beyond the pale of verisimilitude, he is really doing no more than reorganising and reproducing in a new form the component parts of that whole which we call reality.
When Hieronymus Bosch painted his Temptation of St. Anthony, in depicting the monsters pouring up from hell to assail the ascetic in his cell he made use of the materials which reality offered in such abundance. Despite their weird appearance, the devils and fiends testing the patience and faith of the hermit were in fact made of perfectly normal stuff. Bosch merely combined in them the visible elements of natural beings and man-made things which he saw around him every day. He simply altered their natural proportions, put parts of living organisms in the strangest combinations, joining everyday objects like pots and pans, knives and helmets, to insects' tails and feelers, giving animals spiders' and grasshoppers' bodies, and clothed these monsters in armour, endowing these creations of his wild fancy with human emotions, making fiends from hell behave like malicious practical jokers. 5 Thus, while his pictures at first strike one as being apparently at variance with everyday experience, they in fact fit perfectly naturally into the system of everyday values and concepts of his age.
Callot's fantastic pictures or Goya's Caprichos, works which the artist consciously and deliberately freed from a superficial resemblance to reality, were nonetheless based on elements of intellectual, emotional and visual impressions objectively engendered by reality.
Even when primitive man tried to give the fruit of his imagination the attributes of godliness and express his understanding and concept of a deity with the means of art, he could not, in clothing the creation of his fantasy in flesh, go beyond the limits of this earth. The attentive gaze will recognise proto-elements of real concepts of the world reflected in the human mind in the idols and totems of primitive peoples, the monstrous, cruel gods of bygone civilisations, and ritual symbols and masks. Moreover, even such an ``abstract'' form of art as ornament is based on a composition of geometric shapes reflecting the objective relationship of things, or conventionalised animals and plants, or a combination of both.
It is interesting to note that the theoreticians of abstract art Winthrop Sargeant, Andrew C. Ritchie and Reginald H. Wilenski, and the father of abstract painting Vassili Kandinsky before them, tried to justify this trend in modern art by maintaining that the abstract artist's canvas reflects the latest discoveries in nuclear physics, thereby penetrating the very essence of the universe. Thus, these convinced opponents of reality were nonetheless forced to invoke reality in support of their aesthetic theories, for nuclear physics and transformation of energy are every bit as real as trees and fruit, mountains and buildings, people and flowers, and everything else that has always been depicted by genuine painters, on whom the champions of abstract art pour such vehement scorn, accusing them of blind empiricism. This appeal to the microcosm, to reality which is invisible but perceptible to the human mind, is of course pure humbug. There is no connection at all between an arbitrary application of colour purporting to represent the processes going on in the 6 world of elementary particles, and genuine reality. But the nature of the arguments used by the supporters of abstract art to justify their theories is worth noting: struggling against reality, they capitulate to it.
Art is not concerned purely with representing apparent reality. A work of art is not intended to be taken as a likeness of reality. Art's creations differ greatly from objects of the external world, for as well as absorbing impressions and concepts deriving from reality, it reflects too man's inner world, his experience, his personality and his attitude to the world around him. As a special form of spiritual and intellectual activity, and a powerful expression of man's creative powers, art, while ultimately deriving from reality, is to a certain extent independent of it. Goethe had the tremendous perspicacity to point out this rich and complex dialectical relationship between reality and art. Polemicising with Diderot, who reduced the purpose of art to straightforward representation of natural phenomena, Goethe wrote:
``Art does not try to compete with nature in all its breadth and depth, but keeps on the surface of natural phenomena. Nevertheless, art has its own depth, its own strength. It captures the supreme aspects of these superficial phenomena, disclosing what is regular in them---the rational perfection of proportions, the acme of beauty, the virtue of meaning and noble passions.
``We see nature as acting on its own account; the artist acts as a man---on man's account. From what nature offers us, we take into our lives only a small amount, that which is worth desiring, and gives pleasure; what the artist offers man should be entirely accessible and pleasing to the senses, should all give pleasure and have an appeasing effect, should all give food for the spirit, should all educate and ennoble; and the artist is grateful to nature that produced him, and in this way brings back to her a kind of second nature, nature born of the feelings and thoughts, nature perfected by man.
``But if all is to be thus, the genius, the artist by vocation, should act according to laws and rules prescribed by nature herself, laws that do not contradict her, that represent his greatest wealth, for it is with their help that he 7 learns to master and employ both the wealth of his talent and the great riches of nature."^^1^^
Reality is the basis of any image. This is natural, for art is a kind of special language mankind has been talking since ancient times, and just as a word cannot exist without a corresponding concept, so real art cannot deprive an image of its content, that is, of its relationship to what exists objectively, either in the realm of nature or in the realm of human thought and feeling, which is as much a part of reality as the material world.
Art has been man's faithful companion throughout history, developing and improving together with the development and improvement of the human mind. This is why art could never be an amusement to fill the hours of idleness, a source of carefree pleasure, or a means of satisfying purely aesthetic demands. The dual function of art ---cognitive and aesthetic, the two being united and inseparable---was there right from the start, from the moment art emerged.
The earliest extant examples of cave paintings, hunting scenes executed with remarkable accuracy and expression, combined both these aspects of art. In creating these works, the primitive artists must have abandoned themselves to the joyous power and enchantment of line and colour, transferring onto the hard unyielding granite the images and impressions overflowing their souls. Presumably these unknown artists were not the only ones who were moved by their creations. We can assume that their hairy fellow-tribesmen also derived pleasure from the sparkle of art in the prehistoric tribal gloom. The cave paintings were also a part of a magic ritual connected with work, sympathetic magic---a plea to the dark, threatening forces of earth and sky that influenced the life of the tribe. George Thomson, a modern expert on prehistoric culture, writes: ``The Australians are in the habit of decorating rocks and caves with figures of men and animals....
``The human figures are of both sexes, the females with exaggerated sex marks. The animals and plants, so far as _-_-_
~^^1^^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ``Diderots Versuch iiber die Malerei" }n S&mmtliche Werke, Bd. 34, Leipzig, S. 100--01.
8 they have been identified, are all edible species---- kangaroos, lizards, nalgo fruits. . . .``For the interpretation of these designs we can appeal to the natives themselves, who still use them for ceremonial purposes. At the opening of the breeding season the pictures are repainted or touched up in order to bring rain or to propagate the species represented. Abundance of kangaroos and nalgo fruits is thus ensured, and women are made prolific."^^1^^ Referring to a number of features common to Bushman art and the upper paleolithic cave paintings in France and Spain, Thomson goes on to say: ``The resemblance is so close that some authorities regard them as the work of the same people.... All archaeologists are now agreed that the primary intention of these paintings was magical."^^2^^ On the subject of the genesis of art he makes the following emphatic statement: ``Art grows out of ritual. Stated in general terms, that is a proposition no serious student would deny."^^3^^
Thus, at the dawn of history, when the human mind was first becoming aware of artistic images, we find social experience having a say in the matter. The primitive artist's desire to express his impressions of life goes hand in hand with an attempt to understand and explain life.
This invaluable feature of art, present from the very start, is what makes art a great chronicle, a history of the human race told in words, marble or paint by countless volunteer historians, who captured the events and the spirit of bygone civilisations far more fully than the old sheets of parchment that bear the laws and instructions of rulers, or the silent remains of material culture which the archaeologists and historiographers interpret for us.
We can still understand the thoughts and feelings of the citizens of a Greek polis or of Rome, thanks to Aeschylus' tragedies, Aristophanes' merciless satire, and Catullus' moving lyrics. The feather grass steppes of the Don country have flowered and withered countless times, and the bones of Russians, Polovtsi and Khazars have long since _-_-_
~^^1^^ George Thomson, Studies in Ancient Greek Society. The Prehistoric Aegean, London, 1954, pp. 53--54.
~^^2^^ Ibid., pp. 54--55.
~^^3^^ Ibid., p. 463.
9 turned to dust, yet the voices of the Russian warriors who scooped up the clear waters of the Don in their helmets still ring in our hearts, preserved for posterity by the unknown author of The Lay of Igor's Host. The violent political passions the Italian towns seethed with at the time when medieval Europe has discovered the timeless cultural heritage of a small people who had lived on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula are brought to us by the terza rima of Dante's Divine Comedy, and Michelangelo's Last Judgement.Throughout their existence, art and literature have registered with the sensitivity of a barometer all the changes in the course of mankind's stormy development. The collapse of the humanistic ideals of the Renaissance, which were trampled underfoot with the emergence of bourgeois social relations, was reflected in Shakespeare's later tragedies, in the wise sorrow of Don Quixote, and the gnomic philosophy of Calderon's tragedy la Vida Es Sueno, which sounded the death knell for the vital, optimistic world of Renaissance culture. Swift's black satire and the tragic motives that burst into the bright ethereal element of Mozart's symphonies are like a prelude to the nineteenth century, that ``age of iron" with its greatly intensified social contradictions.
The picture of the world that works of art and literature present is not a slavish copy of reality, and has retained the colours and smells of the world for the simple reason that art has at all times dealt with the essential aspects of nature and human life. Every genuine work of art must have a message; this is the very foundation and vital element for its existence. Art cannot help but submit to the great discipline of reality, but this does not mean that art has always and at all times been realist.
Realism as a creative method is an historical phenomenon that arose at a certain stage in human intellectual development, at the time when people began to feel pressing need to understand the nature and direction of social development, when people began to realise, at first vaguely, then more clearly, that human actions and feelings do not derive from wild passions or a divine design, but are determined by real, or more precisely, material causes, 10 Tre realist method arose in art and literature when the members of society were faced with the task ofi apprehending those hidden underlying forces which determine the working of the mechanism of social relations.
There are traits of reality in the writings of the Ancients, in Gothic, Baroque and Rococo art, or in the works of the classicist writers, but the study of the life of society and individuals in all their complex relationships only came with realism. The works of the early realists already give us a true picture of the life of society, of the interests and demands that occupied the minds of people of various social groups and classes in the past. They show us the development of man's social awareness, and how people living in a society based on private ownership came into conflict with that anti-human social order. Between them, the realist writers produced an epic of the modern age. In many cases unwittingly, merely by their sober objective portrayal of the life they saw, they condemned the evils of the irrational civilisation of property owners.
Realism began its road in the realm of everyday life. Depiction of the life man sees around him is to be found in the facetiae, the fabliaux and the Schwanke, and later in the picaresque novel, born of the ferment of popular uprisings, peasant rebellions and bloody religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, this was not realism in the strict sense of the word, but rather a prelude to realism.
But theoretical philosophic thought too, wrestling with problems of existence on the threshold of the modern age, and struggling to free itself of the spiritual concepts that theology and scholasticism had deeply implanted in people's minds, was only beginning to approach an understanding of the world as a material entity.
Descartes with his idea of the indivisibility of existence and thought, and Francis Bacon, who drew attention to the importance of experience in taking cognizance of the world, revolutionised scientific thought, opening the way for its penetration into the nature of things.
Despite the originality and shrewdness of their conjectures, they were still largely dependent on the level 11 scientific thought had reached in their age. The transcendental dualism and mechanistic approach inherent in his views of the living world prevented Descartes from producing a dialectical picture of reality. Yet by raising the question of the indivisibility of existence and thought he encouraged the investigation of their relationship. His elder contemporary Bacon had the genius to grasp the chief requirement of the thought of the new age---the need for analytic investigation of reality.
In Letters on the Study of Nature, Alexander Herzen wrote that the basic principle of Bacon's philosophy is that ``he starts from the particular, from experiment, from the observation of phenomena and arrives at a generalisation, at a collation of all that has been thus acquired. For Bacon experience is not a passive perception of the external world with its attending circumstances. Quite the contrary, it is the conscious interaction of thought and things external, their joint activity, which, while developing, Bacon keeps in curb, neither allowing thought to make conclusions to which it is not yet entitled, nor allowing experience to remain a mechanical accumulation of facts 'undigested by thought'. The greater and richer the sum total of observations, the more inalienable is the right to deduce from them the general rules by means of induction. But as he discovers them Bacon, ever doubting and cautious, demands another plunge into the stream of phenomena, in search of a generalisation or a qualification.
``Before Bacon, experiment was an accident, it was used as a basis even more rarely than was tradition, let alone intellectual speculation. Bacon turned it into an essential, primary factor of knowledge, which subsequently accompanied the entire development of knowledge, which presupposed constant verification, and, by its irrefutable precision and its concrete universality, acted as a curb on the inclination of abstract minds to rise into the rarefied atmosphere of metaphysical generalities. Bacon believed as much in the mind as in nature but his confidence was greatest when they were at one because he foresaw their unity. He demanded that the mind, leaning on experience, should progress hand in hand with nature, that nature 12 should guide the mind as its pupil until it was in a condition to lead nature towards complete elucidation in thought.
``That was new, extremely new and grand..."^^1^^
Investigation of the external world took many courses. Philosophy absorbed more and more of the knowledge accumulated by the natural sciences, which were gradually preparing for the great Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, as bourgeois relations developed and class antagonisms became more acute, the tendency towards analysis of reality grew stronger in art and literature too, and this naturally above all meant analysis of the human environment.
Analysis, one of the essential features of realism, began to develop in the art of the Renaissance, which saw so many various styles, with the Gothic forms existing side by side with the genre novel and anecdote, represented by the works of Poggio Bracciolini and Masuccio di Salerno, where the medieval conte de geste was transformed into the witty comic verse of Pulci or the heroic gallantry of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where the subjectivism of the neo-Platonists, mannerism and the baroque spirit gradually replaced the pure poetic tradition descending from Petrarch.
The analytic approach is already present in the works of the major writers of the Renaissance period---Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare. The Rabelaisan novel, which had close affinities with folk literature and myth and disregards external, rationalistic logic in the narration, solved an important new aesthetic problem of the time. The characters in Gargantua and Pantagruel, despite all exaggeration and extraordinary situations, were inherently true to life. The novel undoubtedly contains the seeds of the analytic approach, deeply planted in a bed of mythology, it is true, but nonetheless sufficient to enable the writer to capture the social features of the papacy, scholasticism, feudal statecraft and morality and, most important of all, features of the new man, providing an early glimpse of the bourgeois in the making. One of the _-_-_
~^^1^^ A. Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works, Moscow, 1956, pp. 265--66.
13 main characters, Panurge, who said he knew many ways of getting rich, among which the most honest was daylight robbery, for all his charm represents a destructive element, and personifies the new social forces that were gradually maturing within the feudal system. The Renaissance humanist ideal of Utopia, the abbey of Thelema, is quite incompatible with panurgianism, with real human relations, which were not developing as Rabelais and other humanists hoped. The presence of this conflict in the novel shows that Rabelais sensed the fundamental contradiction in social life, without being aware of either its true nature or its scale. However, the very fact that he revealed this conflict was an important step towards realism.Fifty years later this same conflict was to underlie Don Quixote, a work which absorbed elements from many different genres of the day, from galant-pastoral prose and ironically revalued poetics of the conte de geste to the tale of manners (mceurs). Despite the fact that during his wanderings over many a stony, sun-baked road, Don Quixote meets a whole host of people from practically every level of society, and his excursions take him into country inns and duke's palaces, the novel does not give a complete picture of Spain at that time. As regards the details it gives us of everyday life and morals, it is of considerably less interest than the anonymous work on the travels of the roguish Lazarillo de Tormes. Yet it towers above the literature of the time by virtue of its literary merits and universality, its conflict reflecting the tragic gap between man's noble aspirations for goodness and justice and life as it really is.
The analytic tendency is more manifest in Cervantes' novel than in Rabelais', although convention and the fantastic element still play a big role in it. Cervantes' analysis of society is much more accurate than that of his predecessor. He analyses human relations more fully, and penetrates more deeply into root causes of the discrepancy between humanist ideals and reality. This is because in examining the essence of the contradictions of his age he resorted to the wisdom of the people, poeticised in the person of Sancho Panza. If Rabelais sincerely believed 14 that harmony could be achieved in life and Thelema's Utopia could be attained the wisdom of Don Quixote lies elsewhere, in the way Cervantes, while glorifying good, destroys the illusion of its triumph being possible in existing conditions.
At the dawn of the modern age people had already acquired considerable experience of life in society based on private ownership. The feudal lords who oppressed the serfs had themselves bowed to absolute monarchy. The wealth collected in the royal treasuries was slowly but surely drained into the coffers of the bankers and usurers.
The Fuggers had no less influence in state affairs than many a crowned head of Europe, and the bourgeoisie waged a fierce, relentless struggle with the nobility for a place in the sun. Crowds of adventurers set out across the wide, unchartered oceans in search of El Dorado, for gold had become the measure of virtue and order, freedom and happiness. As Shakespeare wrote in ``Timon of Athens":
Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? ...
Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; valiant, coward___
Within the moss-grown walls of the towns, where craftsmen still produced works of exquisite beauty, the low, stuffy buildings of the manufactories sprang up, crowding out their workshops. Material inequality divided people. Egoistic passions and ideas, the thirst for wealth became part of their flesh and blood, the determinant factor of their social psychology.
The collapse of patriarchal morals and their adaptation to the new historical conditions accompanied the strengthening of those organic, permanent features of private ownership society which derived from its class structure. Michelangelo, in words of great power expressed the mood of the foremost thinkers of the age, who sensed the eventual triumph of the bourgeois order.
Oh! In this evil, shameful age, to live not
Nor to feel is a most enviable lot,
To sleep 't were best, and to be like unto a stone.
Just as science was bringing mankind greater knowledge of the laws of nature, so nascent realist art and 15 literature, by investigating man's spiritual and social life, his actions, thoughts and feelings, was beginning to shed light on the nature of historical progress. Shakespeare's multi-level depiction of life was based on analysis of the real essence of social relations. With Shakespeare the same conflict that is central to the works of Rabelais and Cervantes lost its conventional and fantastic colouring and acquired a concrete historical form, without, however, losing its universality in the process, for Shakespeare was a thinker and artist of genius who generalised the essential and permanent features of the social outlook of people in private ownership society. This is indeed the main reason why his works have stood the test of time.
However, even Shakespeare's view of the world is not entirely free of mystical, fantastic concepts. Deep as he penetrated the human soul, Shakespeare nonetheless subscribed to many of the illusions prevalent in his day and age. His art is syncretic, with realistic and non-realistic elements interwoven. But dominant with him are a realistic portrayal of characters and a truthful, authentic depiction of the environment that engenders the moral conflicts which beset his heroes and, most important of all, a realistic approach to the relationship between man and society. The tragic situations in which his heroes find themselves owe nothing to fatalism or irrational predetermination: they are always determined by material causes and first and foremost by the conditions of life itself. The fate of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet's spiritual drama, Timon's discord with the world, Lear's or Othello's loss of faith in mankind, are all the result of objective contradictions in life itself. Life is the source of the tragedy.
In describing his heroes' sufferings and inner emotional conflicts and analysing their thoughts and passions, Shakespeare saw through it all the free play of material interests, perverting people's natures and shattering the humanist belief that the chaos of life could be brought to a state of harmony. Michelangelo's bitter invective against his age was undoubtedly something Shakespeare understood only too well. But Shakespeare did not simply understand the drama of the time which was so ``out of joint": by going to the very wellsprings of human feelings, 16 thoughts and actions, he showed that the absence of harmony derived from the structure of society itself. If his heart went out to Prospero, in his mind he understood only too well that Shylock could quite possibly be the man oi the future. In order to portray society as a theatre of war between conflicting material interests, Shakespeare had to initiate an analytic study of society, which he did, thereby laying the cornerstone of realism.
After Shakespeare the tendency towards analytic study of social life gradually gained ground in art and literature, despite the fact that there were whole periods where other, non-realistic, trends held the field---baroque, mannerism and classicism. This tendency corresponded to the spirit of the times. When John Locke proved that there are no inborn ideas in the human mind, received from some external, superior power, he forced social thought to investigate man's environment, which is the original motive force determining his way of thinking and conditioning his actions. Locke saw man's environment first and foremost as the sphere of his social practice, which it vtas essential that he should know, since otherwise he would be powerless in the face of unknown forces influencing his life. Art's investigation of human activity in the broadest sense finally resulted in realism acquiring clear, distinctive features and emerging as a creative method.
In the eighteenth century, in the period leading up to the French Revolution, which brought about the final collapse of the economic and ideological structure of feudalism, realism took a great step forward, from the depiction of everyday life and manners to depiction of social existence.
The works of the early realist writers, great and smallwriters like Richardson, Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, Swift. Steele, Diderot, Goethe, Lessing, Mercier and Marivaux, and many, many others---enable us to determine the essential characteristic feature of the new method, the fundamental distinction between it and all other literary movements.
The essence of realism was social analysis, the study and depiction of the life of man in society, of social __PRINTERS_P_17_COMMENT__ 2---0891 17 relations, the relationship between the individual and society, and the structure of society itself.
Realism took the content of all art and literaturedepiction of the world and human thoughts and feelings--- and made it a principle, thereby rising above the flat copying of reality and subjective presentation of human nature as a playground of unbridled passions. Realism does not arbitrarily isolate man from the social environment in which he lives and acts, but instead sets out to perceive and portray the dialectic of social relationships with their real contradictions. Just as spectral analysis enables the physicist to discover the secrets of the movement of matter, so social analysis, the essence of realism, enables the writer or artist to discern life's essential features and approach an understanding of its laws. The more closely the realist scrutinises reality and investigates the connections between the events his work describes, the more full-blooded and convincing his reproduction of reality is, for he has not only perceived it emotionally, but has interpreted it and generalised it as well.
The realist writer discerns the general pattern of the movements and counter-movements of various social forces behind individual events and phenomena. Thus realism depends on the writer's cognition of reality. As Schiller once put it: ``In order to seize the fleeting phenomenon, one must chain it with the bonds of a law, dismember the beautiful body into concepts and preserve its living spirit in the spare verbal framework.'' The intellectual element that permeates realist works requires that the writer has a definite unequivocal view of life, for generalisation of life and people as they really are is impossible if the writer offers a surrogate for reality or treats the sense and substance of the events and phenomena he is examining in an arbitrary, subjective manner. If the social analysis of the environment in which the characters act is to be realistic, the writer must see and portray reality in its determinant, typical, manifestations, which are objectively present in the sphere of human social relations, refracted through the prism of individual characterisations. Engels insisted that this was a major requirement of the realist method.
18The realist principle of typification involves the tracing of the causality that exists in the world of social phenomena. Since it is human life and the life of society that form the subject matter of a work, the hero's inner world, and the sum of his individual traits which we call character are examined and described by the realist writer as the product of numerous, but typical circumstances, which are in a causal relationship with the personal destiny of the hero. Thus, the typical character is a kind of derivative of social forces. The typical character of the hero accumulates and combines the main determinant features of the environment of which he is a product, and it is through him and his personal fortunes that the features of that environment are revealed.
We do not find this typification of characters in nonrealist works. Thus, Racine, a master of character portrayal, was a classicist, like Moliere, in his aesthetic views and creative method. But Moliere's classicism had strong connections with the popular element, and his characters have concrete historical features explained by a certain degree of social analysis. His characters are exaggerated almost to the point of caricature and lack the depth to be fully realistic. They are one-sided, dominated by a single passion---for example, avarice in the case of Harpagon, and hypocrisy in the case of Tartuffe. These characters are one-sided because Moliere was guided by the rationalist aesthetics and philosophy which underlay classicism. Nevertheless, his characters, which have since become proverbial, have something that Racine's characters lack. This ``something'' is the result of a definite attempt to comprehend such universal qualities as avarice and hypocrisy in the context of the contemporary social scene. That is why Moliere, although a classicist, is to be regarded as a precursor of realism in modern French literature.
The student of Port-Royal, on the other hand, concentrated on analysing human feelings and passions. Neither Phedra nor Hermione, Roxana, Iphigenie, or indeed any other of Racine's characters, rich and full as they are, become types. His men and women are detached and isolated from society, from the rough, cruel life of French society in the period of absolutism. In the words of the __PRINTERS_P_20_COMMENT__ 2* 19 eminent Soviet literary historian V. Grib ``Moliere's works reflected the major conflicts and problems of the seventeenth century. Corneille and Racine grasped the psychological results of the great social problems of their age. From Racine it is impossible to tell what these problems were in the actual historical reality, or what was the real stuff of life that went into the making of his theatre."^^1^^ Naturally the characters in Racine's tragedies, and the passions that torment their souls were the product of his age. But in Racine's portrayal their feelings seem somehow purified, ennobled, and to a large extent abstracted from life. They are purged of the authentic stuff of life, and thus, despite the verisimilitude of characters and events, his plays are essentially non-realist.
Racine's plays are literary masterpieces. Keeping within the bounds of classicism and making good use of the means it put at his disposal, Racine created works of great inner harmony and beauty, which depict human relationships ruled by passions, and the contradictions and conflicts of the moral world of the individual. There is nothing irregular about this, for aesthetic effect can be produced in literature by a variety of means, which is the secret of its capacity to develop, and of the simultaneous existence of various trends and movements, each with different aesthetic principles, different ideological and aesthetic approaches to the perception and description of reality.
The existence side by side of various trends and movements naturally results in antagonism and struggle between them, and, of course, in many cases, mutual influence. Behind the diversity of aesthetic principles underlying various literary movements (and often within the framework of a given movement) lies the dialectic of social contradictions, the diversity of social aspirations finding their aesthetic expression in art. The history of art and literature is by no means a calm idyll: there is a fierce clash of tastes, views and aesthetic concepts running throughout its course.
_-_-_~^^1^^ V. Grib, Selected Works, Russ. ed., Goslitizdat, Moscow, 1958, p. 357.
20Laying the foundations of realist aesthetics, which rejects both naturalist copying of reality and abstract generalisations of phenomena of life, Lessing made great efforts in both his Laocoon and Die Hamburgische Dramaturgie to prove that the content and form of classicist works were lifeless, that the passions were presented in a stilted manner, that the style was rhetorical, and the social ideals were unproductive.
``Racine speaks the language of the feelings. Of course, if we accept that proposition then there is nothing too elevated for him. But I don't know where and when feelings speak in such a language. This is a second-hand portrayal of feelings, but never or only very rarely vital, immediate, uncoloured movements of the spirit, seeking for words and finding them."^^1^^ Thus, Herder defended the principles of realist art. And despite their sharply polemical nature these words of the great democrat and thinker are based on weighty historical reasons and not subjective bias.
The romanticists of the early nineteenth century, although making a tremendous contribution to world literature, did not create a single typical character. In Byron's poems with their violent social protest, the hero is an embodiment of the writer's emotions and political views rather than a character in the real sense of the word, that is in his own right. Typical features in the hero's character only begin to emerge with Beppo, that is, in the hero of the poem that marked Byron's transition from romanticism to realism.
Neither the French nor the German romanticists produced anything comparable to the whole gallery of typical characters we find in the works of the realist writers, whose epic novels contain a deep and penetrating analysis of the social milieu, of the typical conditions that determine their heroes' fortunes. However, the romanticists did perceive and present certain features and contradictions of bourgeois society of which the realist writers were not immediately aware. Without the contribution of the _-_-_
~^^1^^ J. Herder, ``Shakespeare'', in: Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Hamburg, 1773, S. 73--74.
21 romanticists before them, the realists would never have been able to make such advances in the investigation ot the living history of their age.While realism as a distinct creative method that made possible analysis of social environment and the causal relationships present there made for an objective portrayal of reality, each realist writer had his own highly individual view of the world. His view of events and his understanding of life and history reflect his attitude to the contemporary social struggle in which he inevitably participates.
A work that portrays reality is bound to reflect too the writer's personal outlook, and the writer is never an impartial chronicler of his time but always champions the ideas which in his opinion embody the wisdom of his age. Naturally, the writer's subjective understanding of history by no means always corresponds to its objective substance. _However, by investigating the development of everchanging reality and analysing social relationships, the realist writers produced an authentic picture of contemporary personal and social life, since the underlying principle of the realist method, active cognition, brought important new achievements. The realists were able to portray the essential conflicts of their age which conditioned the inner world of their heroes, their way. of thinking and behaving, and to see the sources of social evil that were having such a destructive effect on the human personality. Hence the humanistic perception of reality characteristic of the realists who made a social analysis of life in their time in accordance with an individual philosophy of life.
This distinctive feature of pre-socialist realism was already apparent in the earlier stages of the emergence of the method in the period of the French and English bourgeois revolutions.
The banner of the eighteenth century was bourgeois progress, which was out to destroy the moral and economic structure of the feudal system. The main historical task of the age was the transformation of society. The ideas of civic liberty were blowing in the wind, and they were great ideas, heralding a new stage in the development of human society.
22Until the nascent bourgeois society had revealed its contradictions, it was hailed by philosophers and writers connected with the democratic movement of the age as an ideal and perfect form of civilisation, assuring harmony of individual interests. The idea of free or ``natural'' man came to the fore, man independent of the absolutist morality and the hierarchical and seigniorial concept of duty towards feudal power, towards the political and moral props of the moribund feudal order.
``Natural'' man was free from the dogmas of absolutism propagated by classicism. He was regarded by the ideologists of the third estate as being naturally endowed with such new virtues as honesty, enterprise, and persistence. They were considered his inner essence and not introduced from outside, not, that is, implanted in him by the ethics of feudalism.
Fielding's boisterous heroes, with their tremendous joie de vivre, and the sober, practical Robinson Crusoe, were highly charged with historical optimism. Tom Jones behaves as his nature dictates, and if his nature sometimes lets him down, causing him to behave thoughtlessly or wrongly on occasion, no doubt is cast on his intrinsic virtue: he is simply revealing human nature as it is.
When Robinson Crusoe is left alone to battle with the elements and creates a whole civilisation on his island--- helped, to be sure, by the previous collective experience of mankind---his essential ``natural'' self remains intact and emerges triumphant from the hardest trials.
With their active, independent characters possessed of tremendous drive and tenacity, the early realists reflected in their works the chief feature of their age---the emergence of a new man, fundamentally different from the refined hero of classicism. The creation of the hero of the new age was a great triumph of realism, a triumph indeed that only the realists could have achieved, concerned as they were with the investigation and analysis of social environment.
However, while the early realists achieved undeniable successes in the portrayal of new characters, their depiction of environment was in many ways empirical. They did not spiritualise the surrounding world, which for them was 23 not the independent aesthetic object it is for modern realism. Their prose was precise and businesslike, and they often presented situations, without subtle shades and details. Robinson Crusoe's tale of life on his island is more a sober factual account of a business trip than a literary description of the colourful world. This sober, factual, businesslike approach also characterised the prose of Smollett and Swift, and in the case of the latter became an original stylistic device, perfectly in accord with the aesthetic tastes of the time.
Empiricism is the most significant feature of the early realist descriptions of environment. It is to be seen also in the presentation of the psychology of the heroes, who are revealed through their actions rather than in the sphere of the innermost workings of their minds and hearts. The reader was expected to divine the hero's inner life from his actions, for it was not so much personal as universal traits that were stressed in the character's psychology. The characters' spiritual life had not yet been submitted to deep, let alone many-sided, analysis in the realist prose of the eighteenth century. This sphere of personal life was not to be investigated until the nineteenth century.
In early realism empiricism in the portrayal of reality went hand in hand with a pronounced tendency to idealise the hero. This at first sight rather strange contradiction arose from the concept of freedom upheld by realism, which was based on Enlightenment philosophy and ethics. Rousseau's words ``Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains" rang out as a tocsin in the middle of the century. This powerful formula proclaiming freedom to be the natural right of natural man expressed the very essence of the age, and was born of the revolutionary ferment sweeping Europe on the eve of the French Revolution. It demanded emancipation from the suffocating fundamental spiritual principles of feudalism that were bringing people so much misery, and recognised the need to change the structure of society. The ideologists of the third estate did not regard the practical aspect of the matter as presenting much of a problem. It all seemed perfectly simple: free man from his chains and he would become for ever more the free citizen of a harmonious 24 society, since considered from the point of view of abstract, law all men were equal at birth.
In actual fact, however, man was obviously not free from birth, or indeed even before his birth. Rousseau overlooked the simple fact that the infant letting out its first cry in a lowly peasant hovel was not free since he inevitably inherited not only his parents' appearance but also their material condition. The child born in the nobleman's castle or in the house of a respectable merchant was incomparably freer from the start.
Man was not born free, since the society in which he lived and which had existed before him preserved material inequality and therefore could not possess the quality of genuine freedom.
The bourgeoisie sought its own freedom for itself, and when it finally won it, defined it in the codes which became the holy of holies of bourgeois democracy. Article Six of the French Constitution of 1793 produced by the bourgeois revolution gave a classical definition of freedom as understood by the third estate that had acquired power. ``Freedom is the right of man to do anything which does not prejudice the rights of another.'' In Article Sixteen this moralising thesis received unambiguous sociological substantiation. ``Natural'' man was allowed to ``use and dispose of his possessions and income as he thought fit''. Thus, the freedom of man to do whatever was not prejudicial to the interests of another, the ethical ideal so triumphantly proclaimed in the Convention, legalised an illusory freedom, for it affirmed the inviolability of the principle of private property, the fundamental principle of a society based on exploitation. In this way the man was in fact standing aloof from society, and by implication gaining the right to wage war on his neighbour and the whole of society, for what he ``thought fit" was bound to conflict with what other members of society ``thought fit''.
The complex casuistry of the bourgeois ideal of freedom was revealed magnificently by Marx. Contrasting true freedom with the concept of the citizen's social obligations as embodied in the 1793 Constitution, he wrote: ``... So the right to freedom is not based on human unity, but, on the contrary, on human isolation. It is the right to this 25 isolation, the right of the limited individual.'' He goes on: ``The right of a man to private property is therefore the right to use his possessions and dispose of them as he pleases (a son gre) irrespective of other people; it is the right to selfishness."^^1^^
Thus the rights of natural, that is, ``free'' man, supposedly granted him by nature, were now peremptorily placed within the iron framework of the law, which for the protection of its precepts from those who might wish to introduce real freedom for all, and not only for the man of property, resorted to instruments like the guillotine (in the case of the more progressive French bourgeois) or the gallows (preferred by the more conservative English bourgeois).
The guillotine was what awaited the Babouvists, the members of the Conspiracy of Equals who proclaimed true freedom for all and championed the idea of communist organisation of social relations. The French bourgeoisie saw a more fearsome enemy in Gracchus Babeuf than in all the emigres in Koblenz put together.
The law of the victorious bourgeoisie also made short work of the second part of Rousseau's classic formula. The chains of feudalism were indeed removed, but ``natural'' man suddenly found to his amazement and horror that he was now wearing handcuffs, admittedly of far more subtle workmanship than the rough, primitive chains the serf blacksmith had forged in the baron's smithy.
The relentless logic of history removed the mask from ``natural'' man to reveal an ennobled, idealised, enterprising bourgeois, a slave of his selfish personal interests.
This then was the real dialectic of the development of bourgeois class society, which appeared in the realm of ideology and social consciousness in the form of an antinomy between the ideal of ``natural'' man as it appeared to the revolutionary thinkers of the Enlightenment, and the practical implementation of this ideal.
The real bourgeois was engaged in speculation, organising financial deals, lending money on interest to the reckless, spendthrift aristocracy who lived with no thought for _-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx, F. Engels, Werke, Bd. 1, S. 364. 26
26 the morrow. He took over their estates, built roads and ships which he sent off to mysterious distant lands and whose cargoes of gold, copra, and silks gave off a heady aroma that turned the head of the respectable pater familias, encouraging him to undertake risky enterprises. The real bourgeois soon grasped the possibilities machines offered compared to human hands, and organised factories, learning to turn the sweat of the workers into hard cash, The antinomy between the social ideal of freedom and reality was a puzzle for many of the realist writers, since, reflecting the mood of the democratic plebeian masses, they sincerely wished to see the new society a harmonious one. Although they were bourgeois thinkers with the limitations that implies, they nevertheless presented in their works the sharp social contrasts of the age and many imperfections of the social order, thereby leaving invaluable testimonies.But the early realists were inclined to ascribe the imperfections of social organisation to the imperfection of human nature, the natural qualities of which needed to be corrected, polished and educated in the spirit of reason. Their natural tendency to idealise the hero reflected the objective revolutionary impulse of the age and the faith and hope of the popular masses, whose beliefs were formulated by realist art, that emancipation from feudal institutions could free people wholly and completely.
The tendency to idealise the hero was also an expression of the didactic aims of the progressive ideology which produced the Encyclopedic, Holbach's Systeme de la nature and the pedagogical Utopia of Emile in the hope that if the views and opinions that prevailed in society could be changed, then society itself would be changed as a result and would acquire the harmony and justice it was so lacking. If, as the Enlighteners believed, inculcating rational notions in people's minds could transform heterogeneous egoistic interests and instincts that still guided human actions into some organic harmonious whole, then art and literature with their power to influence through live images could contribute to such education of society. That is why in the works of the eighteenth century realists we find a certain amount of didacticism and a strong 27 moralising element. This applies not only to the more obvious examples, like Voltaire's Candide, where the moral of reason was contrasted with the unreason of the ruling morality of society. There is also a strong didactical element woven into the fabric of such genre works as Defoe's Mo]] Flanders, or Fielding's Jonathan Wild, as well as in Richardson's novels. Even in Beaumarchais' plays, which bubble with plebeian revolutionary joie de vivre and extol the skill and cunning, energy and practicality of the third estate, the feudal morality was condemned from the standpoint of the morality of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
In early realism moralising went hand in hand with criticism of the social morals. This was perfectly natural, for the feudal world and the feudal consciousness reflecting the decline of the old order was least of all concerned with preserving and strengthening moral principles. While pathetic imitators of the great dramatists of the eighteenth century were attempting to uphold the idea of aristocratic hegemony with a stream of precious, bombastic, insufferably pompous tragedies, elevating the wretched passions of the decayed nobility, the rest of aristocratic literature was characterised by a spirit of vulgarised Epicureanism and frivolity. The feudal world was nearing its end in an atmosphere far from solemn. The pleasures of the flesh replaced the strict concepts of morality which were the backbone of Cornelian tragedy. The aristocracy hid their own corruption and spiritual bankruptcy behind a facade of refinement, under powder and beauty spots, ruches and farthingales. Frivolous verse, salon comedies with ambiguous situations bordering on the indecent mocked the principles which the bourgeoisie held sacred and inviolable, such as family life, the home, marital fidelity, thrift and economy, respect for one's elders, and so on and so forth. In its criticism of the feudal-aristocratic morality, revolutionary-democratic literature did not limit itself to exposing the ethical foundations of the old society. Diderot's Le Neveau de Rameau, Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, the novels of Godwin and Crebillon (fils) and the articles and satires of Steele, all revealed the imperfections of the existing social order through criticism of morals. 28 But while early realism had some great achievements to its credit as regards condemnation of the old order and its essential moralising and idealising tendency found support in the revolutionary ferment of the age, while attitudes of social protest inspired the works of the great writers and thinkers of the eighteenth century, associating them with the social struggle of the masses, the emergent bourgeois literature proper reflected the antinomy between the social ideal of freedom and its practical realisation with almost documentary accuracy. Side by side with the epic of the new age, the novel, developed the drama, gradually ousting both ``high'' tragedy and comedy, which had been the dominant genres of the earlier part of the century, answering as they did to the demands of feudal society. The drama, or as it was then called ``com\'edie larmoyante" or ``middle-class tragedy" bore distinct marks of its bourgeois origins.
The realist basis of the new drama lay in its accurate, authentic portrayal of bourgeois life, and the vicissitudes of the struggle of the third estate for a place in the sun, at a time when power and the commanding heights were still in the hands of the privileged classes. Its normal theme and conflict was portrayal of the clash between a bourgeois and feudal society, and the literary presentation of this conflict required investigation and analysis of environment. The realistic nature of the main conflict in the bourgeois drama was matched by accuracy in the presentation of details of everyday life, the way of life of the bourgeois family and social environment. However, the ``com\'edie larmoyante" was still marked by rationalism, rather ``stock'' heroes with a tendency to philosophise and embark on rather obvious, long-winded moralising. The founders of the moralising drama---Lillo, Destouches, Niveau de la Chausse, and even Diderot and Lessing---did not succeed in overcoming the natural prosaic nature of the ``natural man'', that is the bourgeois, despite their deliberate exaggeration of his positive qualities. The aesthetic contradictions of bourgeois drama were ideological contradictions, for the aim its creators had set themselves, that of poeticising the private man, was impossible. The real hero of the ``com\'edie larmoyante" was not a 29 suitable object tor poeticisat ion- His practical activities were based on self-interest, and his true face was far removed from the ideal figure the creators of the bourgeois drama saw in their mind's eye. As realists, keen observers of reality, they could not help discerning the negative aspects of their bourgeois heroes, their egoism, callousness and narrow-mindedness. But since bourgeois development had not yet revealed its main imperfections, its essentially inhuman, dehumanising nature, the negative features of the heroes of the middle-class drama were generally attributed, in accordance with the prevailing attitudes of the day, to the imperfections of human nature, which could be overcome and put right with time.
However, time was to destroy and refute this illusion typical of early realism. The historical process was not only marked by the collapse of feudal ties and the growth of revolutionary protest from the oppressed masses, but also by the establishment of bourgeois social relations. The new features of life forced people to give serious consideration to questions such as: Could not the new conditions be the cause of imperfections and weaknesses in human nature? Could human failings be in fact overcome by educational and pedagogical measures, which according to the ideas of the revolutionary Enlighteners should work without fail, yet in practice showed purely marginal success when they did not fail altogether?
The antinomy between man's spiritual and social development, reflecting objective social contradictions and felt by all the major thinkers and writers of the time, demanded clarification and explanation. If human nature is imperfect and not very susceptible to influence by enlightening reason, then there was clearly a need for further investigation of human nature itself and human psychology. The crisis in the concept of modern man as ``natural'' man resulting from bourgeois development which instilled views and habits contradictory to the ideal norms of civic and human virtue formulated by the morality of the Enlightenment, produced a psychological trend in realist prose, first apparent in the works of Prevost, Sterne, Goethe in his Werther period, and later Choderlos de Laclos. These writers examined aspects of the human soul 30 that the novel of the Enlightenment had failed to notice or deliberately ignored.
Lawrence Sterne perceived and revealed the true complexity of the human heart. No one had ever before submitted to such close scrutiny the movements of the human soul. Like painstaking natural scientist he examined the human heart through a magnifying glass and saw not only its bright aspects, but also the contradictions for which it was difficult to find a rational explanation. A strange melancholy pervades his works. His characters' inner world is an eminently healthy one. There is nothing pathological about them, no deviations from normality. Yet all of them---and especially the narrator---lack the selfconfidence of a Tom Jones or a Peregrine Pickle, who are never at a loss and sail blithely through life's most complicated situations. For them life is an open book, which they read without fear, taking the caprices of fortune and the numerous ups and downs of life in their stride.
Sterne's heroes found things far less clear and simple than did the heroes of the Enlightenment novels. The simplest impending action involved much thought and hesitation. While Fielding and Smollett's heroes went out and grappled boldly with the world, striding cheerfully and confidently along the highways of England, popping into inns and squires' halls, joking with buxom serving wenches, coming to blows with hotheads, crossing the Channel and finding their way into the dens of vice of the French capital to fight their way through rows and brawls with the same tireless energy as back at home, Sterne's rather eccentric heroes were confined to the world of their own Ego and a small circle of friends, and they are clearly baffled by life.
Like other representatives of the psychological trend in the 18th century novel, Sterne was aware of the complexity of the ties between man and his social environment, and felt that this environment, reality, which history formed not according to the laws of the philosophy and morality of the Enlightenment, but according to laws of its own, was far more complex than it appeared to the exponents of the rationalist realism of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, Sterne's character portrayal has much in 31 common with that of his contemporaries. While making an accurate analysis of his heroes' feelings, he singled out their dominant characteristic presenting it in ingenious interplay with other, less important, features. What distinguished Sterne from his contemporaries was not so much the original composition of Tristram Shandy, or the melancholia which gave such a unique charm to his prose, as what was new in his understanding of the relationship between the personal and the social in life. While Condor cet denied any contradiction between man's personal and social interests and saw a guarantee of progress in their supposed harmony, thereby ignoring the absence of class harmony and failing to realise that any attempt to identify essentially different interests could only mean unbridled freedom of personal interests, Sterne showed the divorce between the individual and society. Sterne's nervous irony might soften and blur the painfulness of this divorce, glossing over its causes, but his heroes were confined to their own little world simply because they saw the outside world as an unfavourable sphere of activity.
Goethe laid bare the inevitability and social roots of this divorce between the personal and the social most clearly in his Leiden des jungen Werthers, in which he presents man's spiritual life and emotional world with incomparable lyricism combined with analytic acumen.
That universal genius Goethe recognised the strength of the realist method relatively early on. Discovering for himself (and thereby for literature as a whole) the possibilities the new method offered, the young writer turned first and foremost to the lesson of Shakespeare. A revival of interest in the great English dramatist was characteristic of the eighteenth century as a whole. But the young Goethe grasped better than any other of Shakespeare's admirers and followers the essential feature of his art by virtue of which he can be considered the founder of realism.
Goethe's speech ``Zum Shakespeare Tag'', made shortly before he began work on his tragedy Gotz von Berlichingen---one of the finest works of eighteenth century realism which owed a great deal to Shakespeare's histories---- 32 contained a precise formulation of the basic tenet of realism. Goethe pointed out that Shakespeare's tragedies ``revolve around a hidden point . . . where all that is original in our Ego and the bold freedom of our will clash with the inexorable course of the whole"^^1^^. The natural laws of ``the inexorable course of the whole'', that is, the course and development of social relations, could naturally only be shown by realism, capable of analysing phenomena and investigating their causes and effects. Goethe realised that a man's personality and individual psychology could not be understood and explained unless the complex underlying secrets of ``the inexorable course of the whole" were first discovered.
When 1'abbe Prevost created the baffling Manon Lescaut, although a subtle psychologist and perspicacious observer of manners, he found himself at a loss to explain the inner contradictions of his heroine, who combined apparently irreconcilable qualities: fidelity in love and extreme inconstancy, great purity of soul and levity bordering on immorality in her actions, generosity and meanness, frivolity and a serious nature, and so on and so forth L'abbe Prevost is like an alchemist of old mixing different substances he imagines to be incompoundable in his flask and to his great surprise finding they have produced a totally unexpected and hitherto unknown compound. The new conditions had not only changed the social relations in a class society, but had shaped a new psychology, the peculiarities of which amazed 1'abbe Prevost.
Goethe pondered much on the essence and final aim of ``the inexorable course of the whole" throughout his long life. In Werther he boldly lifted the lid off the mysterious world of human feelings and related the sphere of the emotions to the reality of the external world. His novel quite stunned his contemporaries, and this was not only because the power of love---usually put on the pedestal of tragedy, or larded with sentimentality, or simplified and shown as ``the pale fire of desire"---at last acquired the poetry of simplicity and naturalness, and was allowed into the sphere _-_-_
~^^1^^ J. W. Goethe, ``Zum Shakespeare Tag" in: Von deutscher Ait und Kunst, Hamburg, 1773, S. 146.
__PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 3---0891 33 of everyday life. Along with a lyrical portrayal of complex human feelings, there are strong notes of condemnation of tyranny, and even more important, the novel lays bare the antinomy between a man's longing for freedom and the impossibility of achieving it. This fateful antinomy that racked the young Werther's soul was a burning issue of the time. However, while revealing the new reality, penetrating and investigating so many aspects of it, subjecting the principles of feudalism, its morality and ethics, to merciless criticism, and not stopping short of criticism of the negative aspects of the developing bourgeois society, the eighteenth century realists showed themselves unable to offer any solutions to the basic conflict of the age. Indeed, in accordance with changes in social consciousness and under pressure from other literary methods a transformation of realism began.The revolutionary democratic social thought of the eighteenth century and the emergent bourgeois ideology sensed the approach of revolution whose fiery breath was searing the whole continent, and were each fighting for their own understanding and practical realisation of human freedom. The material and spiritual conditions for a revolution had already matured, and like any other revolution it was attracting many minds and striking fear into the hearts of those who were against any change in the existing order. Like any bourgeois revolution it contained an inalienable contradiction: while declaring freedom it affirmed a new form of exploitation. The storming of the Bastille and the subsequent events of the French Revolution, which became more and more fierce as the revolutionary crisis deepened, while inspiring revolutionary democratic thought, modified the social, and hence the aesthetic, aims of democratic art and literature, which did not rise enough to become truly revolutionary. As Marx wrote in his article ``Moralising Criticism aud Criticising Morality": ``The reign of terror in France could ... only serve to wipe away as if by magic all the feudal ruins of France with blows of its fearful hammer. The bourgeoisie with their cowardly caution would never have managed to do the job over decades even. The bloody actions of the people, therefore, merely cleared the way for 34 the bourgeoisie."^^1^^ If the revolutionary democratic art and literature of the time (Forster, Schubart, Joseph Chenier, Radishchev, the painter David and the composer Gossec and so on) were inspired by the ideas of the Revolution, undismayed by what was called its ``excesses'', democratic, not to mention bourgeois, art and literature, although also seething with civic ideas and sentiments, and considering man's emancipation from the burden of feudal relations an historical necessity, displayed ``cowardly caution".
The character of the development of thought at the end of the 18th century was determined by the fact that the Enlightenment outlook called to life by the ripening revolutionary situation was unable to rid itself of its inner contradictions. For both the ideologists of the third estate and revolutionary democrats expressing the true interests of the oppressed masses, the root causes of the historical process and its real prospects remained a mystery. Nor was realism in a position to bring them to light, for its strength and weakness lay in social analysis of reality, which was constantly changing and fraught with completely new unforeseen tendencies and features of development.
Describing the theoretical achievements of social thought in the eighteenth century in generalising on the practical experience and demands of the bourgeoisie, Engels wrote in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy:
``The eighteenth century, the century of revolution, also
revolutionised economics. But just as all the revolutions of
this century were one-sided and bogged down in
antitheses---just as abstract materialism was set in opposition
to abstract spiritualism, the republic to monarchy, the
social contract to divine right---likewise the economic
revolution did not get beyond antithesis. The premises
remained everywhere in force: materialism did not
contend with the Christian contempt for and humiliation of
Man, and merely posited Nature instead of the Christian
God as the Absolute facing Man. In politics no one dreamt
of examining the premises of the State as such.
It did not occur to economics to question the validity of
_-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx, F. Engels, Wetke, Bd. 4, S. 339.
Classicism as a literary method arose in the period when the countries of Europe were consolidating as nation states, when centralised power was suppressing feudal liberties (which was of unquestionable benefit to the bourgeoisie). Therefore, the essential ideology of classicism was founded on the civic principle, on the absolutisation of monarchic duty, which was placed above personal interests. In the age of the bourgeois revolution, classicism again shaped and expressed civic passions and sentiments, civic _-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts oi 1844, Mos-. cow, pp. 177--78.
36 awareness, but it now absolutised the concept of public duty. The Jacobins, the most consistent revolutionaries, were also the most consistent classicists, which is only natural, since for them the question of civic duty and publicspiritedness was literally a matter of life and death. Through classicism the democratic and bourgeois consciousness also affirmed their understanding of man's duty to society in the new conditions created by the revolutionary crisis.Lessing, Diderot, and even Rousseau, were favourably disposed towards revolutionary classicism because of its social content, for the revolutionary democrats drew a sharp distinction between social interests (essentially, those of the whole people) and arbitrary, selfish, personal interests. The moderate bourgeois ideology of the third estate, on the other hand, characterised, to use Marx's term, by ``cowardly caution'', regarded classicism first and foremost as a means of compromise with reality, although the theoreticians of bourgeois classicism also insisted on the principle of freedom as the natural precondition for human progress. Winckelmann, who did so much to promote the study of the art of antiquity, declared in his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, an important landmark in the development of eighteenth century social thought, ``calm is the quality most characteristic of beauty'',~^^1^^ thereby expressing through aesthetic theory the political demands of the moderate bourgeoisie and formulating the programme for the development of the new art.
Winckelmann did not wish to relate the new art directly to the social struggle. ``The mind of a rational being'', he wrote, ``has an innate longing to transcend matter into the realm of abstract ideas".^^2^^ This definition can be said to characterise German ideology as a whole with its aptitude for accomplishing universal historical revolutions in the realm of pure thought. It clearly reveals the inability of the burghers of Germany (and not only Germany) to go very far in criticism of reality by real, practical, as opposed to theoretical, methods. In the years when _-_-_
~^^1^^ J. Winckelmann, Geschichte dei Kunst des Altertums, Weimar, 1964, S. 144.
~^^2^^ Ibid., S. 135.
37 Winckelmann formulated the aesthetico-political credo of bourgeois classicism, the ``rational being'', far from aspiring to the ``realm of thought" was trying in the most insistent manner to introduce the rational demands of ideology into everyday life. Basically, Winckelmann was reconciling himself to reality, sanctifying his conciliation with refined aestheticism imbued with the spirit of antiquity.For all their important differences, the various classicist trends in eighteenth century literature all arose for perfectly logical reasons, as reflections of changes in social consciousness. The logic of the emergence of classicist tendencies is to be seen especially clearly in the spiritual evolution of Goethe and Schiller whose works represent the consummation of the aesthetic and social quests of eighteenth century literature considered as an independent stage in the development of world literature.
Both Goethe and his younger contemporary, the initiators and finest representatives of eighteenth century realism, had a rare awareness of the historical essence of their time. Both deliberately and warrantably went over to new creative positions, realising that the existing realist means, based as they were on insufficient comprehension of the laws of social development, did not allow of solving the riddles that arose with the emergence of bourgeois social relations. In turning to classicism and attempting to revive the noble, harmonious spirit of the art of antiquity, with its perfect form and great sense of artistic proportion, Schiller and Goethe were basically resolving the same humanistic problems as they had posed in their pre-- classicist works.
Unlike Jacobin classicism, which supported the idea of revolution all the way, the classicism of Goethe and Schiller proceeded from rejection of terror as a method of implanting the new social relations. But if their classicism had been simply a reaction to the events of the Revolution, it would have degenerated into an effete philistine apology for reality or pure formalism manipulating motives borrowed from classical antiquity, and essentially, eclectic and sterile. As it was, their classicism was based on the consequences of the revolutionary changes which 38 had failed to usher in an era of genuine human happiness. Naturally, Gotz von Berlichingen and Werther, Die Rauber and Kabale und Liebe, despite their powerful protest against the abnormalities of social relations, also contained doubts as to the possibility of their transformation by revolution. The world order that was established following the victory of the French Revolution, and especially after Thermidor, far from removing the inherent contradictions of class society, tended to exacerbate them. In regarding beautiful---and hence moral---art based on perfect classical models as a means for educating man and destroying the egoism and disharmony in his soul, Goethe and Schiller were essentially continuing to uphold the ideals of the Enlightenment, displaying wise humanistic faith in the idea of the perfectability of human nature and society. Their classicism, unlike Winckelmann's, did not represent a compromise. Characterised by the universalisation of moral, humanitarian duty, it represented rather an attempt to resolve by new means the new ethical and social problems that the course of historical progress had posed, and it arose on the basis of the achievements of realism. Although late eighteenth century literature was marked by a retreat from realism and the birth of preromantic and romantic trends, these new trends were unable to develop without taking into account the achievements of realism.
Goethe and Schiller were aware of the fruitlessness and futility of the bourgeois individualist cult of self-will preached by the Sturm und Drang school They found equally unacceptable the attempts to find new ways of reflecting reality made by their pre-romanticist and romanticist contemporaries, who began to perceive life as a fabric of interwoven illusions, left the world of reality for the world of fancy, or proposed, like Novalis in his treatise Die Christenheit oder Europa, the restoration of the old order destroyed by history. The time was not yet ripe for revolutionary romanticism to take the stage.
At the turn of the century, the literature which reflected the results of the revolutionary crisis, like philosophical thought, was making a serious attempt to perceive and comprehend what had happened, and raise, on 39 the ruins of shattered hopes and illusions, a new outlook, a new understanding of nature, society and human consciousness.
While bourgeois economists were busy justifying strictly bourgeois progress substantiating its inevitability with frank delight, while German idealist philosophers and Natural philosophers were concentrating all their efforts on criticising the mechanistic materialism of the Enlightenment, while nascent romanticism, painfully aware of the growing discord between the individual and society, was unable to shed any light on the origins of this discord, in the midst of this very confused period a new idea was emerging that was to revolutionise thought---- the idea of development. At the turn of the century, the basic group of questions of outlook later to be formulated by Hegel in his Die Phanomenologie des Geistes ( substantiation of dialectics, definition of the law of the negation of a negation, and a constant attention to history) was already taking shape. New theories developed at this point, new social theories suggesting an unexpected solution to the apparently insoluble question of human freedom, with which the thinkers of the Enlightenment had wrestled in vain, theories proceeding from rejection of capitalist private-ownership relations and seeming to confirm by the very fact of their existence the correctness of Hegel's law of the negation of a negation. Out of the ruins of the feudal system, out of the scaffolding of the capitalist system, Utopian socialism arose, attempting to apply the idea of development to history, seeking a logic in its flux.
In his Theorie des quatre mouvements, which appeared the year after La phenomenologie de 1'esprit, Fourier wisely pointed out the need of the new age for a new spiritual synthesis based on other ideological and social foundations than the democratic ideology of the Enlightenment, not to mention strictly bourgeois political economy and philosophy. ``After the disaster of 1793, all illusions were shattered; the political and moral sciences were in disgrace and all faith in them had been irretrievably lost. Henceforth it was to be foreseen that happiness was not to be expected from any acquired knowledge, 40 that social welfare must be sought in some new science, and new paths laid for the political spirit; for it was clear that neither the philosophers nor their rivals knew the cures for social sufferings and that under cover of the dogmas of both, the most terrible ills, including poverty, would continue forever."^^1^^ This need for synthesis and generalisation of the social experience acquired during and after the bourgeois revolution was also felt by Hegel, who raised the edifice of an encyclopaedic philosophical system, and by Saint-Simon with his idea for a new encyclopaedia, and also by the circumscribed, pedantic, bourgeois thinker Auguste Comte, who emasculated the revolutionary and socialist substance of Saint-Simon, borrowing only the rationalist-positivist aspect of his theory.
The need to acquire an understanding of the new social reality that was taking shape naturally produced a heightened interest in history, which was to characterise the intellectual life of the early nineteenth century.
Such geniuses as Goethe and Schiller also turned their attention to history and tried to understand the lessons of the French Revolution through its events and consequences. Schiller, who had made an extensive study of the past as an historian, and was the author of works on the Netherlands Revolt, the Thirty Years War and the political struggle in France in the reign of Henry IV, all written by an artist rather than a scholar, realised that the hidden mainspring of human passions and actions lay in material interests, or in other words adopted a realist approach in his analysis of events. The realist view of life, which enabled Schiller to rise above the theories and principles of classicism, is already to be seen in Kabale und Liebe. In his later dramas, in the Wallenstein trilogy and Mary Stuart, and especially Wilhelm Tell, it is the principle underlying the whole action. Schiller did not merely turn to history in search of subjects and great figures for the purpose of drama and tragedy. He regarded history as the struggle of various moral principles, _-_-_
~^^1^^ Ch. Fourier, CEuvres Completes, T. 1, ``Theorie des quatre mouvements'', Troisieme edition, Paris, 1846, pp. 2-3.
41 and it was this study of history that brought him round to the belief in the idea of rule by the people in his later years although he had previously rejected the Jacobin method of transforming society.Features of utopianism were also clearly manifest in his outlook, for the objective basis of historical changes remained a mystery to him, a mystery that was to be solved in the near future by social thought, art and literature, once the contradictions of the capitalist system had become apparent.
Both in his Briefe tiber die asthetische Erzeihung, where he expresses great hopes in the power of art to change man and hence society, and in his later tragedies, Schiller adhered to the aesthetic canon of his classicism, exaggerating the power of man's intrinsic moral essence and devoting considerably less attention to study and analysis of the real underlying factors of the historical process. Hence the frequent irruptions of fatality into his heroes' fortunes, this really being none other than disguised historical necessity and conditionally which the author failed to perceive (viz., Wallensteiri). His portrayal of personal passions, thoughts and feelings pushed into the background the environment in which the character moved and acted, the ``Falstaffian background" which could have imparted realistic completeness to the whole structure of his tragedies. Schiller often abandoned objectivity, making his hero the carrier of and voice for his own ideas, resorting to exalted and somewhat abstract rhetoric. All these features of Schiller's drama have a logical historical explanation, and bear witness to the fact that, he was constantly developing as an artist, doing his utmost to embody in artistic images the new reality, which could only be apprehended and presented in word form by realism, and on no account by that revived classicism to which the poet so frequently declared allegiance. Nevertheless, Schiller's later plays do comprise tremendous love of man, magnificent characters, a remarkably full and accurate presentation of the characters' inner worlds, and quite extraordinarily intense and authentic conflicts. Most important of all, Schiller had come to realise that the practical result of the French Revolution, the new order that 42 was establishing itself in place of the old world destroyed by the revolution, was not the end product of social development, and that history was a process in the course of which old ways of life and social forms that pass away are replaced by new ones. The idea of rule by the people which Schiller reached in Wilhelm Tell, after overcoming his bourgeois fears of popular revolt, shows that he realised that only the future would be able to resolve the apparently indissoluble contradictions of his age.
If Schiller turned to history in order to comprehend the meaning of the social revolution he was witnessing, Goethe's works and spiritual evolution reflected the essence of the age somewhat more indirectly. In his treatise Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung Schiller made a very shrewd assessment of the main feature of Goethe's original genius, expressed in his spontaneously realist and powerful perception of life. Goethe strongly disapproved of various forms of subjectivism in art and philosophy, and often openly expressed his contempt for it. He valued the objectivity of the world and nature over and above all else, and constantly felt the living pulse of existence: he preferred the Spinozan brand of determinism to the painful attempts of contemporary Naturphilosophie to derive laws of nature, exclusive to nature, from human thought. Goethe considered development to be a natural feature of nature and extended this concept to history, frequently employing and adapting the views expressed by Herder in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte.
Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pilanzen zu erklaren, which like the works of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, anticipated the idea of evolution, and Faust, that bold, triumphant hymn to creative, constructive, searching human thought, are pervaded with the idea of development, the idea of the incessant movement of life, constantly in the making, continuously changing.
Goethe always saw man as a child of ever-changing, flowing nature, a leaf on the evergreen tree of eternity. Faust, while evoking the spirit of the Earth and recognising its power, at the same time feels himself a part of the Universe, to the understanding of which he devoted all the powers of his mind.
43But if the objectivity of nature and its laws was obvious to Goethe and he was able to grasp the concrete features of the evolution of the living being (suffice it to remember his discovery of the intermaxillary bone); if we can agree with the Russian poet who wrote: ``The book of the stars was clear to him and the salt wave spoke with him'', the idea of development which was such an organic part of Goethe's Weltanschauung never acquired true realist concreticity in his later works when applied to the social sphere, the domain of living history. Following in Herder's footsteps and accepting that history, like nature, conformed to certain reasonable laws, Goethe was unable to discover the forces that determine human social relations. Time put fetters even on his indomitable mind.
Despite the fundamental differences between the two great writers, there is a definite similarity in their approach to the presentation of history, to be attributed to the identical social conditions in which their art matured. The fate of the gloomy, ambitious Wallenstein marching inevitably towards his doom, has its counterpart in Egmont who throws himself with equal passion and delight into sensual pleasures and social struggle. Portraying Egmont as an active participant in the national liberation movement, Goethe focussed his attention on the idealistic political blindness of his hero, his inevitable progress towards the executioner's block, rather than on the struggle between real social forces, which is relegated to the background. This was no accident: Goethe substituted analysis of the spiritual world of his tragic hero for the dialectic of historical contradictions of a class origin which determined the behaviour of Egmont as an historical figure, and thus the fatality, the predetermination of his fate expresses, just as in the case of Schiller's trilogy, the poet's ignorance of the nature of historical necessity.
Goethe, like Schiller, did not welcome the French Revolution and offered in contrast to the fierce political passions raging in France the orderly, limited and moderate bourgeois existence extolled and idealised in sweet hexameters in Hermann und Dorothea. Yet, again like Schiller, he understood perfectly well that the results of 44 the revolution did not represent the final stage in the historical development of mankind.
In his latter years, Goethe followed closely the successes and advances of contemporary social, political and aesthetic thought. In the new period that followed the Revolution of 1789, a period full of events of tremendous scale and importance, Goethe could observe much that was unknown to the 18th century, and Utopian elements begin to feature more and more distinctly in his outlook and literary works.
The idea of education as a means of creating first a harmonious individual and later a harmonious society, was characteristic of Weimar classicism too, and forms the core of Wilhelm Meister. But the new age had introduced new elements into the positive programme for perfecting social relations expounded in the novel. The theme of part two, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, shows a marked similarity to the practical ideas for reorganising society propagated by Fourier and Saint-Simon. Goethe's ideas were particularly akin to the ideas that received this final expression in Saint-Simon's treatise Opinions litteraires, philosophiques et industrielles, containing the famous epigraph: ``The Golden Age which blind tradition has hitherto placed in the past is yet to come".
Saint-Simon wrote: ``The nineteenth century philosophers should now be proceeding with their task which is very different from that performed by the philosophers of the 18th century.
``The nineteenth century philosophers should unite to demonstrate fully and comprehensively that at the present state of knowledge and civilisation only industrial and scientific principles can serve as the foundation for social organisation, or rather to show that at the present state of knowledge and civilisation society can be organised in such a way as to tend directly towards an improvement of its moral and physical welfare.
``The philosophers of the 18th century created Encyclopaedia to refute the theological and feudal system. The philosophers of the 19th century should in their turn produce their .Encyclopaedia to establish the industrial and scientific system.
45``All the ideas there should be submitted to analysis in order to prove that the common weal will be the necessary result of the influence exercised by scientific and industrial principles in place of that which had been exercised on society up to now by feudal and theological principles."^^1^^
In Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Goethe, foreseeing the gigantic role industry would come to play in the life of mankind, accorded a great deal of space to reflections on the organisation of industry on a kind of communal basis. He attached equally great importance to collective labour in working the land, made the property of all. For Goethe labour was inseparable from the problem of education, preparing man for socially useful activity. ``The Province of Pedagogy'', that social and pedagogical Utopia, like the whole system of organisation of life described in the novel, served one end---the future, the affirmation and propagation of a more rational system of social relations than that which had resulted from the Revolution.
The philosophy of Faust also has a Utopian element. The spiritual pivot of the tragedy is undoubtedly the scene of the atonement, the scene of Faust's victory over Mephistopheles, when Faust's bold desire for knowledge turns to the good of others, when, having completed the course of his earthly existence and experienced all human joys and sorrows, he undertakes the re-creation of a whole land and in labour in the name of human happiness and freedom finds happiness for himself and the summit of his desires. Surely Goethe never attained such supreme, stirring tragedy as in this scene where the wild joy and elation of man the creator, at having discovered the meaning of life in fruitful activity, is clouded by the clanging of spades, and the dull sound of earth slipping into the grave Mephistopheles' faithful servants, the Lemurs, are digging for him. The historical optimism in Faust's last monologue, when he says:
_-_-_Only he deserveth life and liberty
Who every day goes out to fight for them
~^^1^^ Saint-Simon, Opinions lHl6iaiies, philosophiques et industrielles, Paris, 1825, pp. 83--84.
46 remove the gloomy tragic atmosphere of the scene, but not the real difficulty of achieving the ideal of freedom which Goethe extols in Faust.Accepting the idea of development as historically legitimate and inevitable, the great poet understood that the tremendous social progress the Revolution had ushered in would not be consummated, for the Revolution had also called forth forces arresting mankind's advance towards rational social relations. Goethe saw that egoism and individualistic desires were eating away the humanistic ideal of the common weal and preventing it from taking root in the soil of life, which had been ploughed by the Revolution and well watered with human blood in the European wars that followed. But he did not reveal the root causes of social egoism, nor the motive forces of the historical process, and thus his social views, while evolving towards Utopian socialism by no means always concurred with it in everything.
Fourier and Saint-Simon applied the idea of development to history and came to the conclusion that the motive force in the historical process was the class struggle. Despite his interest in his theory of new Christianity, towards the end of his life Saint-Simon had begun to speak in the name of ``the lower class'', the force which had formed in the depths of bourgeois society, in the name, that is, of the proletariat. The social organisation which in his opinion would replace the egoistic civilisation which had grown up on the ruins of the feudal system, should promote ``the growth of welfare of the proletarians"^^1^^. Like Fourier and Robert Owen, Saint-Simon still had illusions about the ways and means of reorganising society, but he already spoke with complete conviction of the ability of the proletariat to take part in the government and organisation of the ``system of social welfare'', thereby demonstrating remarkable historical perspicacity and prescience. The combination of the idea of development with the theory of class struggle, and the discovery of the laws of history governing social relations led to the emergence of scientific socialism, which brought about a major _-_-_
~^^1^^ Ibid., pp. 158--59.
47 revolution in human thought and social life. But this discovery of universal historical importance was to be made later, and in the early years of the 19th century progressive social thought was only just beginning to come to grips with the new reality, so that it was perfectly natural that SaintSimon, continuing the tradition of such outstanding 18th century thinkers as Morelly and Mably, and with Gracchus Babeuf as an immediate precursor, should have gone much further than Goethe in his theoretical views. The demarcation line between the democratic and humanist views of Goethe and the socialist theories of the utopists arose for the simple reason that the great poet's Weltanschauung was formed in a backward country with a cowardly and ready-to-compromise bourgeoisie, that displayed more than average ``cowardly caution" towards the Revolution. Genius though he was, Goethe was a scion of the German middle class, and this was bound to leave its mark on his attitude to history.The evolution of Goethe's social views in the latter part of his life entailed corresponding changes in his basic aesthetic principles. The classicist elements in his work were on the decrease and he was searching more and more purposefully for new artistic ways and means of presenting ``the inexorable course of the whole''. Wilhelm Meister had been experimental both from the point of view of its inner spiritual content and the manner in which it was expressed. Realistically reproduced pictures of life and manners alternate with romantic scenes which Goethe, despite his reserved and even critical attitude towards Romanticism, insinuated into his novel, often unwittingly, while the concluding part really represents a sociophilosophical treatise. Goethe was seeking a new literary idiom that would enable him to express the ideas he had reached and convey their objective, historical significance. But his ignorance of the causes determining the `` inexorable course of the whole" prevented him from achieving their realistic embodiment.
The work that crowned Goethe's literary career, his tragedy about Doctor Faustus who sold his soul to the Devil to learn the meaning of things, and after long torments and sufferings rose from the personal, individualist 48 search for the meaning of life to appreciation of the common good and service to one's fellow men, was syncretic in form. The popular legend of the magician and wizard, on which the plot of the tragedy was based, introduced the historical colour of Germany's distant past, conveyed in Sachs' verse; the dramatic episode of the seduced maiden becoming a child murderer brought a powerful folklore current into the tragedy; the gloomy imagery of northern mythology is paralleled by elements from ancient mythology adapted and developed in complexity; the baroque splendour of the court scenes is combined with the strict classical severity of the Helen episode; the poetic exposition of natural science theories did not prevent the inclusion in the tragedy of the solemn liturgical finale; the allegory of the Walpurgisnacht scenes is closely interwoven with elevated symbolics, and the whole work, with its wealth and complexity of artistic elements is reminiscent as regards structure of the old mystery plays and is distantly related to the puppet theatre, that is to the folk tradition, to folk tales and legends. Goethe created a colourful, unusual, fantastic world, owing its completeness to the unity of content and manner of expression. Since the personal fate of the hero represents the fate of the whole of mankind seeking the right path in life and history, intent on discovering the secrets of the Universe, and, in Goethe's opinion, called upon to overcome the tremendous obstacles on his historical path and introduce a rational foundation to his life, Faust and his adversary Mephistopheles are symbolic. Symbolism and (often extremely nebulous) allegory also attach to other characters in the tragedy.
It is in the very nature of the artistic image to lend itself to different interpretations (including symbolic ones), for no art reflects reality with mirror-like accuracy, providing a perfectly unambiguous copy of the world of things and phenomena. Nor could it, for the human mind does not reflect objective reality like a passive mirror. There can be various principles underlying an artistic image: it can be built on associations, on similarity or comparison; it can be sharpened and made grotesque or a caricature; it can be allegorical, perfectly three-- __PRINTERS_P_48_COMMENT__ 4---0891 49 dimensional and plastic, literal and figurative, at the same time, but whatever its structure and whatever features---- rationalistic or emotional---predominate, it is always based on some particular manner of apprehending reality depending on the social nature of the author's outlook.
The aesthetics of the naturalist school began to emerge in the mid-19th century at a time when profound changes were taking place in bourgeois social consciousness based on an empirical approach to reality, which the theoreticians and exponents of naturalism considered a static category not subject to development. Naturalism cultivates the principle of copying reality, and photographic images which cannot be generalised and made to express the essence of things. Thus the naturalist aesthetics not only impoverished art and literature but detracted from the cognitive value of the image, and hence from the cognitive value of art itself.
Unlike non-realist trends, realism makes good use of all the inherent possibilities of thinking in images that help express the substance of the apprehended object. Realism absorbs all the available principles of creating an image and reveals the qualities and features of apprehended reality. In this way the realistic image objectivises reality and is equivalent to it in its own right. Realism conveys the essence of things and not their superficial appearance as naturalism does, and its aesthetics are thus truly rich and varied. The epic fullness of Tolstoi's imagery recreating the tangible, material texture of the fabric of existence, is as typical of realism as is the controlled, rationalist intellectual imagery of Stendhal; the nervous, tense, highly emotional imagery of Dostoyevsky's novels also provided a realistic picture of the life of his age, as did the laconic, concise prose of Chekhov, with its complex overtones conveying the deeper undercurrents of events. The Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin used symbolism and grotesque distortion in his scathing criticism of the social structure of Russia's capitalist-landowner society. His History of the Town of Glupov, although it avoids oversimplified, didactical allegory, is full of symbolism and its characters, too, are symbolic. But the symbolic presentation of the town officials, far from being at 50 variance with realism, Hows straight from the realist tradition, for the author is embodying in these characters typical concrete historical features of social reality. Behind the rather phantasmagorial surface of Shchedrin's satire lay the reality of semi-feudal Russian life, the author's vision of its future path and the impending doom of the existing order. Shchedrin resorted to symbolism as the best means he could find of presenting and typifying the universal features of the social system.
The subjectivist trends that arose at the turn of this century lacked an integrated view of life and went further than naturalism towards destroying the cognitive function of the image. The surrealists, for example, broke the link between the image and reality, treating the image as a form without objective content and only using it as a vehicle for chaotic feelings and emotions, associations and sensations arising in the poet's soul, which is supposedly independent of the external world and unaffected by its logic. The theoreticians of surrealism (Andre Breton and company) seem to have been unaware of the fact that the ``mysterious'' soul of the poet and the emotions it expressed had absorbed the chaos of the outside world. The symbolists, for whom the essence of reality was dark and inscrutable, presented their perception of it by vague, insubstantial allusions. Vyacheslav Ivanov, one of the foremost theoreticians and exponents of symbolism, defined the nature of symbolist imagery thus: ``The symbol is only a true symbol when it is inexhaustible and infinite in its meaning, when it utters in its secret language (hieratic and magic) of allusion and suggestion something indelible, that is not equivalent to external words. It is manyfaceted, polysemantic and always dark in the deepest depth. It is an organic formation, like a crystal. It is a certain monad and hence differs from the complex and disparate composition of allegory, parable or simile. Allegory is teaching; the symbol is indication."^^1^^ Vyacheslav Ivanov and the other symbolists (Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal and Bely) raised an impassable barrier between literature and reality, refusing to apprehend reality and declaring the symbol to be the only means of expressing _-_-_
~^^1^^ Vyacheslav Ivanov, From Star to Star, 1909, p. 39 (in Russ.).
__PRINTERS_P_52_COMMENT__ 4* 51 the essence of life. Adopting an intuitive outlook, they assigned to art the miserable role of diviner of the holy mysteries dispensed in the universe, by some supernatural power which they named, according to taste, personal inclination and what they had read in philosophical and theological literature, the universal spirit, or will, or the life urge, or death, or somewhat more clearly---the divine principle.The symbolism in Faust was not merely the product oi poetic fancy: it was the result of an incomplete apprehension of the concrete forms of the historical process, its foundations and essential root causes. Philosophical abstraction, allegory and symbol made their appearance in Goethe's tragedy where he was unable to impart real, authentic life substance to his reflections on the historical destiny of man and human society. But, like his hero, Goethe aspired to rise from ignorance to knowledge, to apprehend the meaning and goal of man's social development. Goethe, like the progressive thinkers of his day, came to the conclusion that the Golden Age lay not in the past but in the future. The noble ideal of mankind's one day achieving earthly happiness illuminated his last great work, in which the antinomy between the ideal of freedom and the ways it could be achieved although not solved, was at least in the process of being surmounted. This ideal was extremely potent, being deeply rooted in the soil of life, and answering the demands that history had produced in the popular masses, for whom the change in the form of exploitation that was the chief result of the bourgeois Revolution meant the beginning of a new period in the struggle for emancipation. Goethe's tragedy crowns a whole stage in the development of world art and literature, confirming that the solution of the questions the historical process had placed before social thought, questions that arose as a result of the bourgeois Revolution, must be sought in history itself.
This is indeed what happened: with the exacerbation of the contradictions of bourgeois society which came to light in the very hour of its triumph over feudalism, history became of necessity an object of cognizance and investigation for literature and art.
52 __ALPHA_LVL1__ HISTORY AND REALISM __ALPHA_LVL2__ [introduction.]After the French Revolution, which had a colossal impact on all spheres of social and spiritual life in Europe, art and literature entered a new stage of development.
Revolutionary classicism, with its enthusiasm for the strict civic virtues of the ancient Romans, was exhausted as an independent school by the beginning of the 19th century, for the flame of freedom of which it was a reflection was burning low. The painter David, who had given such a touching portrayal of Marat's death agony in famous canvas, already worshipped a new deity. His paintings glorified a new Caesar: Bonaparte, on his prancing horse, pointing towards the Alpine peaks, as misty as his future; Bonaparte, in his splendid court, placing the imperial gold crown on his own head----
Yet despite the crisis in revolutionary classicism, its poetics, imbued with sincere civic ardour, became an essential element in the aesthetic views of many writers who were aware that literature was capable of being an active social force and were ideologically connected with the democratic movements---writers like Byron, Beranger, the Russian Decembrist poets, and Griboyedov.
On the whole, classicism was obviously falling into decay and was ultimately doomed to extinction, for the conditions which had produced the kind of artistic thought of which it was the expression had already disappeared. The new reality could not be apprehended and presented 53 in the classicist manner partly because its canons---the distinction between high and low style, the strict regiementation of genres, the theory of the three unities, and the formalism of classicist associations and motives---were obsolete, but especially because the very essence of classicism, whose basic feature was a conception of life as something static, prevented the works of the classicists from reflecting life's renewed, changing forms. At a time when the idea of development had penetrated the human consciousness thanks to an acceleration in the course of history, development by leaps and bounds, enabling the most progressive thinkers of the early years of the century to divine something of the nature of social ties, classicism revealed its inability to grasp their dynamics, the dynamics of social development. The classicists regarded the passions as the basis of character, considering them to be immutable, the same in all ages. Hence the way their characters were so often mere personifications of particular passions or ideas, and were devoid of real-life concreticity and unable to develop and reveal themselves. The classicists dissolved the individual in the species, depriving their characters of personality, and were therefore unable to combine the general and the particular. They abstracted their heroes from real life, so that their works acquired a general universality often bordering on the schematic. Even their best works show static composition, a tendency to posing in the characters, and a declamatory, rhetorical style, as in David's The Oath of the Horatii, a work which glorifies self-sacrifice. The heroes of the civic tragedy are depicted as if frozen in their spiritual elan at the moment they take their vow, and have not been very individualised by the painter. Their womenfolk stand leaning towards one another in an orderly and rather impersonal attitude of sorrow without ruffling in the slightest impeccable folds of their long garments. The whole painting is in a heavy declamatory style which presents us with the main idea but makes no attempt to go into details. The action is also weak in Goethe's tragedy Iphigenie auf Tauris, which was finished two years after David's picture, and marks the beginning of Weimar classicism. The drama in the play certainly does not derive 54 from the action. Whereas The Oath of the Horatii was in praise of civic action, the necessity and indeed the inevitability of social struggle, Goethe's tragedy poeticised the mora! principle as an agent of transformation, and Iphigenie's meek kindness is contrasted to Orestes's dagger. While in the painting the old man blesses his sons and hands them swords for the battle, Iphigenie takes her brother's weapon from him. This tragedy of renunciation shows Goethe's rejection of the idea of revolutionary transformation of the world.
The spirit of conciliation in Iphigenie auf Tauris did not lessen the moral sufferings of the heroes, but these sufferings were expressed not through the action but through elevated and somewhat impersonal rhetoric, in the cold, measured dialogues and monologues. The static inner world of this tragedy seems distilled as compared with the movement of life throbbing and seething in Goethe's realist works.
While inclining more to the elevated and the lofty, extracted from the mundane, classicism did not turn its back entirely on the everyday stuff of life. What it did do was to regard it as a ``low'', amusing sphere and accord it a subsidiary position in the run of aesthetic objects, thereby failing to rise from portrayal of everyday manners to portrayal of the vast canvas of human life which realism presented. Nevertheless, the question of the social foundations of progress was a major one in art, literature and social thought at the beginning of the 19th century, and by failing to investigate the practical aspects of life, failing to observe its objective movement, classicism was lagging behind the spirit of the times. Classicism gradually became the banner of the inveterate supporters of the old order, who were ready to accept anything rather than change, and it therefore incurred fierce attacks from the romanticists and the realists, who saw it as a force arresting the development of art, and an ideological weapon of reaction.
By the middle of the century classicist painting had degenerated into cold, soulless academicism, despite the fact that such talented artists as Ingres, Bryullov and Thorwaldsen continued to work in the manner. In literature 55 classicism was represented by a host of hack imitators, and not until the latter part of the century, with the appearance of neo-classicism proclaimed and defended by Jean Moreas, Ernest Seilliere and Charles Maurras in France and Paul Ernst, Wilhelm von Scholz and others in Germany, did it again come to merit attention.
The neo-classicists with their insistence on clarity and strict form as against the obscureness of symbolism were least of all concerned with questions of pure aesthetics. Their ideology was based on the Nietzschean interpretation of classical antiquity, and their works and philosophical treatises propagated the morality of the masters and the principles of the hierarchical organisation of society based on strict social discipline. They combined support of class inequality with militant nationalism, and aesthetic refinement with adoration of power and will. The product of new forms of social consciousness, and one of the currents of European decadent art and literature, neoclassicism had nothing in common with classicism apart from its name.
Romanticism played the leading role in the art of the early 19th century. ``Only romantic poetry, like the epos, can be the mirror of the whole surrounding world, the reflection of the age,'' Schlegel wrote, and rightly to a certain extent, for it was Romanticism that first shed light on the new sentiments and outlook that were characteristic of the post-revolutionary period, and indeed on whole new aspects of reality.
Romanticism enriched world art and literature with the sense of history, without which the new order that replaced feudalism could not be properly comprehended. ``There is no other kind of self-knowledge other than the historical,'' wrote Schlegel. ``Nobody knows what he is unless he knows his fellow men and above all his supreme fellow man, the master of masters---the genius of the age.'' These words are a pretty shrewd comment on what was essentially new in the work of the romantic writers, for prior to romanticism art had not noted the changeability of history, and what preceded and prepared the present had not been regarded as essentially different from the present. Earlier art and literature on themes from the past 56 had tended to eliminate the temporal dimension. Thus, paintings of biblical subjects showed Roman legionaries dressed as medieval mercenaries, and townsfolk dressed very much as the artist's contemporaries. As Stendhal wrote: ``Our grandfathers were moved by Orestes in Andromache who was played in an enormous powdered wig, red stockings and shoes with fire-coloured bows."^^1^^ This was perfectly natural, for it never even occurred to the audiences who were so delighted with plays like Andromache that Orestes or Achilles did not wear wigs. Neither in the Enlightenment novel nor in baroque literature, as in Lohenstein's pseudo-historical novels, was history treated as a process. It was only with the preromantic trends in the intellectual life of Europe at the time of the Revolution that history's movement in time began to be examined, as witnessed by the extensive study of folk art and the epic, Macpherson's interest in The Poems of Ossian, and the appearance of historical themes in the so-called ``Gothic novel'', where in actual fact historical events still played a purely decorative role.
The heightened interest in history observable in the social thought of the early 19th century was by no means due to purely intellectual causes; history itself burst into people's lives, for the new century did not descend on the world lightly as a dove but to the thunder of cannon, the beating of drums and whiffs of grape-shot. The rhythmic march of soldiers' feet shook the continent from the Pyrenees to the Volga, and the bloody fields of Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo marked the course of Napoleon's cruel star, its zenith and its nadir.
The invasions of the French armies led by Napoleon's marshals, bloated with victory, helped sweep away the feudal order in the countries of Europe. But the oppressive regimes they set up in the occupied territories produced a rapid growth in national consciousness among the subject peoples and encouraged the development of national liberation movements. Napoleon had a strong taste of this first in Spain and then during his fateful 1812 campaign, _-_-_
~^^1^^ Stendhal, CEuvres completes, ``Racine et Shakespeare'', Paris, 1954, p. 58.
57 when the Grande Armee was crippled by the blows inflicted on it by the Russian people and the foundations of Napoleon's Empire were so shaken as never to recover.The national liberation movements in Europe in the first quarter of the nineteenth century were organically linked with the democratic movements trying to carry through the destruction of the bastilles of feudalism begun by the French Revolution. ``Napoleon's imperialist wars continued for many years, took up a whole epoch and exhibited an extremely complex network of imperialist^^1^^ relationships interwoven with national liberation movements. And as a result, through all this epoch, unusually rich in wars and tragedies (tragedies of whole peoples), history went forward from feudalism to 'free' capitalism."^^2^^
The Spanish guerrilla movement created the preconditions for the bourgeois revolution of 1820. Under pressure from the popular masses, whose mood was expressed by the Tugendbund, the frightened heads of states of the German confederation, vowed to introduce constitutional government, and only the fierce resurgence of feudal reaction following Napoleon's defeat enabled them to avoid carrying out their solemn promises. In Italy the carbonari who had headed an anti-French and anti-Austrian movement, led bourgeois revolutions in Naples and Piedmont in 1820-- 21. Among the officers who entered Paris with the victorious Russian armies were those who took part in the tragic Decembrist uprising on Senate Square in St. Petersburg one cold winter's day in 1825.
The restoration under the aegis of the Holy Alliance of the pre-revolutionary order affected first and foremost the political aspect of European social life. The Restoration was unable to halt the development of the new capitalist system of economic relations.
While social movements on the continent where the bourgeois transformation of society had not yet been completed were mainly bourgeois-democratic or revolutionary-democratic, in England, which was more advanced _-_-_
~^^1^^ ``I call here imperialism the plunder of foreign countries in general and an imperialist war the war of plunderers for the division of such booty.'' (Lenin's note.)
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 51.
58 industrially and socially, another historical factor was making itself felt: the class struggles of the proletariat wen. beginning. ``The new mode of production,'' wrote Engels, ``was, as yet, only at the beginning of its period of ascent; as yet it was the normal, regular method of production--- the only one possible under existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses."^^1^^ These social evils were naturally borne by the have-not sections of the population and especially the proletariat, for the development of machine production, the vast increase in exploitation and the growth of the towns was producing fundamental changes in their patriarchal forms of labour, their way of life and thinking. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the struggle of the working class in Britain had become extremely serious, heralding the fierce class battles that were to erupt on the Continent and culminate in the revolutions of 1848. Driven to desperation by grinding poverty, the workers openly attacked the factory system and, singing hymns fell upon the machines they so loathed with heavy hammers, seeing in the machines the source of their grievances. The bourgeoisie punished the Luddites as an example, but were unable to put a stop to unrest among the workers and in 1819 resorted to arms against a peaceful meeting at St. Peter's Field near Manchester. The Peterloo massacre, as this shameful event went down in history, revealed the extreme acuteness and uncompromising nature of the major social antagonism of the new age to which all the other contradictions of capitalist society were objectively subordinate. But in the first quarter of the nineteenth century this antagonism had not yet taken its place at the centre of spiritual life and was not perceived as the basic contradiction of the age. At that time, as Marx remarked: ``The class-struggle between capital and labour is forced into the background, politically by the discord between the governments and the feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy Alliance on the one hand, and the popular masses, led by the bourgeoisie on the other."^^2^^ _-_-_~^^1^^ F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1969, pp. 309--10.
~^^2^^ K. Marx, Capital, Moscow, 1965, Vol. I, p. 14.
59In the process of assimilating history in the making art, literature and social thought were constantly coming across new phenomena, reflecting its motion from feudalism to ``free'' capitalism. The Enlighteners' illusion of the possibility of social harmony following from the Revolution was shattered on contact with reality, for instead of a harmonious man capitalism produced an unharmonious man, instead of a coherent society, a divided society, instead of concord between people, their estrangement, instead of the individual living for the common good, the individual with selfish thoughts and feelings.
Social consciousness perceived the system of capitalist relations which was inexorably emerging as a sphere of elemental conflicts between heterogeneous, hostile interests, whose destructive power was not only manifesting itself in people's practical activities, but was determining man's spiritual world, mentality and character.
There was naturally nothing new about this observation. The French thinkers of the Enlightenment in their investigations into the mechanism of social relations had come to see interest as the primary motive force of human ideas and actions. Helvetius wrote in his treatise DC 1'esprit that all people are subject to their interests. Hoibach in his Le Systeme de la nature maintained that personal gain and interest lie at the root of such feelings as love and hate. They were not dismayed by this observation, for, like the Russian thinker Chernyshevsky with his theory of ``reasonable egoism'', they believed in the essential goodness of human nature, did not consider different personal interests to be necessarily hostile, and saw no reason why they should not give way to the principle of the common good. However, the thinkers of the Enlightenment did not fully understand the social nature of personal interest and were therefore unclear as to how concern for the common weal could overcome personal interest, and this made their ideas rather utopian.
The bourgeois ideologists proper saw the struggle of interests as perfectly natural and normal. The English utilitarians with Jeremy Bentham at their head considered the concept of the common weal an empty 60 abstraction, pure illusion. For Bentham and his followers the only reality was individual interests, which they regarded as regulating and guaranteeing just relations between people in society. Hegel, however, in his examination of legal structure of society, destroyed the liberal theory of the utilitarians that individual interests acted as regulators in human relations. In his Philosophic des Rechts he noted: ``Individuals are in the quality of citizens ... of a state private persons pursuing the aim of personal interest."^^1^^ Thus society is a battlefield of individual private interests, a struggle of all against all (here Hegel repeats Hobbes' idea), an arena where personal interest conflicts with the special interests of society, and at the same time the interests of private persons and society clash with the established order of the state. This was a pretty accurate description of the bourgeois system. It merely omitted to explain the reasons why society had become a battlefield of divergent interests, an explanation that only Marxism was to provide, by showing that interest is a consequence of the private ownership principle on which class society is based, that it is the expression of the class antagonisms inherent in such a society.
Describing the features of the new, capitalist period in the development of human society, Engels wrote: ``The elevation of interest to the principle that links mankind automatically entails---as long as that interest remains directly subjective, purely egoistic---general disintegration, the concentration of individuals on themselves, isolation, and the transformation of mankind into a crowd of mutually repellent atoms...."^^2^^
The elevation of interest to the position of the principle linking mankind was the objective result of the bourgeois revolution, of bourgeois progress and the process of formation of the capitalist system of social relations. Social atomisation progressed simultaneously and its spread had a tremendous effect on intellectual life and people's social psychology in the post-revolutionary period.
_-_-_~^^1^^ G. Hegel, Philosophic des Rechts, Berlin, 1840, S. 245.
~^^2^^ K. Marx, F. Engels, Werke, Bd. 1, S. 556.
61The historical self-awareness to which the romanticists aspired could only begin with cognition of contemporary history. Romanticism observed life and saw the growth of social atomisation as an anomaly of the historical process. The romanticists had not yet seen this process to be directly dependent on the private ownership system of relations. Able to observe the results and ignorant of the causes, the romanticists sought the explanation of the important phenomenon they had observed in the features of human characters instead of in the circumstances that produced these characters.
The first works of the new school were thus basically studies of human character marked if not by exclusiveness at least by striking novelty. Through the complex fusion of religious, mystical, philosophical and mythological ideas and images of Novalis's Heimich von Ofterdingen--- like a carved crystal cup from which the blue flower of romanticism emanated a strange, mysterious, fairy-tale light---we can distinguish the features that relate the novel to Chateaubriand's Rene, Senancour's Obermann, Tieck's William Love/, Nodier's Le Peintre de Saltzbourg and Constant's Adolphe. Irony and melancholia, preoccupation with their own thoughts and their own persons, and exaggerated sensibility are to a varying degree characteristic of all the early romantic heroes. Their intense feelings and dramatic approach to life represent a tremendous leap forward from the heroes of the pre-revolutionary literature, who compared to them seem embodiments of healthy spirit.
The characters of the early romantic novels were somehow completely detached from their environment, attention being focussed on the new qualities of the social psychology produced by the complex and turbulent historical situation. The romantic hero was always a solitary figure. The gloomy atmosphere of an ancient baronial castle that is Rene's family nest, or the deserted mountain pastures of Scotland, the sun-soaked Italian countryside, ocean storms, or the deceptive silence of the virgin forests of North America are a mere accompaniment to the spiritual moods of Chateaubriand's hero, just as the austere Alpine scenery accompanies the thoughts and 62 feelings of Obermann. The grandiose, exalted life of nature did not leave its mark on Rene's soul, like it did on the moral and spiritual make-up of Nathaniel Bumppo, alias Leather Stocking, who felt himself to be as much a part of nature as the rushing rivers and shining lakes of the primordial forests that were his home. But then Bumppo was the creation of James Fenimore Cooper---a realist writer.
The life of the Indian tribe among which Rene found refuge in his wanderings, the slave-like devotion of his redskin wife,---nothing could affect his soul, which proved impervious to all outside influences. This was not because it was forged of the strongest metal, but because it was simply unable to make contact with the world around; it was refractory to the chemistry of social ties. Between the early romantic hero and his environment stood a kind of barrier formed by his own introvert nature, his devoted attention to his own ``ego'', which was hostile to the world, as the world was to it. Rene does not only have a pessimistic view of life: he expects his own soul to be the focus of existence. His individualism and egoism are little short of self-deification, making him a distant forerunner of Byron's Manfred who demanded more of life than life could provide.
While Rene reflects that new feature of the age, the individual's self-centeredness, Adolphe examines the social and psychological results of the transformation of society into a cluster of mutually-repellent atoms that had resulted from a great schism in the human consciousness. Like Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant merely postulates the effect of environment on the thought and actions of his heroes. In his novel which reveals such profound understanding of the secrets of the human heart, he tells how ``this defiance which follows such complete confidence, forced to direct itself against a being separate from the rest of the world, extends to the whole world'',^^1^^ thereby penetrating a phenomenon that goes far beyond the bounds of the intimate drama or a love conflict. Yet in his portrayal of the separation of two hearts, of the tragic discord between two lovers who can neither be together _-_-_
~^^1^^ B. Constant, Adolphe, Paris, 1965, p. 44.
63 nor live without each other, he merely investigated the metamorphoses of his heroes' feelings, considering that ``circumstances have but little importance, it is character that is essential".^^1^^ In this he differed from the realists whose aim it was to go deeper and more fully into circumstances and character, and examine the connection between them, revealing their mutual influence. Nevertheless, despite the poverty of its social background, Constant's novel, by continuing the psychological prose tradition of the late eighteenth century, helped pave the way for psychological realist prose.As a romanticist, Benjamin Constant portrayed the tragic consequences of alienation without investigating its social origins, believing the causes to lie within people themselves, in their moral qualities. Hence his belief that alienation could be overcome by moral education, and his attack in De la religion on the views of the utilitarians and scholars of the Enlightenment (and especially Helvetius) who explained human behaviour by the motives of profit or rational interest. His view being that the ideal of a society based on these principles could only be industrial production or ``unification organised like a beehive'', he considered that such a society would not be stable, for the application of the principles of gain or rational interest would have dire results: ``Their natural consequence is to transform every individual into his own Centre. However when each man becomes his own centre, all are isolated."^^2^^ However, as Stendhal rightly pointed out, ``the majority of Frenchmen consider that this philosophy is excellently borne out by everyday life" and Constant's attack on it merely served as a further illustration of the spread of social atomisation.
All forms of consciousness and all kinds of ideology were affected by this process. Fichte's philosophy is based on the concept of the absolute ``Ego'', producing or realising its activity in the empirical ``Ego'', that is, in the subject, the individual, whose individual ``Ego'' is contrasted to the empirical ``non-Ego'' of the world lying _-_-_
~^^1^^ B. Constant, Adolphe, p. 182.
~^^2^^ B. Constant, De la religion, Bruxelles, 1824, pp. XIX, AA.
64 outside subjective experience. It might seem as though Fichte were reducing the concept of the absolute ``Ego'' as a supreme active, creative force or supreme principle to the experience and scale of the individual. In actual fact though, he raised to the level of an absolute the experience of the individual, who feels himself to be an atom in the world, extends his subjective view of things to the whole universe, attempting to expand his atomic size to its scale.The Byronic hero, a gloomy, proud dissenter, fighting a one-man battle for his own individual rights as he understood them, something of a mystery to those around him and incurring their hostility, flouting laws and the accepted moral code as being made not for him but for the ``crowd'', combined in his demoniac and seductive figure the features of outlook produced by the process of alienation. Byron's Giaour and Lara were strong individuals challenging society. But their struggle was individualist, and in this they differed as carriers of the new sociopsychological features of social consciousness from the rebels found in the literature of the period leading up to the French Revolution. For Prometheus, who challenged the gods for the sake of man, and in whom Goethe extolled man's eternal natural longing for freedom, the important thing was other people, for whom he made his sacrifice. Byron's heroes put their own will and desires above all else. Caleb Williams, the hero of the novel by the pre-romantic writer Godwin, is a solitary figure who rejects egoistic society with all its evils and injustices, in favour of the interests of the oppressed classes. In his critique and rejection of the system of private ownership relations, Godwin was close to the ideas of the Utopian socialists. Byron's romantic heroes stood beyond the fringe of society, and only opposed it as individuals. Jean Sbogar, the noble rebel rogue in Charles Nodier's eponymous novel, is also outside society. As mysterious and enigmatic as any Byronic hero, the same strong lone rebel, he dreams of human happiness and has come, after a great deal of thought on the course of history, to the conclusion that ``equality, the object of all our desires and the aim of all our revolutions, is really only possible in two states--- __PRINTERS_P_66_COMMENT__ 5---0891 65 slavery and death".^^1^^ This pessimistic conclusion was the result of direct experience and was confirmed by life itself. Since the development of society in the post-- revolutionary period did not bring man welfare and happiness, since the inexorable laws of capitalist competition made society more and more hostile to man, it was only natural that the romanticists should be brought face to face with the question of the objective content and direction of historical progress. Romanticism did not merely reflect the changes in social consciousness that ensued from the Revolution. Registering life's mobility and changeability and the corresponding changes in the world of human feelings, romanticism was bound to turn to the study of history as a source of arguments in its attempt to define and understand the prospects of social progress, and tried to understand the past in order to divine the future.
Feudal reaction, trying to arrest the progress of society along the path of bourgeois development, also produced its theoreticians and philosophers, who sought the model for the future in the recent, absolutist past. Edmund Burke, author of Reflections on the French Revolution contrasted bourgeois reality with an idyllic distilled picture of the feudal world which he saw as the embodiment of order and social harmony. Bonald, Joseph de Maistre and the Swiss historian Haller, author of a lengthy work entitled Restauration der Staatswissenschaften, presented in most vivid and frank form the ideas propounded by the numerous champions of reaction. The most militant of them, Joseph de Maistre, whose works were boiling with the rage of the aristocrat at the insolence of the people, revolution, progress and freedom, launched furious attacks in such treatises as Du Pape, Examen de la philosophic de Bacon, and the semi-fictional Les soirees de St.-- Petersbourg on materialist philosophy and the socio-political views of the Enlightenment. Nobody, possibly with the exception of Nietzsche, was such a virulent critic of JeanJacques Rousseau as de Maistre.
De Maistre opposed the ideas of changing the established institutions of society by revolution with the _-_-_
~^^1^^ Charles Nodier, Jean Sbogar, Paris, p. 140.
66 principle of absolute monarchy, sanctified by religion and the Catholic Church. If a strong force was necessary to keep the people in check, de Maistre was not averse to restoring the Inquisition as a politico-spiritual institution for the supervision of citizens' souls and social behaviour. He was equally prepared to declare force the basis of public order, and the executioner a pillar of the state, a figure worthy of great respect. But if de Maistre's theorising and Donald's dogmatic defence of monarchy, testifying as they did to the violence of political passions, corresponded to the spiritual demands of the feudal aristocratic reaction, they were quite out of tune with the spirit of the age, for they were purely metaphysical. History was not going to be turned backwards, and its heavy step was felt in all aspects of social consciousness. Even the conservative romanticists---and this was one of the great paradoxes of spiritual life in the early nineteenth century---while rejecting the new post-revolutionary reality and the emergent system of capitalist relations and polemicising with the bourgeois ideology, nevertheless turned to history, and by comparing past and present, indirectly confirmed the idea of development.In a letter to Mehring, in which he spoke of the social views of a representative of the so-called ``historical school'', Engels made a remark that sums up fairly well the nature of the conservative romanticists' views on history. ``However the most peculiar thing is that the correct conception of history is to be found in abstracto among the very people who have been distorting history most in concreto, theoretically as well as practically."^^1^^
Chateaubriand, who had created Rene in his novel Les Natchez about the life of the North American Indians, tried in his vast romantic epic Les Martyrs to produce an all-embracing picture of the Hellenic world, the tragedy of the first Christians, the clash between the Romans and the barbarians, including in his grandiloquent, rhetorical narrative pictures throbbing with life of the everyday existence and morals of the ancient world changing under _-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 533.
__PRINTERS_P_67_COMMENT__ 5* 67 the impact of the new, Christian culture that was coming to replace it. Written to glorify Catholicism as a pillar of the old society, Les Martyrs is of interest not so much lor its message as because of the way the idea of development, entering the aesthetic sphere, came into contact with history, which in turn became an aesthetic object. History also became the object of study and portrayal in the works of the German conservative romanticists, The German romanticists were prompted by the demands of the national liberation struggle to accord particular attention to folklore, collecting and adapting it, seeing in it the fullest expression of the national spirit. Arnim and Brentano's Des Knaben V\f under horn, and Grimms' fairy tales are evidence enough of the romanticists' great interest in folklore. It was studied along with the way of life and manners of the periods in which the popular tales and legends were set, and the romanticists' interest in baroque and Gothic art and in the literature of the Renaissance, and especially Shakespeare, was in contrast to the classicists' interest in the ancient world.In presenting the past in their works, the romanticists portrayed the historical colour of the age in question, whether is was post-Reformation Germany as in Arnim's novel Die Kronenwdchtcr, or the idealised life of the craftsmen in old Germany as described by Hoffmann. But the romanticists' interest in the past was still of a purely empirical character. While stressing the difference between the past and present and the changes that had taken place in history, they did not know what determined the motion of history, which is why they were mystified both by past and by present and gave a very approximate picture of the social conflicts of their time. This also accounts for the fact that their criticism of capitalism had a purely ethical character: condemning the egoistic features of the bourgeois outlook and bourgeois society, they railed pathetically against the power of gold and its corrupting influence. Aware that the new society was hostile to man, they ascribed a demoniac nature to the forces at work in it, unaware that the anti-human element that seemed to be superhuman and demoniac, was in fact ``bourgeois society, the society of industry, of universal competition, of 68 private interest, freely following its aims of anarchy, of self-alienated natural and spiritual individuality...."^^1^^
Real criticism of social contradictions appeared so irreal to the German romanticists, that they were led to distort contemporary history in presenting it in concreto. Their dreamer heroes perceived reality in a dual light, in both the fantastic, fairytale, and the mundane, everyday aspects. Minor bureaucrats of petty German states, narrowminded hide-bound and pedantic, in another, romantically pretersensual sphere of their existence became good or evil masters of the elemental forces of nature. A hero longing for wealth sells his soul, receptive to passion and sympathy, to a divine spirit in return for an unfeeling heart of stone. A dead man rises from the grave and finds employment, hiding the gold he earns in his grave. A turnip is miraculously turned into a cocky little fellow with an ability to find hidden gold and. treasure, who finds favour with rulers and begins to play an important role in society. All these ironic and poetic phantasmagoria only give a very approximate impression of the processes going on in the post-revolutionary world and evidence that the ideological seed-bed for the growth of non-realist aesthetic forms, including romanticism, was a failure to apprehend reality.
German romanticism was free from all revolutionary impulses and developed against a background of political compromise between the bourgeoisie and feudal reaction, recognising the changeability of social forms only indirectly. It never found the true material foundation of the historical process, which was grasped far more clearly and fully by revolutionary romanticism.
Byron's art absorbing as it did the moods and views of the European democrats who adopted revolutionary methods against the attempts of reaction to prevent the advance of the peoples towards emancipation from the vestiges of the feudal system, even in those poems where the hero never went beyond an individualistic protest, touched on the real social conflicts of his age, which reflected the clash of interests between the masses and _-_-_
~^^1^^ Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, Moscow. 1956, p. 164.
69 feudal lords and governments united around the Holy Alliance. In examining the disposition of social forces in the period of the Napoleonic wars, Byron acquired a deeper understanding of the historical process, and gradually began to realise that since it was the popular masses, who bore the burden of progress, they were most probably the force that moved history forward.Early on, in his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron had been aware of the antagonistic nature of social relations, and had stressed the difference between the interests of the people, the poor and oppressed part of the nation, and those of the rulers, who were quite indifferent to the former's needs and sufferings. This understanding, combined with political protest against the national enslavement of the peoples, with struggle for the freedom of the oppressed man, and passionate rejection of the principle of authoritarian rule, broadened the social content of his poetry, gradually enabling him to become aware of the real foundation of the historical process, and preparing his adoption of the principles of realism. This change was greatly hindered by the mood of despair and cosmic pessimism that emanated from the individualistic nature of Byron's rebellion, from awareness of the fact that a man isolated from society had not the strength to change society. Shelley gave a very accurate definition of the difference between Byron's views and his own in his dialogue poem Julian and Maddalo. in the passage that runs:
. . .and I (for ever still
Is it not wise to make the best of ill?)
Argued against despondency, but pride
Made my companion take the darker side.
If for Byron the future appeared shrouded in gloom, and in Darkness and the mystery Heaven and Earth he looked on suffering and mankind's struggle for freedom as futile, these moods were largely fed by the weaknesses of the revolutionary movements in the early years of the century. The Italian and French carbonari, the members of the German Tugendbund, and the Russian Decembrists--- noblemen opposed to autocracy---did not see revolution 70 as a mass popular uprising, but fondly imagined that a revolution and the abolition of absolutism could be effected through the work of secret societies, a firmlyrooted illusion shared by many later revolutionaries such as Mazzini, Blanqui and the Russian People's Will organisation. As a rule, the conspirators' struggle with the governments involved enormous sacrifices and produced scant results, for it was waged without the participation of the masses, the only force that was in fact capable of changing the existing order. Byron witnessed more than once the tragic defeat of European revolutionaries, and these failures made a profound impression on him. Like all the revolutionary romanticists of the time, Byron regarded individual action as the basic impulse in social development. Yet, while realising that bourgeois society could not satisfy man's natural aspirations for freedom, Byron was unable, as long as he adhered to the principles of romanticism, to determine what external objective principles and conditions were really capable of promoting the practical achievement of freedom. As a revolutionary he accepted the idea of development, the idea of historical change, and served it with all the power of his great talent appealing for the emancipation of mankind from all forms of bondage. At the same time, Byron lost hope in the future and saw history as an essentially tragic process, at the end of which it was not the reign of freedom that awaited man, but chaos and hopelessness. He was only to emerge from this ideological blind-alley by overcoming the romantic individualist character of his early works, and this meant beginning where the realists of the past had begun, with the study of the influence of environment and circumstances on man, the study of the objective factors that condition the life not only of the individual but of the whole of society. Hence Beppo and Don Juan, and the satires of the 'twenties like The Age of Bronze and The Irish Avatar, works which represented a revival in English literature of the dormant traditions of realism.
Shelley did not know this ideological contradiction since his poetry lent on different social forces. Shelley's poetry marked the beginning of a tradition that was to 71 develop organically and naturally into the socialist art of our present century.
Shelley regarded himself as more than a poet: he regarded himself as a social reformer. From his observations and reflections on contemporary society he, too, came to understand its antagonistic nature. Once he had realised that the sources of this antagonism lay in material inequality, he placed his art once and for all in the service of the lower classes and his poetry began to express the social ideas the movement of the oppressed masses produced. His mind and his poetry were directed towards a tireless search for happier conditions of social, moral and political life than those which capitalism offered. The motive impelling Shelley to seek a new social ideal outside the domain of the ethics, morality and social philosophy of capitalist society was the same as that which caused Robert Owen to first undertake his social reformist activity in New Lanark and later to adhere to Communism--- and that was the position of the working class in England. Capitalist, progress, connected with the growth of machine production which had given rise to the struggle of the English bourgeoisie for world hegemony, was achieved at the expense of merciless exploitation of the people and especially the proletariat, their economic enslavement and demoralisation. Shelley had been quick to observe this, and in his poetry humanistic motifs were organically interwoven with criticism and even rejection, of bourgeois society. His early work Declaration of Rights was a militant propaganda work containing socialist ideas in embryo form, while in his still somewhat immature poem Queen Mab the idea of development is clearly applied to history, which Shelley considers as a process of human emancipation from slavery and from the sufferings and miseries which society based on private ownership inflicted on man. Historical optimism became a dominant feature of Shelley's poetry, and this was what distinguished him from his contemporary romantics for whom pessimism was characteristic, as Shelley himself noted. In the preface to The Revolt of Islam he wrote: ``This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. 72 Metaphysics, and inquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus, calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. But mankind appears to me to be emerging from their trance. I am aware, methinks, of a slow, gradual silent change.''
Shelley's optimism was not unfounded, for it did not simply spring from his hope of the people being freed by revolution but was based on his conviction that life develops according to the law of necessity.
While voluntarism was a characteristic feature of romantic art, and especially of Byron's poetry, and the romanticists saw their hero's self-will as the expression of his inner freedom and independence of any societal influence on his proud soul, Shelley had quite another view of freedom, and could say, like Leibnitz, that the crux of the matter was that people knew their aspirations, but not the external reasons for their aspirations. Thus, the child imagines it is free in desiring the milk that is its diet.
In his recognition of the power of necessity Shelley had taken the first and most important step towards understanding the objective external laws governing the development of nature and society. He naturally came to the conclusion that the laws of necessity also apply to the historical process, and that therefore the changes in social forms that occur throughout history are not fortuitous but inevitable. Thus, the French bourgeois revolution which served to destroy the old order was no sudden, spontaneous burst of political passions or God's oversight, as the reactionary ideologists supposed, but a logical stage in the progressive development of mankind. Likewise, it was also in the order of things that the social system established on the ruins of feudalism---an unjust order where self-interest reigned supreme and which was totally unable to satisfy the demands of the working masses--- should be inevitably replaced by another social order, this time based on the principles of freedom and justice. This 73 idea runs through the poem The Revolt of Islam and becomes a major theme in Shelley's works, making him a forerunner of socialist aesthetics. The fierce criticism of capitalist society contained in Shelley's pamphlets and poems, in his political satires and works that attack tyranny, was reinforced by the conviction of the inevitability of a change in the existing social relations and the ceaseless advance of human history towards emancipation, an idea which found its ultimate expression in Prometheus Unbound, undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of world poetry.
In this poem of emancipation a joyous and youthfully fresh view of the universe merged with a passionate feeling which Shelley himself defined as ``a passionate desire to transform the world''. The poet conjures up a world splashed by the spray of the morning sea, fanned by winds bearing on their wings the sharp heady odour of the earth, with chariots drawn by winged horses and driven by the messengers of necessity, flying over rocky mountains and fertile valleys lit by the light of the planets---a radiant world where clouds gold-tipped with sunlight float across the azure sky and god-like Oceanides, Asia, Panthea and lone, elements in the form of wondrous beings, lament Prometheus being tormented by the furies and greet his liberation with cries of joy. I a this pristine world glistening with dew, Demogorgon, the mysterious, inescapable power of change, the principle of development and formation, that has not yet taken on a definite shape, casts down into eternal darkness Jupiter, the ruler, so that ``the tyranny of heaven none may retain''. The whole radiant universe, the elements and spirits, the Oceanides and the indomitable Prometheus himself receive the tyrant's fall with great jubilation. Now the ocean's ``streams will flow. . . tracking thin path no more by blood and groans and desolation, and the mingled voice of slavery and command''. A new life has begun with the victory over Jupiter and the spirit of the Hour tells of the beneficent changes that have taken place on earth, where ``the man remains sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man equal, unclassed . . .just, gentle, wise''. This hymn of triumph to freedom and social justice that crowns Shelley's works 74 was at the same time a hymn to the ceaseless advance of man towards a harmonious society.
In Prometheus Unbound the idea of development found perfect poetic expression, though not in a concrete-- historical form. This was perfectly natural, for the poet's awareness, like that of the founder of English Utopian socialism, Robert Owen, was formed in the period when the class conflicts of the new social order were but little developed and the real root causes of the historical process were not yet clear. As Engels remarked: ``To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions corresponded crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain."^^1^^ These factors conditioned the Utopian features of Shelley's outlook.
The real root causes of the historical process were only gradually discovered and revealed by realist art, literature and social thought, which undertook analytical investigation of the new order that arose after the victory of the bourgeoisie. Realism set out with new artistic means, different from those of eighteenth century realism, to study the dialectic of post-revolutionary social relations and the causes determining the movement of history, its development, and hence people's behaviour and psychology. Romanticism (that is, the first wave of romanticism, resulting from the clash of interests between the people and feudal reaction), although absorbing and expressing many of the essential contradictions of post-revolutionary social life, was prevented from doing this by the very nature of the romantic method.
Romanticism was extremely sensitive to the mobility and pulse of history and, breaking with the canons of classicism, the static form of classical works, and with the objective form of realist works, it made subjective freedom of expression its banner, regarding only the free soaring fantasy of the writer, not subject to any laws or prescriptions, as being capable of presenting the dynamics of life. Indeed, the works of the romanticists reveal a free _-_-_
~^^1^^ F. Engels, Anli-Duhring, Moscow, 1969, p. 305.
75 treatment of composition, liberties taken with the order ol narration, and a free choice of place and time for the action. The author's presence is felt throughout, and many romantic works are really protracted monologues. The feelings in romantic poetry are intensified and exaggerated, and on the whole romanticism concentrates on man's inner world, looking on life and history as the theatre in which people's passions and ideas are realised, determining, by their fortuitous play and flux, the flux of life. Novalis writes thus of the essence of romanticism as a creative method: ``Absolutisation, the conferring of a universal meaning, and classification of the particular moment, and of the particular situation and so on, is the essence of any creation in romanticism.'' He goes on to say: ``The elements of romanticism. Objects, like the sounds of the Aeolian harp, must arise suddenly, spontaneously, without revealing the instrument that has produced them.'' In other words, romanticism was indifferent to causal relationships between the phenomena of life. But what was it that romanticism absolutised? What, exactly did it universalise?In his Aesthetics Hegel expressed many opinions on romanticism that, accurately define its essence (although he mistakenly applied its features, which have a strict historical place, to past ages). Having written: ``Romantic art no longer has as its aim free vitality of the Being in its quiet and immersion of the soul in the corporeal; it is not interested in this life as such,"^^1^^ he correctly notes somewhat later: ``Lyricism is a kind of basic element of romantic art, the tone in which the epos and drama also speak, and which pervades, like some universal aroma of the soul, even works of the plastic arts."^^2^^ He goes on to say that the truly romantic characters in whom ``the personal attains its full significance" are ``independent individuals who only reckon with themselves, and set themselves special aims which are exclusively their own aims and are dictated only by their own individuality"^^3^^.
_-_-_~^^1^^ Hegel, Werke, Bd. 10, 2 abt, Berlin, 1837, S. 134.
~^^2^^ Ibid., S. 133.
~^^3^^ Ibid., S. 197.
76Thus romanticism---and this is its chief leature as a creative method---grossly inflated the individual and imparted universality to his inner world by isolating him i'rom the objective world. Realism, on the other hand, examined life as an integral whole, within which relations and links were causally conditioned by one another. H the realists singled out -one side of life as revolutionary art did, it was simply because if expressed the dominant trend in social development or that trend which was destined to become the dominant one and subordinate to itself all other sides of life. The romanticists universalised and inflated one aspect of reality or the human consciousness, often one that had a particular significance. Thus Constant studied and described character in its pure form, so to speak, independent of the conditions which produced it. The German romantics, such as Kleist, made their characters subordinate to the power of their feelings or passions and studied that power as completely divorced from the surrounding world. Byron gave the heroes of his romantic poems a rather one-dimensional character. Therefore romanticism did not achieve the historical selfawareness towards which it aspired, since it did not investigate the objective preconditions of human consciousness. Treating reality as a sphere for the application and struggle of subjective expressions of will, the romanticists were unable to explain what lay at the root of and conditioned the movement of different human aspirations.
Criticising subjectivism in social thought (which was also present in romanticism) Marx wrote: ``Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature. The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended. Historical events thus appear on the whole to be likewise governed by chance. But where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed by inner, hidden laws and it is only 77 a matter of discovering these laws."^^1^^ This was no simple task, for nothing was enveloped in such a thick and voluminous cloak of illusions as the content of the historical process. Although history, in the words of Marx, is but the activity of man pursuing his aims, it was exceedingly difficult to perceive and comprehend the hidden inner laws that determine that activity, its motives and end results, and to free them from the numerous metaphysical layers and misconceptions. Only Marxism was to prove capable of coping with that truly titanic task. Progressive social thought prior to Marxism, and realism too, studying as it did life in all its concrete contingencies and participating in the social battles of the age---prepared the great act of cognizance by man of his historical activity and sought to disclose the nature of social relations first and foremost through the investigation of reality itself.
Social theory in apprehending and cognizing reality considered history as a process. ``If we now take a glance at universal history in general, we shall see a vast picture of changes and actions, infinitely varied formations of peoples, states and individuals, continuously appearing one after the other,'' writes Hegel in his Philosophie der Geschichte. ``The all-embracing idea,'' he continues, ``the category that emerges above all in this ceaseless replacement of individuals and peoples, which exist for a while and then disappear, is change in general. A look at the ruins that remain from past glory moves us to take a closer look at this change in its negative aspect---But. the closest definition applicable to change is that change, which is destruction, is at the same time the emergence of new life, that death comes out of life and life out of death."^^2^^ In regarding history from the point of view of formation and recognising the replacement of moribund social forms by new nascent ones to be an inevitable process, Hegel was essentially denying the possibility of a cessation of progress, a halt in the historical development of society.
_-_-_~^^1^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in 3 volumes, Moscow, 1970, Vol. 3, p. 366.
~^^2^^ G. W. Hegel, Weike, Bd. 9, Berlin, 1840, S. 90.
78Bourgeois ideology proper, as soon as it took shape, rejected outright the idea that history was a process. Arthur Schopenhauer, the father of bourgeois pessimism, considered history to be essentially the study of individuals. In his major work, Die Welt als Wille and Vorstellung published in 1818, he wrote: ``The true philosophy of history consists in the insight that in all these endless changes and their confusion we have always before us only the same, even, unchanging nature, which to-day acts in the same way as yesterday and always; thus it ought to recognise the identical in all events, of ancient as of modern times, of the east as of the west; and, in spite of all difference of the special circumstances, of the costume and the customs, to see everywhere the same humanity. This identical element which is permanent through all change consists in the fundamental qualities of the human heart and head---many bad and few are good."^^1^^
Ideas such as this prepared the way for Nietzsche's theory of ``eternal recurrence" and have become a basic element of the modern bourgeois consciousness, which is essentially anti-historicist.
However, Hegel, who approached history from the point of view of formation, continuous development, with its inherent contradictions, its ups and downs, its periods of progress and regression, nevertheless perceived and interpreted history as a purely logical process, not a material one. He was aware that man's ideology, way of thinking, philosophy and law, religion and art, and technical activity are always a product of his time and his time alone, that is, are conditioned by the whole historical character of a particular age. But he explained this particular character as expressing the various stages in the development of the Spirit, Reason, and did not take into account the objective conditions for historical changes, their material and social foundations.
It fell to realist art to fill the speculative and abstract conception of historical process with real objective content, thereby answering the most essential spiritual demands of the time. After having been largely ousted by _-_-_
~^^1^^ A. Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Idea, Vol. Ill, Seventh Edition, London, p. 227.
79 non-realist currents at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, realism now came into its own as an instrument for cognizing life, receiving a tremendous impetus to development and improvement. Many features of the new social relations that arose with the collapse of the feudal system were perceived and depicted by realism.Realism was reborn in the same historical soil as romanticism, and faced the same ideological task---that of presenting the real substance and direction of historical progress. Hence the similarities between realism and romanticism, the presence of romantic elements in the works of Pushkin, Balzac, Dickens, Gogol, and Stendhal, not to mention the realists of lesser stature. In describing his own realism in Etudes sur M. Beyle, Balzac was quite justified in claiming that it contained both features of ``the literature of images'', that is, of romanticism, and of the ``literature of ideas'', as he referred to realism, the exponents of which ``...avoid discussion, do not like reverie and aspire to achieve tangible results"^^1^^.
Another similarity between romanticism and realism was the fact that both movements judged capitalist reality unfavourable for the individual. But while the progressive romanticists simply made a social criticism of capitalism, the realists added social analysis, which brought them, in Balzac's words, very ``tangible results" in revealing the social nature of the contradictions in post-revolutionary society advancing steadily towards ``free'' capitalism. ``There are no `pure' phenomena, nor can there be, either in Nature or in society,'' wrote Lenin, ``that is what Marxist dialectics teaches us, for dialectics shows that the very concept of purity indicates a certain narrowness, a one-sidedness of human cognition, which cannot embrace an object in all its totality and complexity."^^2^^ But the fact that the two artistic movements shared common features did not mean that the revival of realism consisted in the wholesale adoption of the ideological and aesthetic innovations of romanticism. Realism asserted itself by making use of these _-_-_
~^^1^^ Honore de Balzac, Etudes sur M. Beyle, Paris, 1846, p. 481.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 236.
80 innovations and went on to overcome romanticism's one-sided view of lite, as evidenced by the experience of Walter Scott and Pushkin, whose works embraced the most disparate spheres of life and by various paths led literature to a single goal---the creation of a new type of realism. __ALPHA_LVL2__ [Scott, et al.]Walter Scott went through the same stages in his creative evolution as many other romantic writers. From an early interest in gathering and studying folklore material, he went on to investigate the history of the periods in which it was produced. But unlike the other romanticists, he did not rest content with admiring the mysteries of the folk soul as revealed in ancient beliefs, songs and tales, but analysed the objective conditions, both social and spiritual, that influenced the life of the people. Child of a tempestuous and fierce age, Walter Scott combined analytic study of the past, great erudition and a vast knowledge of the life, manners and customs of the past with a keen sense of history, presenting man in his novels not simply as a member of society but as a participant in the historical process. This represented a tremendous step forward.
While in classicism there was a tendency to idealise the hero and stress his noble character to the extent even of ennobling his negative features, and while the romantic hero was an exceptional individual, in his own eyes too, his originality being the distinctive feature of romantic art, the heroes of Walter Scott's numerous novels were ordinary people. The romantic hero's spiritual world was fenced off from the outside world and presented as an independent sphere professedly uninfluenced by environment. The Walter Scott hero is above all an integrated character, his individual nature and spiritual world being organically linked to his environment, of which he is a part, so that he acts as historical man, that is, as the point of intersection of the various conflicting forces in society, as a representative of a particular social force.
This principle of character portrayal represented the triumph of realism. Walter Scott not only continued the realist tradition of the eighteenth century English novel where social environment was given considerable attention, but he enriched this tradition with the addition of __PRINTERS_P_82_COMMENT__ 6---0891 81 a new quality, by differentiating the social substance oi environment, portraying it as the theatre of clashes between conflicting c7ass interests and endowing his heroes with clearly defined class consciousness. Freeing the narrative of the subjectivist element that was so typical of romantic literature, Walter Scott and the other great realists of the nineteenth century imparted truly epic features to the novel, enabling it to become a mirror of life.
Walter Scott's conclusion on the nature of social relations in bourgeois society was proved to be truly momentous and vital by the subsequent development of social thought. Three years after the publication of the Waverley novels, the French historian Augustin Thierry, broke away from the influence of the theories of Saint-Simon and embarked on a work on the English revolution, in which he also concluded that the class struggle is the motive force at the root of the historical process. The affirmation and development of this view in the works of Thierry and Guizot was to be greatly influenced by Walter Scott's philosophy of history as embodied in his novels.
Thierry broke with the accepted canons of historiography, asserting that it was not heroes and rulers but the common people, participants in the movement of the masses, that were the real makers of history. This too betrays the influence of Walter Scott, whose best novels presented the story of ordinary individuals against the background of important historical events that have a direct impact on their destiny, events in which the masses play an important role.
Whether he is writing of the decline of the Scottish clans or Jacobite abortive uprisings, going far back into the past as in Rob Roy, or the Waverley novels, or writing of his own times as in St. Ronan's Well, his manner of portraying his hero's psychology and behaviour is always the same. Scott is not interested in describing his hero's self-contained passions, thoughts and feelings and conveying the illusion of their free play. His novels present the struggle between various social interests, and class conflicts, the clash of socio-political forces at work in society, inevitably involving the main characters of the story, who become participants in the historical drama 82 whether they like it or not. It is these social forces that form the hero's inner world, imparting to him unique individual qualities that are naturally and organically dependent upon the social environment that produced them. Walter Scott adopts an historical approach to the portrayal of character. The Knight Templar in Ivanhoe, the oppressed Saxon peasants and feudal lords, think and act in accordance with the historical conditions of their age. The psychology of the sons of rebellious Scottish clans depends directly on the ties of kinship which hold them in their tight grip and force them to subordinate their own interests to the interests of the clan. Both the stern rebel Rob Roy and his fierce wife are unthinkable outside the environment which bred and educated them. The noble villain Jean Sbogar of whom his creator Nodier is so fond acts in a perfectly artificial world, appearing now amid the inhabitants of some Balkan state, now in splendid salons, and everywhere remaining the embodiment of the author's own views and not a living flesh-and-blood character. Rob Roy emanates the fresh breath of the Scottish mountains, his plaid is made by the calloused hands of women from poor Scottish crofts, his proud bearing, slyness and cunning in his dealings with strangers, his power over his fellow clansmen, indeed his whole nature and behaviour, are determined by the fact that he is a member of a mountain clan. One can only imagine Rob Roy, that bold, rough and ready Highlander, with his own personal code of honour, as he is---dressed in home-spun clothes that reek of sheepskin and night fires, and not in the cloak of the romantic hero.
The pure-hearted, quick-witted and prudent Jeanie Deans,---Scott's best portrait of a character of the people--- reveals great moral fortitude and will-power and a strong sense of justice, in saving her rather flighty sister who is accused of murdering her child after being seduced and abandoned by a dissolute laird's son. Jeanie's journey to London where she manages to get an audience at court and save her innocent sister is a kind of Odyssey, which enabled Scott to present a whole historical period in English life, by making an original historical cross-section. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, as in Scott's other novels, the __PRINTERS_P_82_COMMENT__ 6* 83 personal interest of the individual---in this case Jeanie--- is shown to be interwoven with the social interests of many other people, and indeed to depend on them and form an integral part of the whole system of social relations. Such a view of the interdependency and interconditionality of heterogeneous social phenomena in a causal relationship was a feature of realism, and it is on this that the epic quality of realism is based.
Balzac criticised the romanticists for neglecting to analyse the ensemble of social phenomena observable in life. In his philosophical treatise la recherche de 1'absolu he launched a strong attack on ``certain ignorant and avid people, who demand feelings without the principles that produced them, the flower without the seed that was sown and the baby without the mother's pregnancy. But can art be stronger than nature?"^^1^^ The author of La Comedie humaine insisted that the events of human life, both personal and public, form an organic whole. ``Wherever you begin everything is connected, everything is interwoven. The cause enables us to divine the effect, and an effect enables us to trace the cause."^^2^^
Causality never appears in realist literature as a mechanical succession of events, a chain with every link firmly joined to the next. This is the approach of naturalism, which attempts to present a photographic copy of reality, mixing indiscriminately essential and secondary features and often allowing the particular to obscure the general, and failing to bring to light the hidden processes of life that lie below the surface and determine its movement.
Causality in realism is expressed not only in the organic unity of the whole work and its parts, the unfortuitous nature of the details, the consistent development of the plot and the relationships between the characters, and a well-founded structure, but also, and indeed, above all, in a historicist approach.
Walter Scott evolved a historical approach as the result of his observation of and speculation on the development and intensification of the class struggle going on in _-_-_
~^^1^^ Honore de Balzac, CBuvres completes, V. 14, 2me p., p. 308.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 309.
84 English society during the writer's lifetime. Scott's works covered the long period in English history between the Glorious Revolution and his own day and age. In presenting the antagonism between the two forces of feudalism and the bourgeoisie with their class hostility, the compromises they concluded in the course of the political struggle in which the masses were involved, and in portraying the religious dissentions, conflicting philosophies of life, the clash of material interests, the division of society, and hence of the characters in his novels, into supporters of the old feudal order and supporters of the new bourgeois society, Scott was able to perceive in the mass of facts and events the major trend in social development---the formation of capitalism in England. He was a sufficiently shrewd observer of life to grasp the inevitability of the process and to see it as an historically progressive one. He also realised that the formation of capitalism affected every aspect of English life, and that therefore the personal fortunes of his heroes were dependent on this process, realised, that is, that there was a causal relationship. Thus, in order to understand and present the personal fortunes of his hero, the realist writer had to study the social environment in which the character lived and acted in its entirety, taking note of the general trends in its development, in order to understand and show its influence. This approach put an end to the subjectivism of the romantics' method of treating character, by which circumstances were regarded to be of slight importance, and characters were abstracted from the environment of which they were the product. When Byron ironically combined in Don Juan the character of the seducer sanctified by the old tradition of romantic exclusiveness with a realistic, authentic environment, he was producing far more than a remarkable aesthetic effect: by portraying both character, and environment, Byron created a truly realist work.Scott's historicism destroyed the romantic idea that only the exceptional individual could be the hero of a work of fiction, for he practically proved that realism could depict both the ordinary and the exceptional and not merely the ordinary and mundane as the romanticists 85 asserted. Scott's heroes were ordinary people, who as a rule did not stand out in any way from the masses. But acting as they do in close connection with important historical events, in the magnetic field so to speak, of these events, in the conditions they produce, his heroes acquire substance for the events that affect their lives are substantial. Likewise, Scott portrayed important historical figures not as despotic demiurges of history but as children of their age, linked by numerous threads to the historical soil that grew them and whose minds reflected and refracted the ideas and prejundices of their day. For this reason they have a fulness and completeness which was lost by the twentieth century writers who portray historical figures as independent incisive characters determining the whole course of history.
In presenting an exceptional phenomenon or character, realism explains them, revealing the sources of the exceptional in life itself. Pushkin's Captain's Daughter is a fine example of this. There is no doubt that Pugachov is an exceptional, highly unusual individual.^^1^^ Yet Pushkin explains the appearance of such an exceptional figure by the particular nature of the peasant war in which he plays such an important part. Since the whole psychology and class consciousness of Pugachov and his ``generals'' was inseparable from the social environment that produced them, from the violence and grandeur of the rebellion, the scale of the events which shook the Russian Empire to its foundations imparts scope to the character of the leader and his supporters, making them natural without reducing their significance. The perfectly ordinary squire Grinyov also acquires significance since he is bathed in the reflected glow of history and his life is drawn into the mainstream of the life of the nation.
The idea that the practical activity of perfectly ordinary people is at the same time historical activity gave Scott's novels an epic dimension and a democratic flavour. Although we find no direct depiction in his works of the life of the oppressed and exploited masses, and his social _-_-_
~^^1^^ Yemelyan Pugachov, the leader of the peasant uprising in Russia in 1773--1775.---Ed.
86 views were certainly not revolutionary, his method of portraying history through the lives of ordinary people showed the way for literature to follow if it was to arrive at a broad presentation of the life of the masses, a way that it indeed followed.But Scott's democratic outlook is not only revealed in his destruction of the view of history as being purely the domain of rulers and heroes. The French historians who discovered the laws of the class struggle in society claimed that this struggle ends with the triumph of the third estate, after which an age of general welfare ensues. Walter Scott studied the actual results of the bourgeois revolution and came to a different conclusion. In St. Ronan's Well, which dealt with contemporary life, he showed that bourgeois society resulting from the class struggle had a corrupting influence on human morals. The novel contains in a nutshell Scott's views on England's social development, and shows how, adopting a democratic standpoint, he changed his view of the nature of bourgeois progress, and came to regard it as relative progress since it had not only failed to bring people social welfare, but had revealed its essentially inhuman nature.
Scott came to understand the motive forces of social development through history, as it was history he was concerned with presenting. Pushkin solved a far more complicated aesthetic task, revealing the way these forces influenced contemporary society, observing the influence on society of the very same factors that conditioned historical development. Pushkin was thus concerned with portraying contemporary life, that is history in the making.
Scott's historicism arose against the background of the class struggle which was gaining momentum with the development of the Industrial Revolution in England, bringing with it all the contradictions of capitalism. Pushkin grew to spiritual maturity and came to form his historicist approach at a time when a recent peasant war that had brought to the fore the antagonism between the peasantry and the gentry was still very much in people's minds, at the time of a remarkable upsurge of the national and social consciousness of the Russian people due 87 to the war against Napoleon, in the atmosphere of the Decembrist struggle, when the spirit of Revolution was rising in Europe, and the injustice of the social order was becoming perfectly obvious, for despotism was depriving millions of Russian peasants---the bulk of the country's working population---of the most elementary rights and freedoms.
The unbearable position of the peasantry was the most important social factor in Russian life, and just as radiation changes the structure of live tissues so this factor influenced the minds of Russian thinkers and writers, from Radishchev to Tolstoi, changing the structure of their consciousness, and compelling them to defend the interests of the downtrodden exploited peasant masses. The position of the peasantry attracted the attention of Russian social thought to the essential problems of the historical process, for the emancipation of the peasantry was ultimately associated with the establishment of Russian capitalism, and hence necessitated the adoption of attitude to capitalism as a whole and the clarifying of the prospects of social development in general.
Pushkin was not a peasant poet, but a truly national poet, yet the question of the position of the peasantry, in other words of the people, was at the centre of all his reflections on the principles of social organisation, and it was this that conditioned all those features of his work that go to make him a poet of the people. ``Shall I ever see the people free" was practically the leitmotif of his work. For Pushkin the emancipation of the peasants betokened the emancipation of man and serfdom was a sign of wrongly organised society. Thus, the need to find a way of achieving the emancipation of the peasantry became for him the point of departure for studying the nature and sources of the power some men wield over others and man's objective position in a society based on private ownership.
Pushkin did not only achieve an encyclopaedic portrayal of Russian society. His brilliant mind grasped the results of post-revolutionary development in Europe and was quick to realise the negative effect of capitalist progress on the consciousness and morals of man. Criticism of 88 capitalism became an important aspect of Pushkin's manysided work.
The bourgeois ideologists inferred from the post-- revolutionary development of Europe which so favoured the growth of capitalism that the main positive result of progress was that the individual was able to freely exercise his own will. The apologia for individualism was a reflection of the development of bourgeois society towards ``free'' capitalism and ``free'' competition, characteristic of pre-monopoly capitalism. It was this type of thinking that produced the apologia for bourgeois individualism in Max Stirner's Der Einzige and sein Eigentum. Egoism as a constructive factor, and the individual as its bearer, indeed Stirner's whole outlook fitted very easily into the general anti-revolutionary pattern of bourgeois consciousness, while retaining the semblance of criticism of life. Ideas such as these were blowing in the wind at that time and naturally caught the attention of writers. They became the subject of the half-serious conversations between the young people at Madame Voquet pension that had such serious consequences, hardening Rastignac's heart and arming him with indifference for his fellow men. They turned Julien Sorel's heart to stone and drove Raskolnikov to make his terrible test of the value of his own self, and they were the substance of the nihilism and seductive mixture of criticism and denial of revolution characteristic of Ivan Karamazov's views. Pushkin strongly criticised ideas exalting individualism, and showed their hostility to goodness and humaneness. He began by debunking the selfish romantic hero. The Gypsies represented a turn towards realism, and with such works as Byron's Don Juan and The Age ol Bronze and Stendhal's essay Racine et Shakespeare ushered in a new period in the development of realism. The Gypsies contains a brilliant expose of the features bourgeois social development had introduced into the human consciousness, and reveals that eminently sober view of life and people typical of true realism. Aleko, the hero, is an extremely self-centered individual, who is isolated from others since he only pursues his own personal interests. His rejection of civilisation a la JeanJacques Rousseau turns out to be an illusion, a mistaken 89 and ineffectual way of overcoming life's contradictions, for the civilised world has set its seal on Aleko's soul forever. ``For yet among you sons of nature, happiness I do not see...''. For no man can be happy and free who encroaches on the freedom of others and is unable to master and overcome his own selfishness. So it was that there emerged in Pushkin's work and in world realist literature as a whole a new type of humanism involving a search for ways and means of freeing man from all forms oi social injustice.
Aleko was given the opportunity to overcome his selfishness; the Old Gypsy indicated it to him in his tale about his acceptance of his wife's desertion. Yet Aleko answered the old man's wise humanism with the classic formula of individualism, ``I'll not give up my rights'', and the close knot of relationship between the characters ended in tragedy and bloodshed, in the spiritual bankruptcy of the ``lone wolf" who had sought freedom only for himself. With its striking generalisation and powerful, tragic climax---``There's no escape from fateful passions and no defence from Fate"---Pushkin's poem clearly points an accusing finger at the destructive nature of the dominant outlook of contemporary society.
Condemnation of selfishness and self-will as principles conditioning the relations between people in society based on private ownership is a recurrent theme in Pushkin's works, where it gradually received more concrete historical and social expression as the poet matured spiritually, for Pushkin saw and presented social egoism not as an irrational force but as the direct product and result of a wrongly organised society. As well as studying character and passions, he at the same time investigated society, its manners and morals, its consciousness, the various ideas and moods that prevailed, its structure and social conflicts. He evaluated the development of life and history from a truly humanitarian standpoint. He showed that one of the causes of Boris Godunov's tragic end was that in gaining absolute power and satisfying his own selfish interests, he neglected the welfare of the people and flouted the unwritten laws of true humanity. ``Son by marriage ... of a hangman, himself in soul a hangman,'' he played up 90 to the people, trying to placate them for a while in the pursuit of his own selfish interests and get them to forget the heinous crime he had committed in order to seize the throne. Boris is unable to bring the people true welfare, for his autocratic rule, despotic by its very nature, is based on violence and hostile to freedom.
The memory of the murdered child constantly haunts Boris, destroying all his undertakings and drawing him inexorably towards his doom. The murder of Dmitry was more than a trump in the hands of Boris's political rivals intriguing against him: in the play the image of the dead child is raised to become a symbol accusing the power of man over man, and injustice and evil in life. The question of the effectiveness of this symbol is one that has been much discussed, but it is no accident that Ivan Karamazov's powerful and shattering argument in his revolt against God and the unjust world he has created should be based on the symbol of a child's suffering. The meek defencelessness of a child in the face of the cruelty and inhumanity of life and people, like the defencelessness of the weak in general, developed as a leitmotif in Russian realist literature, with its tradition of the ``little man'', the underdog---from Pushkin's Yevgeny in The Bronze Horseman, terrorised by the great statue symbolising the power of the state, and Vyrin, the hero of The Postmaster, to Akaky Akakievich in Gogol's The Greatcoat and Makar Devushkin in Dostoyevsky's Poor Folk, and a whole host of other tragic figures of ``little men" in Russian literature. But unlike many of his successors---Dostoyevsky for example---Pushkin, the father of Russian realism, was never to ignore the possibility of his underdog rebelling against the social order. The pathetic St. Petersburg clerk in The Bronze Horseman amid the raging elements that crush his brittle happiness dares to raise his voice against the powerful lord and master whose autocratic will was the cause of his woe. It is no accident that Pushkin studied the possibility of the ``injured and insulted" man joining a peasant rebellion in Dubrovsky, or that in The Captain's Daughter, despite the many reservations, the hero's contact with the element of a peasant rebellion filled him with ``exalted awe'', for Pushkin had no doubts about the 91 lawfulness of a popular uprising. Thus, the main idea of Boris Godunov, the opposition of violence and humaneness, arose from the poet's profound awareness of the antagonism that existed between the oppressors and the oppressed.
An historical approach to the present was what determined the historicism of the tragedy, in which the conflict between two states, the struggle between different political interests around the Muscovite throne, human destinies, and the relations between government and people were presented in accordance with the spirit and meaning of history. The tragedy in Bon's Godunov springs from Pushkin's understanding of the real underlying factors of the historical process, of the material interests which determine events. In the play Pushkin presented the characters and the circumstances that produced them, man's environment and psychology in their unity and mutual iniluence, without which realism, and especially the realist novel, could not have developed as they did.
At the time when Pushkin's contemporary Balzac was still writing amorphous works in an ultraromantic and melodramatic spirit, like Clotilde de Lusignan, ou le beau Juil, and Stendhal was writing travel notes and treatises on aesthetics, only just setting out to embody in the novel form the ``iron laws of the real world" he had perceived (which he had not succeeded in doing in Armance), when E. Bulwer-Lytton was just laying the foundations of bourgeois realism, and in his novels Falkland and Pelham or the Adventures of a Gentleman---as in those of his elder contemporary Jane Austen, and later in the forties, in the works of the critical-realist Bronte sisters---realism was strongly spiced with romanticism, Pushkin had already produced Evgeni Onegin, a novel in a new realist manner, whose canons have preserved their validity down to the present day. Despite the fact that the lesson of Evgeni Onegin only became part of the general heritage of European and world realist literature not directly but through the Russian realist novel when it came to occupy a dominant position in the world literary scene in the mid-nineteenth century, the genetic ties 92 between it and the novels of other great realists are easily traced.
For a long time the European novel had preserved Lesage's system of plot development, whereby the hero meets with numerous obstacles and overcomes them. The character of the hero or the narrator are little influenced by environment, and are presented as already formed. Events succeed one another in a chain which could be made quite endless at will. It was of no basic importance what form the writer chose to tell his story, whether epistolary as Richardson or narrative: the general pattern remained the same. We find it in Fielding and Smollett. It was convenient in that it enabled the writer to draw a broad background and cram the narrative with incidents, insert little self-contained novellas and make the work entertaining. The preromantics injected a strong subjective element, and while the early realists often concentrated on portraying environment to the neglect of the characters' psychology, the pre-- romantics, especially in the Gothic and romantic novel, subordinated environment to the subjective world of the feelings. But both preromantic and romantic novels are influenced by the traditional plot structure. Paradoxical though it may seem, Sterne, for example, who showed the most pronounced subjective approach, could have ended Tristram Shandy anywhere or added several further volumes, for the inner world of the heroes did not depend on the objective processes of the external world and the artist was little concerned with relating the events of the characteis' inner lives with real external events. The same applies to the novels of Jean-Paul Richter and the early works of Victor Hugo. Walter Scott's historical sense led him to give a synthetic portrayal of environment and psychology, yet even he did not completely abandon the traditional plot scheme, something that was first achieved by Pushkin.
In Evgeni Onegin the psychology of the characters and the environment which formed them are presented in organic unity and the action is subordinated to the task of revealing individual and unique features of the characters. For the romanticist Constant circumstances were 93 essehtially unimportant: for Pushkin analysis of character was unthinkable without investigation of environment, investigation from a historical angle and a clear understanding of the social features of society. Thus, Pushkin's presentation of his characters' natures and their relationships with one another, their various conflicts, expands to embrace a picture of the life of society with all its social contradictions. The personal life of the heroes, their clashes of opinion and emotional conflicts---everything that had hitherto appeared in novels as independent of environment, was in Pushkin determined by environment and typified, and reflected the main features of the social structure. The mental sufferings of the heroes also reflect their specific class psychology and the basic characteristic feature of the age---its hostility to the normal, healthy, natural development of the personality and the baneful influence of propertied social relations on man.
Evgeni Onegin, like Pushkin's previous works, showed the spiritual bankruptcy of the self-centered, selfish hero. The poem condemned egoism as a typical feature of social relations and social consciousness, and in this sense Evgeni Onegin develops the humanitarian trend in Pushkin's work a stage further.
Pushkin attributed the hero's selfishness to social causes: his freedom was based on the unfreedom of others, who enabled him to lead his empty life of leisure, and since his spiritual world is immoral it follows that the social order which produced such a character is also immoral and abnormal. Pushkin's criticism of his hero implied criticism of life's order.
Onegin's selfishness makes him defy the norms of moral behaviour: he coldly rejects Tatiana's love, trampling her poor heart and ruining her life, dispassionately kills another man, and sails through life vainly searching for pleasure, perfectly indifferent to the fate of others, concerned only with his own self and his own selfish whims. And it was only when he fell hopelessly in love with the woman he had once spurned, when he felt the torture of repentance and was assailed with regrets in much the same way as Boris was by the ``blood-stained ghost... appearing every day'', only then, when he realised the 94 baneful effects of egoism, that he began to feel his loneliness as a curse and his own self-will as a punishment. Onegin's scepticism and selfishness are in sharp contrast to Tatiana's moral integrity, her pure, firm faith in human dignity. Her conscious refusal to build her happiness on the misfortunes of others raises Tatiana above the hero and gives her self-denial the strength of a moral example. The humanitarian idea with which Pushkin imbues Tatiana makes her a perfectly enchanting and delightful character. This poor, modest provincial girl and society lady with tremendous pain locked away in her heart was the first in the gallery of fine women characters in Russian literature on which the People's Will and Bolshevik women of the future were to be brought up.
Confining the conflict to the love relationship between the hero and heroine but analysing their feelings in the wider context of society, Pushkin imbued his heroes with a tremendously rich inner life. In this Evgeni Onegin was vastly different from the novel of the Enlightenment and early realism. This comprehensive approach to character portrayal was soon to become a distinctive feature of realism. Stendhal, comparing the novel in his time with that of the eighteenth century could write in Memoires dun tourists: ``Have you read Fielding's Tom Jones which has practically been forgotten nowadays? This novel occupies the same place among novels as The llliad does among epic poems, and yet Fielding's characters, like Achilles or Agamemnon, now seem too primitive to us."^^1^^ The realists freed their heroes from what Stendhal referred to as their primitiveness, and were to go on to improve the methods of psychological analysis. But it was Pushkin who laid the foundations of analytic study of the human heart in realist literature.
Pushkin studied the nature of human alienation and the causes of man's preoccupation with himself with the thoroughness of the historian and the penetration of the sociologist. Analysis of an apparently purely moral problem inevitably led him to undertake an analytic study of life, for it was there, he knew, that he would find the _-_-_
~^^1^^ Stendhal, Nl6moiies d'un touriste, Tome I, Bruxelles, 1838, p. 27.
95 answer to the question of what was causing alienation and self-centeredness and social conflict. This fundamental problem for realism was brought into special relief in the Little Tragedies, and was in fact the basis of all the tragic conflicts in these plays which form a cycle by virtue of their common philosophical conception. Pushkin demonstrates exceptionally strong historical sense in the cycle. Only a writer aware that the manners and customs of society and people's social and moral conduct depend on circumstances of place and time and perfectly concrete historical conditions could have created such a set of vivid characters from various periods. The characters of the Little Tragedies do not only wear the costume of their age: they are also endowed with many psychological features typical of their age. At the same time they are generalised and realistically typiiied to an extent that is only equalled in Shakespeare's characters, and thereby go beyond the confining limits of historical fact. Pushkin managed to generalise in them the essential, more permanent features of human consciousness formed by the world of property relations. Following the main theme of his art, Pushkin brought his heroes---self-centered individuals---into direct conflict with humanitarian principles, with the unwritten laws of humaneness, condemning egoism as a basis for human relations. Each of the heroes of the Little Tragedies has his own individual type of conflict with other people and the world, and yet in a way all these conflicts have a common denominator. The gay seducer Don Juan, who regards life purely as a source of pleasure and satisfaction of his own desires, is finally crushed by his own inhuman intention to sacrifice another person's virtue, honour and life to his own transient whim; Walsingham in The Feast During the Plague, is assailed by a most bitter moral torment for having turned a deaf ear to the sufferings and hardships of his fellow men in this terrible time of trial and joined with his reckless friends in godless revelry. Salieri suffers a crushing defeat in his moral duel with Mozart, driven as he is to crime by his own pitifully narrow and selfish view of art. Making of art a mystery whose secrets are only revealed to the initiated few, Saliefi dares to oppose his will to the great unifying and 96 educative power of art that freely gives joy to mankind. He extinguishes Mozart's radiant genius, thereby doing a terrible violence to the creative element in man. He acts like all those who seek to extinguish reason and put a stop to its hard and utterly selfless work to free mankind from the power of prejudice, ignorance and evil. Pushkin's humanitarian idea acquires tremendous power of generalisation and great critical force.But what was the soil in which all these human tragedies arose, what is it that feeds misanthropy and breeds disharmony in human relations? The answer to this question was provided by The Covetous Knight, the key work in the cycle. Here we have the world where all ideas of what is right and wrong are turned upside down, where son is advised to murder his own father, where the lascivious murderer seduces the wife of his victim, where selfless kindness produces hatred and anger, where ``bloody villainy" is always ready to be called to life, where tears and sorrows evoke scorn or indifference, youth and talent are forced to sell themselves and a man's worth is judged by what he owns, where self-interest and personal gain are the guiding principles and conscience and morality go by the board---a world ruled over by an old knight-usurer, the master and slave of gold. His armour is rather too tight for him: with his understanding of the essential features of the new masters who were consolidating their position in the post-revolutionary world, Pushkin did not endow the baron with contemporary, early nineteenth century features, lest he should be at variance with the general pattern of the cycle. But despite his knightly attributes, the old baron had parallels in the realist literature of Pushkin's day. He represents very much the same as Balzac's Gobseck, in the understanding of the processes going on in life that he reflects. Gobseck serves his master gold with equally fanatical devotion, and in the same ways as the baron rejects the outward signs of wealth and power for the secret but very real power of wealth, likewise understanding that self-interest and gain are the prime movers in relations between people in the society in which he lives. Like the baron, Gobseck is a powerful, monumental character, despite his petty __PRINTERS_P_97_COMMENT__ 7---0891 97 avariciousness. They are still accumulating capital, not using it to run the world. They are typical of the early period of bourgeois accumulation, and represent the first portrayals of capitalist vultures in world realist literature.
For Pushkin, as for Balzac, Stendhal, Dickens and Thackeray, the main thing in judging the nature of historical development was the question of their attitude to capitalism. In studying the effect the new social system was having on the life of society, they all sought for social forces and principles of social organisation to counter capitalism. Balzac mistakenly supposed that the unruly development and anarchy of capitalist enterprise and the corrupting influence of selfish bourgeois morality could be curbed by the strict authority of the monarchy and the Church. Dickens held that the power of moral feelings--- which must be aroused in people---would be able to counter the destructive influence of capitalism on social consciousness. Pushkin, however, like Stendhal, explored the possibility of union with the revolutionary people in such works as Dubiovsky and History of the Revolt of Pugachov, and also in Scenes from the Days of Chivalry, whose basic idea is similar to that of Merimee's La Jacquerie. Like the other great realists of the past, Pushkin looked beyond life as it was in an attempt to guess the future course of social development. The search for a perspective arises from the very nature of realism and is its sine qua non. When a writer analyses reality he is bound to achieve an understanding of the direction in which the world he is investigating is moving. The great realist writers of the nineteenth century embarked on their search for a perspective due to their refusal to accept the bourgeois society they lived in. Pushkin rejected capitalist progress outright, both in its ``pure'' American form, and in the form characteristic of Europe. ``They were amazed to see democracy in its disgusting cynicism, its cruel prejudices and its unbearable tyranny,'' he wrote of American bourgeois democracy. ``All that is noble, selfless, and elevating is crushed by egoism and a passion for contentment; the majority presumptuously oppressing society; Negro slavery amid education and freedom; genealogical persecution in a people that has no nobility; cupidity and 98 envy on the part of the electors; temerity and servility on the part of the rulers. . . ."^^1^^ Stendhal criticised American democracy in almost exactly the same words in his account of the journey of a certain Captain Holly to North America. Of course, the freedom to which Pushkin and Stendhal were referring was the freedom of private enterprise proclaimed by the bourgeois revolution. These same features of American civilisation were also criticised by Dickens in his superb satire of bourgeois democracy Martin Chuzzlewit.
Pushkin also wrote as follows. ``Read the complaints of the English factory workers, and it's enough to make your hair stand on end. What dreadful tortures and incomprehensible torments! What cold barbarity, on the one hand, what terrible poverty! You might think it were a question of building the pyramids of the pharaohs, of the Jews labouring beneath Egyptian whips. Not at all; it's merely Mr. Smith's fabrics or Mr. Jackson's needles. And note that this is not abuse, it is no crime, but is all performed strictly within the limits of the law. There seems to be no more unfortunate lot in the world than that of the English worker, but look what happens when a new machine is invented and five or six thousand people are immediately released from hard labour and deprived at the same time of their regular means of subsistence...."^^2^^
Engels had the following to say on the position of the
English working class. ``Every improvement in machinery
throws workers out of employment, and the greater the
advance, the more numerous the unemployed; each great
improvement produces, therefore, upon a number of
workers the effect of a commercial crisis, creates want,
wretchedness, and crime."^^3^^ Such were the inherent
contradictions of capitalist progress which did not remain
hidden from the perceptive gaze of Pushkin and the other
great realists of last century. Pushkin gave a great deal
of thought to these contradictions and studied the effect
they had on man's moral world. Thus, in his Queen of
_-_-_
~^^1^^ A. S. Pushkin, Collected Works in ten volumes, Moscow, 1949,
Vol. 7, p. 449 (in Russ.). ~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 290. ~^^3^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, On Britain, Moscow, 1962, p. 167.
Describing the features of bourgeois society, Engels remarked that they made themselves felt most strongly in the life of the big towns, the centres and strongholds of bourgeois civilisation. ``And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.
``Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. Just as in Stirner's recent book, people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a 100 bare existence remains."^^1^^ These features of bourgeois consciousness and bourgeois relations remarked upon by Engels are reflected in The Queen ol Spades. Hermann should really have been struggling for wealth and power not in a gaming house but on the stock exchange, his whole character and outlook predisposing him for that. In both The Queen oi Spades and The Covetous Knight, where Pushkin demonstrates a perfect awareness of the processes going on in society, a deep understanding of the new social phenomena that had arisen since the revolution, and does so with consummate artistry, the emphasis is on analysis of the moral consequences of the growing influence of social egoism on man. This feature of Pushkin's method of presenting bourgeois society was conditioned by the slower rate at which capitalism was developing in Russia. While fully aware of the main trend in social development and understanding perfectly well that the bourgeoisie was bound to come out on top and feudalism was doomed, Pushkin was unable to study and investigate the formation and establishment of the new social relations with the same breadth and fulness as were other realists who actually lived under capitalism. But it was he who laid the foundations of a new type of realism, critical in character, synthetic in the method of portraying the relationship between man and his environment, between man and society. Pushkin portrayed his contemporaries historically, that is, as the product of a particular social environment, and possessing a perfectly clear-cut class consciousness that was their own, and theirs alone. Pushkin's typical method of portraying reality was characteristic of critical realism as a whole in the classical period of its development.
It was this method that enabled Balzac and Stendhal, Dickens and Thackeray, the Bronte sisters, Gogol, and the Russian writers of the ``natural school" to reveal and analyse the contradictions inherent in the new capitalist relations that were growing up on the ruins of feudalism. As it happened, only critical realism proved capable of assimilating the new life, for bourgeois realism, which _-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, On Britain, p. 57.
101 regarded capitalist progress as the natural form of social development, made no effort at all to study life in its actual movement, but substituted portrayal of the spiritual life of man isolated from society for portrayal of the contradictions in society. This attitude was clearly stated by a leading exponent of bourgeois realism, that talented psychologist and portrayer of morals and manners BulwerLytton, who wrote in Pelham or the Adventures of a Gentleman: ``Works which treat upon man in his relation to society, can only be strictly applicable so long as that relation to society treated upon continues. For instance, the play which satirises a particular class, however deep its reflections and accurate its knowledge upon the subject satirised, must necessarily be obsolete when the class itself has become so. ... The novel which exactly delineates the present age may seem strange and unfamiliar to the next; and thus works which treat of men relatively, and not man in se, must often confine their popularity to the age and even the country in which they were written. While on the other hand, the work which treats of man himself, which seizes, discovers, analyses the human mind, as it is, whether in the ancient or the modern, the savage or the European, must evidently be applicable, and consequently useful, to all times and all nations."^^1^^ The portrayal of ``man as such" became the chief characteristic feature of bourgeois literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Carried to its extreme, this principle of portraying man abstracted from the world of social ties lies at the roots of modern decadent literature.Nor was romanticism able to reveal the real contradiction in the ``free'' capitalist system that was developing. The new features of life that lay bare the inhuman nature of bourgeois society needed to be investigated and understood. To the romanticists the process of bourgeois development seemed to be irrational, and extremely difficult if not impossible to understand. The conservative romanticists either adopted a position of stoical non-acceptance of life and the new society, like Alfred de Vigny, or _-_-_
~^^1^^ E. Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham or the Adventures o! a Gentleman, New York, p. 48.
102 openly supported feudal reaction like Arnim, Southy and so on. Those romanticists who, like Lamartine, believed in the illusions of bourgeois liberalism while being opposed to the more unpleasant aspects of bourgeois progress, were of the opinion that the new social order merely required certain minor improvements. Only the revolutionary romanticists who were to a greater or lesser extent connected with the rise of the proletarian and democratic revolutionary movement which culminated in the revolutions of 1848---people like Heinrich Heine, Freiligrath, Moreau, Barbier, Lenau, the worker poets and Chartists--- revealed the contradictions of capitalist progress, though without giving a complete, integrated picture of bourgeois society. The critical realists alone were able to see and comprehend the contradictions in social development as a whole and analyse the main distinctive features of the bourgeois consciousness and social order. Critical realism flourished at a time when bourgeois society had already turned its back on the heroic days of the Jacobins and the bloody epic of the Napoleonic wars, and was consolidating its own gains and entering the stage of free competition. The bourgeoisie were feting their freedom. The cancan replaced the Carmagnole, the bowlar hat replaced the Phrygian cap, the Hussar's uniform with its colourful trimmings had given way to the practical frock-coat oi the new world conqueror, the knight of debit and credit. The orators of the Convention who had shaken the world with their fiery speeches had been superceeded by parliamentary windbags. The bourgeoisie were mercilessly enforcing their rule at bayonet-point. They ruthlessly quelled the masses on the barricades during the July revolution, shed the blood of the Lyons workers who had the audacity to demand human rights for themselves, crushed the uprising of the Silesian textile workers and mobilised their forces against the Chartists, who were naive enough to believe that the democratic freedoms declared by the bourgeoisie would permit the working class to free itself from capitalist enslavement. __ALPHA_LVL2__ [Balzac, et al.]A spirit of research and a thirst for knowledge characterised the great realists of the nineteenth century, who in portraying and investigating life and revealing the 103 objective contradictions of capitalism inevitably adopted a critical attitude towards bourgeois society. ``The public demands beautiful pictures from us,'' wrote Balzac, ``but where are the models for them? Your hideous clothes, your abortive revolutions, your garrulous bourgeois, your dead religion, your degenerate power, your kings without thrones, are they really so poetic as to be worth portraying? All we can do now is mock at them."^^1^^ Balzac's novels have a strong cognitional and critical strain. He frequently interrupts the narrative to give detailed descriptions of his characters' means and interests, and their economic relations, with all the minutiae of everyday life, dress, manners, customs and habits, tastes, scientific discoveries, financial and banking operations, mortgage business, land deals, and legal business, examining juridical institutions, the relations between Church and State, inheritance laws and economic legislature, portraying fashionable salons and money-lenders' chambers, city slums and the manners and morals of rural France.
``Before writing a book, the writer must analyse the characters, immerse himself in all manners, travel round the globe, and experience all passions; or the passions, countries, manners, characters, natural phenomena and moral phenomena must all pass through his mind."^^2^^ Balzac did his best to follow his own advice and endeavoured to examine and portray the life of the individual, the life of society, and history in synthesis. What a contrast there is between Pushkin's light, delicate prose which time seems not to have aged at all so simple and unadorned it is and so perfectly and naturally does it fit into the background of contemporary literature, and Balzac's heavy, somewhat archaic prose with its Cyclopean monumentality! Some parts of the vast incomplete edifice of La Comedie Humaine have become moss-grown with the passing of time, yet nonetheless, this truly titanic work still continues to exert a considerable influence on literature, partly due to its powerful characters and because it reveals the innermost passions of the scions of the _-_-_
~^^1^^ Honore de Balzac, la peau de chagrin, Bruxelles, 1831, Vol. I, p. 19.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 15.
104 bourgeois world, and also because it concentrates and conveys with supreme realism the quintessence of life itself in movement, in all its fulness and intensity. Like Hermann in The Queen of Spades, Balzac's heroes are engaged in a crazed pursuit of their own personal interest, and have that same ``monism'', their inner world being entirely occupied by one all-consuming passion. All Pere Goriot's other feelings were completely submerged by his paternal feeling, just as Gobseck/-Nucingen, Lucien^de Rubempre, du Tillet, the Cointet brothers, Gaubertin, Rigou, Pere Grandet and hundreds of other characters were completely ruled by their passion for wealth. Presenting his characters' self-absorption, their total pursuit of their own private interests, often at variance with the common interest or the interests of other individuals, Balzac was revealing an objective feature of bourgeois social development---the growth and spread of social atomisation.Although he viewed character as man's inner world ruled by a particular guiding passion, Balzac did not equate character with passion: for him the two were dialectically related, but not identical. The passion was the guiding motive force in a character, and could, and often did, contradict the hero's moral and mental make-up. A man's character was formed under the influence of his environment, reflecting its distinctive features and dependent on it. Thus the heroes of La Comedie Humaine were clear-cut individuals despite their social typification, and were neither reduced to their purely social essence or their particular overriding passion, as was the tendency in classicism, nor representative of some universal feature or trait of character, as with the romanticists.
In portraying his ``monistic'' characters Balzac revealed remarkable perception and discernment of life in breadth and depth, and his works contained all the minutiae of human existence. With his truly encyclopaedic knowledge of such far-ranging subjects as the art of land speculation, the way the peasants steal timber from the landowners, the value of the jewelry some Viscountess or Marchioness stricken with love and grief takes to a Parisian pawnbroker, what goes on in the stately homes tucked away in the quiet woods of St. Germain, the sordid secrets of stock 105 exchange manoeuvres and political intrigues, Balzac studied the penetration of self-interest into all spheres of private and public life with a historian's thoroughness, and showed how this corrupted people's minds and embittered human relations. Sentiments of kinship (Les parents pauvres), family relationships (Le Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet and Le Colonel Chabert), friendship (Les Illusions perdues), love (Interdiction, La muse du departement and La femme de trente ansl honesty (Cesar Birotteau), the state machine (Les Employes, Une tenebreuse aHaire), the press, the theatre, publishing, art and banking---everywhere self-interest and egoism reigned supreme, making life a battlefield where the weak were given no quarter, where morals and goodness were trampled underfoot or sullied. A struggle going on in society is not merely a struggle between a man and his fellows, one individual and another, and between the individual and society. In the words of Doctor Benassis, Balzac's alter ego, this struggle is none other than the war of the poor against the rich going on in bourgeois society, ``a union of the haves against the have-nots''. It is also the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the nobles, between the peasants and the landowners, between the workers and the manufacturers, in short the class struggle which lies at the root of social relations explains the mystery of the development of history and is the motor of progress.
Balzac's analysis of society led him to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie was bound to triumph, and therefore despite his loathing for the bourgeoisie and his love for fine and noble, aristocrats untainted by self-interest, he was forced to portray the decline of the old society, to sing its swan-song, giving his depiction of the nobility and the aristocracy a strong critical flavour. Balzac made his bourgeois powerful figures, with tremendous will-power and boundless energy, qualities his highly idealised aristocrats seldom possessed. He saw the aristocrats antagonists as the carriers of social activity and drive, and in this respect his founders of financial dynasties anticipate the Griinders in later realist literature---old Buddenbrook, Artamonov senior, and Cowperwood, who have the same strong characters as Balzac's heroes. But while recognising 106 the strength of the new class that had emerged victorious---and this shows his spontaneous historicism--- Balzac did not consider the bourgeois system of social relations to be the summit of creation or eternal. It was his humanism, his refusal to accept the inhuman nature of capitalist civilisation that led Balzac to this conclusion. In his view capitalism was doomed to perish as surely as it was unable to secure happiness for mankind. This ethical criticism of capitalism represents both the strength and the weakness of Balzac's outlook. While correctly considering alienation, social atomisation, to be the most important result of capitalist progress, Balzac failed to see the other side of capitalism, its unifying role, the way the new social conditions abolished feudal separatism and increased people's dependence on one another, strengthening connections between people in the sphere of production, and that of industrial production in particular, and in commerce, creating the objective conditions in the capitalist system for the poor to unite against the rich, the oppressed against the oppressor, with a view to changing the existing social order.
Balzac was full of scorn for bourgeois democracy and bourgeois liberalism and had a pretty clear idea of the real contradictions and the negative aspects of capitalist progress. He was full of sympathy for the republicans, whom he saw as defenders of the rights and interests of the people. Yet for all this, for all the tremendous perspicacity and penetration of his analysis of bourgeois social relations and social undercurrents, the hidden processes of history, Balzac was not up to the level of the Utopian socialists whom he knew well, and with whom he polemicised, pointing out the weak points in their teaching. Balzac's failure to understand certain important aspects of life occasionally marred his work, and brought romanticist elements into play, introducing a strain of Gothic horror into his essentially realist approach, resulting in such highly improbable, fantastic and naive works as Les Treize. When he came to examine social questions and try and work out. the ways and means of overcoming the negative results of capitalist progress, Balzac adopted a kind of conservative utopianism, 107 suggesting that the power of the aristocracy resting upon the moral values of religion could bring social welfare without destroying the existing property relationships and merely curbing but not abolishing the principle of private ownership. This was the kind of theory expounded by Benassis, the hero of the didactic and Utopian novel Le medecin de campagne, a rather colourless, insipid work, only remarkable for the fact that it contains an expose of the author's ideas concerning the reorganisation of society. The same thing happened to Balzac as happened to Gogol and Dostoyevsky. Rejecting the capitalist path of social development, while at the same time refusing to accept the idea of revolution as a method of changing the world for the better, they had to seek support in the struggle against bourgeois egoism in authoritarian power and Christian ethics. In the case of Balzac, his conservative utopianism also resulted from the fact that in.studying the forces at work in the society of his day he did not take into account the people as an independent factor, determining the movement of history. At a time when the Utopian socialists led by Saint-Simon were insisting that the ``lower classes" including the proletariat were capable of managing all branches of the political and economic life of a country on their own, Balzac openly polemicised with them, maintaining the opposite. In revealing the real contradictions inherent in capitalist progress and criticising capitalism for its failure to satisfy the needs of the masses and of the individual, Balzac was clearly expressing the feelings and attitudes of the ``lower classes" that were oppressed by capitalism, in other words, the views of the masses. Yet at the same time he considered that social reforms aimed at abolishing the noxious effects of the capitalist system could only be introduced from above.
Although witness to the 1848 Revolution, Balzac was to cling to this attitude to the end of his days. Not so Stendhal, who had no illusions about the possibility of authoritarian power resting on the aristocracy and the Church being able to iron out the contradictions in bourgeois society and abolish social egoism through the agency of Christian ethics. For him, a republican with a strong 108 spiritual link with the democratic revolutionary movement, the Church, the aristocracy and all authoritarian power were anti-popular forces. As for the views of the ruling classes, he was firmly convinced that they could not be reformed to serve the common good by rational arguments, for they were borne of advantage. In the same way and to the same extent, the bourgeoisie who had struggled hard to gain its privileges and thought only of increasing its power and wealth, would not sacrifice their own interests to the aristocracy, let alone the masses, without a hard and bitter struggle. Thus, besides seeing the society of his day not simply as a battlefield where it was every man for himself, as also did Balzac and other critical realists, Stendhal---and in this is manifest the truly democratic nature of his outlook---was also aware that a constant struggle was being waged in society between the ruling classes, the propertied classes, and the deprived masses, and it was to the latter that he gave his wholehearted political and personal allegiance. Stendhal's heroes, unlike the characters in La Comedie Humaine, are either opposed to society as an alien force, like Julien Sorel, Lamiel, Valbayre or the carbonari Missirilli, or begin to sever their link with society like Olivier, Fabrice, and Lucien Leuwen. A number of Balzac's heroes struggle with society, with its laws and customs, and its oppressive forces---characters like Vautrin, Raphael, Lucien de Rubempre, and even Rastignac. But their struggle is waged within the system, and the main stimulus behind their struggle is the desire to gain a good firm position in society, and if they are successful they eventually come to find society's laws quite acceptable. The escaped convict Vautrin who is an outcast from society returns to the fold and is willingly received back, becoming a pillar of the society whose laws he had formerly broken. Julien Sorel, forced to make his own way in life and win a place in the sun by his own efforts, uses the same weapon to achieve his aim as those other ambitious people whose victories and defeats are presented in La Comedie Humaine. Yet he never merges to become one with the ruling class in whose orbit he moves, and far from accepting their views, remains their sworn enemy until his 109 dying day, for his plebeian origin makes him socially hostile to bourgeois society. Whereas the conflict between the heroes of La Comedie Humaine and society can be resolved, that between Julien Sorel or Lamiel and their social environment cannot, for it is based on class antagonism, which will last as long as the existing system of social relations persists.
Despite the fact that the range of subject matter is far narrower in Stendhal's works than in la Comedie Humaine, he revealed social contradictions no less vividly, and indeed far more sharply and intensely than Balzac. The reason for this is that Stendhal approached the study of society as a democratic writer for whom the fact that bourgeois society was hostile to the true interests of the people was more obvious than to Balzac, whose vision of life was somewhat blurred by the conservative aspects of his outlook.
Stendhal's works provide a particularly clear example of the analytic nature of realism. Heir to eighteenth century materialism, Stendhal saw man as combining moral, psychological and physiological principles which could be apprehended and analysed. As a child of his own age, he knew that a man's spiritual world depends on his environment and his behaviour is motivated by social, that is, material causes. Realising that in bourgeois society man became a monad shut up in himself since private interest tended to disunite people, he did not consider that interest as such had a purely egoistic character. He believed---and it was this that Stendhal regarded as the guarantee of the possibility of social improvement--- that personal interest did not necessarily have to be satisfied at other people's expense: man could also satisfy his own interests and at the same time bring benefit to his fellow men and hence to society as a whole. Thus, while adhering to the views of Helvetius and Holbach, who considered personal gain to be the sole stimulus of human behaviour, Stendhal was proceeding from the humanist belief in man's creative powers, the might of his intellect and his ability to perfect himself, a belief based on his democratic convictions. He considered that the capitalist system corrupted human nature and the 110 ubiquitous egoism gradually stifled human qualities opposed to self-interest. The gradual destruction of the human being by society or the shattering of his hopes of happiness was the subject which Stendhal was most concerned with.
Studying the effect of social environment on man's spiritual and moral world, Stendhal focussed his attention on portraying the psychology of his heroes as subject to the ``iron laws of the real world'', and indeed as a part of the real world. He reduced description of situation and circumstances to a minimum, transposing the action to the sphere of human relationships, making the human mind the mainspring of the drama, developing and perfecting the art of psychological analysis in critical realism.
Stendhal studied the motives of human behaviour, conditioned, directly or indirectly, by a person's own interests, and described the way man ``sets out to hunt for happiness''. At the same time he made a thorough analysis of man's feelings and passions. Thus while in De 1'amour he tried to penetrate the innermost mysteries of the apparently most irrational passion by means of rational analysis, describing the abstract feeling, divorced from environment and actual conditions, in his later works he went beyond mechanical rationalism stemming from the philosophy of the eighteenth century and examined the psychological and social in man in unity and synthesis. Man and his feelings and passions was not, for Stendhal, an island washed by the waves of life. Stendhal perceived in his personality and general make-up features typical of the milieu, society and class to which he belonged. Signer Valenod and Monsieur de Renal, Count Mosca and Rassi are all social types, but Stendhal reveals their typicality through the sphere of psychology, by studying their inner world which conditions their actions in the given circumstances. Since Stendhal saw character to be a dynamic synthesis of ``moral habits'', and these ``moral habits" to be the result of the influence of the social order on the human consciousness, he naturally included in the sphere of character essential heterogeneous qualities. Stendhal compared the novel to a mirror placed along the 111 highway and reflecting both the azure sky and the roadside mud. He might as well have said the same of his heroes, for they, like a mirror, reflected both the noble and base, generous altruistic and egoistic ``moral habits''. This is what gives Stendhal's characters their tremendous authenticity, vitality and completeness. A dynamic synthesis of various qualities, a Stendhalian hero seems to reflect in his inner life, in the inner struggle of contradictory characteristics, the objective movement and contradictions of life itself.
Julien Sorel combines vastly differing elements: vanity, cold calculation, selfishness and noble ideals, heavy, gloomy suspicion, and an open, generous nature, strict self-control and violent, unbridled passion are all mixed and fused in his nature into a mobile, dynamic whole. All these different elements of his nature intermingle, and react on one another. Stendhal examines this contradictory movement, this conflict and development of different thoughts and feelings by means of psychological analysis, and in so doing makes several important literary discoveries, like introducing to the narrative art the inner monologue, which enables him to penetrate with his searching, dissecting lancet further and deeper into the living flesh of the hero's heart. Equally rich in inner movements and subtle shades of feeling and thought are Stendhal's other characters---Fabrice, Gina Sanseverina, Count Mosca, the old Leuwen, and Lucien Leuwen. Yet despite the highly variegated nature of the elements that form the character's dynamic entity, the result is not a loose mixture. It is rather like a magnetic field where the movement and direction of different lines of force can be observed. Every one of Stendhal's characters has an inner social dominant, to which all the other elements are subordinate. For Stendhal character is the product of circumstances and social environment. The hero acts in certain given circumstances and his actions are the result of his particular character and not accidental: they have their own logic determined by the way the hero sets out ``to hunt for happiness'', dependent, that is, on how he struggles to achieve and satisfy his own particular aim or interests and how he clashes with the interests or aims of 112 others in the process. Julien Sorel, a plebeian out to attain success and power in bourgeois society, behaves all the time, and especially when among the upper classes, as if he were behind enemy lines. Class awareness pervades his every thought and action. He even turns up to meet his future mistress armed to the teeth. The behaviour of Fabrice, Gina Sanseverina and Monsieur de Renal are also conditioned by their class psychology. The banker Leuwen, a sceptical free-thinker and Epicurean, retains his essential class consciousness as a capitalist for all his broad views. He despises the common people and plays around with the values of bourgeois democracy just as he does with money on the stock exchange. In Stendhal we find causality---that essential feature of realism---in the form of a social, class dominant, determining the psychology and behaviour of the characters, which are very clearly and methodically analysed.
Stendhal makes an equally comprehensive analysis of the destructive influence of bourgeois society on the human consciousness. Julien Sorel, with his frank, open nature and heroic ideals, whose whole bold, resolute character would seem to destine him to join the struggle for social justice finds itself on the wrong side of the barricades, devotes his outstanding abilities to ensuring his own advancement in the upper class milieu he so hates, and makes one compromise after another with his ideals. His soul becomes corroded by social egoism, which conditions the main features of social psychology and consciousness in a propertied world. It becomes a part of his flesh and blood, making him a slave of bourgeois prejudices, an out and out individualist, guided in his behaviour by the principle: ``every man for himself in this desert of selfishness called life''. Julien Sorel was the first in a long line of characters in world literature of young people corrupted by capitalism. They include Greelou in Bourget's Le Disciple, London's Martin Eden and Eugene Witla, the hero of Dreiser's The Genius, and especially Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who under the influence of the terrible and unnatural conditions prevailing in the society in which he lived evolved the supremely individualist idea that the chosen individuals had the right __PRINTERS_P_113_COMMENT__ 8---0891 113 to sacrifice other people in the interest of achieving their own aims and purposes, the idea that lies behind the concept of the ``hero and the crowd'', a theme which in variations is ubiquitous in the philosophy and morality of bourgeois individualism.
Society had a similar destructive influence on Lamiel, leading her on the path of crime. The feudal-bourgeois reaction crippled the lives of Fabrice and Clelia. Bourgeois society was hostile to the people, oppressing them. It was also hostile to the individual, instilling egoism in him and impoverishing and standardising his nature. Stendhal often shows the flagging of energy in members of bourgeois society, the erasure and loss of true individuality. Stendhal's views were formed at the time when the class struggle between labour and capital had faded into the background and the chief conflict to be discerned was the struggle between the masses and feudal reaction, which explains why he regarded rule by the people and a republic to be the essential condition for the harmonious development of society. Later, when bourgeois democracy had already revealed its limitations, he was able to distinguish between it and the principles of popular democracy, and indeed believed in the possibility of rule by the people being one day achieved. He rejected the American brand of bourgeois democracy quite emphatically. Lucien Leuwen learns by experience the non-popular character of the bourgeois democracy the July Revolution ushered in. He leaves the army so as ``not to have to sabre workers''. But though unwilling to join the ruling classes in the impending struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat which he realises is inevitable, he does not understand that the proletariat is not merely brave fellows, but an historical force coming to the fore of the social, class and political struggle. Stendhal himself did not grasp this either, any more than did the other writers of the classical period of critical realism.
The manner of character portrayal where psychology and action were interrelated, which Pushkin and Stendhal introduced to realism, co-existed with Balzac's method of concentrating mainly on the study of the social conditions determining the mentality and the ``sum of moral habits" 114 of the hero, and also with the original method Dickens affirmed. Dickens created character on the basis of generalisation, intensiiication and exaggeration (satirical or comic) of the main feature in a character's nature. The characters of Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Pecksniff, Uriah Heep, Dombey, Scrooge, Bounderby and Mr. Podsnap were none other than variations of a particular psychological trait, elaborated in remarkable detail, with a mass of shades and implications, packed with realistic minutiae of morals and manners. The characteristic so emphasised might be hypocrisy as in the case of Pecksniff, or smugness as with Podsnap. Dickens's method differed from that of the classicists in that he was not studying an abstract passion as such, but was interested in the expressive side of human nature which to a large extent determines behaviour. Nor do Dickens's characters resemble the romantic heroes, for he did not isolate the features of human nature from the objective world. All his heroes are very much a part of the social environment which produced them, and have the outlook of the class to which they belong. The highly authentic presentation of a character, complete with all the concrete details, from description of his dress, habits, eccentricities, tastes, likes and dislikes, inclinations, intentions, aims, comportment, convictions, views, the circumstances and conditions in which he lives, trade or occupation, to his actual behaviour---coloured with powerful lyricism or criticism, exaggerated to the point of being grotesque or emanating an aura of the fantastic---creates the illusion of a complete and manysided study of the character's psychology. Dickens's characters are so typified, and their social nature so fully defined that the author had no need to embroider on their psychology in the course of the narration in analysing their relationships with other characters or their reactions in various situations. Their moral qualities might alter---Mr. Dombey changes from a cold, soulless capitalist to a repentant and kindly old man, and the miserly old Scrooge becomes the epitome of kindness and generosity---but the inner course of these changes is not traced. This principle of character portrayal is not at odds with __PRINTERS_P_115_COMMENT__ 8* 115 the realist method for it is based on social analysis and is thus a perfectly valid form of realistic generalisation of the real, genuine aspects of life reflected in the human consciousness. Gogol, for example, in Mirgorod, and especially in Dead Souls, created his characters solely on the basis of broad generalisation of their basic traits. Plyushkin, Nozdryov, Korobochka, Sobakevich, Ivan Ivanych and Ivan Nikiforovich, Shponka and Podkolesin are all highly typified and presented in their full social essence. In the course of the action they only reveal various shades and aspects of their already set natures. Psychological stability is also a feature of Thackeray's characters, presented against an extensive background of everyday life. Combining satire with description of manners and morals, Thackeray exaggerated certain aspects of his characters' nature and paid little attention to their psychological and emotional sub-stratum, being satisfied with stressing the social motives of their behaviour. Becky Sharp, the epitome of the selfish bourgeois go-getter, acts in conformity with her social nature throughout Vanity Fair, revealing generic psychological qualities in various circumstances, always remaining herself. She is more interesting for the energy with which she pursues her own advancement, than as a psychological study. The straightforward and honest Henry Esmond goes through his numerous adventures in wars and Jacobite conspiracies without changing psychologically. Nor is Pendennis at all changed by all the tricks spiteful Fortune plays on him. The embittered plebeian Heathcliff, the extremely striking hero of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, who takes wrathful revenge for the wrongs inflicted on him by life and other people, and suffers prostrating personal tragedy, is the same gloomy, embittered outcast at the end of the novel as when he first appeared, and we only learn about what goes on in his heart from his actions and a few brief confessions and personal admissions.
Dickens's highly typified characters are the fruit of his thorough analysis of the fundamental motive processes in life. The years left their mark, and his early optimism gradually becomes clouded by gathering gloom, humour is replaced by tragic irony, and pure fun by angry satire, 116 as he gradually becomes more and more aware of the negative aspects of capitalist progress and bourgeois democracy, which had attained maturity in England. The good-natured, superficial pattern of human relations reducing social contradictions to the struggle between the forces of good and evil, between good, kind people and cruel, hardened rogues, which characterised his early works and was somehow reconciled with a mercilessly truthful portrayal of the hard lot of the working masses, gradually collapsed under the impact of the writer's growing understanding of the nature of bourgeois social relations. Aware, like all critical realists, that society is a battle-ground of conflicting human interests, Dickens was not content to let the matter rest at that. In his later works, he no longer treats interest merely as a moral and ethical factor, but infused the concept of social struggle with real class content, discerning the clash of interests between the haves and the have-nots in life, between the ruling classes and the people, between the capitalists and the proletariat. From portrayal of individual shortcomings and criticism of certain aspects of bourgeois life, whether it was the position in workhouses and orphanages (as in Oliver Twist) or the state of education (as in Nicholas Nickleby), he passed to a critical presentation of capitalist social relations in their entirety, bourgeois marriage and family life (Dombey and Son), justice and the law (Bleak House), the machinery of government and the apparatus of coercion (Little Dorrit with its famous description of ``the Circumlocution Office" and Marshalsea jail), and the factory system and the position of the working class (Hard Times). Dickens criticised bourgeois society from a democratic standpoint, endowing his favourite characters, characters from the people, with fine moral qualities, spiritual beauty and kindness, and making his representatives of the ruling classes ruthless, callous and aggressively self-seeking. Dickens presented the poverty and wretchedness in which the people at the bottom of the social ladder lived, deprived of even the most elementary human rights as the result of exploitation by the wealthy classes. He saw the most important and dangerous consequence of capitalist progress to be the dehumanisation 117 of man due to bourgeois egoism and self-interest. ``Oh! Ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of Christian knowledge, who soundingly appeal to human nature, see first that it be human,'' he exclaimed in Martin Chuzzlewit, referring to the various apologists of the existing order, from utilitarians and Malthusians to religious moralists and parliamentarians, in whose view the bourgeois system of social relations was perfectly in accord with the demands of human nature. ``Take heed it has not been transformed, during your slumber and the sleep of generations into the nature of the Beasts."^^1^^ The bourgeois outlook and morality with their bigotry and hypocrisy act like a corrosive acid on the human soul, making it cruel, callous and indifferent to the fate of others. This was the case with Mr. Dombey prior to his ``conversion''---one of the most monumental figures of a capitalist to be found anywhere in world literature. It is true too of any number of Dickens's negative characters---Uriah Heep and Carter, Ralph Nickleby and Murdstone, Merdle and Jonas Chuzzlewit. But capitalism does not only distort and disfigure human nature: by enslaving the masses and condemning millions of working people to poverty and misery, and building the wealth and well-being of the possessor classes on their blood and sweat, it thereby produces in the social order of its own creation an insoluble contradiction between oppressors and oppressed, a conflict fraught with the direct consequences for itself. His analysis of life under capitalism and its very real contradictions led Dickens, as it did other realist writers, to the discovery in the very womb of history and life of a new contradiction of decisive importance for the fate of the capitalist system---the contradiction between labour and capital.
The blatant contradictions in capitalist progress came to light in the middle of the nineteenth century: everywhere the bourgeoisie had shackled the proletariat to the factory system, to a life of backbreaking toil and appalling hardships---whether the Welsh miners or the weavers of Silesia and France, the German artisans or the workers in _-_-_
~^^1^^ Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures oi Martin Chuzzlewit, London, 1951, p. 224.
118 the iron and steel foundries of Sheffield. The cold, calculating brutality of exploitation exacerbated the class struggle and led to the development of a revolutionary situation, which came to a head in 1848, the Year of Revolutions, bringing new social forces into historical activity---the popular masses led by the proletariat. The conditions were created for the formation not only of the revolutionary consciousness oi the working class, but also working-class philosophical and political selfawareness.Bourgeois ideologists continued to consider capitalist production, with all its consequences---the class struggle, social inequality, the division of society into rich and poor, and exploiters and exploited---the perfectly normal, just, and indeed the only possible, system of production. But scientific socialism was already proving the possibility of another method of organisation of production in place of the capitalist, one which would create a new form of social relations based on the principle of collectivism. Grafted to the workers' movement, scientific socialism brought to it understanding of an aim and transformed socialism from a beautiful dream into a science that unravelled the secrets of historical development and the laws that guide it, thereby placing in the hands of the workers of the world a theoretical weapon that would enable them to effect a transformation of social relations. The ideas of scientific communism did not immediately achieve recognition in the working class movement, however. On the eve of the 1848 revolutions and in the years that followed, the movement was still influenced by manifold social theories and had still to cast off a host of bourgeoisdemocratic and revolutionary-democratic illusions. But it was in these years that the spectre of communism began to haunt the world historical arena, gradually assuming flesh and blood in heroic class battles, and becoming a reality in the feat of the Russian proletariat, the first to embark on the building of communist society.
Various views were current in the working class movement in the years before the Revolution, from the ideas of levelling communism stemming from the Babouvists, and taken up by the French egalitarians and the German 119 supporters of what was known as ``spoon communism" ( Loffelkommunismus), to the ideas of Christian socialism and the theories of Utopian socialism developed by Hazard and Enfanim, Theodore Dezamy and Cabet, and the pettybourgeois theorists Louis Blanc and Proudhon. the father of anarchism. The working class had still not discarded faith in the possibility of bourgeois democracy and its capacity for development. It still believed that once the ruling classes fully realised the appalling plight of the people, they would come to their aid and help ease their burden. This kind of illusions were shared by the English Chartist movement, which Lenin described as the first broad, truly mass proletarian revolutionary movement of a political nature. In the verse of the movement's poet spokesmen---Ebenezer Elliott, whose poetry is largely connected with the struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws, Thomas Cooper, Gerald Massey and Ernest Jones---- revolutionary motives are interwoven with philanthropic ones, and opposition to tyranny is found side by side with nonresistance and universal forgiveness. Such illusions were also characteristic of the Weitlingers, the German levellers, and Herwegh and Freiligrath, poets connected with the workers' movement. They were reflected, too, in the poetry of Heine, who represents the summit of that second romantic movement called to life by the revolutionary situation. Heine, who was quite happy to be called ``the defrocked romanticist" for his fierce attacks on reactionary romanticism and for his ``unromantic'' criticism of the bourgeoisie, said of himself: ``Despite my murderous campaigns against romanticism, I have always remained a romanticist, and was much more of one than I ever suspected."^^1^^ Yet he demonstrated remarkable historical perspicacity when he said of the Communists ``that they are the strongest party in the world, that their day has not yet come it is true, but patient waiting is no waste of time for the people to whom the future belongs".^^2^^
The contradiction between capital and labour was becoming the central issue of history, and could no longer _-_-_
~^^1^^ Henry Heine, De 1'Allemagne, T. 2, Paris, 1855, p. 243.
~^^2^^ Henry Heine, CEuvies Completes, Lut&ce, Paris, 1859, pp. XI-XII.
120 be avoided or ignored either by social thought or literature. It was natural that the issue should have first been examined by the English realist novel, since England was at the time the most industrially advanced of the European powers, and the contradictions of capitalism were consequently more sharply in evidence there.Not only the critical realists---like Charlotte Bronte, whose Shirley presents a fine picture of the spiritual world of the working man, retaining a sense of human dignity intact in spite of appalling hardship, or Elizabeth Gaskell, whose Mary Barton gave a shockingly truthful picture of the life of the Lancashire textile workers that represented a strong indictment of the capitalist system--- but the bourgeois realists, too, were forced to investigate the position of the working class in order to understand the consequences its struggle for its rights might have for the future of the bourgeois system. In his novel Sybil, Disraeli displayed a sobriety and breadth of vision no longer to be found among bourgeois ideologists today in his portrayal of the terrible position of the English proletariat. He introduced characters who were members of the Chartist movement, and was able to admit the division of society into two nations, the rich and the poor, which he said were as far apart as if they lived on two different planets. However, Disraeli suggested that the class conflict should be solved by partial reforms, improvement of the lot of the poor and by making certain concessions to the proletariat. In this he was counting on the philanthropic feelings of the ruling classes and the obedience of the workers. Harriet Martineau developed a similar view in her cycle of works entitled Illustrations oi Political Economy. In the story Weal and Woe in Garveloch, she made an open attempt to convince the workers of the ideas of Malthus, arguing that large families were the cause of poverty. She called on the workers to abandon organised political struggle (in A Manchester Strike) and advised the bourgeoisie to reduce the burden of taxation (For Each and for All) and increase private charity (Cousin Marshall). Written in a lively, interesting manner, with a good knowledge of the working class milieu and everyday life of the working people, and a 121 certain amount of sentimentality---but avoiding the exaggeration characteristic of the works of Eugene Sue or the novels of the ``true communists"---Harriet Martineau's works enjoyed long popularity with the reading public.
The critical realists, who had discovered the meaning of the contradiction between capital and labour, were not clear as to how the conflict should be tackled and overcome. Elizabeth Gaskell and Kingsley, author of Yeast and Alton Lock, thought that the answer lay in Christian socialism. Charlotte Bronte and Dickens sought a counterbalance to the bourgeois system in man's moral qualities, humaneness and goodness. In Hard Times Dickens opposed the levelling power of the capitalist system--- using the generalised image of the factory town of Cocktown to symbolise soulless capitalist civilisation and branding the sterile inhumanity of utilitarian theories in Gradgrind and Bounderby---with the humanity of Blackpool and the boundless kindness of Sissy, and also with the purity of his own moral standpoint, with a humanitarian indictment of capitalism.
The writers of the classical age of critical realism did not look deeply enough into the contradiction between capital and labour to discover the right way to solve it, the way, that is, which would lead to the ultimate victory of the proletariat, with which they sincerely sympathised. This was due partly to the hazy democratic nature of their own views which prevented them from recognising this prospect, and partly to the fact that the working-class movement was still ridden with numerous Utopian, revolutionary-democratic and petty-bourgeois illusions. It took Marx and Engels with their genius to generalise its experience and, fusing it with scientific socialism, to create the revolutionary theory that paved the way to the victory of the proletariat.
However, critical realism in the classical period of its development assimilated the essence of the new capitalist order that had sprung up on the ruins of the feudal world. It penetrated and presented the conflicts of bourgeois society with merciless clarity and incomparable artistry. The realists turned their attention to every sphere of private and social life and, perfecting the realist method, 122 left a truly encyclopaedic record of a whole historical epoch, its life and morals, and its ideas and types of people, generalising the lasting features of the capitalist system and of the bourgeois mentality. Their works are permeated with the idea of development---the concept of life and society as changing, moving, developing objects of literary portrayal. Thus their views and their works show an inherent spontaneous historicism, a quality that is lacking in present-day bourgeois thought. They presented the clash of opposing interests which divided and alienated people, to reveal the class struggle, the struggle of material interests. In the age of ``free'' competition, they mainly examined the consequences of capitalist progress which led to division and alienation and could devote far less attention to the unifying processes within the system.
The desire to interpret reality synthetically characteristic of progressive social thought in the first half of the nineteenth century was likewise a feature of critical realism of the classical period. But critical realism, failing to fully reveal the main contradiction of capitalist society, the contradiction between labour and capital, with all its historical consequences, did not succeed in achieving this synthesis. It was Marx's Capital and the theories of scientific communism which effected a synthetic interpretation of history, its general laws and tendencies and the real prospects of its development, and proved that the sources of class division and hence of the class struggle are to be found in the economic structure of society. It was the method of socialist realism, which inherited and carried further the achievements and aesthetic discoveries of critical realism, that was able to make a synthetic portrayal of reality.
Critical realism also foreshadowed socialist realism in the method of artistic investigation of reality and in the social views it expressed. An appraisal made by Marx and Engels of the legacy of French materialism is equally applicable to the classical critical realist tradition, and its importance for the formation of the socialist realist method. They wrote: ``There is no need of any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the 123 original goodness and equal intellectual indowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, the empirical world must be arranged so that in it man experiences and gets used to what is really human and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all moral, man's private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. ... If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human."^^1^^
Similar views may be found in the works of almost all the classics of critical realism. Children of their age, unable to avoid the mistakes and prejudices engendered by the historical conditions which formed their consciousness, and with no clear political concept of how society might be transformed, they expressed the protest of the masses against the inhumanity of capitalism. The moral essence of their works was opposed to the apologist trends in bourgeois ideology, so that despite the limitations and occasional erroneousness of their political ideals, their art was essentially democratic, since it objectively coincided with the interests of the masses opposing capitalism's encroachments on human rights. A necessary stage in the development of literature, their works paved the way for a new aesthetic method---socialist realism.
Although the bourgeoisie managed to quell the 1848 revolutions, it had become clear to the bourgeois ideologists that the question of the workers was now the central historical issue on which the future of capitalism depended. The bourgeoisie sensed that despite scientific and technological progress, despite the stabilisation of capital ism, the flourishing of trade and the strengthening of the political positions of the possessor classes, a force was maturing within capitalist society which represented _-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx, F. Engels. The Holy Family, Moscow, 1956, pp. 175--76.
124 a very real danger to the whole system of social relations based on exploitation. They could not help noticing that the decline of bourgeois culture had already set in. __ALPHA_LVL2__ [Nietzsche, et al.]Nietzsche, with his usual frankness, pointed to the workers' question as the main cause of the earthquake which had shaken the apparently firm edifice of bourgeois civilisation. In Gotzen-Dammerung he wrote: ``The worker has been made fit to struggle, he has been given the right to form associations and the political right to vote, so that it is hardly surprising that the worker has begun to regard his existence as wretched. But what do they expect?... If you are striving to achieve a certain aim you must choose the appropriate means. It is only a fool who wishes to have slaves yet educates them as masters."^^1^^
Nietzsche was one of the first ideologists and apologists of capitalism to note the first symptoms of the decline of bourgeois democracy. He threw all the weight of his arguments into strengthening the positions of the ruling classes, attempting to arouse in the bourgeoisie a will to power, and to find the ``appropriate means" to the end of turning the masses into obedient slaves. He was not, however, the only one to sense the approaching crisis. For while the shares remained high on the Stock Exchange and bourgeois politicians and economists were forecasting the permanent florescence of capitalism, while feverish economic activity was bringing its fruits in the form of the growth of industry and finance capital was creating powerful financial empires, stretching out their tentacles to overseas countries and subduing new lands and peoples in Africa and Asia, while this economic expansion created the impression of the inexhaustible power of the capitalist world, at the same time complicated processes and changes were taking place deep down in its social consciousness, which testified to the malaise of the whole capitalist system. Full-blown capitalism not only brought about general disintegration and the _-_-_
~^^1^^ F. Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Biinden, Zweiter Band, Miinchen, 1962, S. 1017,
125 concentration of the individual on himself but also gave A strong boost to the process of estrangement of the social force from man, a process that became a permanent feature of capitalism, especially in its monopolistic, imperialist stage.In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels defined the essence of the process of estrangement as follows: ``The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these."^^1^^
This process of estrangement strongly influenced all aspects of consciousness, introducing numerous fetishist, illusory concepts of reality and man's relationships with it. It was aggravated by the growing complexity of social life, by the increasing division of labour isolating whole layers of people from one another, by the development of technology and industry, and the deepening of class national and cultural divisions. It became more and more difficult for the estranged human consciousness to take an integrated view of the phenomena of life, and instead they were perceived as separate parts. Lenin wrote: ``Every individual producer in the world economic system realises that he is introducing this or that change into the technique of production; every owner realises that he exchanges certain products for others; but these producers and these owners do not realise that in doing so they are thereby changing social being-----Social being is independent of the social consciousness of people. The fact that you live and conduct your business, beget children, produce products and exchange them, gives rise to an objectively necessary chain of events, a chain of _-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow, 1964, p. 46.
126 development, which is independent of your social consciousness, and is never grasped by the latter completely."^^1^^However, estrangement of man's productive and social, force was an historical phenomenon connected with the specific conditions of capitalist production. Examining the ways and means of overcoming estrangement in his article ``On the Jewish Question'', Marx wrote: ``Only when the real individual man has retracted into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, he has become a species being,- only when he has recognised and organised his own powers as social powers so that he no longer separates social power from himself as political power, only then will human emancipation be brought about."^^2^^ In other words, man's estrangement from his social force will be finally overcome only in the conditions of communist society, when all the barriers between the consciousness of the individual and that of society will be removed, and the harmful consequences of estrangement will be overcome in the course of the political struggle against capitalism. Thus revolutionary consciousness, armed with the advanced theory of scientific communism, is free from those illusions which the process of estrangement introduces into consciousness as such. The progressive, revolutionary consciousness perceives reality as it actually is.
As for the consciousness of the masses, it perceives and apprehends the mechanism of social relations, the trends of social development and the nature of the views and convictions of the different classes not only in a period when class battles and conflicts are intensified, but also when this knowledge is introduced to it from without, by a revolutionary party wielding the theory of scientific communism.
Thus the process of alienation only develops fully in the bourgeois consciousness, which distorts reality _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 325.
^^2^^ K. Marx, F. Engels, Werke, Bd. 1, S. 370.
127 producing false concepts of society, nature and man, and the relationships between them in various ideological spheres^^1^^. The concept of history and the forces that determine its course also change. The idea of development and the idea of progress that are a feature of bourgeois ideology in its early stage, give way in the period of mature capitalism to the idea of the permanency of social relations based on social inequality.Bourgeois ideologists have come to accept as a selfevident and undisputable fact the idea that the final victory of capitalism has removed the need for the transformation and reorganisation of society. As the great Hungarian revolutionary poet Petofi wrote, inveighing against the apologists of capitalism:
Indeed, the French historians who first noted the class struggle, argued that it is discontinued with the victory of the bourgeoisie, while the positivist philosophers and sociologists treated society and consciousness as something permanent and immutable subordinate, according to Comte, to ``changeless natural laws''. The supporters of social Darwinism reduced the class struggle to a struggle for survival, thereby denying the possibility of any change in the social order, for the struggle they were referring to could, by its very nature, only continue within the existing system in the form of a battle for the highest possible level of material welfare. Those bourgeois ideologists who, like Renan, did recognise social change _-_-_False prophets claim that we have reached
The longed-for shore of our endeavours.
The promised land, they say, is here,
The long, long road behind us.
~^^1^^ Contemporary __NOTE__ Error in original, missing superscript "1" at start of footnote. bourgeois philosophers, such as the French Jesuits Fathers Bigo and Calves, who deal with the revolutionary substance oi the concept of alienation in their books Maixisme et humanisms and La pensGe de Karl Marx, respectively, firstly try to eviscerate this concept of its revolutionary content, and secondly, in an attempt to show Marxism to be an ethical philosophy, reduce its content to the theory of alienation. These and similar views have been submitted to wellsubstantiated, shattering criticism in contemporary Marxist literature. Here we are only concerned with the problem of alienation in as far as it concp'cns the evolution of realism.
128 supposed that it could only take place organically, that is, without destroying the existing social structure. The protective character of bourgeois consciousness and the decline of bourgeois democracy in the mature period of capitalist development was brilliantly revealed by Dostoyevsky in his essay ``On the Bourgeois'', a chapter of his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. He wrote: ``Why has he (the bourgeois---B.S.) forgotten the high style in the chamber of deputies he was formerly so fond of? Why does he not wish to remember anything and waves his arms at you when he is reminded of something that was in the old days? Why this immediate anxiety in his mind, in his eyes, and on his tongue, when others dare to wish for something in his presence? Why, when he makes the foolish slip of suddenly wishing for something himself, does he immediately wince and begin to deprecate: 'Good lord, what am I doing?' and for a long time afterwards conscientiously tried to make up for his misbehaviour with diligence and obedience?"^^1^^ This happens, Dostoyevsky continues, because he is afraid that ``people may think that the ideal has not been reached... that perhaps one might wish for something more, and that thus the bourgeois is himself not completely satisfied with the order he stands for and forces on everybody else; that there are loopholes in society that need repairing".^^2^^ Who is the bourgeois afraid of? Dostoyevsky answers this question too. The bourgeois is afraid of the communists and socialists. ``Yes, these people he is still afraid of."^^3^^ He is afraid because social welfare has not resulted from the ideals he declared in carrying out his revolution. ``The immortal principles of 1789"---liberty, equality and fraternity---to which Flaubert's Hornet had sworn like countless liberals with similar views in parliamentary speeches and from university Chairs, in philosophical treatises and in the daily press, had revealed their bankruptcy. ``Freedom, what freedom?" Dostoyevsky wrote. ``The same freedom for all to do anything at all within the bounds of the law. When can you do just as you please? When you have a _-_-_~^^1^^ F. Dostoyevsky, Collected Works, Moscow, 1956, Vol. 4, p. 100.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 101.
~^^3^^ Ibid., p. 105.
__PRINTERS_P_129_COMMENT__ 9---0891 129 million. Does freedom give everyone a million? No. What is a man without a million? A man without a million is not one who does anything at all, but one with whom anything at all is done."^^1^^ As for equality before the law, in the form in which it exists, the bourgeois ``can and should take it as a personal insult''. What about fraternity? In the Western, that is, bourgeois nature it ``... has not appeared. What has appeared instead is the individual principle, the principle of the private man, increased self-- preservation, self-advancement, self-entrenchment in the Ego, and the opposition of this Ego to the whole of nature and all other people as a law unto itself, perfectly equal and equivalent to all that there is besides himself".^^2^^ In other words, capitalist civilisation resulted in the alienation of man, whose nature the bourgeois ideologists try to present as immutable. They assert that both society and man are static and constant, denying that society, and thus the consciousness of its members, could be reorganised on different lines. Herbert Spencer, who had a pathological hatred for socialism, basing his ideas on evolutionist theories, tried to make an absolute of class inequality considering it an immutable law of life. Although he sought the causes of the defects in the capitalist social order in capitalism itself, he attributed them to ``human imperfection'', as if this were something inherent and not conditioned. He rejected the idea of communist transformation of society on the grounds that: ``The machinery of Communism, like existing social machinery, has to be framed out of existing human nature; and the defects of existing human nature will generate in the one and the same evils as in the other. . . . The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts."^^3^^ Socialist humanism and the theory of scientific communism reject and refute such _-_-_~^^1^^ F. Dostoyevsky, Collected Works, Vol. 4, p. 105.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 106.
~^^3^^ Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State, London, 1914, pp. 38, 39.
130 misanthropical views of human nature. Lenin wrote: ``We can only build communism out of the material created by capitalism, out of that refined apparatus which has been moulded under bourgeois conditions and which---as far as concerns the human material in the apparatus---is therefore inevitably imbued with the bourgeois mentality. That is what makes the building of communist society difficult, but it is also a guarantee that it can and will be built."^^1^^ The guarantee of success in building socialism and communism lies in the fact that socialism enables the individual and the masses ``display their abilities, develop the capacities, and reveal those talents, so abundant among the people whom capitalism crushed, suppressed and strangled in thousands and millions".^^2^^The practical experience of socialist and communist construction in the Soviet Union and People's Democracies, and the spread of the ideas of communism all round the globe, confirm the sterility and mendacity of the opinions of Spencer, and of the contemporary bourgeois philosophers and sociologists, writers and propagandists who vainly try to prove the ``immutability'' of human nature, and hence deny the possibility of creating rational social relations.
The protective nature of bourgeois ideology was most fully and clearly in evidence in Nietzsche, whose views not only anticipated the views of contemporary bourgeois ideologists but paved the way for them. Nietzsche's philosophy reflected the essential features of the new phase in the development of bourgeois consciousness produced by the transition of capitalist society to the imperialist stage, with the increased alienation it entailed. The main features of the bourgeois outlook of the new phase, which cause us to define it as a decadent outlook, were formulated and defined in Nietzsche's philosophy. Decadence became the essential distinctive feature of the bourgeois consciousness during this period.
Like all bourgeois ideologists, Nietzsche took as his point of departure the immutability of capitalist society, _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 388.
~^^2^^ Ibid., Vol. 26, p. 404.
__PRINTERS_P_131_COMMENT__ 9* 131 but he defended the immutability of existing relations so fiercely as to banish from history the very concept of development. He began his Kampl against the progress of socialism and humanism, freedom and revolution with scathing criticism of the concept of ``historical man".First and foremost, he detached man from all social ties and considered him as a sort of abstraction in his philosophising, as extraneous to all social and historical conditions. He also detached man from historical tradition, since, like historical thought, it was a legacy of the age of revolutions and thus hostile to the ideas and concepts that Nietzsche was infusing in the bourgeois mind, calling for a revaluation of values, and above all of those values which were in some way connected with the revolutionary and democratic movements past and present. With his view of man as a self-contained entity, independent of his environment and historical conditions, whose behaviour was determined by his will to power, Nietzsche nevertheless produced a fairly authentic picture of bourgeois civilisation and culture. While simplifying and vulgarising the social struggle past and present, he considered slavery to be the foundation of civilisation, the soil in which the culture of the chosen few grows and flourishes. According to his theory this elite of `` supermen" is called upon to rule over the masses, or, to use his own term, ``the herd".
Abstracted from history, Nietzsche's man is also extracted from the flow of time. His consciousness, essence and thought, his whole psychology are extratemporal. This attribution of an extratemporal nature to human thoughts and deeds, and to the whole human Ego, is a typical feature of decadence as a form of consciousness. No less characteristic of him is denial of rational cognition. Detached from the external objective world, estranged from reality, man is unable to fill the gap, the great yawning chasm between his subjective Ego and the outside world with the aid of reason, which only dissects and organises the chaotic stream of life, flowing its eternal course alongside man and washing against his soul. Only intuition can fill this gap. By suggesting a Dionysian approach to perception and apprehension of the world, 132 Nietzsche was opening the door wide to irrationalism, placing reason at the mercy of dark, cruel, ``nighttime'' instincts, and the ferment of wild passions. Bergson, who allotted the intellect the subordinate role of analyst and guide in the lower sphere of the material world, also considered intuition the supreme form of perception and cognition, since it embraces lasting motion in its entirety, and hence enables man to grasp not merely separate parts but the whole sum of phenomena of which the world is compounded. Intuitivism, an inherent feature of decadence, is an essential element of bourgeois consciousness and art and literature in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and likewise of all forms of decadent art in the twentieth century, beginning with symbolism and continuing in surrealism and abstract art. Just as decadence as a form of consciousness places the emphasis on the instincts and the sphere of the feelings, so the aesthetics of decadent and kindred trends in art---symbolism, for example---constantly strive to transmit vague, indistinct sentiments and sensations that are subjective and particular rather than to portray and analyse objective human thoughts and feelings with a universal significance. This hyperrefmed transmission of the feelings of an alienated man is a feature of the poetry of Mallarme, Wilde, Hofmannsthal, Sologub and George, an element uniting them all under one roof, so to speak, despite their very different personalities and artistic gifts, for it derives from the same Weltanschauung, produced by decadence as a special form of consciousness.
Viewing human nature as extratemporal, Nietzsche rejected the very concept of historical progress, replacing it with the theory of eternal recurrence. He countered the idea of development with the idea of ``life, as it is, senseless, purposeless, but inevitably recurring, without a conclusive 'naught'---'eternal recurrence'. This is the most scientific of all possible hypotheses. We deny final aims: if existence had such an aim, it ought to have been achieved by now".^^1^^ Thus, with the theory of ``eternal recurrence" or ``changeable constancy'', where things and _-_-_
~^^1^^ F. Nietzsche, Bin Buch fur Alls und Kunei, Leipzig, 1900, S. 321.
133 phenomena change but their essence remains the same, Nietzsche proclaimed the permanence and immutability of the capitalist social relations, for the defence and protection of which the theory was indeed devised.In Also Sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: ``All things eternally recur, and we with them. . . . We have already existed countless times and all things with us.'' But by denying development, Nietzsche was also denying the existence of historical time. Earlier, in his Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1875--1876), he had written: ``We experience phenomena so strange for us that they would be inexplicable, as if hanging in the air, as if going back into the depths of time, we were not able to connect them by analogy with Greek phenomena. Thus between Kant and the Eleatic philosophers, between Schopenhauer and Empedocles, between Aeschylus and Richard Wagner, there is such a close tie of kinship that the relative nature of all concepts of time is practically invisible: it begins to appear that many things are connected with one another, and time is but a veil screening this mutual connection from our view. . . . The pendulum of history has returned to the point from which it began its oscillation--- it has returned to the mysterious distance and the depth of time. The picture of our modern world is by no means new. It must seem more and more to the historian that he is recognising old familiar features."^^1^^ Along with the theory of eternal recurrence and the relativity of historical time, another of the main features of decadence was anti-historicism. Basically, all forms of modern bourgeois consciousness are affected by anti-historicism. Despite the fact that bourgeois consciousness has taken shape in conditions of crumbling social relations, in the period of the final collapse of bourgeois democratism, of the decline of the old colonial empires and the meteoric rise of the masses to activity, not to mention the scientific and technological revolution, it has practically lost all idea of the reality of history as a process. ``Our critical cast,'' wrote Karl Joel on the eve of the First World War, ``leads us to scepticism. This scepticism threatens to deprive us of the _-_-_
~^^1^^ F. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemiisse Betmchtungen, Leipzig, 1873, S. 22.
134 last and finest thing we inherited from the nineteenth century: our understanding of history. Nietzsche struck the first blow, with a book in which he intended to speak of the use and harm of history, but in which he in fact only spoke of its harm. Soon now the epitaph will be written: The death of a Science'.'' The neo-Kantians Rickert and Simmel subjectivised the concept of the historical process; Benedetto Croce simply denied that history was in any way a law-governed process, even to the extent of doubting the very existence of historical time; the determinist Spengler examined history as a sequence of separate, isolated cultures, each like a kind of organism whose life span was preordained, the features of their development being definable by analogy. Spengler, like Nietzsche, pointed to similarities between phenomena of different historical nature, thus rejecting in fact historical time: ``Pergamum is the double of Bayreuth,'' he wrote. ``Similarly, the illusionist painting of the Asian and Sicyon schools is purely a colourful episode corresponding fully to the Barbizon episode and Manet's school,'' and so on and so forth. If one adopted this approach one could continue such comparisons ad infinitum. Arnold Toynbee's philosophy of history is also related to this kind of thinking. If Spengler distinguished eight cultures as compounding the whole of history, Toynbee, the most influential of modern historians of philosophy, distinguishes no less than twenty-one. In his multi-volume work A Study of History he examines history not as an integrated developing process, but as a combination of various independent civilisations. Like Nietzsche and Spengler, he puts quite different historical events into the same category. Thus, he draws an analogy between Sparta and the Prussian state. Toynbee rejects the idea of the development of history in time, producing his own variant of the theory of eternal recurrence. Anti-historicism is not only to be found in the views of bourgeois historians and philosophers, but also in art and literature where the decadent outlook is present.In Ulysses James Joyce compounded various historical periods, concentrating them in his hero Stephen Dedalus. The authors of ``autobiographic novels'', like Andre 135 Maurois and Emil Ludwig, as well as many authors of historical novels, have modernised history, projecting modern social features into the past. The nature of this anti-- historical trend in the bourgeois consciousness was noted long ago by Lenin when he wrote: ``Nothing is more characteristic of the bourgeois than the application of the features of the modern system to all times and peoples."^^1^^ The sense of history, which social thought acquired at the cost of such tremendous effort in the years after the French Revolution, is gradually lost in the age of imperialism, indeed even suppressed by the bourgeois consciousness, which no longer wishes or is able to see history as a process, and is unable to grasp the meaning and content of the changes taking place in the world.
Nietzsche's philosophy with its frankly voluntaristic and aggressive character, which made ``free will" the prerogative of the Superman, in fact denied freedom to all, including those who belong to the chosen elite. Since there is no development, but only eternal marking time, ``eternal recurrence" or ``changing constancy'', there is no real need for freedom, freedom of action or manifestation of will, since everything that goes on within man or outside him turns in a vicious circle and is predetermined by the wheel of life. Thus a frank, overt fatalism and slavish submission to fate creep onto Nietzsche's philosophy as a logical outcome of its very essence. With his characteristic rhetorical grandeloquence he calls this fatalism amor fati, that is, ``love of fate''. Nietzsche not only affirmed the enslavement of man in the conditions of capitalist society, but asked us to love social slavery.
The sense of unfreedom is the fundamental characteristic of the decadent world view. Estranged social force is perceived by the bourgeois consciousness as an extraneous power, mysterious, blind and inscrutable, as something which, far from being dependent on human will, actually directs and governs it. The proposition that man is not free is common to numerous sociological and philosophical theories and systems of the late nineteenth century, and of the present day too for that matter. The _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 154,
136 neo-Kantian Simmel wrote in Jahrbuch der Gehe--- Stiltung zu Dresden: ``In practice and in vague perception the individual may be to a greater degree than he is aware reduced to a quantity negligeable, to become a speck of dust in the face of the tremendous organisation of objects and forces which gradually take from his hands all progress and all spiritual and material values.'' Such feelings also lie at the root of the deathly fatalism of Spengler, for whom the succession of civilisations, their birth and passing is subject to iron necessity. It is also the core of the existentialist philosophy, which views the external social forces as wielding dictatorial powers over the individual. It is an equally essential part of neo-- Thomism, for which history is independent of the people who make it, depending entirely on the will of God, who pursues some grand design of His, so that people's behaviour is predestined.Decadent art and literature faithfully reflected this proposition and man's lack of freedom was indeed to be its main content. Dorian Gray, an immoral character who was unable to distinguish between good and evil because he regarded beauty as superior to any moral values, belonged to the caste of the chosen, concerned only with the satisfaction of their own lusts and desires. His wealth and his disregard for the moral norms of the community appear to make a free man of him. In actual fact he is not free, either in his thoughts or actions. With the directness that is characteristic of decadent art, Oscar Wilde materialised his hero's state and sense of unfreedom, harnessing his fate to that of his portrait which absorbed all his base and sinful actions, and became his curse, reproach and secret master, one that Gray could not destroy without destroying himself.
Maurice Maeterlinck's characters, anaemic and fleshless, and reduced to vague, indefinite symbols, live and die as slaves of destiny. Foredoomed, and unable to escape their fate, not understanding what is happening to them, they either perish, like Tintagiles and Princess Maline, await their doom like the characters of the play The Blind, who symbolise mankind as a whole, or float away unresisting 137 on the river of life into the unknown, without aim or purpose, and without hope of freeing themselves from the inscrutable power which controls their lives. Chance and fate rule the lives of Hofmannsthal's heroes. They dispose equally of people's destinies, appearing as two aspects of necessity, whose icy breath falls on that gay slave of fortune the adventurist Baron Weidenstam (in the play Der Abentemer und die Sangerin) and the Madonna Dianora (Die Frau im Fenstei), who also becomes the victim of chance. Hofmannsthal reduces the wisdom and meaning of life to the following proposition: ``All is inevitable, and great happiness lies in knowing that all is inevitable. This is the good, the only good."^^1^^ It was quite natural that Hofmannsthal, in his Electra and Oedipus, should imitate ancient tragedy for which the theme of fate was an organic part of the action.
The life of Hamsun's heroes is spun of the unknown, illusions and solitude, the threads of their destiny woven and unwoven by some mighty invisible hand. Estranged from one another, seeing their own lives as an unsoluble enigma, they are slaves to their passions and love, which has the force of fate and embodies the power of fate. As if under the influence of some magic potion, they strain towards one another, but the destructive power of destiny prevents them from uniting. Hamsun replaces social antagonism which disunites people in real life with the antagonism of the sexes, biological difference, the love duel, generally ending in tragedy, for the heroes of his works are powerless to break the chains of passion' which fetter them and deprive them of freedom of action and will. They pass one another by, like separate atoms, either in the glare of the night lights of the city, where dramas of poverty and hunger are enacted, or in some god-forsaken villages, to which, like an echo of the urban civilisation which Hamsun so detests, destructive passions reach out their tentacles, bringing anxiety and mystery to the simple life of people who are close to nature and whose hearts harbour nature's savage, hidden nocturnal passions. Hamsun hated the city and its civilisation, _-_-_
~^^1^^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Tealer in Versen, Berlin, 1905, S. 23.
138 including its offspring the proletariat, and observed with anxiety the decline of the kulak village, whose ``pristine'' power he extolled in Growth of the Soil, and the collapse under the impact of bourgeois enterprise of the old way of life of the peasants and fisherfolk, which he loved for its immobility and described in his trilogy The Vagabonds. This outlook drove him into the camp of political reaction and eventually to collaboration with fascism.Man's sense of ``unfreedom'', as a fundamental feature of the decadent outlook, was organically linked with disbelief in the creative historical activity of the masses, and accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness in the face of social injustice.
We're beasts in captivity,
Each howling our rage,
Yet lacking the courage
To open the cage.^^1^^
Thus Sologub expressed his deep anguish and his renunciation of social struggle against the capitalist world. He even went as far as to reject the very possibility of helping the oppressed and humiliated who craved for true emancipation:
Somebody cries out ``Help!''
What can I do?
I myself am a poor, small man,
I myself am a tired man.
What can I do
To help?^^2^^
We find the attitude that man is not free, but eternally at the mercy of irrational inscrutable forces, permeating the whole world view of Leonid Andreyev in the period after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution when he abandoned realism to become one of the originators of expressionism with his plays Anathema, Man's Life and King Hunger. Comparing history to a pendulum, indifferently marking the succession of very similar events, and _-_-_
~^^1^^ F. Sologub, Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 4 (in Russ.).
~^^2^^ F. Sologub, Scorpio, A Collection of Poems, 1904, Vols. III-IV, p. 5.
139 repeating with depressing monotony ``as it was, so it will be'', Andreyev considered vain any attempt by the masses to change its course. The permanence and recurrence of everything in life rendered pointless any urge for freedom and revolutionary struggle, with the aim of changing the world for the better. The feeling that man is not free, paralysing the will and the mind and reconciling them to things as they are, is found equally in the governor (in the short story of the same name), who knows that a terrorist's bullet is waiting for him, and in the revolutionaries in Tale of Seven Hanged, who accept their end as a blessing, as the solution to their doubts, hopes and anxiety. The hero of My Notes subordinates human nature, freedom of thought, and the very idea of freedom to ``the sacred formula of iron bars'', comparing life and the world to a vast prison in which man is serving a life sentence.Franz Kafka frankly portrays man as a ``quaking creature''. Caught in the clinging web of fear, the -will-less plaything of unknown forces, man is regarded by Kafka as incapable of throwing off the chains of his fate, and is doomed forever to carry in his soul the curse of fear of the unknown. Finally, in the plays and stories of Samuel Beckett, a disciple and heir of James Joyce, life--- and hence the affairs of men---are shown as senseless and absurd. His works are peopled not by real people, but by faceless abstractions. Isolated from the world of reality, having lost all idea of what life is about, crushed and paralysed by their fear of death, and unable to understand one another, they mutter disconnected, illogical thoughts, whose only sense is horror of the world, life and the cruel forces of history. Beckett's works represent one of the clearest examples of the crisis and malaise of the modern bourgeois consciousness affected by the process of alienation.
Declaring slavery to be the foundation of civilisation, Nietzsche saw his main task to be to educate masters who would be able to seize the various seething social impulses that cause social unrest with an iron hand and hold them firmly in check. Nietzsche's ``Superman'' was not to be bound by conventional ethics. Nietzsche gave free rein 140 to his instincts and passions, cultivated cruelty in him, praising violence, war and bloodshed. This glorification of war and brutality was an essential feature of the decadent Weltanschauung, reflecting the growing brutalisation of man in capitalist society, where no quarter is given in the general free-for-all.
Literature was bound to reflect the brutality of life in a society where war and violence, crime and iniquity and individual and mass suffering were the permanent concomitants of progress. Previously, however, literature had regarded all this as the dark side of progress, and had not glorified evil for the sake of evil. It was only decadence, with its confusion of moral values, that began to look upon violence as an inalienable part of the new ethics that developed in the pre-imperialist stage of capitalism, and flourished in the hey-day of imperialism. For all his serious concern for the state of affairs in the world and his tragic dissatisfaction with it, in his Les Fleurs du Mai, Beaudelaire aesthetisised evil in its manifold expressions. Decadent art threw the veil of beauty over evil, violence and suffering, thereby justifying the brutality of capitalist society. The morbidness of Oscar Wilde's Salome comes from the mixture of sentimentality and brutality, and self-torture and the desire to inflict pain on others characterise Hamsun's characters. Barres and Paul Adam created a veritable apotheosis to force and brutality, while the countless ``colonial'' novels full of racialist contempt for ``coloured'' peoples, cultivated brutality, thereby fulfilling the function of preparing soldiers for colonial wars and punitive expeditions against the peoples of Asia and Africa struggling for their freedom and independence. The glorification of violence and brutality is typical of such bourgeois realists as Kipling, whose works contain all the features of imperialist ideology with its aggressive optimism.
Nietzsche, himself decadent to the marrow, was a sharp critic of decadence as a way of thinking that served to weaken the class rule of the bourgeoisie, as an expression of the essence of bourgeois democracy which he thoroughly detested, seeing its negative aspects with the perspicacity born of hatred. Nietzsche's criticism of the 141 bourgeois world was motivated by his desire to see the existing social structure strengthened, and the relative truth of his analysis of contemporary society was a demagogical cover for his apologia for capitalism. But there were many writers influenced by decadence who did not make any conscious apologia for capitalism. Rimbaud and Verlaine, Rilke and Apollinaire, expressed the real tragedy of life and man's inability to resist its power. This is why their works contain, alongside their natural, organic moods of despair and pessimism, anti-bourgeois motifs and moods of subjective, often anarchical revolt.
Too long I have wept!
How merciless the moon, how black the sun.
May my keel be smashed on some jagged reef
That I may sink and lie on the sandy bed.
Enough of the wave's slow ripple around,
Enough of the convoys, the sky for my roof,
Enough of the proudly fluttering trade flags
The twinkling lights on the convict pontoons.
Thus Arthur Rimbaud writes in his ``Le bateau ivre'', a poem whose tremendous bitterness and intense imagery expressed an individual's sensation of the collapse of the very supports of life, and a certain nostalgic anguish for the world he so hated and cursed. The crisis of the decadent Weltanschauung was a symptom of the general crisis developing in the bourgeois consciousness.
This crisis was bound to be reflected in the realist literature of the period, too, introducing features that had no place in the literature of classical critical realism. These changes were the result of fundamental changes in the historical development of bourgeois society. The period of revolution in Western Europe was coming to an end, and now Russia became the new centre of the world revolutionary movement. The new historical conditions brought about the decline of realism in Western Europe and its florescence in Russia. This process was to affect first and foremost the epic form, the very core of realism.
Gogol defined the novel as the epos of bourgeois society. He was obviously referring to the realist social 142 novel, and his observation is basically correct, for the epic form was very much a feature of critical realism. At the same time the novel of critical realism was not epic in the true sense of the word. The true epic---in folk literature---is based on the unity of the individual and society, which reflects the real nature of social relations in the early stages of historical development. The epic quality of the works of classical realism lay above all in the fact that the hero was the product of his social environment, and ultimately depended upon it. But the subjective element which invaded the epic narrative in modern times inevitably severed the individual's links with society. It was the conflict between the individual and his environment that underlay the action in works of critical realism, and this reflected the process of atomisation of bourgeois society, since the gradual advance of alienation also entailed a widening of the gap between the individual and his environment. The conditions for genuinely epic literature were only created in our own time by socialist realism, the main feature of which is analysis and portrayal of the process of reconciliation of the individual and society as a result of socialist transformation of private ownership social relations.
The growing conflict between the individual and society left its mark on all spheres of spiritual life in the latter part of the nineteenth century, injecting subjectivism into social consciousness and producing the tendency to look upon the thoughts and feelings of the individual, the isolated, alienated individual at that, as more ``real'' than external reality. Edmund Husserl, one of the forerunners of existentialism which has been one of the most influential philosophical movements in the twentieth century, remarked in his time that ``all recent and most recent philosophy so inclines to anthropologism that it has become quite exceptional to come across a thinker who is perfectly free from the errors of this theory".^^1^^ Indeed, metaphysical anthropologism was becoming a most _-_-_
~^^1^^ E. Husserl, Logische Unteisuchungen, Erste Thiel. Prolegomena zur Reinen Logik, Halle, 1900, S. 116.
143 characteristic feature of social consciousness in bourgeois society, although anthropologisation, anthropocentricity of consciousness reflects only one side of the process of historical development---the alienation characteristic of bourgeois society. However, in the age of imperialism, alongside this alienation, interdependence of men and class ties also make themselves felt more strongly.The objective contradictions in social consciousness were naturally reflected in literature and art. Thus, impressionism was undoubtedly an offshoot of realism. The rejection of the smooth manner of academic painting in favour of generalisation and concentration of details, the presentation of the form of objects and the human figure by means of colour rather than line, the freedom and depth of perspective and sharp colour contrasts---all the innovations that the impressionist technique introduced--- had as their aim maximum authenticity in the depiction of nature and the surrounding world. The impressionists dispensed with the superficially authentic traditional and artificial compositions of late romantic and classical art which had made a comfortable nest for itself under the protection of official academicism, and which was in fact hostile to realism and real nature with its conventional subjects, colours and compositions. The impressionists brought to art all the colour of life, simple unadorned reality, choosing as their subjects the everyday life and manners of the ordinary inhabitants of the big towns, their work and leisure. But their exclusive interest in personal experience made their art somewhat narrow, depriving it of social scope and impact, and confined it to the sphere of the subjective individual experience thereby undermining its realist foundations. In the paintings of the neo-impressionists and the divisionists we find the impressionist techniques, which originally enriched art and served to present real life, becoming an end in themselves, so that art's links with reality are dissolved.
One has only to compare the revolt of the impressionists against the established canons with that of the peredvizhniki in Russia, to see quite clearly the difference between the development of realism in Western Europe, 144 and in Russia heading for revolution. The peredvizhniki, on the one hand, tried to present the texture of life and real objects and were thus the champions of truth in art, and, on the other, they were realists in the true and most precise sense of the word since social analysis and typification were major features of their art and were never sacrificed for the sake of experimenting with colour and light. It is because their art was rooted in the popular soil that in their best works the peredvizhniki and other artists who adopted their traditions, such as Surikov, rose above mere genre painting and achieved an epic quality. The realist art of Western Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century did not so directly reflect the interests and views of the common people, and this was one of the reasons for the weakening of the epic element. Margaret Harkness, to whom Engels addressed a famous letter on realism, grasped very well the new features of realism and was to comment rather ironically on it, in her characterisation of the hero of her novel City Girl. He intended writing a novel in which he proposed to describe some strange episodes, interspersed with rather interesting psychological observations and which was to have no plot, for the plot had died out with Thackeray and George Eliot. Indeed it was true that ``psychological observations" and ``character study'', having become an essential feature of realism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, often replaced the portrayal of the characters' relationship to their environment. In Hebbel's plays, which were based on classical and Germanic mythology, the action centres round two distinct points, reality and the psychological. Although all the plot and the conflict leading up to the final denouement was intended to reflect real-life relationships, a new quality had arisen in the character of his heroes: they had soared above the earth, so to speak, become too refined for reality, and against their tortured spiritual life and their complex psychological drama, the conflicts of real life seemed to lose their importance. In his petty-bourgeois drama Mary Magdalene, his characters' behaviour depends on social causes, but these causes gradually become less and less concrete, and the characters come to regard them as a series of chance __PRINTERS_P_145_COMMENT__ 10---0891 145 misfortunes combining to form a hostile force. By introducing an element of fatality into the course of events, and thereby limiting the extent to which his heroes can exercise their will, Hebbel gradually destroyed the realistic foundation of his work. He reduced the social causes for the behaviour and actions of his characters to an initial impulse, which ceased to play any role whatsoever with the subsequent development of the plot, since from then on the dramatic conflict was produced not by a social conflict but by psychological conflicts in the characters themselves. His heroes were exceptional people, larger-than-life, with their strong, violent passions and desires. In Hebbel's view it is these inflated feelings and aspirations that make the world go round and determine the course of history. The fall of Candaules, the last of the Heraclids and King of Lydia, and the succession to the throne of Gyges (in the tragedy Gyges und sein Ring), marking a radical social change, hinged in Hebbel's play on the all-consuming passion of the two men for the Queen of the Rhodops. The fall of the Burgundian dynasty in Die Nibelungen hinged on the love conflict between Siegfried and Brunhild and Kriemhild's hatred for Brunhild. Hebbel's monumental trilogy concentrates on the royal love story, relegating the historical setting, the transition from pagan culture to Christianity, to the background.
Hebbel's strong characters---Herodes, Candaules and Etzel, are all children of the nineteenth century. They are all in the grip of destructive resignation, despite their tremendous capacity for action, and their spiritual worlds are highly unstable. They live in an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust, having lost the ability to open their hearts to one another, to understand one another, condemned to perpetual isolation and loneliness. They are completely ignorant of one another's needs and feelings. In Herodes and Mariamne, Herodes, who doubts his wife's love for him, sets off to Rome condemning her to death if he should lose his life, not wanting her to give her love to another man after him. He does not tell Mariamne of his sentence, and she is very hurt when she finds out, for she loved him and was quite prepared to sacrifice herself 146 for their love. Floundering in the dark, Hebbel's heroes perish tragically, this fatal ignorance and lack of trust between people being an expression of the chaos and disharmony in life. This is expressed with particular force in Die Nibelungen, where Hagen, Gunther, Etzel, Spielmann and the other characters are crushed by the titanic fury of Kriemhild's vengeance, through which all Siegfried's murderers come to a cruel, bloody end. But the fateful love of Brunhild and Siegfried is also doomed by her larger-than-life passion, and these proud natures are the victims of ignorance, for when Brunhild is baptised she loses the Valkirian gift of prophecy and is unable to foresee the tragic end of her love. Hebbel's later tragedies are tragedies of fate, and concentrating on passions and sufferings of individuals detached from their social environment, he largely abandons realism.
This gap between the inner world of man and external reality is an even more important feature of the works of Richard Wagner. The lyrical element which keeps breaking in with such insistence makes them lyric dramas instead of the powerful epics the composer intended. By expressing the intense pulse of life and its endless flow through human emotions and feelings, Wagner reduced the contradictions and social struggle of the objective world to contradictions and struggle within the human soul. ``I see not the masses but individual people,"^^1^^ he wrote to Malwida Meysenburg, and the tragic fate of individuals, their inner dramas, the hypnotic power of love are what he presents. The very rhythms of his music, their intensity, mobility and endless build-ups convey the battle of passions in the human heart, love torments and bewitching power driving Tristan and Isolde, the Flying Dutchman and Senta, and Siegfried and Brunhild not to happiness but to destruction. Wagner regarded the world as ``a disharmonious chord'', fn Ring Cycle, which tells of the destruction of Siegfried, ``the man of the future which we all cultivate and long for, whom we cannot _-_-_
~^^1^^ Richard Wagner an Frcundc und Zeitgenossen, Berlin und Leipzig, 1909, S. 306.
__PRINTERS_P_147_COMMENT__ 10* 147 create but who will arise from our destruction'',^^1^^ Wagner believed, and not without reason, that the tragic finale of his opus magnus reflected one of the major conflicts of the age. Both the Ring Cycle and Hebbel's tragedies have two nuclei, two centres around which the action revolves: one in the sphere of the human feelings, the other in the external world. In the Ring Cycle we have the theme of love opposed to the theme of gold and the whole conflict of the drama, vested in abstract, mythological form, reflects the real conflict between man's spiritual needs, his great potential, his aspirations towards harmony and happiness, and the ugly prose of life, the lack of harmony in the world, which holds man captive and prevents him from exercising his powers. These heroico-pessimistic features of the Ring Cycle are most clearly evident in Wotan, who, in Wagner's own words, '', . .is like us down to the last tiny detail''. If, as Wagner says, ``all the ideas of our time are combined in Wotan'',^^2^^ then the outlook is bleak indeed, for the fruit of Wotan's reflections on life is that reality and human values are pure illusion, and man's only desire is ``longing for the inevitable''. ``It teaches death": thus Wagner summed up the meaning of his colossal creation. Begun in the years of revolution, as an apotheosis of the radiant hero Siegfried, the Ring Cycle ends with the death of the gods, in a gloomy, pessimistic finale. ``The main misfortune is not that the daughters of the Rhine reject Alberich,'' Wagner wrote. ``...This was quite natural for them. Alberich and his ring could cause the gods no harm, if the gods were not themselves already on the path to destruction."^^3^^ What relates the idea of Wagner's great work to the decadent world view is the all-pervading sense of the downfall of the ideals of the bourgeois democratic age and its approaching end, and the inner admission that the circumstances of life are stronger than revolutionary courage. The superb realism Wagner achieved in his characters in Die Meistersinger is diluted in his later works _-_-_~^^1^^ Briete an August Rockel von Richard Wagner, Leipzig, 1903, S. 37.
~^^2^^ Ibid., S. 35.
~^^3^^ Ibid., S. 35.
148 by naturalist exaggeration, eroticism and ponderous symbolism. The political views and sentiments they express--- just as in Hebbel's later dramas---were conservative in the true sense of the word, that is, both men were concerned with conserving existing social relations however unharmonious they might be, for the simple reason that they found it impossible to believe in change. __ALPHA_LVL2__ [Flaubert, et al.]In narrative prose, too, the trend was towards the study of man's inner world, the latter becoming more and more an object of interest per se and no longer in relationship with environment. An early example of this is Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which is essentially an enlarged psychological study, and not a picture of morals and manners or an analysis of the anatomy of society such as we find in the novels of the classical period of critical realism. Viewing bourgeois life as a slough that sucks man down, swamping his energy and aspirations for happiness, Flaubert combines his description of the spiritual torments of an insignificant petty-bourgeois woman sinking lower and lower with a description of an equally banal and petty world, which serves as the trivial background to her trivial drama. He still adhered to the analysis of life that is such an important principle of critical realism, and also to the method of typification that realism had introduced. The main characters of the novel are full-blown portraits, not thumb-nail sketches, and the social picture he presents is consistent and uncompromising. The provincial doctor Charles Bovary and Hornet, the chemist, and the other inhabitants of the provincial town are portrayed in a manner akin to classical critical realism. But the spiritual drama of the heroine, the loss of her romantic illusions, her love torments, her sufferings, fears and remorse for what she has done, her rapid swings from sentimental ecstasy to petty-bourgeois calculation tend to outweigh, both emotionally and by virtue of the importance Flaubert assigns to them, the depiction of the social environment---static and stagnating in hypocrisy, prejudice and selfishness. However, in the thorough analysis of Emma's feelings and moods, the hidden desires that ravage her heart and her essential duality, we find new realist features that were not present in the realism of an earlier 149 period. By his flexible, many-sided analysis of his characters' psychology Flaubert made up for the deficiencies in the portrayal of social environment.
The mouthpiece for the social ideals of the milieu Flaubert depicts is the liberal chatterbox Hornet, with his solemn appeals to the ``sacred'' principles of the French Revolution, of whose ubiquitous degeneration the author was only too well aware. The participants in, and witnesses of, Emma Bovary's drama are isolated from one another and are quite incapable of understanding the feelings of even those who are closest to them. Emma is a closed book for her husband and her prosaic lovers alike, while she herself sees others not as they are, but as her imagination paints them. In fact, one of the main themes of the novel is loneliness in a crowd, solitude in a densely populated world where people are so indifferent to others and so estranged from one another that real communication, spiritual contact, is practically eliminated. This theme was new for realism, and must be ascribed to the development of the process of alienation.
Flaubert's family drama, although typified as a logical phenomenon in the tragic conditions of humdrum existence of bourgeois society, ran its course within the closed circuit of personal, private human relationships without overspilling into social life, or in any way affecting it, and had as its arena a stable, fixed system of social relations. Flaubert did not regard bourgeois society as a stage in human social development. For him it was an imperfect but essential condition of human existence, a world order corresponding to man's imperfect nature.
While the earlier realists had accepted the idea of development without question, Flaubert and many other writers of the latter half of the nineteenth century had serious doubts about the changeability of society and human nature. The ``progressive'' Hornet is a living refutation of the idea of progress. This acceptance of the stability of social relations and human feelings introduced fundamental changes into the nature of realism in the latter half of the century. Madame Bovary, like Maupassant's Une Vie, was heavily charged with social criticism. But doubt in the possibility of perfecting human nature or 150 society prevented these and other great realist writersof their time from seeing the trend of the historical process in its full dimensions and in true historical perspective. Impassive portrayal of life began to replace analysis of the contradictions that were the motive force of social development. Instead of a full picture of reality in its totality Flaubert gives us a sequence of independent scenes. This characteristic feature of his narrative manner was to find its fullest expression in his Tentation de Saint Antoine, where the action is compartmentalised into a number of more or less self-contained episodes loosely strung together. The structure of this later work of Flaubert's testifies to the collapse of the epic form, where the world is treated as a mobile entity. Thus, Tolstoi's prose can be compared to a motion picture conveying the flux of life in all its tiniest details and thus presenting the processes of change in the human soul, in man's relationship with the outer world, and in that world itself. Flaubert's prose, on the other hand, is more like a magic lantern showing separate views of life, which only recreate the whole when taken together. The image of the world in Flaubert's works is like a mosaic, made up of numerous separate coloured pieces. Behind this manner of depicting reality lies a concept of reality as fixed and unchanging. It is therefore only natural that Flaubert should unconsciously compartmentalise motion suspending it even in the most dynamic portions of a narrative, as he does indeed in Salammbo, an historical novel in which he took great pains to reconstruct in minute detail the features of a lost civilisation and analyse the fierce love of the barbarian Matho for the daughter of Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian general. The following passage should suffice to illustrate this.
``.. .Suddenly the Carthaginian army appeared on the bend from behind the hills. The baggage slaves armed with slings were on the flanks and the first row of the main army was composed of legionaries in gold chain-mail mounted on fat maneless horses without ears or hair and with silver horns on their foreheads to make them look like rhinos. Between each squadron marched youths in small helmets with a javelin of ash-wood in either hand, 151 and wedge formations of heavy infantry brought up the rear. All these merchants had armed themselves as heavily as they could: some carried two swords and a spear, axe and club besides; others bristled like porcupines with arrows and carried unwieldy ivory or metal shields. Last to appear were the massive machines; slings, onagers, catapults and scorpions trundling along on wheeled platforms drawn by mules or teams of four oxen. As the army advanced the commanders rushed backwards and forwards breathlessly, shouting out hoarse orders, keeping the ranks from spreading or closing up too much. The senior commanders wore purple cloaks with magnificent long trains that got caught up in the straps of their sandals. Their rouged faces shone smoothly beneath their enormous helmets decorated with godheads. . . .''~^^1^^
We find this same immobility in the works of the Parnassians, and especially J.-M. de Heredia, and in Thomas Hardy's novels about rural England, where the tragedies of shattered dreams of people sunk in poverty, at the mercy of the cruel whims of fate, are played out in a completely static, stagnant world. We find this same static quality---a basic feature of naturalism---in Zola's De la description which indicates but does not transmit the flux of life. Tolstoi, on the other hand, who was writing in conditions of a mounting tide of revolution which threatened to sweep away the very foundations of society, when the struggle between opposed social forces was coming into the open, showed life on the move, as in the following passage describing an army on the move in a draft copy for War and Peace. ``From all sides, from ahead and behind, as far as one could hear came the sound of wheels, creaking carts, and gun-carriages, the pounding of hooves, the crack of whips, goading cries, the swearing of soldiers, officers and batmen. All along the roadside at intervals were dead horses, some skinned, some not, broken carts with odd soldiers sitting by them waiting for something or other, or groups of soldiers who had got separated from their commanders, and were setting off for nearby _-_-_
~^^1^^ G. Flaubert, SalajnmbQ, Paris, p. 127.
152 villages or returning from villages carrying chickens, lambs, hay or bulging sacks. Wherever there was a slope up or down the crowds grew denser, and the din of shouting crescendoed. The soldiers, up to their knees in mud, pushed the guns and waggons. Whips cracked, hooves slithered, traces snapped and men shouted at the tops of their voices. The officers rode back and forth between the transport waggons giving orders to keep things moving.''~^^1^^ What a collection of sounds and sights! The whole passage is seething with life and movement, full of noise and bustle. Mind, ear and eye are all vitally alive to the raging torrent of life that pours through the pages of this great epic.The feeling that life was static, which is the determining factor in Flaubert's prose and is generally characteristic of West European realism in the last decades of the nineteenth century, testifies to a decreased sensitivity to the rhythm of history, the music of history, if you like, and the meaning of its deep-down processes. Take Flaubert's novel L'Education Sentimentale, in which he makes a subtle analysis of the exaggeratedly romantic love of his hero Frederic Moreau for the beautiful wife of the art dealer Arnou. This love is everything in the life of Frederic Moreau, which is essentially as colourless and anaemic as his passions. Flaubert makes fun of the romantic illusions of his spineless hero who floats like a splinter on the tide of events, and at the same time of the illusions of bourgeois liberalism, its social demagogy which Flaubert always so detested. He was equally scathing in his criticism of those true sons of the bourgeoisie, Monsieur Arnou with his love for copy-book truths and his knack for making money, and the banker Dambreuse, far more of a vulture, possessed of remarkable vitality and a great talent for dressing his sails to the wind. Thus, as long as the power of the propertied classes seems absolute and in no way threatened he is as hard as nails, but as soon as the mighty edifice of capitalism is rocked by popular _-_-_
~^^1^^ L. Tolstoi, Collected Works, Moscow, 1951, Vol. 4, pp. 203--04 (in Russ.).
153 insurrection, as soon as the barricades go up in Paris and the people storm the ``sacred'' principle of private property, he does a volte face and immediately poses as a ``friend of the people'', nearly a proletarian himself.Flaubert is quite well aware that the banker Dambreuse and the people are natural enemies and the struggle between them is inevitable, the aim for the bourgeoisie being the complete subjugation of the masses. The cultural and intellectual sterility of the ruling classes and the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality which hides immorality behind the cloak of respectability involve his scorn and derision. But social criticism is secondary in the novel to the portrayal of Frederic's limp passions, his arid, brainspun love for the beautiful madame Arnou. The characters' personal life is somehow detached from real life, and runs an independent parallel course to it. It is more interesting for Flaubert than the events of the 1848 Revolution which he viewed as an isolated episode that was over and done with when the revolutionary explosion fizzled out, and not as a warning of what lay in store for the bourgeois order. This complete absence of faith in revolution and the creative power of the people was fundamental to his whole outlook. He was equally sceptical about the Paris Commune and the activities of the International. He did not accept socialism as a theory and did not believe in the possibility of a socialist society ever being established. Side by side with the hatred he harboured for the bourgeoisie went a deep hostility towards the working masses. This was what made Flaubert's attitude to society so complicated, and in this he was like many other critical realists of his day. He wanted to occupy an intermediate position between conflicting social forces and counterposed to the social ideals of both the bourgeoisie and the revolutionary people artistic values, beauty and the cult of form. Flaubert initiated the illusion that art was independent of social life, that the artist or writer could stand aloof from class struggle, which has survived right down to the present day. This illusion is based on the contradiction of a democratic, hence anti-bourgeois awareness, which was not, however, revolutionary, which could be 154 critical of reality but had lost the sense of history involving change.
The anti-bourgeois note is strong in Flaubert's works, but his range of subject matter was far narrower than that of his predecessors. A sceptical attitude towards the progressive ideas of his age and lack of faith in socialism one day achieving happiness for mankind, led him and several other contemporary critical realists, such as Ibsen, into an ideological impasse, leaving them wide open to the influence of decadence. The cult of form, doubt in the power of reason and science and rejection of the idea of social progress and development which came to the fore in Flaubert's later works, and especially in Bouvard et Pecuchet, weakened the realist texture of his art and introduced features of aestheticism. This crisis makes itself felt far more strongly in Flaubert's works than in the works of Maupassant, who greatly enriched the realist tradition with important aesthetic innovations.
For Maupassant---the greatest realist in West European literature of the latter part of the nineteenth century--- life itself was the object of analysis and depiction. He still saw man and environment, character and the social conditions that moulded it, as inseparable and interdependent. Maupassant's prose engulfed all the processes of life and he typified them on the basis of analytical study of the social nature of behaviour, mentality, feelings, in short---people's whole individual cast. Peasants and soldiers, bureaucrats vegetating at their desks and enmeshed in red tape, young bourgeois bohemians, landladies, provincial gentlefolk and truculent prosperous farmers, grasping petty bourgeois counting every sou and making money the measure of all virtue, the proprietors of small restaurants, brothel keepers and whores, big businessmen and financial magnates, journalists and country priests, sailors and nuns, small traders and doctors; love, sordid and pure, the fierce clash of interests with no quarter given, the decay of family ties, the degeneration of feelings and of bourgeois society as a whole, patriotism of common people and venality of the bourgeoisie, the idiocy of country life, the endless struggle for wealth, monstrous cruelty in human relations, poisoning people's love and 155 respect for their neighbours---Maupassant's works conveyed the whole colourful, motley scene of life in bourgeois society with all its contradictions and conflicts. Like his realist predecessors, Maupassant saw that the struggle between material interests was the mainspring of human actions and was aware of the class nature of these interests. He sought and found the root causes of Jeanne's tragedy in Une Vie and George Duroy's success in the objective conditions of bourgeois society.
Maupassant could see that the bourgeois order was hostile to man, destroying his finest qualities and turning him into a ``two-legged animal'', driven by the basest of instincts. He was horrified by the brutalisation of man under capitalism, which was to be the main theme of his whole ceuvre. In the broad treatment he gave this theme, he drew on the objective features of life and generalised them as the destructive consequences of bourgeois progress. This latter, while being marked by a fast rate of development of science and technology and generally the material side of life entailed, as all advanced thinkers noted, and as Maupassant was clearly aware, a sharp contradiction between the material achievements of the capitalist system and its baneful influence on man's spiritual world.
The great unbridgeable chasm that yawned between the haves and the have-nots, which applied to cultural as much as to material values, was deliberately maintained by the former. The appalling conditions in which the masses, including children, worked to produce material values, the long hours leaving them no time for recreation and self-improvement, and all the attendant ills such as neglect of children and juvenile crime, prostitution and chronic alcoholism, the perpetual exhausting rat race, the stupefying propaganda of the ruling classes designed to consolidate the existing order and enlisting the services of the Church, schools, the theatre, the press and cheap literature which encouraged the basest instincts and fanned out national and racial hostility, the glorification of war and jingoism, the bribing of the skilled workers with the extra wealth derived from colonial plunder, the duping of the proletariat with the opportunist theories of ``class 156 harmony" and ``class co-operation" (and later, in our own day---state capitalism), the punishment meted out to free thinkers and the institution of terror to quell the masses, in short the objective conditions of life in the capitalist world in their entirety led to the brutalisation of man, which found its expression in the atrocious colonial wars, the First World War, the bestialities of fascism and the merciless suppression of the resistance of the masses by the bourgeois ``democrats''.
Maupassant felt that this cruelty pervading every sphere of social life, and every aspect, big or small, of human relationships, constituted a serious threat to the human personality. He gave numerous examples of how it tainted even the most personal feelings: rich parents send away their child, the offspring of adultery, to be brought up in the country, condemning it if not to death at any rate to wretchedness; a peasant family frighten to death an old woman who had become a burden to them; a father meets his abandoned daughter in a brothel; and so on and so forth. His short stories are full of observations on the cruelty of life, full of examples of the debasement of human feelings, honour and dignity, which are just everyday dramas and tragedies. Maupassant was above all concerned with studying the moral and psychological consequences of the distortion of social relationships, analysing their effect on man's spirit, and in this he was typical of the critical realists of the latter part of the nineteenth century and of the new social consciousness that was the product of the intensification of the process of alienation.
Maupassant considered self-interest to lie at the root of the brutalisation of man, and the proprietary instinct seemed to him to be all-powerful. He himself gradually gave in more and more to the pressures of his age, and was later to become convinced that social evil springs from the imperfection of human nature. Character gradually ceases to be socially based in his works, and begins to disintegrate as the elements of which it is composed become increasingly disharmonious. They become not so much social influences as inherent biological factors, generic, inborn characteristics. In cases where the social is 157 shown to be less important than the biological and even sexual factors, as in Yvette or Fort comme la mort, the latter lose much of their universality. With his tremendous sensitivity to all that was new in life it was only natural that Maupassant should have been deeply disturbed by the process of alienation which was gathering momentum. His famous story Solitude was a cii du coeur of a man who longed for contact with the world and other people and yet was prevented from achieving it by a great wall of incomprehension and estrangement. The theme of the story was a very actual one, and was to be developed in his later works, and notably in his novel Pierre et Jean.
While being aware of the process of alienation of man from his fellow men, his environment and the material culture he helped to produce, Maupassant was unable to grasp its socio-historical origin, and transposed it to the plane of inscrutable mystery, though fully appreciating that the phenomena connected with it constituted an essential feature of the new phase of history. It was at this time that the contradictions of imperialism began to reveal themselves, and they were reflected in Maupassant's philosophical story Qui sail? which describes how the things man has produced, his mute slaves, revolt and run away from people to lead their own independent existence. Maupassant's fear of the future which can be glimpsed through the weird irony of this philosophical parable is even patent in his fantastic story Le Horla, conveying the sense of unfreedom of the alienated man and forebodings of a new kind of bondage prepared by the mysterious, inscrutable forces of history erupting into everyday life.
Maupassant's contradictory view as expressed in his writings prevented his powerful criticism from breaking through the confines of the bourgeois system. He failed to see that there were powerful undercurrents in the bourgeois system itself that were capable of liberating man. In the long run the limitations of his bourgeois-democratic ideology, which had lost the sense of historical change, was to produce a crisis, decadent influences making themselves more and more felt in the ideas and style of his later works to the detriment of his realist method.
158In English realist prose of the latter part of the nineteenth century there was a shift of emphasis to the personal and psychological, and the typical novel of the period was the psychological novel or the chronicle of family life. George Eliot, heir to the Dickensian and Thackeray tradition, treated the theme of the moral degeneration and regeneration of the individual, the theme of the power of egoism in combination with analytic portrayal of social environment and its contradictions. But she tended to somewhat oversimplify these contradictions and her analysis lacked the broad scope of her predecessors. She generally reduced such antagonisms to a contrast between the beauty and wealth of human nature and the consuming power of money. Silas Marner the weaver is estranged from other people by his egoistic passion for hoarding: ``The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web. . . .''~^^1^^ The thirst for enrichment proves the undoing of Hetty Sorrel, the heroine of Adam Bede, and of the Tulliver family in The Mill on the Floss, and is responsible for the sad downfall of the millowner's daughter Maggie. In Middlemarch George Eliot shows the erosion of family ties, the collapse of that bastion of bourgeois life, the family, and condemns egoism as the chief evil undermining the foundations of human relationships. But egoism becomes less and less of a class characteristic in her novels and more and more a negative feature of human nature which can, consequently, be overcome by education or moral example. Thus, social problems gradually give way to ethical problems and we find in her works the illusion that society can be transformed through moral enlightenment oi its members, a fallacy that has persisted in critical realism down to the present day. George Eliot came to this false conclusion in a comparatively stable period with few outbreaks of class conflict, and was no doubt influenced by the ideas of ``class harmony" preached by the positivists whose views she shared.
_-_-_~^^1^^ George Eliot, Silas Marner. The Weaver oi Raveloe, New York, p. 190.
159The idea that moral education could be an instrument oi understanding and changing life for the better or could serve the opposite end of deforming a human personality was also treated by George Meredith in The Ordeal oi Richard Feverel and Samuel Butler in The Way oi All Flesh. They combined it with scathing criticism of the official morality of the ruling classes, the stifling oppressiveness of bourgeois family life which was hostile to the natural aspirations of ordinary healthy human beings. Both these writers were critical of bourgeois democracy, the negative aspects of which they could observe for themselves in the life of their age. But they were equally critical of socialist ideas, and remained democratic radicals, being concerned with studying not the laws and trends of history and social contradictions but the contradictions inherent in their characters' natures. In criticising human defects they sometimes overlooked the fact that these were conditioned by society, and in condemning egoism (Meredith's The Egoist, for example) concerned themselves with its influence on human nature rather than with the external factors that engender it. They perfected methods of psychological analysis at the expense of social analysis, and lost sight of the dialectical relationship between character and environment, treating man's spiritual world as a separate entity, coexisting and running parallel with life as a whole.
Indeed there was nothing surprising in this approach for it merely reflected the fact that the process of alienation was affecting all spheres of consciousness. What is far more remarkable is that so many great writers of that age managed to remain faithful to the traditions of realism, when the objective conditions obtaining were a hindrance to its development, and it was persecuted by bourgeois ideology, for, as Oscar Wilde put it, the bourgeoisie's hatred for realism was like the fury of Caliban seeing himself in a mirror.
Thus, at the close of the nineteenth century there was an increasing tendency in realism to separate the hero from his environment, and the character from those very factors which made him what he was, a tendency which destroyed epic unity and prevented a synthetic portrayal 160 of life with its main historical contradictions. Closely allied to this tendency was the one to ascribe an undue importance to environment, which was an essential feature of naturalism, a method that is fundamentally hostile to realism and was extremely widespread in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The main tenet of naturalism was verisimilitude, the aim being to give a life-like picture of reality. In their attempt to remain true to reality, be objective and show life as it really is, the naturalists overlooked the importance of analysis. They described reality and classified it roughly in the same way as did the positivists---for positivism was the philosophical basis of naturalism---but did not attempt to reveal its contradictions or its movement, for both naturalists and positivists were prone to the metaphysical and non-dialectical approach inherent in bourgeois thinking. Naturalism imitates realism, but differs both in the absence of social analysis and typification, and in the way it equalises essentially different phenomena. While the realist method enables the writer to single out and stress the most important features of character or environment, and thereby understand and present correctly their trends of development, naturalism precludes the presentation of life as a changing category. The naturalist method, which stems from Emile Zola, has long since run its course as an independent literary method, but several features of it are still to be found marring realist works today.
Emile Zola considered naturalism to be the only way of properly cognizing life and portraying it synthetically. It accorded with his positivist views. Like many of the writers and thinkers of his age, he was acutely aware of a vast gulf between the observer and the object of perception, between subject and object, a gulf that widened as alienation increased. The decadents tried to bridge the gap by intuition. Zola tried to bridge it with the aid of objective facts, facts taken from books, newspapers, court proceedings and statistics, or directly observed. Anatole France made the following highly unflattering appraisal of Zola's method: ``The artist's faceted, fly-like eye produces the most extraordinary impression: thanks to this __PRINTERS_P_161_COMMENT__ 11---0891 161 all objects are multiplied for him as if he were looking through cut topaz".^^1^^ Certainly, descriptions occupy an inordinately large place in Zola's prose. Quite often, as in his description of the shop window in Au Bonheur des Dames or his description of the cheeses in Le Ventie de Paris, they merely hold up the action and encumber the narrative with superfluous details. But Zola considered such descriptions as a means of cognizance, and used them to try to present life as it really is, with its features, facts and events that explain the development of society, whose historian and sociologist he set to be, and indeed was. In his anatomy of bourgeois society he frequently confused biology and sociology, which was in accordance with the spirit of his times. Positivism, with its cult of facts, its descriptive, cataloguing method, drew on the practical achievements of the natural sciences, in which mechanistic ideas were very strong, particularly in physiology. Many scholars and scientists in the period in question who were spontaneous materialists and were influenced by the ideas of the positivists, considered that the microscope and the scalpel would eventually yield the secrets not only of living matter but also of human social behaviour. Zola shared the tendency to ascribe men's actions to heredity and temperament, and this oversimplified scheme lay at the root of his naturalist theories, and was the idea behind Les Rougon-Macquart, a series of novels in which he intended to write the biological case history of two families who ``physiologically. . . represent the slow succession of accidents pertaining to the nerves or the blood, which befall a race...."^^2^^ Yet, instead, he wrote a social history of the Second Empire. He could not force his art into the straight]' acket of naturalist dogma, and for all its organic unity his work was really a battlefield on which naturalist and realist methods and trends clashed and fought with varying success. This battle reflected the deep contradictions of his outlook, which in turn reflected the contradictions inherent in the social awareness of his age.
Zola's desire to encompass the whole social reality of _-_-_
~^^1^^ Anatole France, La vie litteraire, Premiere serie, Paris, p. 229.
~^^2^^ Emile Zola, La Fortune des Rougon, Paris, 1955, p. 1.
162 an historical period, to reveal and assess the content of its determining processes, widened his thematic horizon and brought into his works aspects of reality which had never before been treated in literature. With his keen artist's eye he saw how the bourgeoisie had come into its own, crushing the 1848 Revolution, how it had entrenched itself and harnessed the state and democratic institutions to its own needs (La Fortune des Rougon, La Curee, La conquete de Plassans, Son Excellence Eugene Rougon). In the well-established bourgeois world money and profit became synonymous with the concepts of public order, prosperity and social calm, the measure of personal success, the real basis of virtue and the hidden mainspring of the official morality. He saw how the bourgeoisie formed an armed alliance against the people, how a single class awareness was common both to the financial oligarchy who stood at the helm of the ship of state and the bourgeois shopkeepers. The characters in La Curee, organisers and practitioners of shady financial deals, bureaucrats and big financiers had the same conservative ideology as the characters of Le Ventie de Paris, thrifty vociferous tradesfolk, with a fierce hatred for anybody that sought to shake the foundations of the established order that assured them a comfortable livelihood. Zola observed the emergence of the new kind of financier and finance capital beginning to coalesce with the apparatus of state, becoming linked to it by a multitude of invisible, but nonetheless perfectly material, interests. This was a new feature of the age, as was the character of Aristide Saccard who embodied it. Saccard and his more successful younger ``brother'' Cowperwood, the hero of Dreiser's trilogy, as well as the hero of Jack London's Burning Daylight embodied the tremendous initiative and organising drive of finance capital. Saccard's business affairs, always involving risk and relying on masses of petty-bourgeois investors, were all the fruit of his own initiative. Zola shows capitalism as it was before it assumed the faceless, abstract form of the trust period, as described by Norris or Vershofen. Nevertheless, side by side with Saccard, his bank exists as an independent force standing above the mass of people and influencing their lives like a deus ex __PRINTERS_P_163_COMMENT__ 11* 163 machina, lor the successes or failures of his Universal Bank is what determines the financial position of the investors and finally leads them to ruin. Zola also noted how the industrial power of capitalist society grew hand in hand with the growth of finance capital: how mines and factories invaded the peaceful countryside and the railways spread their web everywhere. So impressed was Zola by the scale and rate of capitalist progress that his critical ardour was weakened and he harboured the vain hope that in the long run the healthy forces of progress, which he himself was unable to define, would lead mankind onto the true path of prosperity and well-being. Nevertheless, he was not blind to the growing moral corruption of the bourgeoisie (Pot-Bouille and Nana) and the irreversible slide of the Second Empire towards collapse and ruin, which he described in La Debacle.Zola also realised that the development of bourgeois society would be accompanied by a strengthening of ties between people, and that social forces would tend not only to divide but also unite according to common class or property interests, common work or common sufferings. Zola tends to dissolve the individual in his environment, whose slightest tremor or disturbance sets up a wave which engulfs him. Hence his collective portraits, depicting the feelings and reactions of crowds, such as the procession of enthusiastic insurgents in La Fortune des Rougon, the crowd of enraged workers in Germinal, the terrified, demoralised soldiers in La Debacle, and the avid crowd at the stock exchange in L'Argent.
Although he observed a great deal in the social life of his age, he often limited himself to pure description of what he observed rather than analysing it and revealing its contradictions and the contradictory relationship between man and his environment. While recognising the mutability of history and the fact of historical development, he at the same time asserted the stability of human nature, seeing man as biologically static, prevented by heredity from escaping the power of social environment and exerting an influence on it, to change it. Zola's insistence on the power of environment and heredity often approaches fatalism: thus the hereditary alcoholics Gervaise 164 Coupeau and her daughter Nana advance towards inevitable ruin; Gervaise, brought up among down-and-out illiterate workers in L'Assommoir, is also doomed from the outset, and there is the same fatal inevitability about Jacques Lantier's mad urge to kill in La Bete Humaine, and in the various abnormalities found in all the members of the Rougon-Macquart family. A typical feature of Zola's naturalism was his tendency to illustrate a particular social process by the actions and fortunes of his characters, rather than treat them as an organic part of the process, presenting man and environment as the indivisible whole they are. He thus often sacrificed historical perspective, substituting biological causality for social causality, thereby obscuring the real causal links in psychological and social phenomena. Zola's man is by no means always historical man: he was frequently the mechanical product of environment, branded with its evils and imperfections. Thus the peasants in La Terre are grossly simplified to the point of caricature, as are the workers ruined by drink and poisoned by the futility of their lives in L'Assommoir. The epic form of classical realism has disintegrated in Zola, and symbolism has begun to penetrate his works, as we also find in the naturalist works of Ibsen (Ghosts, Rosmersholm and The Master Builder), and Hauptmann, arid countless lesser writers, such as Huysmans, Holz and Verga. Naturalism gradually leads Zola to animalise man, placing him at the mercy of irrational instincts and animal passions.
Yet his keen powers of perception and his democratic outlook enabled Zola to see the social conflicts of his age, and particularly the main contradiction, that between capital and labour. He was not fully aware of all its implications, but like the majority of his contemporaries, he did sense that, despite its apparent stability, capitalist society contained the seeds of its own destruction, that a powerful force was developing which threatened the existence of the whole system based on the exploitation of man by man.
In Germinal, as he had previously done in L'Assommoir, Zola presented a mercilessly accurate picture of the appalling conditions in which the workers lived reduced 165 almost to the status of animals and he recognised the right of the exploited to revolt, and showed in his novel how the ``red spectre of revolution" loomed large, and was leading the working masses in its wake. But Zola, through the limitations of his outlook, was unable to perceive the conscious element in their movement. Though unable to understand the historical significance of the Paris Commune, he sincerely sympathised with the oppressed masses. The inhumanity and the injustice of the bourgeois order was all too clear to him, and he realised that the masses would not agree to be led by the halter forever. He had grave doubts about the continued existence of capitalist civilisation. In his later works, written in the opening years of the present century, Les Quatre Evangiles, he turns to a kind of latter day utopianism and in L'CEuvre (1901), draws a picture of the class harmony which should replace the class conflicts of bourgeois society.
It is hardly surprising that Zola's idea of socialism to which he came towards the end of his life should have been diluted with reformism, for the general trend in European socialism in the latter part of the nineteenth century had been a development in breadth with a corresponding loss in revolutionary intensity: the labour movement was spending most of its energy in the economic and trade union struggle. As a result of the spread of reformism in the socialist parties, they came to represent very little danger for the capitalist system, the Fabians in England, the French socialists and the German social-democrats having all retreated in their practical programmes from the militant principles of Marxism. The struggle was waged within the parliamentary system, using the legal opportunities offered by bourgeois democracy, and this led by the beginning of the present century to a revival of the illusion of bourgeois democracy both in the labour movement and among progressive thinkers, Zola among them.
However, Zola was too familiar with the true face of capitalism, had penetrated too deeply into the bourgeois soul to ever reconcile himself, even for a moment, with bourgeois reality. He began to look upon the masses as 166 a force capable of leading mankind to happiness, but, as with many of his great contemporaries in Western Europe, this idea remained in the realm of pure speculation and did not find artistic expression in his works. For Zola the masses, including the proletariat, were an object of deep sympathy and pity, but not a conscious historical force: thus in Germinal, the proletariat revolts without understanding the meaning or purpose of its revolt. We find a similar picture in Bjornson's play Beyond Our Powers and in Hauptmann's The Weavers. In those rare works of West European literature in which the position and historical role of the proletariat was examined at all, the presentation suffered from the same defects as were apparent in Margaret Harkness's City Girl, where, according to Engels: ''. . .The working class figures as a passive mass, unable to help itself and not even showing (making) any attempt at striving to help itself. All attempts to drag it out of its torpid misery come from without, from above."^^1^^ Thus, on the threshold of the twentieth century West European critical realism had yet to undertake the task of finding ways to the people and ideas renewing social life.
The feelings and hopes of the masses really came to occupy an important position in the literature of Russian critical realism, which developed against a background of preparation of a major revolution that was to forever transform the modern world.
The ethical power of Russian literature, its humanity and deep sympathy for the masses, its boldness in treating vital issues made it a carrier of the awareness of the masses and, once socialist transformation was underway in Russia, also of the self-awareness of the masses.
A typical feature of critical realism in the latter half of the nineteenth century was the great attention it devoted to man's inner world. Dostoyevsky submitted human psychology to mercilessly penetrating analysis in his novels, lit by the dim glow of the night lights of a big city, permeated with the smoky, dank atmosphere of St. Petersburg ``lodgings'' where powerful passions seethed, where pure hearts were singed by life's falsity and cruelty, where _-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 479.
167 human baseness and wretchedness bred disbelief in the possibility of universal happiness and it was even blasphemously rejected, and where passionate faith was to be found side by side with militant unbelief. He presented the violent irruption into Russian life of the new bourgeois outlook, and showed the tragic contradictions of social progress. Dostoyevsky only examined the sick, twilight aspects of the human consciousness at various stages of affection because the normal state of the human mind interested him little and seemed to him to be undramatic. But he also presented the struggle between various social psychologies, thereby characterising both the environment and the central conflicts of social life. Dostoyevsky does not usually separate his characters from their environment: they are interdependent, and his characters have marked social features, although these are only presented through a character's spiritual world, in the conflicts between his own intellectual demands and interests and those of other characters, and the author is sparing of details of the environment. Thus the high degree of intellectualism of Dostoyevsky's novels determines their essentially playlike structure: the action develops from conflicting points of view, largely expressed in dialogues, and the psychological state of the characters determines the plot and denouement. Dostoyevsky investigated various forms of mental alienation and the ideas it produced, including Raskolnikov's idea of the ``superman'', Kirillov's idea of the `` God-Man'', and young Arkady Dolgorukov's ``Rothschild dream''. Dostoyevsky quite rightly links such ideas with bourgeois individualism. But in presenting the extreme forms of individualism, anatomising the human mind and spirit and penetrating the most hidden recesses of the human consciousness, Dostoyevsky, like other critical realists of the latter half of the nineteenth century, often imparted features of extratemporal independence to the spiritual life of his heroes. Svidrigailov, and especially the ``last scion of the nobility'', Nikolai Stavrogin, who although ostensibly diabolical, showed signs of an eerily grotesque parody of the extreme fatalism characteristic of Lermontov's gloomy hero Pechorin, have elements of strong inherent perversity and submission to instinct 168 which Dostoyevsky ascribed to human nature. This view of human nature as the playground of dark, mysterious, irrational forces and the focus of inherent ungovernable instincts, for the most part base and destructive, that we find in Dostoyevsky's works was connected with his reactionary Weltanschauung and served him as an extra argument in his struggle against revolutionary ideas.But in constructing his conservative positive programme for the organisation of society, out of religious dogmas, as the foundation of social morality and the back-to-- thesoil idea, as the foundation of social relations, and advancing this programme as an alternative to capitalist progress and the views of the revolutionary democrats, Dostoyevsky based himself on an idealised image of the peasant and peasant life. His muzhik Marei, with his tremendous tenderness and humanity, lavished on the mass of the Russian people wallowing in the abomination of a life of violence and brutality, and calling them to peace, appealing to them to love one another, was ever invisibly in the background of all the complex philosophical edifices in Dostoyevsky's novels and the wild abstractions of his thought. The idea of kinship with the masses, though deformed by reactionary political views, underlay all his writings, imparting tremendous critical power and sympathy with the insulted and the injured. Even in his misinterpretation of it, this idea was able to give his works vitality: the very fact that he looked to the masses as a force capable of resolving all the contradictions of the human mind and history was in keeping with the spirit of the age. The idea that the masses are the motive force of history was making relentlessly headway in art and literature at that time.
This idea was the pivot of Victor Hugo's romantic epic Les Miserables, where the masses were presented not simply as an enslaved giant bearing on his shoulders the whole social edifice but as a giant in the process of freeing itself. The people was counterposing its own will to the will of the ruling classes and the whole apparatus of coercion created by the latter to defend their selfish interests---the State, the Army, the-Police, the Law and the Church. Hugo presented the masses as suffering from want 169 and earning their bread by the sweat of their brow, and he also showed them on the barricades, taking up arms to pave their way to the future. Hugo's epic was an historically accurate reflection of the objective side of the social process---the growing role of the masses in the life of society.
In accordance with the spirit of the romanticist method, Hugo universalised the characters of his heroes. Each one of them was an embodiment of a particular principle which absorbed the individual and the particular and gave the characters an abstract universality. Thus, Jean Valjean became the personification of goodness and virtue, Javert personified fantastic devotion to duty, and Thenardier--- all that is base and vile. The conflicts are based on the romanticist principle of antinomy---the struggle between irreconcilable principles such as good and evil, brutality and mercy, and so on. Thus, objective truth was expressed in a somewhat abstract form, giving les Misembles the declarative quality while indicating that the author's views were genuinely democratic.
In Charles de Coster's Thyl Ulenspiegel the masses are regarded and presented as the essential creative force in society, the motor of history. Here too the characters have a symbolic meaning, and embody various aspects of the soul of the masses. The epic quality of these two masterpieces of West European literature stems from the recognition of the true role and significance of the masses. Yet both belong essentially to the kind of epic where the general idea underlying the work does not find a unique, particular and individual expression in the characters. Dostoyevsky's characters, on the other hand, are highly particularised, each being endowed with highly distinctive characteristics. These are most carefully explored and the unique features revealed, not infrequently overshadowing the impersonal course of events and the objective development of life, those real conflicts which form the basis of the psychological conflicts that rack the heroes' souls. The essence of the epic quality of Dostoyevsky's works lies in the objective logical necessity of what takes place that is hidden behind the explosions of individual passions and feelings, and the complex emotional experiences of 170 the heroes. But the general and the particular are not balanced: the individual, the apparently exceptional (for, despite its appearance of being exceptional and original, Raskolnikov's crime, or the murder of old Karamazov, or the tragedy of Nastasya Filippovna are in fact phenomena typical of class society) seems to drown out the historical content of his works. Dostoyevsky's ``psychological realism" had its limitations: it was better suited to investigating and expressing in aesthetic form the special features of social psychology than to analysing and depicting the real everyday life of the people and the real social conflicts.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ [Tolstoi, et al.]The life of the people was fully presented by Lev Tolstoi, in whose works the epic quality of realism rested on a balance between the individual psychological content of the hero and the historical sphere of his actions, presented in full concrete detail. The epic quality of Tolstoi's realism derived from his kinship with the masses, for, as Lenin put it, he ``succeeded in conveying with remarkable force the rnoods of the large masses that are oppressed by the present system, in depicting their condition and expressing their spontaneous feelings of protest and anger".^^1^^ Tolstoi's works, reflecting the mentality of the patriarchal peasantry in the age of bourgeois-democratic revolution, which developed in a relatively short time into socialist revolution, directly express the views and sentiments of the people, which was something totally new in nineteenth century literature. This identification with the people helped strengthen the epic quality of realism, this major quality, which was gradually being lost in West European realist literature of the latter half of the century.
Thomas Mann, remarking on the fact that it was the epic element that predominated in Tolstoi's prose, wrote: ``It is the Homeric element, that I mean, continuously flowing narrative, half art half nature, enveloped in a naive grandeur, corporeality, objectivity, deathless health, deathless realism."^^2^^
_-_-_~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16, pp. 323--24.
~^^2^^ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, transl. by Constance Garnett with Introductory Essay by Thomas Mann, Vol. 1, New York, 1939, p. X.
171For Tolstoi, the objective course of life, its continuous, uninterrupted flux, is also a major sphere of depiction. Historical conflicts, shaking and changing the destinies of peoples, gigantic collisions between vast numbers of people, personal dramas, the falseness of the official morality of the ruling classes, Church, Army and State, all came under his keen, searching gaze, and his ears were wide open to the sounds of life. Great and small things---the enchantment of a moonlit night and the sense of pleasure of doing a job well, minor details of peasant life, the colours and smells of the countryside in summer, the inhuman din of battle and the bubbling conversation in a society salon, the cracking of the ice in spring, the voices of convicts trudging eastwards---all were woven by Tolstoi into a vast and remarkably complete picture of the world. The powerful creative force of life moulded his language, his phrases, as ponderous and massive outwardly as they were essentially harmonious, and imparted extraordinary visual power to his three dimensional and impeccably authentic images. But as well as giving a remarkably vivid depiction of the physical aspects of reality, Tolstoi penetrated the innermost recesses of man's spiritual life and presented it no less vividly. Indeed it is this extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of the human soul revealing all its wealth and subtle shades, its real contradictions and almost imperceptible and inexplicable movements combined with complete portrayal of the objective processes of life that' constitutes the distinctive epic quality of his works, deriving from his essential kinship with the people. Describing in true epic style the general bustle of human life, Tolstoi never lost sight of the individual in the crowd: all his characters have an intrinsic value and each is an individual world through which, however, there flows the endless stream of life, uniting the atoms of history, individuals, in a whole, called society. The masses of people who by their labour create the material and spiritual values of life, who fight and lay down their lives in battle to do the will of rulers, who bend over furnace or plough, sow and reap, mine coal and ores, build factories and palaces, the working millions, weary and oppressed, deceived and robbed, exhausted by inhuman labours, are 172 all individuals for Tolstoi. The interests of Ivan, Pyotr and Marya, their separate wills, desires, feelings, hopes and plans, make up the desires, will, hopes and plans of the historical force called the people. In order to understand the masses it is necessary to understand the spiritual and moral essence of each individual representative of the people. Thus, for Tolstoi study, analysis and portrayal of the life of society of necessity involves study of the spiritual life of the individual, for the upper classes, the rich, culture and art, power and coercion, the concepts of good and evil, religion and the State---everything that constitutes the content of the life of a given age, depends in the final analysis on the will of the people, and hence on the will of each particular member of the people.
Tolstoi took a great step forward in portrayal of the people, a step without which it is quite impossible to conceive the development of a new type of realism, namely, socialist realism. For Tolstoi the man of the people---above all the peasant---was not an object of detached observation and sympathy as he was for Turgenev or Leskov; nor was he the soulless property owner ruled by an all-consuming passion for making money and base, almost animal instincts, as he was depicted by the West European realists and naturalists, although Tolstoi did depict the ``reign of darkness" in the consciousness of the masses with implacable truth. Nor did he present the man of the people as a paragon of virtue as did the Russian and French populists---although he certainly was wont to idealise the muzhik at times. Tolstoi's portrayal of representatives of the people---and in this respect only one writer was close to him, and that was Gleb Uspensky, one of the wisest of Russian writers---was based on a correct understanding of the real contradictions of life that made them what they were. Tolstoi's characters from the people, both such important ones as Tikhon Shcherbaty, Yeroshka or the soldier Avdeyev and minor, incidental characters---vagrants and beggars, impoverished peasants who have been reduced to extreme despair and embitterment, and the odd one who has been more fortunate--- are accorded a place of equal importance with his characters from the educated and privileged classes, and are 173 in many cases superior to the latter as regards moral integrity.
The ground ploughed so deeply by Tolstoi's realism has yielded an extraordinarily rich harvest. Without the fundamentally new approach to the portrayal of the people introduced to world literature by Tolstoi, who was capable of surveying history and bourgeois civilisation at once through the eyes of a consummate artist standing at the summit of European culture and through the eyes of the mass of the people, there could never have been Gorky, who represented the character from the masses in the process of acquiring revolutionary self-awareness. The Tolstoian tradition flowed organically into the literature of socialist realism and many characters in Soviet literature would have been impossible had not the ground been prepared by Tolstoi.
Tolstoi himself regarded his works as belonging to a new period in the development of realism, when ``... the interest of details of feelings replaces the interest of events themselves".^^1^^ This definition did not mean that Tolstoi denied the importance of events in literature, as is testified by his own works, which are packed with events. Thus, in War and Peace the drama derives from historical events of vast magnitude affecting the private lives of the heroes. Hadji Murat is rich in events; action in The Power of Darkness is dynamic, not to mention Anna Karenina and Resurrection. However, nowhere in Tolstoi's works---and this applies equally to his major works and his short stories---do events themselves form the basis of the plot and carry the action forward, as they do in the works of Balzac and Dickens, for example: they are always presented in terms of their influence on the inner world of the individual. The fortunes of Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempre or the secrets surrounding Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit, or the adventures of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon and Philip are interesting and important in themselves. With Tolstoi events serve purely to impart authenticity to the narrative and reveal the spiritual content of the _-_-_
~^^1^^ L. Tolstoi, Collected Works, Goslitizdat, Moscow, Vol. 46, p. 188.
174 characters. In Tolstoi's writings psychological analysis does not merely serve to supplement and deepen social analysis, but becomes an independent means of investigation. The portrait of Tsar Nicholas in Hadji Murat which is so striking for its historical accuracy and the scathing criticism implied is achieved using the method of psychological analysis. Tolstoi's superb study of the tsar's character, revealing the motives of his behaviour and actions, showing his changing moods, his constant posing and habitual self-deception, at the same time represents a study of the social essence of despotism. The detailed account of the thoughts and feelings of the dying Ivan Ilyich, his frank self-analysis and self-confession, is at the same time a scathing criticism of the society and milieu in which the hero lived his dishonest, fruitless and unjust life, so typical of a dishonest, unjust society. By making psychological analysis serve as a major means of showing social contradictions, Tolstoi greatly enriched world literature, revealing new aesthetic and analytic possibilities of the realist method. Tolstoi's psychological analysis was more complex and flexible than that of Dostoyevsky, for example, especially because it always preserved an instinctive historicist approach. Besides, if Dostoyevsky portrayed intense psychological experiences of his heroes in a state bordering on the demented, Tolstoi presented various natural psychological states. While Dostoyevsky was wont to treat his characters' thoughts and feelings as eternal intrinsic categories, Tolstoi always presented the nature and emotions of his characters as socially conditioned, that is, as clearly reflecting their genetic link both with their environment and their time. Thus, spiritual movements of Tolstoi's heroes were not merely the interplay and conflict of personal feelings and desires, a kaleidoscope of emotions in the closed personal world of the individual, but could and did reflect the movements and contradictions of social life. Tolstoi, who sensed the impending collapse of bourgeois civilisation and felt the existing relations between people to be unjust and unnatural, did not view society as something static and immutable. Unlike the naturalists, he perceived the ceaseless flux of history in all spheres of social life, the ``inexorable 175 course of the whole'', which Goethe had considered to be the realist's main task to portray. True, the reactionary and conservative elements in Tolstoi's outlook sometimes moved him to regard causality of phenomena as conditioned by an inscrutable force of fatal necessity extraneous to man. Tolstoi acquired this view of history also under the influence of the process 01 alienation, of which this illusion is a typical result, but it was never to prove strong enough to prevent him from portraying the phenomena of life in constant collision and development. For this reason, in the emotions of his characters too Tolstoi always strove to present the incessant, uninterrupted working of thoughts and feelings characteristic of human consciousness.Attempts had been made in realist literature before Tolstoi to find means of penetrating the innermost recesses of the human soul. Lawrence Sterne and Jean-- Jacques Rousseau made psychology an important element of narrative, but their method of presenting the inner world of their characters was purely descriptive. Thus, although Rousseau wrote his ``Confessions'' in the first person, he did so in a highly detached manner, so that one is more struck by the frankness of the account than by any feeling of immersion in the depths of the human Self. Literature at that time was not equipped to handle the process of the appearance, development and struggle of different emotions and thoughts actually within the human soul. A big step forward was taken by Stendhal, whose heroes act, think and try to explain their thoughts and actions. We hear the inner voice of Julien Sorel speaking, but this is still no more than the hero commenting on events. It was Tolstoi who first made the inner monologue serve as a means of presenting thought processes actually going on, and the complex workings of the human feelings, thereby giving literature an important new expressive device, opening up vast new possibilities of expression. This was a major break-through: without such scenes as the death of Captain Praskukhin in Tales of Sebastopol, Petya Rostov's ``musical'' dream in War and Peace, and Anna Karenina's inner monologue before she commits suicide--- scenes of tremendous authentic power---the picture of life 176 would have been very much poorer and its events would not have been perceived with the necessary fulness.
It was no accident that Tolstoi should have paid such attention to psychological analysis: it was dictated by the objective phenomena of life, for as social life of man becomes more complicated so does his spiritual life. Numerous new facts enter the sphere of his attention and he is only able to assimilate them all by developing his ability to associate different phenomena, with the result that associative throught becomes a most typical feature of the modern mind. Tolstoi perceived this tendency and reflected it in his works, without however raising it to the quality of an absolute or making it the universal principle of his presentation of psychological processes, as was later to be done by ``the stream of consciousness" school. Joyce and Proust took the method of presenting the inner life of characters first introduced to literature by Tolstoi and made it universal presenting inner monologues (outwardly disorganised as in Ulysses or ordered and coherent as in A la Recherche du temps perdu) of alienated individuals as the only reality of life. As for Tolstoi he used inner monologues in order to increase the scope of his presentation of reality. Developing and improving psychological analysis as a literary method, he employed the device of decomposing the impression made by a particular character into separate impressions they produced in different characters. He stressed the need to ``describe how this or that affects the characters".^^1^^ In Tolstoi's works the main hero is presented through a plurality of views the other characters obtain of him. Then, to typify the character, he used the device of adding together all the different impressions of him that the other characters have already revealed in their judgements and inner assessments. Thus, in an apparently subjective appraisal of a character through the reactions to him of the other characters, we are in fact presented with an objective appraisal, since it is many-sided and thus remarkably complete. Tolstoi always typified his characters, stressing those _-_-_
~^^1^^ L. Tolstoi, On Literature and Art, Moscow, 1958, Vol. I, p. 319 (in Russ.).
__PRINTERS_P_177_COMMENT__ ---0891 177 psychological and social features and qualities in them that were typical of the existing social relations. He created a vast portrait gallery of typical characters---poor peasants and rich peasants, day-labourers and kulaks, beggars, vagrants beau-monde pleasure seekers, country and town gentry, common soldiers and officers, servants, pettyfoggying court officials, and official dignitaries, liberals and conservatives, convicts and lawyers, society belles and prostitutes, workers and merchants, aristocrats and statesmen. The whole seething stream of Russian life, where the established customs, views and relations were breaking down, in the course of its inexorable advance towards revolution, was generalised and typified by Tolstoi. His tremendous psychological insight, combined with a correct understanding of the motives of human behaviour and an ability to see the organic link between men's inner world and their social environment enabled Tolstoi to perceive and present the processes going on in the human soul as the true, accurate reflection of the actual processes of life. Tolstoi did not draw up an inventory in his works of various facts and instances of social injustice and the terrible position of the working people, as the naturalists were wont to do. The distressing plight of the lower classes served as the natural background, the historical undercurrent of his works. Portraying the continuous struggle between justice and injustice, that is the content of life, Tolstoi studied the conflict between these two principles both in society and in the human soul. His criterion of what was good and just was what was necessary and useful for the masses, all that fitted into the outlook of the masses; and he viewed as unjust all that ran counter to the needs and outlook on life of the people. This is why he expressed his criticism of bourgeois society in ethical terms. He supported the ethics and morality of the havenots against the ethics and morality of the privileged classes, viewing the whole system of social relations, the personal and societal life of people in private ownership society through the sober and naive gaze of the working man. Tolstoi discovered that all the principles underlying bourgeois civilisation were false, unnatural and inhuman. Revealing their real essence, tearing off all manner of 178 masks, Tolstoi ruthlessly exposed and criticised egoism and the pursuit of personal interests, and condemned the estrangement of people.Unlike his West European contemporaries, Tolstoi did not make the basic conflict of his works property contradictions, the tussle between bourgeois outcasts for their share of the loot, or the destructive influence of instincts and heredity on people. The typical Tolstoian conflict is a moral conflict, and the whole mass of facts, events and testimonies that generally crowd his works and give them a convincing authenticity serves to highlight and stress the moral roots of the conflict. This does not mean that real-life material is of secondary importance in the narrative: realistic analysis enables Tolstoi to reveal the injustice and inhumanity of the existing social order, with its false, hypocritical official morality, its legalised injustice, vast apparatus of coercion---prisons, courts, Army, police, etc.---sanctified by the Church, with its division into rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed, to show it as alien to man and to normal, natural human relations. The existing social order corrupts human nature, makes man a slave of egoism and instills in him hatred rather than love for his fellows. We find a moral conflict in The Power of Darkness, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, The Kreutzer Sonata and Father Sergius, not to mention Tolstoi's didactic works. From his analysis of the contradictions of the personal and social morality that reigned in society based on private ownership and exploitation, Tolstoi came to the conclusion that this morality was obsolete, both because it was incompatible with the natural healthy movements of the human heart and because its social foundations and the forms in which human relations had been moulded by historical progress were outmoded. Indeed, presentation of the obsolescence and unnaturalness of existing social relations became the dominant theme in Tolstoi's later works, testifying to his historicism.
The bells still rang out from the countless churches throughout Russia, where prayers were recited for the health of the imperial family; and the foundations of the Empire, safeguarded with the whip and the bayonet seemed firm and unshakeable; the gendarmes were still __PRINTERS_P_179_COMMENT__ 12* 179 all-powerful, and the man in the street supposed his whole life to pass under their watchful eye; joint-stock companies were still springing up overnight like mushrooms, and liberal professors and lawyers held forth on the benefits of parliamentary, constitutional government. Katkov's publications were still pouring forth unction and poison, Suvorin was laying the foundations of a Russian gutter press; famine was still stalking across whole regions, and the muzhiks were being taught to use guns so that they could be driven to the slaughter in Manchuria and later Galicia. The concessionaires still felt secure, confidently delving into the rich Donets coalfield and lining their pockets on Baku oil, and foreign creditors were still quite willing to support the dwindling finances of the Empire. The factory owners' dividends continued to grow at a time when millions of people of different nationalities were still deprived of the most elementary human rights, and the workers and peasants lived in indescribable poverty. But already the Empire was rocked by the terrorist acts of the ``People's Will" revolutionaries and the world held its breath as the flame of Revolution sprang up in the East. Massive workers' strikes throughout the country already heralded the upheavals to come; the anger of the masses was already bursting to the surface---the countryside was seething with unrest and the time was not far off when the peasants would start setting fire to the landowners' country seats. In the depths of the workers' movement, Lenin was already at work forging a new type of Party, the instrument with which the Bolsheviks were to make a revolution in Russia and show mankind the path to the future. Indeed, the existing social order in Russia had outlived its day and its change by revolution was inevitable.
Tolstoi was a merciless critic of capitalism with its unjust, unnatural relations. Investigating such various social institutions as the family, the established Church, the courts, the police state, he showed the need for changes at grass-wots level, since all these institutions served to enslave and oppress people. He demanded the abolition of private ownership of the land and his ideal was to have the class state replaced by communes of free and equal 180 small peasants. Tolstoi's conclusion that social relations resting on private ownership should be abolished---the objective conclusion his criticism implied---coincided with the socialist ideas, and Tolstoi basically posed in his writings those very questions of social development that were tackled by socialism. The vast mass of material from life that Tolstoi incorporated in his works, all the observations contained in them, argued cogently in favour of replacing the inhuman social relations that then existed with new ones based on humanitarian principles. Tolstoi's works reflected the spontaneously mounting tide of revolution, and, presaging the historic changes that were about to come, he submitted bourgeois civilisation to comprehensive criticism. Hence Tolstoi's urge to capture and fix in words the dominant features of life, which was reflected not only in the numerous actual events in which his works abounded but in the very fabric of the narrative. His long periods, and highly complex sentences with numerous dependent clauses, abounding in epithets and definitions, testified to a tendency to try and embrace life synthetically, define his characters from numerous angles and present a full picture of historical links. Yet his presentation of history did not embrace all the major tendencies of social development. This could only be achieved by a revolutionary consciousness, perceiving and investigating the whole of reality, all its forms, shades and the methods of struggle of all social classes and thereby revealing the general tendency of social development. With Tolstoi, on the other hand, as Lenin put it: ``The exposure of capitalism and of the calamities it inflicts on the masses was combined with a wholly apathetic attitude to the world-wide struggle for emancipation waged by the international socialist proletariat."^^1^^
The sentiments of primitive peasant democracy imparted to Tolstoi's views and works not only tremendous critical power in exposing an unjust social order but also a certain passiveness. His heroes from the people display the submissiveness that had been instilled in the masses over centuries of exploitation and bondage. Tolstoi's _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works. Vol. 16, p. 325.
181 humanitarian ideal, his great impassioned plea lor love as the natural basis for human relations appeared in his works in contemplative forms, as preaching of non-- resistance to evil. The prejudices of peasant democracy infused his outlook with a conservative element, pushing him towards Tertullian's condemnation of reason, progress, and the ``superstition of science'', and an ascetic condemnation of the needs of the flesh. Despite his closeness to the masses, a typical illusion bred by the process of alienation had crept into Tolstoi's outlook: he regarded moral selfperfection by the individual independent of the group as an effective means of resolving social contradictions and changing the unnatural relations that existed between people. This Utopian view was to become one of the most typical illusions of democratic thought in the twentieth century. We meet it in Remain Rolland's Jean-Christophe, in the plays of G. B. Shaw, and in the works of almost all the outstanding critical realists of our century.Nevertheless, the new features in Tolstoi's realism outweighed the conservative side of his outlook. His works ushered in a new stage in the development of critical realism. While before Tolstoi critical realism had been concerned with the relationship between the individual and society, the structure of society, the destiny of the individual in conflict with society, for Tolstoian realism, as for all twentieth century realism, the destiny of society became the object oi investigation. The burning issue Tolstoi raised---how is a man to live in a society where falsehood, injustice, cruelty and violence reign, and where the masses are enslaved and deprived of the most elementary human rights---was to become the major ethical problem in the twentieth century literature. The idea that the existing social order must be changed, that is fundamental to Tolstoi's works, began to make its appearance in West European literature too. By the beginning of the twentieth century realism, having engaged in a fierce struggle with naturalism and various decadent trends at the end of the last century, had begun to gather strength, extending its field of vision to embrace new facts and contradictions of life that had been unknown in the last century.
182The new century brought with it not sense of the prosperity, calm and stability of an established order, but a feeling of uncertainty and lack of faith in the firmness of the very foundations of capitalist society. The historical content of the twentieth century was and is determined by the greatest revolution in history---the complex, painful, vast process of transition from capitalism to socialism.
The First World War revealed to their full extent the glaring contradictions of capitalism at the imperialist stage of its development. The October Revolution in Russia ushered in a new era in the history of mankind and greatly accelerated the general crisis of capitalism, for which the period of decline now set in. The relatively calm, untroubled and steady development of bourgeois society was not only speeded up but rushed headlong towards disaster. All forms of ideology and consciousness became sharply aware of the impending disaster the historical process spelled for bourgeois society. In the face of the mounting class conflicts bourgeois ideology mobilised all its reserves, digging out of the philosophical archives Gobineau's racist theory of the natural superiority of the white race and its unlimited right to use violence to assert itself over other races. Nietzsche's inhuman philosophy came into its own and its ideas were made to serve as a justification for aggressive war and holding the masses in bondage, those essential features of the capitalist system. If Oswald Spengler had predicted the decline of Europe---bourgeois-democratic Europe, that is, or, as he put it, the ``Europe of Manchester"---and called upon the ruling classes to display ``firmness'', paving the way for the dictatorship of imperialist reaction, his precursor Georges Sorel in his book Reflection sur la violence regarded contemporary history of the twentieth century and its future as an arena of wars and cataclysms, maintaining that the idea of war was an inalienable feature of the human consciousness. He ridiculed bourgeois democracy for its failure to hold the masses in check and proposed violence in the place of all legal methods of coercion as the only means whereby the bourgeoisie could hope to maintain their class domination. He proposed that the masses should be kept at a low level of spiritual development, 183 that base instincts should be cultivated in them, and that they should be held in submission by unconcealed crude demagogy. Bourgeois literature created the image of a powerful and highly primitive hero, the lord and master relentlessly striding towards his goal knee-deep in blood and trampling the ``coloured'' peoples underfoot. The colonial, military and social novels of Claude Farrere and Kipling, d'Annunzio and Vershofen extolled the ``strong'' individual.
The sense of impending doom was equally strong among the critical realists. All the writings of H. G. Wells, for example, were pervaded with a sense of universal cataclysms about to destroy contemporary civilisation. The clashes between Man and the spider-like denizens of other worlds who nearly succeeded in enslaving mankind and destroying the Earth's culture; the fierce enmity between the degenerate classes of the future---the Eloi and the Morlocks; scientific discovery becoming a source of evil and misery; merciless battles between the haves and the have-nots, the masses and their masters, on the moving streets of the city of the future; the destructive battle in the air between Great Powers imperilling the very existence of civilisation---all Wells' pessimistic fantasies were to be traced to the atmosphere of intensification of the contradictions of bourgeois society. Even Jack London's works, where the mood is basically cheerful and optimistic contain highly tragic pictures of the relentless struggle between the workers and the financial oligarchy in The Iron Heel or of the collapse of the bourgeois order under the blows of a general strike in The Dream of Debs. This sense of impending catastrophe was present in prose works that portrayed concrete everyday life quite as much as in science fiction works where the conflicts were deliberately exaggerated and presented as larger than life. The ordinary everyday life of people, the serene, regular succession of births, marriages and deaths of old age in one's own bed, the daily round of work and play, was affected by historical forces producing deep and irrevocable changes in the very foundations of this regular life. Dramatic family chronicles became broad pictures of the decline and fall of bourgeois civilisation. Such was the 184 subject of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. But as in Wells' science fiction, here too bourgeois culture and bourgeois life are still viewed as universal culture and life, so that the decline and fall of the bourgeoisie is regarded as the decline and fall of civilisation in general.
New phenomena of social life, its increasingly patent contradictory nature, its illogicality, the widening gap between the principles of official morality and fact, between the theory and practice of bourgeois democracy, forced realist writers to seek new means of presenting the changing world of reality. The critical realists of the twentieth century have wide recourse to the grotesque, to hyperbole, striving to convey the paradoxical nature of life by means of a paradoxical system of images. G. B. Shaw's plays were based on this method, whereby he strove to tear off the outward mask of respectability and expose the hypocrisy of the bourgeois system and its social contradictions. Heinrich Mann also made the grotesque a powerful instrument of his social criticism. He created a vast gallery of portraits of vicious German philistines, his crowning achievement being the ``loyal subject" Diederich Hessling, in whom he embodied in exaggerated form the all too real features characteristic of the mentality of the German burgher of the age of imperialism. In his novel The Head, which contained scathing criticism of German militarism, and the ultra-nationalism and aggressiveness of the German bourgeoisie, he abandoned superficial likeness and made his characters parodies of their type. Irony, grotesque and paradox also characterise the method of Anatole France, whose works crowned the development of West European nineteenth century critical realism and absorbed its ideas and social ideals.
Adopting the view of progress as ``the natural course of things" borrowed from Renan, Anatole France examined the changes this ``natural course" had wrought in the society of his age. While the idea of development characteristic of the preceding stage of critical realism was by no means alien to him, it appeared in his works in a much more complicated form from the addition of new ideas 185 typical of the philosophy of the turn of the century, by which he was strongly influenced. Various fallacious concepts of the nature of social development to which he adhered were also the result of the influence on him of the process of alienation.
Unlike his predecessors, who depicted the society and individuals of their age in minute detail, Anatole France preferred reflection to depiction as such, analytic study of manners to straightforward narration: he combined artistic presentation of reality with its philosophical interpretation, artistic imagery with the straightforward unadorned language of analytical philosophy, wise scepticism with the unassuming simplicity and native cunning of the born storyteller. These various elements were combined to produce his sparkling prose, full of irony, yet essentially sympathetic to man and people in general, and equally suited to a philosophical treatise, a satirical novel or a moralising novella. Anatole France's highly intellectual prose was infused with tremendous cultural content, and it was no accident that he attached such importance to questions of culture in the broadest and most universal meaning of the word. Witnessing the general decline of culture in the society of his age, the indifference of the bourgeoisie to culture as essentially hostile to its own narrow, selfish interests, Anatole France defended cultural values as the universal heritage of mankind from the primitivism of the bourgeois who was rapidly becoming a ``two-legged animal" (Maupassant), the consumer and purchaser of cultural values. France defended humanism as well as cultural values. However, the idea of humanism that Pushkin associated with the ideas of liberty and struggle for emancipation, was originally regarded as an independent idea, unconnected with the struggle for emancipation by Anatole France and other major twentieth century realists and even those connected with the democratic movements of their time. To give Anatole France his due, it must be said that in the course of his spiritual development he did gradually overcome the illusion that humanism belonged entirely to the realm of speculative thought. However, in his works connected with the circle of ideas that were most fully expressed in Le Jardin d'Epicure, he 186 treated humanism as a refuge of thought and culture rather than a banner of struggle and action. Early twentieth century philosophy in general tended to draw a line between action and speculation, between thought and deed. ``Pure thought" was scornful of prosaic reality, and the man of action who was cultivated in bourgeois literature was disdainful of thought. The refined aesthete Andre Gide contrasted ``pure thought" to ``pure action'', insisting that thought should not interfere with the solution of the practical problems of life and confining it to the sphere of speculation and abstraction, and using the theory of ``pure action" to justify individual arbitrariness, and later on even fascist aggressiveness.
Anatole France destroyed the artificial antimony between thought and deed. The venerable old humanist Sylvestre Bonnard commits a ``crime'' by official moral standards in order to save a man, while Monsieur Bergeret, a respectable Latin scholar of the armchair variety, a humanist through and through, first revolts against the routine of day-to-day life, and subsequently joins the social struggle against the clerical-nationalist-militarist conspiracy to seize the key positions in the Third Republic. Anatole France sought to combine humanism with social action, the struggle to liberate man from religious, nationalist and other prejudices. He presented the real contradictions inherent in the society of his time, and showed how the Church, Army and State served to defend not the interests of the nation and the masses, but the selfish interests of the ruling classes who speculated on the Stock Exchanges, waged bloody colonial wars and used bourgeois democracy to safeguard their own privileges. The injustice, unreason and cruelty he saw in society sometimes caused him to be assailed by pessimism and to doubt the possibility of changing human nature and society for the better. However, these conflicts in his mind could not blind him to the movement of history and make him abandon the quest for social forces and guiding ideas capable of liberating man from all prejudices and all forms of slavery. His tremendous historical perspicacity enabled him to see in socialism and the working class movement the necessary basis for action to promote the 187 welfare and emancipation of mankind. Connected as he was with the socialist movement in the early years of this century, it was only natural that he should have succumbed to the influence of some of the weaknesses that characterised it at that time. He was no revolutionary theoretician, and embraced socialism in the forms in which it was developing in most of the major capitalist countries. The opportunist, social-democratic nature of the socialist movement in the West led him to doubt the possibility of a complete transformation of society.
These doubts were expressed in his attempt to substitute the idea of historical rotation for the idea of development. In his major works, L'lle des pingouins, La revolte des anges and Dieux ont soif, France drew the conclusion that history repeats itself, and human development passes through the same vicious circle repeated over and over again. He based this conclusion on his study of the results of revolutions that occurred at various periods, and especially the French Revolution. No revolutionary upheaval in the past had changed decisively and fundamentally the conditions of human existence. Every time exploiter classes retained power and the masses were defeated despite unparalleled examples, of courage and self-sacrifice displayed in the struggle for freedom. If Victor Hugo in his Quatre vingt-treize stressed the heroic character of the French Revolution, and practically ignored the more prosaic Thermidore aspect, Anatole France took the opposite line in his Dieux ont soif, avoiding rhetoric and concentrating on the objective causes that provoked the events of the 9th of Thermidore and brought about the downfall of the Jacobins. He shows no great enthusiasm for the bourgeois revolution, for he saw that it merely involved the replacement of the power of the feudal lords with despotic rule of money. This is also the dominant idea in Satan's dream in La revolte des anges, where the author shows how the overthrow of one form of tyranny leads almost automatically to the triumph of another.
Yet France combined misconceptions of the prospects of historical development with scathing criticism of that 188 offspring of bourgeois revolution---bourgeois democracy. Only direct connection with the awareness of the masses could serve to free Anatole France and other critical realists of the time from their fallacious views of the prospects of social development. What he needed was not only a knowledge of the terrible conditions in which the masses lived, which he had, but also a knowledge of the potential creative powers of which the masses were the carriers, the ability to perceive the constructive element in the movement and struggle of the masses, that was capable of transforming the world. In short, what he lacked was that real understanding of the historical role of the masses that enabled Maxim Gorky to effect a qualitative change in the realist method. With a few exceptions, Anatole France never made the life of the masses the direct object of his attention: their interests and needs rather tended to be reflected indirectly in his works. Yet a sense of kinship with the masses, his inherent propensity as a humanist to assess life in terms of the interests of the masses, was the basis of his critical attitude to the bourgeois civilisation leading him to conclude that capitalist society was doomed. ``One must not doubt the future: it belongs to us,'' he wrote towards the end of his life, having assimilated the experience of the First World War and the October Revolution in Russia. ``The plutocracy will perish. The signs of destruction are already visible in its strong organism. It will perish because every caste regime is doomed to perish; the system of hire-labour will perish because it is unjust. It will perish, while still boasting of its power, just as slavery and serfdom have perished."^^1^^ This conclusion was objectively deduced from critical analysis of capitalist society. Anatole France's political views underwent considerable evolution in the years following the October Revolution, and he came to believe that mankind's future lay in Communism. Yet, as a writer he proved unable to portray in literature the movement of mankind toward Communism. His creative method just as Tolstoi's lacked the qualities which might have enabled _-_-_
~^^1^^ Anatole France's Preface to Jack London's Le talon de ler, Paris, 1933, p. 18.
189 him to reflect the new trends of historical development that were making themselves so powerfully felt in the twentieth century.The objective development of the productive forces of society created real conditions for man to start becoming a ``species being'', as Marx put it, and to no longer `` separate social power from himself as political power'', for socialism to be translated into reality, for what Marx termed true ``human emancipation" to put an end to man's alienation from his socio-productive force.
The transformation of capitalist society into a new type of society had begun. This process naturally found its reflection in art and literature. The time had come for critical realism to recognise the necessity for a change in existing social relations. It had amassed a vast quantity of facts showing that the social order based on private ownership was becoming outmoded and was at odds with the true interests and needs of man. But it was unable either to portray the forces capable of effecting, and indeed already preparing, the social changes that were in the making or to fully reveal the causes of the decline of capitalism and its inevitable collapse, and failed to perceive the actual prospects for the solution of the class conflicts of capitalism. It was inevitable in the very evolution of realism that it should give rise to a new creative method enabling it to take cognizance of and present the new factors at work in society that were preparing the reorganisation of the whole system of social relations on a socialist basis. The development of critical realism paved the way for a qualitative change in the realist method and led to the emergence of socialist realism. It should be stressed that this process did not represent a simple straightforward transition whereby critical realist tradition was simply developed and enriched, but involved important changes. Socialist realism inherited some, but not all, of the traditions of critical realism. As Lenin wrote in ``Critical Remarks on the National Question": ``The elements of democratic and socialist culture are present, if only in rudimentary form, in every national culture, since in every nation there are toiling and exploited masses, whose conditions of life inevitably give rise to 190 the ideology of socialism."^^1^^ These elements of democratic and socialist culture undoubtedly played a role in the development of the socialist awareness of the masses. They were present in the Weltanschauung of many great writers of the 19th and 20th centuries---Shelley, Heine, Morris, Tolstoi and Anatole France, to name the most outstanding in this respect. However, since they existed merely as tendencies, as aspects of the social views--- philosophical, political, ethical, or economic---held by critical realists, and not as the sum total or dominant feature of their whole outlook, they did not, and indeed could not, result in the creation of a new method.
The emergence of socialist realism is connected with a tremendous growth of the social self-awareness of the working class, and in turn presupposes full awareness by the writer of the historical mission of the proletariat. In other words, class plays the decisive role in the development of the new method, which involves the writer's adopting the standpoint of the revolutionary proletariat which carries out a social and cultural revolution. The writer has to identify his outlook wholly and completely with the outlook of the working class in their struggle and victory, to be able to respond to life's phenomena in their entirety in the socialist spirit of the revolutionary proletariat and to accept Communism as the real prospect of historical development. Naturally, a creative method is more than an outlook, but it is based on an outlook and embodies its features. Thus, socialist realism cannot be unless the writer shares the outlook of the revolutionary working class, in the case of capitalist countries, or the outlook of the working class that is the ruling class in socialist countries.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ [Gorky, et al.]Socialist realism was born in Russia. Centuries of autocratic government had led to the accumulation among the masses of tremendous revolutionary energy. Russian literature, with its legacy of heroic service to the masses paved the way for the emergence of the new realist method. Finally, the Russian masses produced a genius of the stature of Maxim Gorky. It was Gorky's works that _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 24.
191 marked the advent of a qualitatively new stage in the development of world literature, a stage corresponding to the socialist era in social relations.After the triumph of the October Revolution in Russia and the building of socialism, at the juncture when a new social reality made its appearance in the world, with concomitant new relations between man and society, a new social ethic, a new understanding of the social aims and tasks of art and literature, a new literary method corresponding to the historical conditions and the historicallyconditioned needs of the new society, socialist realism, began to develop. A similar process is to be observed in the people's democracies, where a new system of social relations fundamentally different from the capitalist, has emerged. Socialist realism is gaming ground in the capitalist countries, too, as the growth of the working class and democratic movement increases the influence of socialist ideology and culture. Aragon, Eluard, Nexo, Pratolini and Pablo Neruda---all writers with socialist views--- have been logically led to adopt the socialist realist method, since the new processes going on in society cannot be expressed and cognized within the framework of the old creative methods, including critical realism.
The basic features of socialist realism were already clearly manifest in the writings of Maxim Gorky, which organically combined universal, all-embracing criticism of moribund capitalism with passionate affirmation of the new socialist social order that came to replace it.
Gorky's universal criticism of capitalist society was based on comprehensive analysis and portrayal of the life and relations of its major classes. The whole vast, turbulent current of life in tsarist Russia, rent by irreconcilable contrasts and howling contradictions, reverberating with the warning sounds of the greatest revolution in history, flowed freely across the pages of Gorky's books. The human driftwood of the mighty Volga, the human wrecks, battered and broken by life in the capitalist towns, `` have-beens'', the traders and dealers forcing upon the wild, refractory country the harness of forced labour, practically slave labour, and having the presumption to claim that by their depredations they were performing a noble 192 mission and bringing progress to the country; the intellectuals alarmed by the thought of imminent revolution and boldly offering themselves to its cause in an orgy of ``love for the people''; ruined peasants, torn up by want from their tiny holdings and finding themselves become disinherited proletarians with disconcerting speed; wealthy peasants, guarding their barns and pantries with the fierceness of watchdogs; the provincial petty bourgeois, wallowing in a slough of mental torpor and vegetating in their stagnant backwaters; secret police agents, soldiers, and all kinds of defenders of the tottering establishment of the Russia of the landowners and bourgeoisie; revolutionary workers, engaged in mortal combat with the autocracy and the power of capital; vagrants, monks and intellectuals who were hiding from the vital issues of life behind a wall of fine phrases; seekers after truth and justice in a world of falsehood and injustice; people who had lost their resemblance to human beings in the fierce struggle for existence with no holds barred; meek philistines and heroes paving mankind's way to the future; the extraordinary beauty of life and its most sordid wretchedness---Gorky overlooked no one, turning his fearless, penetrating gaze on life's awesome and enchanting countenance. Gorky saw and portrayed the whole of Russia seething as the mighty cauldron of revolution came to the boil, at every level of society, in its historic hour, the hour of the formation of the self-awareness of the masses.
Gorky showed with tremendous courage and merciless truth the depths of human degradation and brutalisation brought on by capitalism. Where even Tolstoi hesitated and stopped short at the nakedness of human sufferings and the shamelessness of man's abasement, Gorky went boldly on ``to the end" (``The Watchman'', ``A Little Girl'', ``The Creepy-Crawlies" and ``Caramora''). Gorky presented the horrors of the human condition under capitalism through simple, everyday facts treated as an intrinsic part of the system. His descriptions of various forms of brutality and violence were not an end in themselves, but merely served to demonstrate the inhuman nature of society based on exploitation. Gorky showed that the brutalisation of the working man was the result of the unnatural __PRINTERS_P_193_COMMENT__ 13---0891 193 conditions in which he lived, while the boundless selfishness, greed and cruelty of the scions of the bourgeoisie, who would stop at nothing, not even crime nor the most immoral acts, to achieve their selfish aims, was but the natural expression of their class essence. For Mayakin, Vassa Zheleznova, Pyotr Artamonov, Dostigayev and other vultures, big and small, depicted by Gorky, there was not, nor could there be, any other law but personal gain, and awareness of the need to defend their personal interests made all the property owning classes automatically hostile to the masses, who were already ripe for making a bid for emancipation from the exploiter classes.
Gorky's heroes are always types, clearly expressing social class instincts and views. While portraying a character's individual features to the full, and refusing to reduce him to a social cipher, Gorky never overlooked his class essence. The outlooks of Boss, Bugrov or Mayakin are at once perfectly distinct and similar in that they are equally hostile to the masses. The division of society into rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed, was the natural order of things for Gorky's capitalists, which they would never allow to be changed without a fierce struggle. Their outlook being based on the instinct to conserve the existing order, they form a single social unit in the struggle of interests going on all the time in society.
Unlike the critical realists, Gorky did not limit himself to a statement of the existence of class struggle and its influence on individual members of society. He saw and depicted the natural consequences of the class struggle [or the fate of capitalist society as a whole. For the first time in world literature, in Gorky's works the prospects of social development as perceived subjectively by the writer coincided with the objective movement of history and social development, and indeed this is the essential feature of socialist realism.
Gorky did not need to find his way to the masses, he was himself of the masses. His critical realist contemporaries were clearly aware of this feature of his art, something totally new in world literature, Stefan Zweig was quite right when he noted that in Gorky's works the people itself acquired the gift of speech. ``From out of its own 194 flesh it created itself a mouth, and of its own speech its own spokesman, out of its own midst a man, and this man, this writer, its own writer and champion, it brought forth from its gigantic womb that he might make known to all mankind the life of the Russian people, the Russian proletariat, the humiliated, the oppressed and the persecuted."^^1^^ Gorky's social views, his whole Weltanschauung, enabled him to see capitalist society not only irom within, but from without too, from the standpoint of the future that was relentlessly approaching, heavy with revolution and the collapse of capitalism. As a revolutionary writer, standing outside the system of the bourgeois consciousness, free from the illusions born of bourgeois ideology and the process of alienation, Gorky revealed the real contradictions of the capitalist world and was able to submit all the principles underlying bourgeois society to truly universal criticism. Gorky's historical perspective w^as based on his understanding of the inevitability of the replacement of capitalist social relations by other. Unlike the historicism of the classics of critical realism---and this was a basic feature of the new creative method---Gorky's historicism was not limited to the portrayal of characters and types in accordance with objective historical truth, which was the great achievement of realist art as a whole. Gorky, for whom both as a revolutionary thinker and a writer the idea of development was organic, portrayed life, and thus history, in ceaseless movement. He portrayed not only the concrete forms and aspects of its movement visible to his contemporaries, but also the direct natural results of this movement, which was paving the way for the final triumph of the working people. That is why historical optimism is a basic feature of Gorky's works and of the new creative method, an optimism based not on the writer's own subjective views and sentiments, but deriving from perception of the objective process of social development, an optimism of a new type, that did not involve glossing over the contradictions and tragic aspects of life, as bourgeois liberal thought is inclined to do.
_-_-_~^^1^^ Stefnn Zweig, Begegnungen mil Menscher Bilchern Stadten, Berlin, 1956, S. 98.
13*
195Gorky's optimism was marked by a straightforward, sober view of life and people, a refusal to ignore the tragedy and drama that constantly arose in and from social reality. Behind the chaotic course of events, all the various manifestations of life's cruelty, injustice, misery and suffering, Gorky perceived the relentless movement of cause and effect paving the way for the elimination of misery and suffering from man's life. It was Gorky's kind of optimism, the new principles of portraying reality the founder of socialist realism introduced to literature, that engendered the essential optimism of Fadeyev's The Rout, Vishnevsky's Optimistic Tragedy and the best works of Soviet literature about the war. It is from Gorky's kind of optimism that socialist realist writers in the capitalist countries have derived the courage with which they portray the horrors of capitalist exploitation and the enslavement of man by the bourgeois system.
The new historical perspective that is to be found in the works of Gorky predetermined the new kind of causality that is a feature of socialist realism. Take Thomas Mann's portrayal of the decline and fall of the bourgeois family in The Buddenbrooks. He deliberately equated the fate of his burghers and the fate of bourgeois society as a whole in analysing the objective causes that led to the ruin of the Buddenbrooks, and ascribed a secondary importance to the social aspects of the process. He described the ruin of the Buddenbrook business and dynasty with tremendous artistic skill but confined the narrative almost entirely to the sphere of family ties and the personal lives of his heroes.
Gorky, on the other hand, in The Artamonovs, also describes the decline and fall of a powerful family of entrepreneurs. But in presenting the downfall of the Artamonov business, the business, that is, of the whole Russian bourgeoisie and the social system they support, he adduces a vast mass of facts drawn from the social history of the age. For Gorky the degeneration of the Artamonovs, the weakening of their ``blood'', is a secondary factor. More important for him by far in determining their fate is the mass movement. Revolution is the basic cause of the downfall of the Russian bourgeoisie, and it sealed the fate 196 of the Artamonovs, the Bulychovs, the Dostigayevs and other scions of the bourgeoisie.
Thus, in the new creative method, the investigation and interpretation of the causal links operating in society involves determination and clarification of their social na ture.
In analysing and depicting the life of bourgeois society, its inherent contradictions, Gorky felt bound to define the motive forces of social development. Unlike bourgeois ideologists, who take a metaphysical view of the historical process, Gorky saw the sources of class antagonisms to lie in the material conditions of life, regarding the masses as the motive force of social development. In Gorky's works---and this is an important feature of socialist realism---the masses are presented as the force that makes history and produces all spiritual and material wealth. This makes his works a real encyclopaedia of the life of the masses, providing an exhaustive account of both their everyday life of need and deprivations, and their heroism and creative potential. For Gorky regarded the consciousness of the masses to be a major factor in the creation of culture. He pointed out how the powerful, inexhaustible spiritual and creative resources of the masses found reflection in the gigantic images, created by popular fantasy, such as Gilgamesh, Prometheus, Mikula Selyaninovich, Vassilisa the All-Knowing, Faust and Thyl Ulenspiegel. In the years preceding the October Revolution Gorky insisted that the culture of the future would rest on popular culture, and in the years following the Revolution, he worked with equal persistence to help create that culture of the future by participating in the practical organisation and effectuation of the cultural revolution.
It was this new understanding of the historical role and mission of the masses that determined Gorky's new portrayal of the character of men from the masses, fundamentally different from that to be found in the works of the critical realists. Men and women of the people in Gorky's works are highly ``intellectual'', not in the sense that they are ``well-read'' and ``educated'', which is so often confused with intellectual ability, but in that they have a keen 197 mind when it comes to finding their way in the complex situations in which life abounds, and in their attitudes to life. Gorky's heroes, in their relationships with one another and society, in their attempts to determine and find their place in society, always exercise their active probing minds. They not only ponder over questions of love, death and conscience, and the work at hand; they also think about life and society, trying to work out for themselves where they are heading. Gorky's heroes, all kinds of different people he has met in the course of his long wanderings through the towns and villages of Russia, are all the time pondering seriously on how life can be changed and in what direction. They are constantly straining under the burden of exploitation, oppression and coercion, and they understand that it is impossible for life in Russia to continue as it is. They slowly but surely become aware of the fact that it is necessary and inevitable that the existing order should be changed, and the best of them pass from spontaneous protest, spontaneous rejection of social injustice, to the higher level of conscious protest against capitalism, joining the ranks of active opponents of the bourgeois system.
Gorky presents the formation of the self-awareness oi the masses above all as a process, a complex, tortuous process, starting from a correct understanding of the objective position of man in capitalist society and passing through the overcoming of illusions engendered by the existing order, and instilled by traditions and human alienation, to finally arrive at inner liberation from the private ownership mentality and egocentrism and fusion of the individual interest with the common interests of the working masses struggling for their emancipation from capitalist enslavement. Basically, the most important thing for Gorky is the theme of man's emancipation from all forms of spiritual and material slavery. Gorky's tremendous interest in man, which was expressed in his very first works and the anthropomorphism characteristic of his whole literary output, derives directly and is inseparable from the revolutionary, emancipatory nature of his world-view. While in the bourgeois consciousness anthropocentrism was the outcome of greatly increased 198 alienation both among individuals and between individuals and society, Gorky's anthropomorphism reflected the process of overcoming those objective conditions that gave rise to alienation and associated illusions. Gorky contrasted the freedom and beauty of man, the lord of the universe, with the miserable existence of man under capitalism. In order to become the real master of his destiny, man must struggle for freedom. Gorky portrays a whole host of characters representing in vastly different ways the awakening of the self-awareness of the masses, from those heroes like Smury, Konovalov and Gvozdyev, who are constantly pondering over the meaning of life, to those who have already raised the banner of revolution. Gorky's revolutionaries differ greatly as to their level of social self-awareness. Alongside Nilovna, moved by her maternal instinct and sense of justice intrinsic to a worker to embrace the revolutionary cause, we have her son Pavel, dedicated working-class revolutionary, one of those who stood in the vanguard of the Bolshevik struggle. Along with Nil, opposing the will of the working class and faith in its ultimate triumph to the will of the ruling exploiter class, we have the Bolshevik Kutuzov, a man armed with a mature mind and vast knowledge and experience, who crushes his spiritual and political opponents with the strength of his ideas and manages to smash the complex phraseology whereby the bourgeois intellectuals attempted to protect themselves from the inevitability of revolution. Gorky did not reveal all the aspects of the revolutionary at one go, but did so gradually, widening and deepening his portrayal as he himself gradually, with the expansion of the revolutionary struggle, came to know the typical features and qualities of revolutionaries. Gorky---and this is another major feature of socialist realism---attributed tremendous importance to the matter of creating convincing images of those in the forefront of the freedom struggle, rightly considering them to be the supreme expression of the finest qualities of the masses. The ideals of the critical realists were expressed in their moral standpoint, and only rarely in positive characters, and even then these usually lacked power. This was the case with Balzac's Benassis, Tolstoi's Karatayev, 199 __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2007.03.30) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ Dostoyevsky's Alyosha Karamazov and Father Zosima and so on. In Gorky's aesthetics, however, the aesthetics of a new type of realism, the problem of creating the image of a hero possessed of that exemplary moral strength which would help mould the character of the participants in the struggle of the masses was a problem of primary importance.
Gorky's greatest achievement was his portrayal of Lenin, the leader of the Revolution, something that could only have been accomplished with the help of the new creative method, which made it possible to make an objective appreciation of historical phenomena in their real relationship with social life. Gorky perceived and depicted Lenin in revolutionary perspective, as a creative person, transforming the world, as a thinker, possessed of remarkable historical perception and acumen, as a man of action, inseparably linked with the people, and able to sense the slightest motion of the popular masses, and finally as a statesman, realising exactly where and how to lead the masses.
Gorky's portrayal of men and women of the people was remarkable for its completeness and vitality, and wealth of feelings and ideas. Gorky was a consummate master of psychological analysis, and in many ways carried forward the Tolstoian tradition. However, for Gorky, psychological analysis was more than a means of criticism, more than a surgeon's scalpel dissecting the human soul and exposing all that was hidden under all manner of masks and poses, for him it was also a means of presenting the richness of human nature, the great variety of human sentiments and thoughts about life and the world. Gorky used psychological analysis to reveal the latent wealth and power of the mind and spirit of the ordinary people prevented from manifesting themselves properly by the unnatural social conditions. In portraying characters of the masses Gorky constantly stressed not only the vast reserve of practically untapped moral energy, but also the vast creative potential. The people of the masses are united by strong ties of brotherhood and fellowship, by gradually perceived common goals, an essential prerequisite for revolution. He shows how capitalism disunites people, in 200 the sense that it ``desocialises the personality'', as he put it, but at the same time serves to produce solidarity among the masses. This new collective spirit that had arisen among the masses could only be perceived and expressed by an exponent of the new creative method. Gorky shows the manifold ways in which the creative energy of the masses is revealed---now in spontaneous outbursts of fury and revolt, often reckless and foolhardy, against the bourgeois order, the moribund establishment protecting the rights and interests of the possessor classes, now in purposeful constructive activity, in moments when the people begin to work freely, selflessly engaging in creative work. The poetisation of labour---a new, major feature of socialist realism---made its first appearance in Gorky's works. Gorky showed how natural it is to work and create, and what great joy creative labour can bring to free men who have thrown off the capitalist yoke.
Man cannot acquire true freedom without freeing himself from those views, habits and illusions that capitalist society instils in him. For Gorky it was perfectly obvious that the main feature of the bourgeois outlook was individualism, resulting from a rift and antithesis between man and society. He made a penetrating study of the process by which illusory views of life arise in the consciousness of people who perceive themselves as individuals alienated from the objective world, which appears to the self-centered individual as a mesh of insoluble mysteries and hostile forces. Gorky devoted two extremely important works to the problem of alienation, the stories Blue Life and On Cockroaches. The illusory perceptual anomalies that afflict the heroes of these stories---Konstantin Mironov, returning to his normal routine of philistine existence and money-grubbing after a violent spiritual crisis, and Platon Yeryomin, dying ``on his feet"---are the direct result of the abnormal, unjust social order.
The heroes' illusions and misconceptions as regards the world, life and other people are the consequence of selfimmurement from the processes going on in life around them and complete absorption in their own personal world. Gorky made a comprehensive analysis of the social 201 essence of this phenomenon in Klim Samgin where he portrayed and submitted to universal criticism the most typical aspects of the bourgeois mentality.
Gorky embodied in this, his last novel, a whole complex, eventful period of history! beginning in the years leading up to the First Russian Revolution culminating in the events of February 1917, a period including the years of reaction and the years of the upswing of the revolutionary movement, marked by the ideological collapse of the autocracy and the destruction of the illusions of Russian bourgeois democracy, a period that abounded in grandiose class battles, violent strikes, the burning of landowners' estates, the brutal mowing down of defenceless demonstrators in Palace Square of the imperial capital that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, the adventurism of the social-revolutionaries, the provocations of tsarist secret police, selfless, consistent agitation by the Bolsheviks at factories and plants, a period of ideological ferment and vacillation among the intelligentsia, its division along the lines of political sympathies and antipathies.
Gorky omitted no detail of the social setting. It was all there: merchants and bureaucrats, Narodniks and Marxists, the students and their search for the true values, the aberrations of decadent art, the revolutionary struggle and the sectarian distractions of the intellectuals, rejecting revolution, the activities of secret police agents, and so on and so forth. The completeness with which Gorky portrayed the social environment enabled him to give an exhaustive presentation of the intellectual and spiritual life of Russian society on the eve of the revolution. The tone was set by the mounting tide of revolution, which made itself felt in every sphere of social relations. Its radiance lit up the furthest recesses of life and of the bourgeois consciousness, showing up for what they were really worth---all the pathetic efforts to postpone the hour of truth in the sphere of spiritual values made by the bourgeoisie and its offspring---half-baked democrats, cowardly liberals, newly-baked Nietzscheans, apostles of pure beauty and art for art's sake, energetic entrepreneurs and provincial thinkers, all out to probe the immutability of the existing order of things.
202Simple truths were taken wholesale and, eviscerated of their true content, woven into a sticky web of words, concepts and phrases: the masses should be loved as the carriers of divinity, but they were not yet ready for freedom and needed guidance and protection; revolution was necessary, but the masses were too ignorant to be entrusted with the task of carrying it out; people were estranged from one another, and this was an eternal, immutable law of existence, and so on and so forth. Such false ideas, corrupting heart and mind, became part of Klim Samgin and those like him, and he was no longer capable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood, or good and evil. Spiritual and moral values had become confused and devaluated in his mind, and while guessing that underlying the ``system of phrases" in which people envelop themselves, underlying all the falsehood on which human relationships, love, the family and friendship, were based was fear of the truth of that which was approaching, fear of an uprising of the masses, fear of revolution, Klim Samgin nevertheless tried to put off that fateful moment for he was hostile to it. Klim and those like him are unable to make a correct assessment of the historical prospects or the real position that obtained as a result of the developing revolutionary situation. Isolated from the real needs of the masses, centered entirely on themselves, they embrace with open arms all sorts of illusions, which have one thing in common--- they are all of a protective, anti-revolutionary character.
Historical truth, the totality of real relationships, can only be grasped by the revolutionary consciousness, the consciousness of the masses. Peasants and revolutionaries, workers and progressive revolutionary intellectuals look the truth of the age straight in the eye. In the course of the revolutionary struggle, in the struggle with the bourgeoisie and tsarism, man takes cognizance of the tendencies of history and social development, and by recreating and transforming the world, becomes master of his alienated socio-political force. Kutuzov understands perfectly well what is going on in life and what the outcome of the struggle between the working masses and the bourgeoisie 203 will be. In this lies his strength and the guarantee of victory.
Gorky also submitted to extensive criticism the ethical principles of bourgeois society. His art, glorifying the emancipation of man, is fundamentally humanitarian. Gorky's humanism, as distinct from the reflective humanism of many of the critical realists, and above all Tolstoi, is active. It is the culminating point of the vast humanitarian tradition of Russian literature beginning from Pushkin, who first linked humanism with the struggle for freedom. The principle underlying Gorky's humanism is activity directed towards human welfare, activity designed to help man practically, activity to destroy unjust social institutions and free man from suffering. Gorky invariably took as his point of departure man's real interests, and it is from this that his humanism derives its power. This humanism determined the particular kind of epic principle in his works.
Gorky is a writer of epic caste not only by virtue of his tendency to write works of vast scope, or even because the underlying theme of his work was the revolutionary transformation of bourgeois society and the growth of the social self-awareness of the masses, but above all because of his great love for the physical world, for the beauty of the tangible fabric of life. His palette contains thick, rich colours. His prose is full of remarkably expressive and strikingly authentic details. Yet despite this love of the concrete, physical fabric of reality and his comprehensive portrayal of the social forces at work in society, the human personality is never lost sight of, never swamped in the narrative, and a marked lyric strain runs throughout his works. A major feature of Gorky's works is fusion of the lyrical and epic elements, to form a synthetic whole. In his autobiographical trilogy, this synthesis of the two vastly different principles enabled him to present a large variety of people, a complex, comprehensive picture of life, and reveal the conflict between different social classes while at the same time creating a lyrical hero of giant spiritual stature.
Gorky was able to perceive and distinguish all the various social forces acting and conflicting in the society 204 of his time, and saw their struggle in revolutionary perspective. The new creative method that was born in the works of Gorky opened up practically boundless opportunities for synthetic portrayal of the contradictions of life and the complex processes that go on in the human soul. Gorky always held comprehensive depiction of human thoughts, feelings and aspirations to be a major aim of literature. The new creative method enabled a writer to perceive the relationship between the individual and society in its true light and present all the manifestations of the human personality in their entirety. The new method, exploring the relationship between man and society, enabled a writer to produce an epic of socialist society, to investigate and capture the complex historical processes going on in the new society, its struggle with the forces of the past, its affirmation of socialist relations. The founder of socialist realism did not only develop the new method through his own creative writings. On the basis of the experience of the young Soviet literature, he made a tremendous contribution to the elaboration of the aesthetic principles of socialist realism. The new method he created made possible the depiction in literature of the gigantic transformations and changes that have taken place in the world since the October Socialist Revolution.
205 __ALPHA_LVL1__ CONTEMPORARY REALISM __ALPHA_LVL2__ [introduction.]Every major change in the form and content of literature is conditioned by a major change in social life. In the twentieth century, the course of historical development has been exerting constant pressure on realist literature, irrespective of its class nature and origins, to search for ways of achieving a synthetic portrayal of our life and age, that is of understanding and presenting its historical content.
The October Revolution in Russia, that major upheaval of our age, rent asunder the old order based on private ownership and opened up real prospects for the peoples to advance towards the new, socialist order. It marked the great turning point, the beginning of the transition from capitalism to socialism, a process involving colossal difficulties, fierce class struggle, and constant onslaught by the possessor classes on the masses who were rising to conscious historical activity.
For realism the unsoundness of the capitalist system began to become patently evident, appearing as the basic fact of historical development in our age. Some writers were able to fully grasp all that this implied and openly embraced the ideas of revolution. But many major critical realists only came to recognise the truth as a result of a long and often painful process of reassessment of established views. In art and literature as a whole, the question of the historical existence of capitalism, the nature of social changes afoot, the direction in which history is 206 moving, man's place in the changing world, his destiny in modern society which is in a state oi revolutionary transformation, naturally became the main object of attention, and was reflected, either intentionally or spontaneously, in the works of artists and writers of the most various trends. Literature and all other forms of social ideology recognised the need for a synthetic perception of history in the making. This is why bourgeois social thought tried to develop a universal conception of life that would explain the ``secret'' of human relationships in the modern world (although this ``secret'' had been revealed long since by Marxism) and the nature of the relationship between man and the world of natural phenomena.
The most common feature of modern philosophical theories, for all their essential differences, is undoubtedly a gravitation towards synthesis. Freudism elaborated a universal conception of culture where everything is derived from sexual urges. In their philosophy of culture, the Freudists tried to explain the motives of human behaviour and the nature of social conflicts in terms of basic biological factors and evolve a system for controlling man's individual and social behaviour. The tendency towards a synthetic interpretation of the world is even more manifest in the views of the British and American neo-realists of the cosmological trend and especially in Whitehead's activistic philosophy of process, which regards life and all that exists as a process, where the individual is part of the whole and at the same time, a condensation of the whole. On the basis of this view of things, Whitehead developed what he considered to be a comprehensive, all-inclusive philosophical model of the world, history, sociology, ethics and aesthetics, all based, in the final analysis, on God, and interpreted accordingly not only natural scientific, ``pan-physical'' processes, but also questions of practical politics. Whitehead regarded history as ``adventures of ideas'', that is as a process of changing human views of the world, society and God, changing and moving history itself. He held that ideas, rather than material factors underlay historical progress and tried to develop a system of views more appropriate to our age than the collection of old concepts evolved back in the 207 nineteenth century. Whitehead realised that unless the old society was provided with new ideas, and unless it changed its old methods of controlling the masses, sooner or later the passions, desires and feelings of the masses would burst forth in revolt and the result might well be a socialist revolution. He himself was a supporter of liberal evolutionism in politics, and held that it was preferable to satisly certain of the most pressing needs of the masses than to radically alter the existing order.
Neo-Thomism is another philosophical movement that makes a claim to universality and is as conservative in the original meaning of the word. The neo-Thomists posit that God is the all-embracing essence of the world and eternal existence, and every mortal creature is comprehended in the essence of God. Despite their declared belief in free will, they are in fact denying it, since, according to their theory, man, like everything else in life, depends on divine will.
The neo-Thomists reject the view of history as a senseless, chaotic, and aimless movement of heterogeneous forces, an uncontrolled stream of events, as it was presented by Theodor Lessing, author of Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen which caused a furore in the twenties, and by other representatives of ``the philosophy of life'', who denied causality and interdependence of historical phenomena. On the contrary, they hold that God organises, synthesises and guides history towards some goal, and that this goal, which may be cognized through faith and revelation, has nothing at all to do with the social ideal affirmed in life by revolutionary socialist thought.
In art and literature the tendency towards a synthetic comprehension of reality exerted a strong influence--- sometimes fruitful, sometimes destructive---on form, and served to somewhat erode the boundaries between the different arts. This was also promoted by several new factors, such as the development of the cinema, whose aesthetic idiom draws on the theatre and makes use of words, music, colour, and the visual image, as well as devices from painting and narrative prose.
The synthetic nature of the cinema, now universally recognised, was realised early on by some of its most 208 outstanding exponents. After the appearance of the colour film, the major Soviet film director Alexander Dovzhenko wrote: ``The tremendous advantages of the colour film over black and white are as obvious as the prospects for its development are unlimited. If we called the cinema before the appearance of colour a synthetic art, now that it has received new expressive means, including the vast possibilities of the art of painting, this definition will become applicable in full measure."^^1^^
The specific features of the cinema, such as dynamic movement of the subject in time and space, free transposition of events and the fact of there being no obligation to adhere to strict chronological sequence, the frequent change of angle of vision and distance, the possibilities of contrasting episodes and grouping facts in montage has had a noticeable influence on modern prose.
There has been considerable mutual influence between other genres, for instance, poetry and prose. Andrei Bely began to combine the techniques of prose and poetry back at the turn of the century, and there are strong poetic undercurrents in his prose giving it an added expressiveness and producing inner rhyme, alliteration and the organisation of the period on the poetic pattern, the latter thus acquiring the independence and emotional completeness of verse. The influence of poetry is strong in the works of several modern writers. Some of them, like Sean O'Casey, combine features of poetry and prose to evolve a highly original, striking and expressive style, rich in rhythmic transitions, brilliant alliteration, internal rhyming and assonance in lyrical or solemn passages, and lyric poems in prose included here and there as emotional highlights. Prose, in its turn, has been energetically invading poetry. Many poets have begun to feel the classical forms and metres inadequate for conveying the rhythms of modern life and have thus resorted to prose verse.
This is true of a number of major revolutionary poets, such as Gastev, Berthold Brecht, Eluard, Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet and Miezelaitis.
_-_-_~^^1^^ A. Dovzhenko, ``The Colour'', The Art of Cinema, Moscow 1948 Nos. 2-3, p. 6 (in Russ.).
__PRINTERS_P_209_COMMENT__ 14---0891 209Partly under the influence of the Walt Whitman tradition, the new prose verse has gradually been adopted by British and American poets, from Lee Masters in the twenties, through W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Carl Sundburg, Archibald MacLeish, down to the younger generation of poets, including Allen Ginsberg. French poetry, developed independently but in the same direction, modern exponents including Jean Cayrol and SaintJohn Perse.
In prose verse, the tendency is to abandon straightforward prosody and rhyme for a language that outwardly (but only outwardly) resembles prose, poetic metre being replaced, as the cementing principle, by melodic rhythm. However, the image in prose verse remains strictly poetic,, without expansion into detail that is characteristic of narrative prose. This form is perfectly viable since it enables the writer to base his poem on a sequence of associations and develop the poetic idea in a strictly logical fashion. It also opens up wide possibilities for epic and lyrical development of the theme.
While the mutual influence of prose and poetry has not greatly affected the structure of the artistic image, the opposite is true of attempts to associate arts with such vastly different expressive techniques as sculpture and painting. In their attempt to achieve a synthetic representation of the world, many painters have resorted to a combination of techniques and devices of these highly dissimilar arts. Cezanne who devoted a great deal of thought to the question of the relationship between volume and space in a painting, conceived the idea of presenting nature by means of the cylinder, the ball and the cone, that is by means of three dimensional geometrical figures, believing that in this way it would be possible to fully capture the physical depth of nature. He himself only took the first steps in this direction, but his ideas fell on wellprepared ground, and were taken up and developed by many other artists, especially the Cubists---Gris, Braque, and above all Picasso, who, quite unconcerned about the consequences, set about dissecting the world into geometric elements attempting to capture their volume, to depict all sides of a model at once and present it to the 210 viewer from every angle simultaneously. Basically, Picasso was trying to do the work of the sculpture. He produced paintings where the natural proportions of objects were distorted, all their sides and surfaces being superimposed upon one another or crossing one another at various angles.
Picasso's painting, like that of the other Cubists, deformed and distorted the real appearance of objects. Twentieth century bourgeois art has been going much further along this road of distorting reality, representing it not as it actually appears, in its materiality, but through various abstractions. This perception and representation of the world and the development of life is becoming a characteristic of the modern bourgeois consciousness, which attempts both to embrace the whole of reality and at the same time to break it down into certain abstract elements. This is expressed, for example, in Husserl's phenomenology, where the world is seen as a collection of ideal substances, each of which can be denned and determined by logical analysis. The adherents of ``creative evolution'', notably Bergson, held that rational (non-intuitive) perception, being analytic by nature, splits the stream of events into separate concepts, transforming the essence of things into symbols. Bergson's views served to pave the way for the penetration of abstraction into art. Bergson considered rational thought to be capable of distilling a phenomenon from its concrete nature and viewing it as an abstraction. An example of this is a film, which transmits the impression of movement by the sequence of immobile images. In order to reproduce the motion of the world latent in it, writes Bergson in Creative Evolution, it is necessary to extract ``from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement, abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph."^^1^^ By introducing the concepts ``impersonal'', ``abstract'', ``movement in general'', Bergson thereby _-_-_
~^^1^^ Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, London, 1913, p. 322.
__PRINTERS_P_212_COMMENT__ 14* 211 opened up to art the possibility of conveying not real phenomena but ciphers of these phenomena. As for the film, it does not ``extract'' some impersonal, abstract movement from a sum of static images, but combines these images, imparting to them a live causal relationship by means of movement, by means, that is, of a real process....However, the tendency towards an all-embracing depiction of the world, so strong in twentieth century art, did not, and indeed could not, lead to the emergence of syncretism, since art in our age is not developing on a homogeneous social foundation. All one can say is that in certain arts there has been a growing desire to achieve a synthesis of reality. But while revolutionary democratic art makes, as Aragon put it, the ``real world" the basis of artistic synthesis of life, bourgeois art bases its attempts to achieve a synthetic depiction of life upon the alienated individual consciousness. For this reason all attempts of bourgeois social thought and art to achieve a synthesis of the contemporary world only resulted in pseudo-synthesis.
For example, the Freudian philosophy of culture, with its claims to universality and to an exhaustive explanation of the facts of history and sociology, is based on an extremely meagre unhistorical concept of man as an unchanging and unchangeable biological creature, whose instincts, physical desires, lusts and neuroses are supposed to determine the whole course of history, the main features of modern civilisation and the nature of contemporary social conflicts. Not only does Freudism fail to explain our age, either the nature of its contradictions or the meaning and content of the changes in progress: it deliberately reduces the real variety of life to the narrow, limited outlook of the individual, a creature assailed by fears and moved by aggressive urges, giving a free rein to his animal lusts and instincts and dark passions, a slave to a possessive, egoistic ethic.
Neo-realism, a highly respectable philosophy leaning heavily on the natural sciences and mathematics, won great popularity in the West by virtue of its apparent objectivity. Yet the explanation it offered of the phenomena of the material world was based on the identification of the real object of reality, its abstract idea, with individual 212 perception of it. Basically, the neo-realists were returning to some of the concepts of idealist Naturphilosophie.
Although he insisted that he was regarding nature as a continuous, incessant process, in terms of duration, Whitehead was in fact unable to perceive things in their collective unity, since he extended the atomisation of his own perception to the whole universe, dividing it into separate events, thereby viewing collective unity and ``duration'' as the sum of separate events. Whitehead, like the other neo-realists, equated perception with the object of cognition, and regarded the real world as the product of the human perception: he was thus subscribing to the subjective idealist views and, like Bergson, making intuition the instrument of cognition. Whitehead's philosophy of the nature of things was thus built on very shaky foundations of the alienated individual perception, detached from live connections with the world, and was thus unable to produce a synthesis of the world. As for the systems of the neo-Thomists and other fideists (Hartmann, Alexander, Haberlin and others), they demonstrated great flexibility and a capacity to adapt to the social requirements of present-day capitalist society, and altered the nature of their arguments to correspond to changes in social conditions.
Neo-Thomist philosophy recognised the reality of the world, but investigated not that reality which exists objectively, but the strange pseudo-reality formed of ``actual'' and ``potential'' existence, invented by the isolated, selfcentered consciousness of the alienated individual. This latter ``reality'' admits of the existence of a static immortal soul, as the basis of human nature. This concept of ``reality'' admits of revelation and various other concepts that belong more to the dark ages of theology, scholasticism and demonology than to our age of great social transformation and scientific discovery. The fact that the neoThomists accept the reality of the material world does not mean that they explain the essence of existence by material factors. For them, material factors are of secondary importance, since God is regarded as the origin of all things. Thus, they hold that man's perception of things can never be complete since man perceives not the real 213 essence of things or processes but merely their likeness formed in his mind, so that he approaches cognition of the truth by way of these simulacra. Perception is never complete for the added reason that it is independent of time and space, that it is ``pure'' and non-concrete, and, we might well add, thereby unable to take possession of its object. Thus, despite the fact that it is the avowed aim of neo-Thomism to examine and perceive reality, in actual fact it is powerless to do so.
Realist writers who are in some way or other under the influence of the Catholic outlook---writers like Mauriac, Bernanos or Boll---are thereby limited and hindered to a degree from perceiving the real conflicts of life. Their works, while giving a largely authentic panorama of personal and social life (Mauriac less than Boll, since he mainly confines himself to the bourgeois family), nevertheless tend to treat social conflicts as a struggle between ``pure'' good and evil, eviscerated of their real social content.
The basic theme of the works of Mauriac---an extremely profound writer in the realist tradition, whose ``novels of character" reveal an outlook divergent from the official Catholic set of standards---is the struggle against all manifestations of evil. The aesthetic ideal underlying his works is born of the desire to free man from all the baseness and evil in which he wallows in everyday life. Mauriac has never acknowledged that man's moral code of behaviour can only be changed as a result of changes in the social conditions in which he lives, so that in this sense he was and remains within the framework of the traditional bourgeois philosophy. Nevertheless, his ethical ideal calls forth extremely pungent criticism of evil, which he presents most vividly, sometimes investigating and depicting quite hair-raising details as in Therese Desqueyroux, where a young woman who has made a marriage of convenience slowly poisons the husband she does not love or Sagouin, describing how a wretched, ugly child perishes as a result of the cruelty and callousness of a bourgeois family. Mauriac has a wealth of realistic detail to build up the mundane dramas of mundane bourgeois existence--- the collapse of family ties, and the destruction of the 214 personality through egoism and self-interest, the gradual erosion of the better aspects of a man's nature by the overwhelming urge for personal gain, the numbing of the heart, personal despotism, secret crime---and produces a picture of striking power and authenticity. However, in all cases these are purely human dramas, brought about because people had failed to apply the ethical principles of Christian morality, and this makes Mauriac's realism narrow both in the subject matter embraced and the conclusions drawn. The shrewd observations of life his works contain constantly seem to strain at the confines of his ethical ideal towards a wider system of views on the sources of human misfortunes and the ways of putting them right. But Mauriac has never taken this step.
In the case of Boll, his sharing of the sentiments of the democratic strata in West Germany, his irreconcilable hostility to all the consequences of nazism, his clear memories of the days of the national disaster and his opposition to neo-nazism and reaction, gained the upper hand over his Catholic illusions making them hardly noticeable, so that his works reflect the real conflicts of life and genuine social contradictions.
Genuine realist literature could not derive sufficient sustenance from the views and sentiments expressed in neo-Thomism or other religious outlooks on life.
There is another reason why the tendencies towards synthesis in the bourgeois consciousness were destined to be unfruitful, and that is that the anthropocentric and anthropological approach to interpretation of the processes of life, asserted itself in new forms. Typical in this respect are the sociological conceptions of Max Scheler whose philosophical views along with those of Husserl had a marked influence on existentialism. Scheler foresaw the growing role of elitism in capitalist society, and thus regarded the problem of ``leadership'' and ``following'' as the basic problem of sociology and the philosophy of history. He sought to justify the rule of a minority over the majority, the rule of an ``elite'' over the masses, by the so-called ``law of small numbers" invented for precisely that purpose by the Austrian sociologist Wieser. In Die Vorbilder und die Fuhrer, Scheler wrote: ``The law of 215 leadership (Fiihrerschaft) and following, or rather, the law whereby any group, whatever it might call itself---family, tribe, clan, people, nation, commune, cultural circle, class, professional association, estate, robber band gang, of thieves---falls into two parts, the minority that rules, and the large part that follows, is a natural and universal law of sociology. ...'' Further on he says: ``The group as such reveals a strong analogy to a living organism. . . . Each multicellular organism has vital organs of different value: there is a hierarchy of leading, dominant and subordinate, performing organs and functions."^^1^^ Since Scheler regards the division of society into a ruling elite and a subordinate mass to be an organic law of existence, depending neither on the class structure of society nor on consequent inequality, he holds that there must be basic carriers of permanent qualities of representatives of the ruling hierarchy. Hence Scheler's idea that anthropological qualities fall into definite categories which he views as the motive principle of social progress and an expression of ``the eternal and immutable" in man himself. ``Here is a possible scheme of models, or as I would put it, archetypes: the saint, the genius, the hero, the leading mind of civilisation, the practical man."^^2^^ Scheler holds that these models exist in life as soul models, predetermining certain forms of human behaviour valid in all times and ages. However, while attributing great importance to the hero type, Scheler in fact associates heroic qualities with the type of man produced by bourgeois society. ``These are the main types of hero---the statesman, the military leader and the coloniser,"^^3^^ he writes.
Echoes of Scheler's classification are to be found in the writings of numerous modern bourgeois philosophers and sociologists, while the idea that qualities of human nature are unchanging and immutable is a hallmark of the contemporary non-socialist consciousness and is frequently to be met with in art and literature.
This idea gives rise to an abstract view of human nature, entailing loss of contact with reality and an exaggerated _-_-_
~^^1^^ M. Scheler, Schriften aus dem NachJass, Bd. I, Bern, 1957, S. 260.
~^^2^^ Ibid., S. 268.
~^^3^^ Ibid., S. 314.
216 emphasis on psychological analysis. In the works of many twentieth century writers man's inner life is treated as something perfectly independent of the outside world, developing according to its own laws, reality merely serving to provide an outside impulse for the auto-development of the human spirit. This was the approach of Marcel Proust, undoubtedly one of the greatest bourgeois writers of the century. Such writers as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Eugene O'Neill divorced psychology from the environment and social circumstances that condition it neglecting social analysis, and thereby weakening the realist element in their works. But even writers who were, on the whole, realists but failed to give due attention to social analysis of reality frequently regarded the spiritual and biological aspects of human nature as something autonomous, and substituted biological or instinctual motives for social motives of human actions and behaviour: Sherwood Anderson did this all the time, and William Faulkner did it very frequently. The works of these two very different writers present a fairly full, authentic picture of American provincial life, of people entirely absorbed in their own narrow interests, their family and business worries, motivated entirely by the pursuit of gain and profit, which disfigures them morally and spiritually. For Anderson this thorough, accurate presentation of the real conditions of life of American provincial Philistines, callous and embittered, ruled by racial and religious prejudices, crass hypocrisy and avarice, is simply a background for the terrible personal dramas of his alienated, lonely heroes. Anderson saw his heroes for what they really were--- little people with trivial passions, unsatisfied cravings, and unrealised dreams---but regarded them as persons rather than social types, as individuals revealing each in their own different way an immutable, extratemporal human essence, which is ruled by instincts, sex, passions, a sense of fear or joy, but above all fear, fear of life and the people around them. He was interested in exploring the dark crevices of human nature, supposedly free from the influence of social factors. Sex, the instinct to reproduce repressed or fulfilled, is what motivates the actions of many of Anderson's heroes, both in his novels, like Dark 217 Laughter, and his stories in ``The Triumph of the Egg'', or ``Winesburg, Ohio".In Anderson's works, natural social causality often gives way to irrational, impulsive causality of psycho-- physiological phenomena. The characters' actions are often unexpected and largely inexplicable, as the reader has not been prepared for them. This approach to the characters naturally affects the narrative manner, which is adapted to convey capricious changes in the characters' sentiments and emotional state, and as a result the external logic of events is often sacrificed without any inner logic acquired. Anderson is often unwilling to see a phenomenon in its entirety, complete with its causes. As a result there is little action in his short stories and their conflicts, if any, are left unresolved. The heroes tend to make their appearance in the narrative with already formed characters outwardly independent of their social background and environment. That they are products of their environment is a matter for the reader to guess, for this is masked by the author's appeal to their ``eternal human" qualities. Thus, Anderson fails to make full use of the realist method, and elements of naturalism and decadence penetrate his works, to the detriment of its critical power.
Faulkner's manner is extremely original. If Stendhal compared the novel to a mirror, being carried along a highway, Faulkner's novels can be compared to a cart travelling along the dusty street of a small provincial town. Aboard the cart are several grey-haired people, local oldtimers, who know everything there is to know about all the local inhabitants know all the latest gossip and scandal, which are discussed in the local drugstore, know every single person's past, and what they are about to do before they've done it. They know what the important townsfolk are doing, what speculation is going on in cattle, grain, property and land, what plans are in the offing at the local bank. They also know all the secrets, all the heart-rending dramas, played out in the silent nights beneath the roofs of the peaceful homes, in the nearby forest, from whence an occasional shot is heard and there is one citizen less. The old-timers look around and each in turn tells all he has seen, slowly, unhurriedly and in great 218 detail, in time with the slowly moving cart. They talk about the same event, but each in his own way, with his own little details, sometimes repeating what another has already said, but always adding something new to the account. And as they talk on about their hometown, about their district, about the nearby farms, about blacks and whites, about wealth and poverty, about good deeds and crimes, about love and misfortunes, a picture of everyday life, o routine, hard, joyless, busy life, gradually emerges from their slow, leisurely talk. A light dust from the wheels of the cart covers the faces of the narrators, a scorching sun roasts their backs; the wheels creak, and the wind carries to their nostrils the odour of ripening corn, smoke from the chimneys of the homes, and the acrid smell of horses. This is a saga of oppressive life in a stagnant rural backwater in the American Deep South.
For a long time this element held Faulkner in its grip: he gave himself up wholly to the tide providing a precise photographic copy of life's harshness and coarseness, presenting man not so much as a social being, but rather as a biological creature hostile to all others, as an unintellectual being, ignorant, uneducated, acting out of selfinterest, and influenced by purely physiological factors--- a mixture of neuroses, pathological abnormality, repressed or unrevealed sexual desires and pursuits. Time past and time present---landowners and metayers, tenant farmers and day-labourers, the vestiges of aristocracy, Negroes who can still remember slavery, and whites nostalgic for the old plantation days, hired labourers and provincial lawyers salesmen and local councillors, policemen and convicts, murderers and their victims, prostitutes and pimps, confidence tricksters and enterprising traders, housewives up to their eyes in domestic chores and tramps, cranks and cattle drovers, war veterans and smalltown intellectuals, Ku Klux Klansmen and Left-wingers, bankers and informers, and many, many more besides, crowd the pages of his books, presenting a dense, bustling, lively and curiously gloomy panorama of life, at times realistically full-blooded, at times naturalistic, decadently weird, painfully cruel, bestial and hopeless.
219An exaggerated attention to the instinctive, hidden, irrational side of human nature, moving a person to behave illogically and the extension of this to the narrative, as well as a naturalistic ``copying'' of emotions, account for the incoherence of many of Faulkner's works, with events presented out of order, in a highly confused manner. Faulkner's own perception of life was transferred to his works, which abound in confused inner monologues and condensed emotions of characters crazed by fear of life or death, thirsting for violence, exalted by saccharinesweet noble emotions or pursued by the most trivial, mundane worries. Faulkner's own disorganised, chaotic outlook made for works that were equally disorganised, chaotic and not easily intelligible (viz. Go Down, Moses and A Fable). Sometimes the symbolism overcame the realistic element, as weeds strangle a wheat stalk, sucking all the live juices out of it.
Faulkner's concept of human nature determines the structure of his works. If man's inner, spiritual world cannot always be subjected to rational analysis, and man sometimes remains a closed book even to himself, then the truth of life, the real nature of relationships, events, and facts, that is, the cognizable sphere of people's practical behaviour cannot be regarded as an entity, something which has only one meaning, but is regarded as the sum of the varying views of different people. This explains why Faulkner's novels became a string of personal monologues, with the voice of the narrator woven into them (viz. the Snopes trilogy---The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion), or an investigation undertaken by the author together with the characters (as in ``Absalom, Absalom!'').
The realist foundations of Faulkner's works were undoubtedly somewhat shaky: nevertheless, in his best novels the realist element got the upper hand, the result being works of serious content, with important conflicts presented objectively, that is, following the true movement of life, and allowing it to determine the characters' behaviour. For a long time Faulkner wrote exclusively of the American Deep South, his native country, an influence which extended to his views and prejudices. In his later 220 novels, however, and particularly in The Mansion, the main theme became the social order itself, rather than Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants. Faulkner evolved towards critical realism, gradually freeing himself of his decadent-naturalist view of the world. Realistic trends developed and came to the fore in his later works under the impact and pressure of the processes which in America as everywhere are gradually weakening the positions of capitalism.
There is a constant conflict in his works between decadent-naturalist tendencies and critical tendencies on the one hand and idealising ones, on the other. He attempted to counterbalance the lack of ideals, the eminent practicality, utilitarianism, and amorality of American provincial life with some positive social ideas and their carriers, since he realised that man was becoming dehumanised in the society in which he lived.
He realised the importance and nobility of Communist ideas but was unable to accept them, finding them totally alien to his own nature. He regarded Communism as a beautiful dream completely unrelated to real life, and this was his main mistake, which prevented his works from acquiring an objective historical perspective. He was completely given over to the ideas of bourgeois democracy--- not to be confused with that which rules in America today and reflects the interests of the monopolies, and which Faulkner regarded with irony and suspicion. His own social ideals were deeply rooted in the past, they were that system of ideas that were defended by the Southern democrats in the mid-nineteenth century---federalists and constitutionalists like Stephens, Calhoun, and Liber, based on patriarchal relations between people, between master and worker, white and black---democrats who defended the rights of the proprietor, and thus held in esteem the personal freedom of the individual---provided he was white, and a man of property. They staunchly defended the interests of the owner classes, and were fierce critics of the overt capitalist production of the Northern states, attempting to prove that slavery, preserving the patriarchal way of life, was more humane than the factory system.
221Clearly these outdated ideas were assimilated by Faulkner in a somewhat modified form, as a tradition transformed by modern conditions. But his criticism of callous greed and cupidity, as poisoning all humane, moral qualities---personified in his works by Snopes and Snopesism--- is very much in the spirit of his predecessors. The heroes, who stand for the patriarchal traditions of the South ( Gavin, Ratcliff, Judge) are all but sugar-coated, while all the author's anger and scorn are visited upon the carriers of ``Snopesism''. But Faulkner sees the essence of Snopesism as irrational, and inherent in human nature rather than deriving from objective social conditions. Basically Faulkner considered the democratic spirit of the Old South---an illusory spectre---to be the only force capable of opposing the corruptive, corrosive influence of Snopesism and the ugly, one-sided morality it engendered. In portraying people's hardships and sufferings, their joyless daily tasks, he did not believe they had it in them to change the conditions of their own existence. He likened the ordinary working folk---tenant farmers, metayers, hired labourers etc.--- to moles or termites, with the reservation that if moles could burrow through the foundations of a building, and termites eat their way into it, making the building unstable, people are incapable of shaking the established order, since they possess neither the individual determination of the mole nor the collective determination of termites. His lack of belief in the creative, revolutionary potential of the masses blinded Faulkner even to the features of American life that were perceived and presented by Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath and by Erskin Caldwell. Naturally, this concept of stability and the impossibility of fundamental change in society ruled by Snopeses---- except, of course, for minor internal changes and modifications within the framework of that society---prevented Faulkner from producing a synthetic picture of the real contradictions of contemporary bourgeois society and contemporary history. His works are rather like a sombre fresco, in places mercilessly truthful, in places phantasmagorial. The main thing is it is incompleted and patchy, not because the author lacked the time or patience, but because he failed to perceive the full flow of historical 222 progress behind the movement of everyday life, and did not present those features of live history that are essential for a full-blooded, realist epic.
Faulkner diluted and transformed the realist method, but not to the extent that the realist writers of undivided bourgeois affiliations did, as a look at the works of Proust will immediately show.
Proust's epic work A la recherche du temps perdu is generally regarded as a literary offspring of Bergsonian philosophy. There is no doubt that Bergson had a strong influence on Proust's outlook, as indeed he did on that of many other bourgeois intellectuals. However, Proust's works were not simply a direct application of Bergson's philosophical views in literature, since the influence of philosophy on art and literature is always mediated, being passed through the prism of the artist's personal experience. The views of Proust show a great deal in common with the ideas of Bergson, but this is rather the result of a common outlook produced by similar social causes than the result of direct influence.
There are certainly similar features in the approach of Bergson to the study of the material world and the approach of Proust to the study of society. Bergson might well have been referring to Proust's creative manner when he wrote in Matiere et Memoire: ''. . .Restore the link between the separate objects of your everyday experience; then dissolve the static continuity of their qualities in vibrations on the spot; concentrate on these movements, ignoring the divisible space that supports them, and note only their mobility, fixing only this indivisible act by your mind; you will then have a vision of matter, that may be exhausting for your imagination, but pure and free from all that life's needs add to your perception."^^1^^
Bergson regarded perception as a combination of past and present, where the past never disappears but enters the present, continuing its existence there thanks to memory. This simple, and when all is said and done, rather banal idea, is to be found in Proust's novel, which is constructed on the basis of reminiscence or _-_-_
~^^1^^ Henri Bergson, CEuvres, Paris, 1959, p. 343.
223 recollection of the past, which comes to play a more vital role for the author than the actual present. Proust regarded memory, combining past and present, as an instrument reproducing the past in the present. He sees no division between them, and views the boundaries between past and present to be extremely imprecise and fluid.Bergson termed the process by which memory unites past and present, imparting actuality to the past, and adjusting the past in the present, ``duration'', and was in fact substituting this speculative concept, which but imitated the actual movement of life for real development. Proust also resorted to the adjustment of the past in the present, seeing the main aim of his work in reproducing the stream of life as a stream of consciousness. In other words, Proust believed that by making a thorough study of the inner world of his hero Marcel and the other characters of his novel, by investigating and analysing their reactions to the world and describing their perception of things, he would thereby be presenting a full picture of the life of society, that is, of the life of the wealthy French bourgeoisie in the period extending from the end of the last century up to the First World War. Proust undoubtedly regarded himself as a chronicler of society life and manners. In fact, however, reality was dissolved in his novel in the individual's perception of life, and objective truth became as flexible and fluid as its reflection in the narrator's consciousness. This dissection of life into events in progress, experiences, memories, feelings and impressions, and so on, emerged from Proust's view of the individual perception of the external world as a mobile, incessant, indivisible process, in the way William James had done before him, ``Consciousness ... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits,'' James had written in his Psychology, which can by rights be regarded as a pragmatist theory of knowledge. ``Such words as 'chain' or 'train','' he continued, ``do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described."^^1^^ James insisted that sensations transmit the _-_-_
~^^1^^ William James, Psychology, New York, 1900, p. 159.
224 reality of things to the mind. ``If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum natura, so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known. . . .If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own."^^1^^ Proust's view was basically similar to that of James in this respect, and he concentrated on subjective illumination of life's phenomena through the stream of consciousness, thereby depriving them of their reality.Proust did not destroy the material fabric of the world--- his roman fleuve is full of authentic details of everyday life, morals, habits, interests, occupations and pastimes showing great perception and most expressively conveyed, and his characters were by no means ciphers, but had the depth and completeness of real people. Nevertheless, their mainspring, their inner essence, somehow escapes us. The characters reveal themselves as different personalities in different spheres of life, and it is extremely difficult to decide which is the real ``they''. Odette Swann, a vulgar harlot, appears now idealised by Swann's love for her, now as a refined society lady, now as a protagonist seeker of adventure, now as a wife and mother. Swann, too, changes according to the company he is in at a particular moment, altering from society dandy to a stodgy bourgeois. Albertine, the woman loved by the main character and narrator, Marcel, is also an enigmatic character, and many of the minor characters are extremely elusive. Even the scene of action, the landscapes and interior settings, vary constantly according to Marcel's changing perception of them.
Proust believed that by presenting his heroes in this fashion he was conveying their constant development and movement in time, and at the same time reproducing the flux of life. In point of fact in so doing he was violating the fundamental principle of realism, since such an approach to the object of portrayal presupposes the absence of a true objective essence in phenomena and events. This view was far from new or original. Nietzsche had written _-_-_
~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 162.
__PRINTERS_P_225_COMMENT__ 15---0891 225 long before him: ``There are different kinds of eyes . . . and therefore there are many truths too, and thus no truth at all.'' Proust, like Whitehead, for whom the world consisted of separate events in collective unity, divides the integral process of the movement of life into separate moments, whose boundaries are fixed by various discrete personal mental states. A line is viewed as a succession of dots. Duration, which is supposed to be transmitted by means of reminiscences of the past on the one hand and highly involved syntax on the other---in other words, by the very form of the narrative, adapted for the purpose of transmitting the flux of events---actually appears in the novel as a succession of separate events perceived by the narrator---and having for him equal significance, whatever their real significance and scale. The movement of life was adjusted and strengthened by the perception of the individual, whose spiritual experience was incomparably narrower than the world in which he lives. For Proust, however, it was individual experience that was the object of investigation and portrayal and not real Irfe, which in fact gives birth to that experience and is inseparable from it.Proust destroyed the epic fabric of art not only by refusing to depict the fulness of social conflicts, preferring to present the circumscribed, spiritually arid life and lax morals of the wealthy classes, but also by perceiving and treating human nature in a dualist manner. While regarding the human essence of his characters as an unknown quantity, which could not be submitted to social analysis and realistic portrayal, he at the same time considered this essence to be fixed and revealed in the one permanent and stable element there is---class-conditioned behaviour and self-perception. Proust viewed bourgeois social relations as the only possible form of human relations, and class differences as a norm. This view helped to counteract his epic's hermetic insulation from the outside world and open it to the events of real life. Proust presented a detailed, enthusiastic description of the select world of wealth and aristocracy, and the inhabitants of that world, with their relationships, their views and feelings. He poured cruel irony upon those, like Bloch and the 226 Verdurin couple, who tried to climb the social ladder into the world of high society. But at the same time he could not help showing that this world was unstable, that the social barriers were breaking down, as illustrated by the career of Odette Swann, Madame Verdurin, or Robert de SaintLoup's marriage. This world corroded from within by gross immorality was also shaken by social events---the Dreyfus affair, and signs of the approaching imperialist war. Criticism has a place in Proust's novel, albeit of a very different kind from the social criticism of G. B. Show, Thomas Mann, Remain Rolland and other critical realists. In his latter writings, especially in Le temps retrouve, Proust gradually came to the conclusion that the way of life he so cherished was seriously threatened: the high waves of social battles and cataclysms had begun to beat insistently against him too. In poeticising a moribund way of life, Proust used the old well-tried tactic employed by all champions of the bourgeois system, that is, self-criticism in the interests of self-preservation and conservation. The alienated individual, who considered himself to be the measure of all things and the hub of the universe, felt the need for a social support. It could not be otherwise, since alienation of the individual from society can only take place within society, and is especially marked in a highlydeveloped society. While describing the shadier aspects of the life of the social hierarchy, Proust began to extol the military and pay tribute to nationalism, showing ostentatious reverence for Robert de Saint-Loup, who dies a hero's death in battle in the name of the imperialist interests of the French bourgeoisie.
Although the social aspect of Proust's novel was overshadowed by his preoccupation with psychology, its importance was considerable nonetheless as an example of the way the bourgeois consciousness---however refined in form and aloof from practical life it might appear to be--- was beginning to practise determined self-defence in the new historical conditions that arose in capitalist society after the First World War, when its political structure was undergoing a transformation under the impact of the October Revolution and its ideas and under the influence of its inherent contradictions. The complex processes that __PRINTERS_P_229_COMMENT__ 15* 227 took place in the spiritual life of the twentieth century were a reflection of equally complex processes in social life.
The far-reaching historical events and changes in our age of transition from capitalism to socialism affect the existence of every single inhabitant of our planet, taking him along in their irresistible course. All the old, outmoded institutions, ideas, views and principles are being transformed before our very eyes, and the future can be seen in the making in the workshop of history, so that the consciousness that the ideas of the old society are obsolete and are on the way out has become a characteristic feature of the spiritual life of our age.
As a natural result of all this, modern man is faced as never before by the need to choose and define his place in the social struggle that is under way, the ultimate sense and content of which is the socialist transformation of social relations based on private ownership. Today, nobody can live like Robinson Crusoe on a ``desert island''. Neither a man's outlook nor his practical activities can remain without social supports, as independent perception or independent action. They are bound to form a part of the complex, highly involved system of social links, dependent relationships, conflicts, interests and aims of which life is made up.
The bourgeois consciousness can no longer be integrated, clearly-defined and unassailable by doubt. As for the non-bourgeois consciousness that has not yet become socialist, the problem of its alignment with the forces that exist and conflict in society at the present time is of decisive significance. Hence its heterogeneity and instability, its inherent contradictions and inconsistencies, its illusory concepts of the world. Hence also its outward complicatedness, with a system of myths erected in an attempt to consume and dissolve reality. But behind all these illusions and figments of an alienated consciousness stands---in various forms in each individual case---a sense of the instability and vulnerability of the existing order of social relations.
One of the most widespread forms of rejection of contemporary society is criticism of it from the standpoint 228 of a pseudo-naive individual, endowed with a ``childish'', spontaneous perception of the world. This kind of criticism is generally associated with a spontaneous democratic outlook when life is seen through the eyes of simple folk, as in Hasek's Adventures oi the Good Soldier Schweik or the comedies of Charlie Chaplin. But in the bourgeois consciousness in the proper sense of the word, the sense of obsolescence and instability of existing social relations often receives a curious slant, being expressed in rejection of the technological progress of the machine age and the hectic urban life of modern civilisation, saturated with all kinds of machines.
This attitude has found expression in modern art in a taste for the primitive, a keen interest in prehistoric art forms, or the art of peoples still at the tribal stage of development who have not been seriously affected by modern civilisation. However, bourgeois artists remove this wholesome art from the living context and historical background which gives it its real power and meaning and vulgarise it by concentrating exclusively on the formal elements---such as laconic, formalised style, exaggeration of certain physiological features and expressiveness of nature---deprived of their original religious or cult significance. Bourgeois artists thus primitivise folk art that is really far from primitive, regarding it formalistically, which is only natural since the very concept of ``primitive'' as an artistic form and the attitude to the art and culture of the non-European peoples as something exotic and savage arose out of a primitive and oversimplified understanding of the conflicts of contemporary life and the ways of their solution.
Primitivised art was incapable of generalising, let alone synthesising, life with its real contradictions and of conveying its real complexity. Primitivism as an artistic movement (whatever name it was given---Dadaism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, etc.) was a symptom of the decadence of modern bourgeois culture. It merely served to confirm that the contemporary bourgeois consciousness is lagging behind the development of life and is less and less capable of grasping its determinant features,
229The attitude to urbanisation, mechanisation and technical progress was incomparably more complex in content and social mood in literature than in the fine arts or music, although the latter was also affected by the tendency for primitivisation. Study of the effects of the urbanisation on man's personal and social life and observation of the contradictions accompanying material and technological progress inevitably prompted in a writer an urgency to grapple with all the problems connected with the subsequent development of capitalism, with the objective course of modern social progress.
Even before the First World War, Joseph Conrade described the colourful, scintillating world of the South Seas--- tranquil lagoons glowing red in the light of the setting sun, luxuriant coral islands, dozing to the eternal murmur of the surf---a fresh, outdoor unspoiled world---as the only refuge for man languishing in the civilisation of cities and machines, carrying in his soul, like a curse, the evils, the views and habits, the hopes and disappointments it engendered. Conrade and his heroes---for all that they were undoubtedly strong-willed people---no longer believed in the viability of the society they had left, setting out for the sea. But the world in which they sought refuge was very different from their own idea of it. Conrade realised that the life he presented, in the exotic form he so admired, would soon be a thing of the past. Light sailing boats were being replaced by motor vessels, and the bold, adventurous individuals forging their own happiness at their own risk were giving way to the cynical agents reeking of blood and whisky and representing faceless, merciless concerns and trading companies. Conrade's contrasting of the rugged beauty of pure, unadulterated passions, a virile, healthy spirit and integrity with the ever more complicated life of civilised society with its mounting pressures did not solve any social conflicts but merely revealed the writer's disillusionment with the results of social development that brought alienation, sowed distrust among people, and cast everyone into a solitary cell of suffering.
The tragic note we find so often occurring in Conrade's works was by no means a feature of all the bourgeois realists and was wholl