Unveiling Trotsky the Literary Critic
Helmut Dahmer on Trotsky's Literary Writings
At the end of 2023, our comrades at Neuer ISP Verlag published Literatur und Revolution (1900-1916), the eighth volume of their series of Leon Trotsky’s writings, the Trotzki Schriften. In this article from 2024, the volume’s editor, Helmut Dahmer, explains the scope and context of the work. Dahmer’s article is translated from Die Internationale, a magazine produced by the Austrian, German, and Swiss sections of the Fourth International.
"Politics and literature are indeed the essential content of my personal life" (Trotsky, 1935).
Decades of demonizing the great revolutionary are still having an effect today. And so, the political analyst, social theorist, and advocate for council democracy, who was on par with Rosa Luxemburg, is still yet to be discovered. He was the only sociologist in the barbaric twentieth century, during the 1930s, who not only continuously analyzed and commented on the fascization of Germany and the Stalinization of the Soviet Union, but also consistently developed practical proposals for an alternative politics from his diagnoses. Among the Marxist revolutionaries of his time, Trotsky holds a special position in several respects, not only because of his 1906 prognosis (confirmed in 1917) that the Tsarist regime in backward Russia could only be overthrown by a workers' party allied with the peasant majority, but also as an inspirer of the Petersburg Workers' Council in 1905 and 1917, as an organizer of uprisings and army leader, as well as a literary figure, biographer, and historian. In this context, his enduring interest in Freud's critique of psychic economy should also be emphasized, which he became acquainted with during his years of emigration in Vienna (1907-14) through his friend Adolf Joffe, who was in therapy with Alfred Adler. Its kinship with Marx's critique of political economy fascinated him. Trotsky's understanding of Marx was shaped by his reception of Freud, similar to that of his contemporary Max Horkheimer (the founder of the "Frankfurt School"), and conversely, both their understandings of Freud were shaped by historical materialism.
Within the framework of our selection of his writings, appearing in 12 volumes, of which the 8th volume is now available, volumes 4.1 and 4.2, titled "Literature and Revolution," are intended to present Trotsky as a literary and cultural critic. He lived for writing and by writing, and whenever his political-organizational activity allowed him time for it, he delved into classical and modern literature and commented on it with regard to the possibility of replacing the capitalist crisis and war economy with a democratically controlled world planned economy, in time, before the impending "common downfall of the warring classes." In 1900 and 1901, while imprisoned in Odessa and Moscow – then "universities" for revolutionaries – he learned from the writings of the Italian Hegelian-Marxist Antonio Labriola¹ that knowledge of literary tradition and contemporary literature is just as indispensable for understanding society and history as is knowledge of the psychology of the masses and the individuals from whom they are recruited. Volumes 8 and 9 (sub-volumes 4.1 and 4.2) of our edition of his writings introduce Trotsky as a literary and cultural critic. As with volumes 2.1 and 2.2, "On the Chinese Revolution" (published years ago), we have also endeavored in this case to document his writings on literature and culture as completely as possible – in commented first or new translations (from Russian). This edition will, for the first time, make it possible to learn about the methods and level of his literary-sociological studies.
The first sub-volume contains 69 texts from the years 1900-1916. The first series of these originated in 1901-02 during Trotsky's exile to Southern Siberia. With his (first) wife, Alexandra L. Sokolowskaja, and their two daughters, he lived 6000 miles away from Odessa, in the Irkutsk Governorate (briefly in Ust-Kut, then in Vercholensk). The trading city of Irkutsk was considered "the Paris of Siberia" around 1900 – a center of science and culture with a theater and library. There, the 22-year-old Trotsky began his career as a writer. He wrote (under a pseudonym) for the (legal) "Eastern Review" (Vostochnoye Obozreniye) and soon became a sought-after author. In the two years before his escape from Vercholensk, 27 of his texts appeared in this newspaper. His debut was (in December 1900) a detailed discussion of the work of the recently deceased Nietzsche; this was followed by essays on Gerhart Hauptmann, Ibsen, Arthur Schnitzler and Sudermann, Gogol and Gorky, as well as studies on Uspensky and Leonid Andreyev.
After the Revolution of 1905, in November 1906, he was exiled a second time (and this time "for life") to Obdorsk (Salekhard) on the Arctic Circle. At the end of February 1907, he again managed to escape (from Beryozovo) westward (by reindeer sled across the tundra), then further by train via Petersburg to Finland. Via London and after a stay in Germany in the summer of 1907, he arrived in Vienna in October, where Victor Adler and the Russian revolutionary Salomon Klyachko, who gathered emigrants and refugees from the Tsarist Empire in his salon, took him in. The seven years Trotsky spent in Vienna were years of counter-revolution in Russia – after the suppression of the 1905 Revolution – to which a large part of the intelligentsia also adapted. In the "West," meanwhile, the "Belle Époque" was coming to an end, and the danger of a major war between Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side, and Great Britain, France, and Russia on the other, grew year by year. In these years, Trotsky wrote (among other things) a second series of literary studies and critiques, most of which appeared in "Kievan Thought" (Kievskaya Mysl).
This "Viennese" series opens with a study on Wedekind (published in shortened form in Kautsky's Die Neue Zeit at the time). It is followed by a critical presentation of the Munich satire magazine Simplicissimus and two tributes to Tolstoy, major polemics against Merezhkovsky, Chukovsky and Masaryk, a retrospective on Alexander Herzen, three detailed reviews of Viennese art exhibitions, café house discussions in Paris and Vienna, an overview of the Russian "journals," a presentation on the development of the Russian intelligentsia (supplemented by a critical review of Max Adler's book on the relationship of intellectuals to socialism), and finally the magnificent "unsystematic notes of a Russian reader and listener in the European West" (from spring 1909). A constantly present background theme also of these literary excursions is the specific development of "semi-Asiatic" Russian society (in comparison with that of the Western European-bourgeois) and in this framework – the engagement with the Slavophiles, whose ideology has re-emerged in the "Putinism" of our days, and with the Narodnik-Revolutionaries, who relied on the peasant majority of the country as the bearers of the anti-feudal revolution. The last text group in this volume consists of five articles from Paris during the war years 1915/16 and a report on Trotsky's experiences in Spain (after his expulsion from France). The critique of the literary-philosophical turncoats after the failed Russian Revolution of 1905 corresponds in the "Parisian" text group to the "moral portrait" of the hyper-nationalistic, pre-fascist Action française (around Maurras and Daudet). Overall, the book reveals the intellectual foundation from which the theorist of the Russian Revolution and critic of its later degeneration could draw. The subsequent volume (4.2) contains another 100 texts and letters on art theoretical questions from the years 1919-40. It deals with Russian literature of the revolutionary period (and a future "socialist" art), the politics of the Communist Party toward art and artists, Futurism and the "Formalists." Trotsky writes about Block, Pilnyak, Mayakovsky and Yesenin, about Malraux, Jack London and Céline, Silone, Romain Rolland and Gide. Finally, Trotsky's alliance with the Surrealist Breton and the Muralist Diego Rivera is documented, who (1938) defended the "autonomy" of art, while in the totalitarian states of Stalin and Hitler it was reduced to propaganda.
Note: the opening quote by Trotsky is from Diary in Exile ([1935] 1958); Cologne (Kiepenheuer & Witsch) 2018, p. 69. (Entry from March 25, 1935: our translation from the German)
References
1 Trotsky, Leo D. ([1900-1916] 2023): Literature and Revolution; Writings, Volume 4.1 (edited by H. Dahmer, W. Feikert and J. Ranc). Cologne/Karlsruhe (Neuer ISP Verlag).
2 Trotsky's complete works would, if completely printed, fill about 80 thick volumes.
3 After the arrest of the Petersburg Workers' Council (1905), imprisoned in various Moscow prisons, Trotsky's prison cell [as his fellow prisoner Sverchkov reports] "soon turned into a library. Literally all somewhat noteworthy new books were brought to him; he read them and was occupied all day long [...] with literary work." Trotsky himself writes: "For recreation, I read the classics of European literature. I lay on my bunk and devoured the works with such physical sensual pleasure, as gourmets sip a fine wine or draw on a fragrant cigar." My Life; Berlin (Fischer) 1930, pp. 179 f.
4 Labriola, Antonio (1895-99): On Historical Materialism. [Ed. by A. Ascheri-Osterlow and C. Pozzoli.] Frankfurt (Suhrkamp) 1974.
5 Trotsky combined three forms of criticism – first, the "external," which politically classifies and judges texts with regard to their political tendency (and effect); second, the "immanent," which deals with problems of form, experiential content, and immanent contradictions of literary works of art; and finally, the "sociological," which inquires about the socio-historical preconditions (the conditions of possibility and limits) of aesthetic constructs and philosophical systems. Cf. Korsch, Karl (1938): Karl Marx. Frankfurt (Europäische Verlagsanstalt) 1967, Appendix III.
6 "I traveled westward on the Siberian railway," "holding Homer in Russian hexameters by Gnedich in my hands," Trotsky recalls. My Life, op. cit., p. 129.
7 In the autumn of 1912, the Kiyevskaya Mysl sent him for three months as a war correspondent to the (first) Balkan War (of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece against the Ottoman Empire). Cf. Trotsky (1926): The Balkan Wars 1912-13; Essen (Arbeiterpresse-Verlag) 1996.
8 "The Kiyevskaya Mysl was the most widely circulated radical newspaper of Marxist persuasion in the South." My Life, op. cit., p. 220.
9 Cf. Trotsky's introductory chapter to his History of the Russian Revolution, Berlin (Fischer) 1931, pp. 15-27: "The Peculiarities of Russia's Development."
10 Trotsky praises Gleb Uspensky in this context, whose realistic sketches of peasant life in Russia contributed to overcoming the "Populist" ideology, to which the poet himself adhered.
Trotzki Schriften
Band 4.1: Literatur und Revolution (1900-1916)
749 pages, hardcover with dust jacket
Subscription price €60.00
ISBN 978-3-89900-912-5
"Trotsky represents the Marxist school of thought unadulterated, as it existed before its corruption by the social democratic and Stalinist organizations," wrote his biographer Isaac Deutscher.
The thematically-chronologically ordered, commented edition Trotzki Schriften (Trotsky Writings) is the first large German collected works edition. The texts have been newly translated from Russian or appear for the first time in German. The 69 texts contained in this first sub-volume of Volume 4 document Trotsky's publications on art and culture from 1900 to 1916. 31 texts are available in German for the first time.