Anatoly Lunacharsky: ‘On Literature and Art’

I have just completed the transcription of ‘On Literature and Art’, a compilation of the writings of Anatoly Lunacharsky. You can find this work in the MIA’s Lunacharsky archive here. A few of the articles were already available on the MIA so I can’t take credit for all of it. What I have done is fill the gaps so that the volume can be presented in its entirety.

Lunacharsky (1875–1933) was Commissar of Education in the Soviet Union, which included responsibility for culture. Lunacharsky was both open-minded and cultured, with wide-ranging interests in philosophy, languages and art criticism. He campaigned effectively against illiteracy, reformed the education system and introduced subsidies for the arts. He even wrote several plays. I won’t attempt to assess his career here: suffice to say that he was a tolerant figure close to Lenin and Trotsky, who was stripped of important positions when Stalin took power.

This compilation was put together by a Soviet compiler in 1965, who notes in the introduction that it represents just a fraction of his writings on the arts.

G. V. Plekhanov: ‘Art and Social Life’

The second of my transcriptions for the Marxist Internet Archive is now online: Georgi Plekhanov’s 1912 pamphlet Art and Social Life.

You can find it here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1912/art/index.htm

I won’t write a full analysis of the work here, but would like to make one point. After Marx and Engels, Plekhanov was one of the major contributors to Marxist theory, particularly on historical materialism, as noted by Trotsky in his short assessment ‘A Note on Plekhanov’. But Trotsky also notes the decline of Plekhanov’s later work, a period to which this pamphlet belongs.

In Art and Social Life, Plekhanov draws a mechanical connection between the ‘decay’ of Western capitalist society at the time, which was heading towards the crisis of the First World War, and a supposed decline in the quality of the art produced in that society. This theory led him to dismiss Cubism as ‘nonsense raised to the third degree’. Cubism may not be, and still isn’t, to everyone’s taste, but it is quite wrong to reject an entire artistic school on such terms. Plekhanov would not have been aware of Marx’s comments in the Grundrisse upon the uneven relationship between art and society, as those manuscripts were not published until 1939–1941, otherwise he would perhaps have better understood the relative autonomy of art. The real usefulness of his pamphlet was to the Stalinists in putting together their bogus theory of ‘decadent art’.

Despite its shortcomings, I am pleased to help make the text available online. The best approach is not to censor such texts but to explain their misconceptions.

Francis Klingender: ‘Marxism and Modern Art’

My transcription of Francis D. Klingender’s pamphlet, Marxism and Modern Art: An approach to social realism is now available at the Marxist Internet Archive.

You can find it here: http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/klingender/index.htm

Klingender was a British Marxist whose life spanned the first half of the twentieth century. His major works included Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947) [1], Goya in the Democratic Tradition (1948) and his posthumously published Animals in Art and Thought (1971).

In this pamphlet, Klingender builds an argument for a Marxist theory of aesthetic value, beginning with the formalism of Roger Fry and taking us through the escapism of Tennyson, the realism of Chernyshevsky, and finally drawing upon the epistemology set out by Lenin.

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[1] Readers should be aware that the later edition of 1968 was revised by Arthur Elton to tone down Klingender’s Marxism.