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Soviet Literary Theory in Britain: Bukharin, West, Caudwell.”Mediations 32.2 (Spring 2019) 17-40

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Soviet Literary Theory in Britain: Bukharin, West, Caudwell.”Mediations 32.2 (Spring 2019) 17-40 Philip Bounds. “Soviet Literary Theory in Britain: Bukharin, West, Caudwell.” Mediations 32.2 (Spring 2019) 17-40. www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/soviet-theory-britain Soviet Literary Theory in Britain: Bukharin, West, Caudwell Philip Bounds The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never came close to achieving political power, but its contribution to British society during the seventy-one years of its existence was by no means negligible. Some of its most important achievements occurred in the fields of culture and the arts. From the early 1920s onwards — though especially in the period between the mid-1930s and the late-1950s — the CPGB played host to an array of writers, artists, and musicians whose work has proved of lasting value.1 One of the Party’s particular strengths was in the area of literary and cultural theory. Although a number of writers had adumbrated a Marxist approach to culture in the years before the foundation of the CPGB in 1920, it was only under the influence of Party critics such as Christopher Caudwell, Alick West, and Ralph Fox that Marxism became an accepted tool of literary and cultural analysis in Britain. Moreover, it is now becoming clear that the CPGB’s cultural line exerted a seminal influence on some of twentieth-century Britain’s most important writers and thinkers. George Orwell, Jacob Bronowski, Raymond Williams, John Berger were among the cultural titans whose work was deeply affected by their early exposure to British communist ideology. In spite of the efforts of a number of pioneering scholars, British communist criticism has yet to receive the academic attention it deserves. This is partly because of the cultural and political prejudices by which it is still surrounded. Because many British communists were influenced by ideas originating in the USSR, there is still a tendency to dismiss them as “Moscow dupes” whose only contribution to intellectual life was the mindless repetition of Soviet dogmas. If assumptions like these have discouraged many people from examining communist criticism in depth, they have also had a distorting effect on the small body of work that takes it seriously.2 Insofar as scholars have tried to defend the British communists against the charge of mindless pro-Sovietism, it has sometimes been at the cost of understating the extent of the Soviet influence. As stimulating as the work of pioneering scholars like Prakash, Paananen, and Behrend undoubtedly is, the impression it creates is that men such as 18 Bounds West, Caudwell, and Fox owed no particular debt to Soviet theory and were usually more responsive to ideas drawn from the Western tradition. The result is a vision of communist intellectual history from which the specter of the USSR has been mysteriously erased. One of the aims of this article is to suggest an alternative to the two existing positions. Its central assumption is that British communist critics were deeply influenced by Soviet ideas but never enslaved by them. Although the British communists derived their basic intellectual framework from Soviet theory, they often succeeded in extending Soviet ideas in highly innovative and unpredictable ways. Indeed, there were times when the British response to Soviet theory was downright unorthodox. Unwilling to follow the prevailing line too uncritically, British communists sometimes developed ideas that were both deeply inconsistent with Soviet aesthetic orthodoxy and implicitly critical of the CPGB’s political perspectives.3 This article seeks to illustrate these ideas by examining communist debates about literary aesthetics in the late 1930s. The first section focuses on the work of the Soviet intellectual Nikolai Bukharin, whose writings on literary aesthetics played a major role in legitimizing the Soviet government’s promotion of “Socialist Realism” in the arts. Sections two and three examine the specifically aesthetic element in the work of Alick West and Christopher Caudwell, Bukharin’s two most important British interlocutors. My intention is to show that West and Caudwell owed a considerable debt to Bukharin but never even came close to sacrificing their intellectual independence. In the end they should both be regarded as communist dissidents. Nikolai Bukharin and the Defense of Socialist Realism The emergence of Marxist literary and cultural criticism in Britain long predated the foundation of the CPGB in 1920. Marxist writers began addressing cultural themes as early as the 1880s and some of their insights — especially those of William Morris, Edward Aveling, and Eleanor Marx — retain their importance more than a hundred years later.4 Nevertheless, it was only in the second half of the 1930s that Marxist cultural theory in Britain acquired real intellectual weight. The single most galvanizing influence on the new cohort of CPGB thinkers was the aesthetic ideology explored at the famous Soviet Writers’ Congress in August 1934. In many respects the Congress was the culmination of the extraordinary cultural debates which had occurred in the USSR in the seventeen years since the October Revolution. As soon as Lenin and the Bolshevik Party took power in 1917, a bewildering variety of artistic groups, engaged intellectuals, and culturally minded politicians rushed to express their ideas about the role of the arts in the emerging socialist society. The debate was characterized by an unusual degree of fervor from the very beginning. On the one hand, spokesmen for a variety of modernist tendencies — notably Futurism, Constructivism, and the so-called montage cinema — insisted that only the most uncompromising avant-gardism was equal to the task of reflecting and shaping Soviet Theory in Britain 19 life in the post-capitalist era. By contrast, naturalist groups such as the AkhRR and RAPP claimed that revolutionaries would struggle to find a mass audience unless they employed techniques of a more traditionalist vintage. The influential Proletcult group around A.A. Bogdanov even went so far as to advocate the complete abandonment of all existing artistic traditions, insisting — much to Lenin’s chagrin — that an authentic socialist culture would have to be built from the ground up by working people. The Soviet government’s attitude towards the competing artistic trends was at first a comparatively liberal one. No movements or individuals were suppressed in the early years of the revolution unless they were perceived as explicitly counter- revolutionary. However, the state’s efforts to extend its influence over the arts began to gather pace shortly after Lenin’s death. The first sign that Soviet politicians were swinging behind the traditionalist, realist, and anti-modernist camp came in 1925 when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) issued a resolution entitled On the Party’s Policy in the Field of Literature. At the heart of the resolution was the demand that politically conscious artists should “make use of all the technical achievements of the old masters to work out an appropriate form, intelligible to the masses.”5 It was now only a matter of time until the state sought to bring Soviet artists under complete control. State-run organizations to oversee the production of new work in each of the arts were eventually set up in 1932. Two years later, during the tumultuous debates at the Writers’ Congress in Moscow, Stalin’s hired intellectuals finally clarified the aesthetic ideology to which Soviet writers and artists were expected to adhere. The core of this ideology was the instruction that communist cultural workers should eschew modernist experimentation and observe the conventions of “Socialist Realism.”6 The most important speeches at the congress — those by A.A. Zhdanov, Maxim Gorky, Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukhari, and A.I. Stetsky — were subsequently translated into a number of different languages and published in book form throughout the world. The English translation of the speeches can reasonably be regarded as the single biggest influence on British communist criticism in the 1930s.7 When critics such as West, Caudwell and Fox wrote about the arts, they developed their ideas within a conceptual framework established by their Soviet counterparts. As innovative and unorthodox as they could frequently be, they took it for granted that their main duty was to tease out the significance of Soviet criticism’s defining shibboleths. The overriding purpose of the congress was a prescriptive one. Zhdanov, Gorky, and the other keynote speakers all had a hand in stipulating what a work of Socialist Realism should look like. Zhdanov came closest to encapsulating the new form in a single sentence when he said that Socialist Realism “means knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art, not to depict it in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as “objective reality,” but to depict reality in its revolutionary development.”8 Soviet writers were given precise instructions as to how they should shape their work at the level of both form and content. They were told, in the first place, to turn 20 Bounds their backs on modernist experimentation and to employ only traditional forms — linear narrative in the novel, rhyme and rhythm in poetry, Renaissance perspective in painting, and so on. They were also told that a meritorious work of Socialist Realism should strike a balance between illuminating the present and prefiguring the utopian promise of the communist future. On the one hand, guided by the materialist conception of history, revolutionary writers should sharpen their audience’s understanding of contemporary affairs by laying bare their “essence.” This could only be done by portraying society as synoptically as possible and by rigorously adhering to the principles of klassovost (the idea that the working class has the main responsibility for changing society), partiinost (the idea that the Communist Party must lead the working class in its revolutionary activity), and ideinost (the idea that Marxism alone provides an adequate means of interpreting human affairs).
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