The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

190 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The relationship between Modernist aesthetics and the most destructive totalitarian regimes of twentieth-century Europe – Fascism and Stalinism – has long been in dispute. On the Russian front, one transition can be found in the closing sentences of Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, published in 1924. It is an eloquent and enlightened Marxist treatise, in which Futurists, Russian Formalist critics, and budding proletarian art are all discussed, their positive and negative aspects weighed. Trotsky, although no friend of Modernism, acknowledged the artistic avant-garde as a potential ally in building the new world. He did not, of course, exempt its members from the “consciousness” versus “spontaneity” dialectic: “We stepped in to the Revolution,” he insists, “while Futurism fell into it.”33 But “mysticism” and “Romanticism” of the old Symbolist and nineteenth-century sorts are declared altogether incompatible with the Revolution.

Then Trotsky ends his treatise on a vision so mystically romantic that it recalls an utterance from Zamyatin’s D-503 in his most true-believing phase, before the birth of his doubting soul. “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent . . . to create a higher biologic type, or, if you please, a superman,” Trotsky wrote (p. 256):

Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process . . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise.

Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and murdered in Mexico on Stalin’s orders in 1940. But the utopian sentiments expressed in those final lines continued to inspire, guide, and torment writers throughout the Stalinist years.