Lenin On Literature Language and Censorship

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Guilford Press
Lenin on Literature, Language, and Censorship

Author(s): Annette T. Rubinstein
Source: Science & Society, Vol. 59, No. 3, Lenin: Evaluation, Critique, Renewal (Fall, 1995),
pp. 368-383
Published by: Guilford Press
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Science & Society, Vol. 59, No. 3, Fall 1995, 368-383
Lenin on Literature, Language,

and Censorship
ANNETTE T. RUBINSTEIN
ABSTRACT: Sophisticated Marxists have always been aware of

the important contributions to literary criticism of Marx, Engels,
Trotsky and Gramsci. Yet, except for Lukcs, there has been
almost no discussion of Lenin's great interest in literature. This
paper glances at some of the contemporary evidence of Lenin's
concern with the classic Russian novelists - especially Tolstoy,
to whom he devoted four essays (his only works of formal liter-
ary criticism). Lenin placed great emphasis from the earliest days
of the revolution on building a popular library system and on
publishing good fiction cheaply. He also had an informed inter-
est in language and was a life-long opponent of literary censor-
ship. In this connection, his struggle against the sectarianism of
the Proletkult movement is recorded.
WHO USE THE TERM "MARXIST" at all are ignorant

of Marx's profound interest in literature from Homer to
Balzac, or of Engels' long insightful critical letters to and about
contemporary novelists and dramatists. Anyone to whom Gramsci's
name means anything is aware of his significant literary criticism,
and many otherwise orthodox Communist Party members devoured
Trotsky's Literature and Revolution as soon as it appeared in English.
Yet, except for a ubiquitous and misleading quotation from
Lenin's 1905 pamphlet, Party Organization and Party Literature, his
serious concern with literature has apparently been ignored by both
friend and foe. However, Lukcs, one of the few Marxist critics who
has had a real impact in the West, devotes a substantial section of
a major work - Studies in European Realism - to Lenin's analysis of
Tolstoy's work. He begins his discussion:
368
LENIN ON LITERATURE 369
The object of the present study is to def

ture and outline his part in the develop
Lenin's evaluation of Tolstoy's work. On
relating to method and of the historical
depth of Lenin's conception was not ful
The four short articles on Tolstoy w

and 1911, and which we will discuss l
formal literary criticism for which
letters, conversation remembered by
on other topics, offer important rel
Lenin and Classical Literature
An almost unknown little book, Lenin, Krupskaia and Libraries,

documents Lenin's detailed concern for the early establishment of
a network of public libraries to make generally available not only
history and scientific material but also belles lettres, fiction both clas-
sical and modern.
In 1919 in a talk to the first All Russian Adult Educational
Conference he began: ". . . there is little paper and we cannot pro
duce books. That is all true, but it is also true that we cannot get a
the books which we do possess." After suggesting ways in which
private collections, often moldering unread, could be made pub
lic, he continued to emphasize the overwhelming importance o
milking books of all kinds easily available, of encouraging timid ne
readers, of "feeding hungry readers with books."
Two years later a signed Pravda article began: "We are poor
We have no newsprint. . . . [But] long before the war the French
bourgeoisie discovered how to make a profit by publishing fictio
not at 3V2 francs a copy for the aristocracy but at 10 centimes i
the format of a popular magazine; why then can't we do the same
These could carry daily to the masses serious and worthwhile lit-
erature, the best modern and classical fiction."
Lenin's own omnivorous reading was apparently done almost
secretively in hours stolen from sleep. Krupskaia recalls how surprised
she was when, in exile together, she first learned that her husban
"knew not only Russian but also foreign literature and loved, as I did,
Nekrasov, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dobroliubov, Blende, Chernyshevski."
370 SCIENCE f SOCIETY
Turgenev, like Pushkin, was a spe

quoted or referred to his work in
ample a comrade, Gusav, asked
view to a woman who had come to Geneva with a letter of intro-
duction from a generous Iskra supporter. Lenin refused, saying,
"This idiotic woman is a real double of Matryona Semyonova, and
I don't want anything to do with Matryona Semyonova." When
Gusav asked, bewildered, "What Matryona Semyonova?" Lenin
snapped: "Matryona Semyonova Sukanchikova in Turgenev's Smoke.
You should be ashamed of yourself not to know your Turgenev!"
Nikolay Valenti Volskii, a young student revolutionary who had
escaped to Geneva, was befriended there by Lenin and was, for a
time, a favorite of Krupskaia's. Amused by his athleticism, Lenin
nicknamed him Samsonov, a name then used by the entire circle.
Volskii recalls this incident in his memoir Encounters with Lenin
(1968), adding:
I was greatly surprised and pleased (as I too loved Turgenev very much)
to learn that Lenin had a first-rate knowledge of Turgenev, considerably
better in fact than mine. Lenin knew all his most important novels and
stories; he even knew those miniature pieces called Poems in Prose. It was
evident that he read Turgenev frequently and keenly; his vocabulary had
absorbed certain words and expressions of Turgenev's from Virgin Soil,
Rudin, and Smoke among others.
For example, talking about Fedoseyev's suicide in Siberia, Lenin said,
"All the same, Fedoseyev was not a namby-pamby gentleman (barchuk) and
milksop like Nezhdanov" (a character in Virgin Soil). On another occasion
Lenin said of someone: "he is not a man, but a Chinese idol - all talk and
no deeds" (a sentence paraphrased from Rudin). Turgenev's Smoke pro-
vided him with the figure of Voroshilov, whom Lenin hated and often
quoted, generally with fierce contempt. To call anyone in the writing com-
munity a Voroshilov was one of the greatest insults of which Lenin was
capable; we knew from his writings that he abused this epithet mercilessly.
For example in the course of a polemic with V. M. Chernov in his article
"The Agrarian Question and the Critics of Marx" Lenin calls Chernov a
Voroshilov fourteen times. . . .
At one time Lenin had a very high regard for the young Trotsky who
had escaped from exile in 1902. However, after the Congress Trotsky found
himself among the Mensheviks. From then on Lenin never called him
anything but Voroshilov, adding for good measure the epithet "Balalaykin"
(from Shchedrin). I remember that on 1 May 1904 Trotsky spoke at a
meeting of exiles. His speech was rather t

tive. When Lenin heard my impression o
with irony in his eyes: "I am sorry to no
Voroshilov-Balalaykin." "But you can't de
orator?" "All Voroshilov-Balalaykins are
educated seminarists with the gift of th
babble about Marxism, and pettifogging
all these in Trotsky."
Shortly thereafter Volskii tried to

was a more important philosopher
until he agreed to read a volume o
He tells of the stormy interview at th
wryly: "Six weeks later I too was to g
Voroshilovs."
Before leaving Geneva for Moscow we must report one more
incident that helps one understand Lenin's determined opposition
to the Proletkult there.
Volskii had secured a copy of Herzen's My Past and Thought,
which had been banned in Russia, and reading the lyrical descrip-
tion of the author's life on his father's country estate the young
man became acutely homesick for Russia. He approached Lenin
for help in securing papers which would help him return to work
in the underground there, mentioning that, reading Herzen, he had
been "carried away to Tambov Province ..." where he had spent
his childhood. Instead of chiding him for his sentimentality Lenin
asked: "Did you have many flowers there? What sort were they?"
He had just begun to describe them when a comrade came in,
bringing Lenin a sheaf of papers.
After listening for a minute the newcomer interrupted.
Vladimir Ilyich, surely you must be sickened by what Samsonov is saying.

Listen to the landowner's son giving himself away. . . . Just see how car-
ried away he is when he talks about the beauty of the lime and birch trees.
A revolutionary has no right to forget that landowners used to flog their
peasants and house-serfs with birch-rods in those beautiful lime-tree
avenues. . . . Surrender to such feelings is dangerous for a revolutionary.
Then before long you'll find yourself wanting the peasants to get on with
the work while you lie in a hammock with a French novel in your hands
and doze comfortably in your lime-tree avenue.
372 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
Before Volskii could attempt to d
Well, Mikhail Stepanovich, you surprise m

that many fine pages of Russian litera
ful, and for all I know, torn out and b
best pages of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Aksa
charm in the old lime-tree avenues beca
of serfs, or because peasants were birch
over-simplification that plagued Populi
thank goodness. ... I can see absolutely
and words to make you so angry. The
ried away by something that reminded h
- and it has made him so homesick for
out of this wretched Geneva as fast as he can. . . . Because Samsonov likes
lime-tree and birch-tree avenues and the flower-beds of country estates you
decide that he must be infected by some specifically feudal psychology and
that he is sure to end up by exploiting peasants. ... I too used to live on
a country estate which belonged to my grandfather. ... I remember with
pleasure how I used to loll about in haystacks, although I had not made
them, how I used to eat strawberries and raspberries, although I had not
planted them, and how I used to drink fresh milk, although I had not
milked the cow. ... So am I to understand that I too am unworthy to be
called a revolutionary? Think it over carefully, Mikhail Stepanovich, aren't
you going a bit too far?
Volskii says that he was so overwhelmed by this championship,

and by the feeling that the leader he then idolized had, most un-
characteristically, revealed something of his private life, that he
made a verbatim memorandum of the talk as soon as they sepa-
rated.
Lenin's own physical longing for Russia is apparent in the many

letters to his mother or sister which speak so lovingly of Russian
food or scenery. A speaker at the 25th Anniversary of Lenin's death
quoted him on the "International." Lenin had said: "This song has
been translated into all European and other languages. In whatever
country a class-conscious worker finds himself, wherever fate may
cast him, however much he may feel himself a stranger, without
language, without friends, far off from his native country - he can
find himself comrades and friends by the familiar refrain of the
Internationale."
Censorship, Nihilism, Modernism, Lan
It is not surprising that Lenin's love

led him to oppose any form of artisti
explicit in his pamphlet on party "liter
the difference between creative work and
polemics, etc. There, writing in 1905,
one who considers himself an artist, h
according to his ideals, regardless of
question that literature is least of all
ment or levelling, to the rule of the m
There is no question either that in th
doubtedly be allowed for personal initi
thought and fantasy, form and conten
Then he turned to the other sense
the danger when self-proclaimed Socia
literature" tainted by the old "semi-
Russian principle . . . bourgeois-anarchi
continues: ". . . newspapers must beco
ous party organizations, and their writ
members of these organizations. Publi
ters, bookshops and reading rooms, li
ments - must all be under party con
fervor of liberal indignation he expect
censorship to arouse he concluded:
Calm yourselves, gentlemen! First of all, w

and its subordination to party control. Ev
whatever he likes without any restrictions. B
(including the party) is also free to expel
the party to advocate anti-party views.
Obviously a party in power in a one

"voluntary organization" in the same
party control of publishing and distribut
problematic matter. But Lenin consiste
between literature, however distastefu
erature." Even for the latter he genera
urging reconsideration or overruling
He would obviously have opposed

attempted to take control of the
work was permissible. But the em
Proletkults' unilateral assertions of
to impose these, show a deeply e
There were, of course, many v
understanding within the organiz
enthusiastically applauded Kirillov
short poem:
We are rebelliously, passionately tip

Let them scream at us: "Wreckers o
In the name of our Tomorrow - w
Destroy museums and trample unde
At the First All Russian Conference on Adult Education, after

Lenin had delivered his prepared talk, A. A. Bogdanov, President
of the Proletkult, spoke. He stressed the unparalled importance of
his organization, lauding its insistence on discarding all past cul-
ture, and warning that alliance with the peasantry and petty bour-
geoisie, who were "incapable of comprehending the new spiritual
culture of the proletariat," must not be allowed to taint their pro-
gram. Lenin rose again to give a short impromptu talk in which he
said that "the most stupid attitudes are propounded as something
new, and . . . offered under the guise of purely proletarian art and
proletarian culture."
The following year, in an address to the All Russian Congress
of the Young Communist League on October 2, 1920, he said:
We shall be unable to solve this problem unless we clearly realize that only
a precise knowledge and transformation of the culture created by the en-
tire development of mankind will enable us to create a proletarian culture.
The latter is not clutched out of thin air; it is not an invention of those
who call themselves experts in proletarian culture. That is all nonsense.
Proletarian culture must be the logical development of the store of knowl-
edge mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist landowner and
bureaucratic society
Although Lenin knew and loved music he had little understand-

ing of, or feeling for, the visual arts. But there too he was seriously
concerned to preserve and transmit t

ture to those who had never been p
clared: "It is absolutely essential to m
pillars of our culture from crumblin
happen, the proletariat would never
sized how important it was to insure
the museums and their contents but
that their curators "did not starve or run abroad."
Lenin's refusal to impose his personal tastes as standards and
his humility in fields where he had no special expertise contrast
sharply with his sledgehammer attacks on political views or pro-
posals he thought wrongheaded and dangerous. Lunacharsky tells
of Lenin's reaction to an exhibit of monuments in a competition
"to replace a statue of Alexander III. . . . Especially amazed he stood
in front of a statue done in a futuristic manner. . . . When I told
him that I did not see any worthy design there he was very glad
and said, 'And I thought you'd put up some futuristic monstrosity.'"
During the extreme paper shortage of 1919 Lunacharsky had
authorized a comparatively large edition of one of Mayakovsky's
long poems. Lenin grumbled: "Aren't you ashamed of yourself?
. . . Nonsensical, stupid, sheer stupidity and affectation. I think
that only one out of ten such things should be printed and in no
more than 1500 copies for libraries and cranks." But he did not
countermand the order.
Both Krasikov (Prosecutor-General of the Supreme Court in
1924 who disappeared in the Stalin purges of 1937) and Inessa
Armand's young daughter describe another Mayakovsky incident.
"Little Inessa" took Lenin and Krasikov on a surprise visit to a stu-
dent dormitory at the Higher Art School in Moscow. Lenin asked
the students about their reading, speaking enthusiastically of Pushkin.
They said they found him "old-fashioned," "bourgeois," even rep-
resentative of "parasitic feudalism." The discussion then turned to
a Mayakovsky poster on the wall. Inessa says:
Then we spoke about Mayakovsky's poetry in general. It was obvious that

Lenin enjoyed the enthusiastic way in which the young people spoke about
their beloved poet and about the revolutionary spirit of his verse. How-
ever there was much disagreement as it turned out there were many wor-
shippers of futurism in poetry.
At the end, tired by the debate, Len

make a special study of futurism in pai
the literature on the subject and the
able to hold his own against all the d
Krasikov adds that as they left
I simply cannot understand their enthu

is cheap mumbo-jumbo to which the
I am quite convinced that the revolu
who flirt with it, such as Mayakovsky
think that even these buffoons are nec
yet, people should be reasonable and
put buffoons, even if they swear by
Pushkin.
Lenin did arrange further meetings with some of the students

and at least six of them recorded their conversations. A young sculp-
tor, Y. Yakolov, wrote:
I would like to formulate briefly Comrade Lenin's views on the question

of proletarian culture. I had some five conversations with him on the sub-
ject. The essence of his argument was this: he was against treating the
proletarian culture as if it were a kind of laboratory. He considered dan-
gerous the mere thought that proletarian culture might be produced as if
in an incubator. Proletkult was such a hot house, such an incubator.
Klara Zetkin, a close friend and comrade who had had many
serious, sometimes heated, arguments with Lenin about problems
with the organization of women, describes an unusually relaxed
occasion when he surprised her one evening at supper with his wife
and sister. The three women had been discussing contemporary
developments in art and "Lenin immediately entered with great
liveliness into the discussion." He began:
The awakening, the activity of forces which will create a new art and culture
in Soviet Russia is good, very good. The stormy rate of development is under-
standable and useful. We must and shall make up for what has been ne-
glected for centuries. The chaotic ferment, the feverish search for new solu-
tions and new watchwords, the "Hosannah" for certain artistic and spiritual
tendencies today, the "crucify them tomorrow!" - all that is unavoidable.
The revolution is liberating all the for

and is driving them up from the depths t
example. Think of the pressure exercised
ing, sculpture and architecture by the fa
court, as well as by the taste, the fancies
geoisie. In a society based on private pro
for the market - he needs buyers. Our r
of this most prosaic state of affairs from t
state their protector and patron. Every a
to, can claim the right to create freely a
turns out to be good or not. And so you
ment, the chaos.
Then, speaking more critically of so

ments, Lenin concluded:
Why turn away from beauty, and discard it

it is "old"? Why worship the new as the
is the "new"? That is nonsense, sheer no
conventional art hypocrisy in it too, and re
West. Of course unconscious! We are goo
obliged to point out that we stand at the "h
I have the courage to show myself a "bar
of expressionism, futurism, cubism and
sions of artistic genius. I don't understan
"Lenin laughed heartily. Tes, dear

must be satisfied with remaining yo
revolution. We don't understand the n
behind it.'"
There are innumerable other specifically literary comments in
letters to such friends as the editor V. D. Bonch-Bruerich, Inessa
Armand, and Rosa Luxemburg, as well as those included above.
Many were part of several lengthier discussions with Maxim Gorki
who quotes one brief but penetrating remark Lenin made when
the two attended a music hall in London.
V. Illyitch laughed gaily and infectiously at the clowns and comedians and
looked indifferently at the rest. ... He was already making some interest-
ing remarks about the pantomime as a special form of the art of the the-
ater. "It is the expression of a certain satirical attitude towards generally
accepted ideas, an attempt to turn them

the arbitrariness of the usual. It is a
Lenin's concern for Russia's cult

about anything that threatened t
article in Pravda began:
We are spoiling the Russian language

necessarily. Why use the foreign wor
sian synonyms - nedochoty, nedostatk
made by those who write in the new
instance - the word budirovat is used
stir up. It comes from the French w
pout, which is what boudirovat sho
Nizhni-Novgorod French is the adopt
representatives of the Russian landow
but who, first, did not master the la
the Russian language.
Lenin frequently attacked the

by jargonizing rather than French
the agrarian question he says: "In
to relate in a clear and simple m
agronomics and to omit scientif
nine-tenths of the readers. The V
cisely the opposite manner; they p
of scientific names in the domain
omy, critical philosophy, etc. and
scientific lumber/'
Criticizing a Resolution on Trade Unions drafted by Bukharin and

Trotsky, Lenin began by quoting this sentence: "Accordingly, the
methods of workers' democracy must be those of industrial democ-
racy which means. . ." He continues caustically: "Bukharin opens
his appeal to the masses with such an outlandish term that he must
give a gloss for it. ... You must write for the masses without using
terms that require a glossary."
It is tempting to cite some more of the sometimes vitriolic
passages in which Lenin decried pretentious rhetoric, scientific
jargon and bureaucratic obfuscation. As Christopher Hill said in
his Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1947), Lenin's own
style of speaking seems to have had the sam

wardness and simplicity as his argument
the sense in which Kerensky and Trotsky
gesticulation, oratorical tricks and flouri
appeals to their emotions. Clara Zetkin s
unhewn blocks of granite." ... All his spe
thinking and as soon as he had made his p
The Tolstoy Studies
We conclude with a brief discussion of

mentioned above.
Lukcs' evaluation partially quoted there continues:
Because of Tolstoy's worldwide fame and the important part he played in

the working-class movement during the period preceding and following
the revolution of 1905 nearly every literary critic within the orbit of the
Second International found himself bound to discuss him at length. Need-
less to say everything they wrote radically diverged from Lenin's views.
Lukcs is not here concerned with the obvious contrast between

Lenin and the reactionary critics who adoringly pictured Tolstoy
as a dimwitted saint-like Utopian urging the oppressed to await their
reward for political passivity and vegetarianism in a vague, if not
unearthly, world of universal love. Such readers are not necessar-
ily, or even usually, dishonest. Most are just gratefully attracted to
the confused philosophy in those passages and other philosophi-
cal Tolstoyan essays that enable them to shy away from the unbear-
able re-creation of the real world that Tolstoy too could not bear
to face. But, as Yeats said, one must trust the song, not the singer
- or the philosopher. There was no need for Lukcs to deal with
such "Tolstoyans." Lenin himself had adequately settled accounts
with them in his first, 1908, essay.
Lukcs is here concerned to distinguish Lenin's analysis from
that of other radical - even, like Rosa Luxemburg, Bolshevik -
readers who, whether impressed or patronizing, failed to under-
stand Tolstoy's genius and whose admiration, however sincere, was
still often essentially irrelevant, often belittling. As Shaw once said
of a similar admirer: "I say to him, The house is on fire' and he
responds 'How admirably monosyllabic.'" Or in a more homely,
380 SCIENCE f SOCIETY
more Tolstoyan image, Charles Lam

home who "examineth all your fu
special commendation of your win
Similarly, Lukcs describes many
extent the excellent 19th-century Ma
agreed with Plekhanov that Tolstoy
working class because, despite the f
the struggle for the transformati
successfully expose their evils. Oth
declared that he had nothing to of
was an aristocrat and devoted mos
aristocrats. At least one such liter
count of the number of noblemen described in War and Peace and
Anna Karenina. He may have included in this damning roster the
unquestionable aristocrat Prince Nekhleudov. Tolstoy's description
reads: "[having] nothing else to do than to don a beautifully pressed
and brushed uniform, which not he but others had made and
brushed, put on a helmet and gird on weapons which were also
made, cleaned and put into his hands by others, to mount a fine
charger which again had been bred, trained and groomed by others
and ride to a parade or inspection. . ."
Lenin did not, like too many devoted and otherwise intelligent
radicals, equate a novel with its propositional content - the trap,
as Matthiessen calls it, which led as serious and informed a critic
as Maxwell Geismar to dismiss Faulkner as well as Henry James.
Lenin was not diverted by monosyllables or window curtains. As
for class origin, Gorki tells us of an incident when he visited Lenin
at Gorky (the resort bearing his name) in 1919. He noticed a copy
of War and Peace open on the table. Lenin said:
Yes. Tolstoy; I wanted to read over the scene of the hunt, I then remem-
bered I had to write a comrade. Absolutely no time for reading. Only last
night I managed to read your book on Tolstoy. . . . What a colossus, eh?
What a marvelously developed brain! Here's an artist for you sir. And do
you know something still more amazing? You couldn't find a genuine
muzhik in literature until this count came on the scene. . . . Can you put
anyone in Europe beside him? . . . No one!
The peasant identity of this nobleman was, eis Lenin shows, the
root of Tolstoy's strength. It was, he said, this that made it pos-
sible for the great novelist to sense

before the peasant uprising of 1905
tions that made it possible but also th
response that made it necessary - an
Lenin begins this first essay by ca
that revolution" and then immediate
thing a mirror which so distorts re
obsession with Christ, its crackpot pr
resistance to evil." But, like Marx
novels of Balzac, the faithful Catholi
apparent the complete bankruptcy o
lute corruption of the church, Leni
unobscured through the thin veil wo
personal beliefs. In fact, Lenin went
ing how Tolstoy's Utopian socialist h
not to be ignored but must be seen a
found identification with the real R
Tolstoy did not and could not und
or meaning of the chaos that follo
the serfs. But he felt and expressed
ation, rootlessness, bewilderment a
their new "freedom" in the emerg
forced Tolstoy, as it did his peasant
that promised escape from the inesc
pher Hill shows in his studies of the
ever Cromwell in his late addresse
problem insoluble in the world of t
became increasingly biblical, taking
history.)
Lenin's analysis dwelt on the way in which Tolstoy's equivocal
position made it possible for him to reveal without himself fully
understanding or accepting the unique character of the imminent
revolution as a bourgeois-peasant revolution, a revolution made by
forces who had nothing to gain but a change of masters. This was
a class revolution, but one that nevertheless looked confusedly back
to a peasant economy which had never existed. In one of his later
essays Lenin, who is generally thought to have decried all Utopian
dreams, expands this point, discussing the difference between those
who look toward a visionary past and those who look to a vision-
ary future. As he says elsewhere,

one would have heart for the str
Before Lukcs moves on to hi
work, which, he says, is based en
asks how it was possible for Lenin
when so many other competent sy
continued to fail, to do so.
A contemporary American cri
Marx, deals with a similar question
The Pilot and the Passenger. Speak
sented a deeper truth than he un
contrast between the way in whi
and a passenger see the dangerous
involvement, his need to look thr
tracting eddies, to understand w
changing contours of the riverba
for him to realize the paradoxi
strength and weakness.
In 1910, when delay had "made s
there was a strong movement tow
idealism. A number of former
Tolstoy's philosophy as their ratio
no diminution of his respect for
to an attack on the self-styled
resistance," asceticism, quietism
as "... the jaded hysterical snivelle
who publicly beats his breast and
but I am practicing moral self-perfe
I now eat rice cutlets.'"
Finally Lenin's last essay on Tolstoy, "Tolstoy and His Epoch,"

speaks more specifically of Anna Karenina, although much of his
interest still seems centered in War and Peace. Lenin dwells on an
important figure, Levin, whom Tolstoy himself also clearly admired.
He quotes a key passage in which Levin thinks: "The talk about
the harvest, hiring laborers, and so forth which, as Levin knew, it
was the custom to regard as something very low . . . now seemed
to Levin to be the only important thing." Lenin points out how close
to the heart of the matter Tolstoy had brought his character with-
out himself following. He concludes: "Like the Narodniks Tolstoy
dismisses the thought that what is ta

other than the bourgeois system."
We cannot even imagine what p
have taken had Lenin not died a bare
tion. But anyone who knows his pro
his deep concern with Russian cult
Russia would have had no room for Zhdanovism.
The Brecht Forum

122 West 27th Street
New York, NY 100016281
REFERENCES
Deutscher, Isaac. 1960. Russia in Transition. New York: Grove Press.

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Lenin on Literature, Language, and Censorship

Lenin on Literature, Language,

ABSTRACT: Sophisticated Marxists have always been aware of

WHO USE THE TERM "MARXIST" at all are ignorant

The object of the present study is to def

The four short articles on Tolstoy w

Lenin and Classical Literature

An almost unknown little book, Lenin, Krupskaia and Libraries,

Turgenev, like Pushkin, was a spe

meeting of exiles. His speech was rather t

Shortly thereafter Volskii tried to

Vladimir Ilyich, surely you must be sickened by what Samsonov is saying.

Before Volskii could attempt to d

Well, Mikhail Stepanovich, you surprise m

Volskii says that he was so overwhelmed by this championship,

Lenin's own physical longing for Russia is apparent in the many

Censorship, Nihilism, Modernism, Lan

It is not surprising that Lenin's love

Calm yourselves, gentlemen! First of all, w

Obviously a party in power in a one

He would obviously have opposed

We are rebelliously, passionately tip

At the First All Russian Conference on Adult Education, after

Although Lenin knew and loved music he had little understand-

concerned to preserve and transmit t

Then we spoke about Mayakovsky's poetry in general. It was obvious that

At the end, tired by the debate, Len

Krasikov adds that as they left

I simply cannot understand their enthu

Lenin did arrange further meetings with some of the students

I would like to formulate briefly Comrade Lenin's views on the question

The revolution is liberating all the for

Then, speaking more critically of so

Why turn away from beauty, and discard it

"Lenin laughed heartily. Tes, dear

accepted ideas, an attempt to turn them

Lenin's concern for Russia's cult

We are spoiling the Russian language

Lenin frequently attacked the

Criticizing a Resolution on Trade Unions drafted by Bukharin and

style of speaking seems to have had the sam

The Tolstoy Studies

We conclude with a brief discussion of

Because of Tolstoy's worldwide fame and the important part he played in

Lukcs is not here concerned with the obvious contrast between

more Tolstoyan image, Charles Lam

sible for the great novelist to sense

ary future. As he says elsewhere,

Finally Lenin's last essay on Tolstoy, "Tolstoy and His Epoch,"

dismisses the thought that what is ta

The Brecht Forum

Deutscher, Isaac. 1960. Russia in Transition. New York: Grove Press.

Vol. 10. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

in Collected Works. Vol. 15. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

eign Languages Publishing House.

Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

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