p 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".  [171•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.

p 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."  [171•2 

p For 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 173 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.

p 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 174 in many cases superior to the latter as regards moral integrity.

p 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.

p 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".  [174•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 175 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 176 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.

p 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 177 would have been very much poorer and its events would not have been perceived with the necessary fulness.

p 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".  [177•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 178 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 179 masks, Tolstoi ruthlessly exposed and criticised egoism and the pursuit of personal interests, and condemned the estrangement of people.

p 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.

p 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 180 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.

p 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 181 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."  [181•1 

p 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 182 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.

p 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.

p The 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.

p 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, 184 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.

p

p 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 185 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.

p 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.

p 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 186 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.

p 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 187 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.

p 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 188 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.

p 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.

p Yet France combined misconceptions of the prospects of historical development with scathing criticism of that 189 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."  [189•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 190 him to reflect the new trends of historical development that were making themselves so powerfully felt in the twentieth century.

p 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.

p 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 191 the ideology of socialism."  [191•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.