Lenin adored literature. One of his favorite authors was Leo Tolstoy, the Christian Anarchist whose novels are far from advocating a socialist revolution and idealizing proletarians. In fact his most famous works, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, are ruminations on the lives of Russian elites, their day to day joys and miseries and struggles. If you look enough you can find some progressive, materialist, even socialistic elements in these works, especially in some of Tolstoy’s later output (recall for example his long detours on what is very close to a materialistic conception of history in War and Peace, problematizing the “Great Man theory of history”). But it was also clear that Tolstoy disliked socialists and Marxists for their lack of spiritualism, and yes also their devotion to a materialist worldview wherein economics figured as a primary factor. Tolstoy argued that this was a reflection of urban petty-bourgeois thinking, universalizing the conditions in their immediate surroundings while ignoring the mass of the peasantry living in the countryside with forms of life that did not conform to this model of an industrial, urban setting. He also accused the socialists of merely wanting to become the new managers of society, replacing the old with their rational schemes and ideas (see chapters 5 and 6 of this essay of his). “Even the most advanced economists—the Socialists, who demand the complete control of the means of production for the workers –expect production of the same or almost of the same articles as are produced now to continue in the present or in similar factories with the present division of labor.”
Lenin was naturally aware of this, yet he still loved Tolstoy’s literary works and praised them effusively while also offering critical reflections on his politics. He also loved Goethe, Pushkin, Shakespeare, the classics like Ovid, Virgil and Horace, and more besides as Tariq Ali covers in this piece. He was, in short, the opposite of a puritan pseudo-radical whose appreciation of the artistic and cultural was narrow and limited to whatever fit some sectarian mould of “proper socialist art”.
Lenin was no exception. Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Gramsci, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Thomas Sankara, leaders and intellectuals of the communist movement and also the workers who made up its base were always wary of such narrow frames of thinking. Castro did not despise a literary genius like Gabriel Garcia Marquez for not writing strictly “proletarian revolutionary literature”, he loved him for his talent and vision and ability to bring to life with words what others could not, the history of Latin America as reflected through the prism of his characters. Marx and Engels adored a “bourgeois” writers like Balzac, Goethe and Shakespeare because they too reflected the societies of their times, like France in the era of capitalist ascendancy and the breakdown of aristocracies.
Were there also puritanical strains in the communist movement that at times expressed themselves? Yes of course, and one’s mind immediately goes to Soviet history of the 1920s and 30s, although a lot of that is very much exaggerated and I recommend reading the work of historians like Sheila Fitzpatrick on “everyday Stalinism” for how those puritanical elements did not express some totalitarian mass movement, but were often relegated to bureaucrats whose official proclamations did not translate to the actual lives of the working masses in the country, who continued to read their Pushkin and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Even better, read Soviet pedagogue and at the time a bestselling author Anton Makarenko’s epic Road to Life, depicting the life of an orphanage and its inhabitants from its creation shortly after the October Revolution up to the 1930s. Three volumes describing life in the Soviet Union in a state-run institution, books that were published in the Soviet Union itself at the time and was even turned into a film in 1931 (and another version in 1955). Yet there is no sign of this totalitarian model where only one type of art, one type of music, one type of novel, one type of poem, one type of living was allowed and enforced onto everyone. This is why serious historians like Fitzpatrick questioned the premises of this model as being an abstraction with very little relationship to the realities of people’s everyday experiences.
There is no country today led by a socialist party, whatever you may think about its “real nature”, that strictly enforces such a narrow conception of the cultural onto its population. Yes, I am including North Korea in that, although it is toward the narrow side of the spectrum as compared to Cuba, China, Vietnam, Venezuela, Bolivia and Laos. There is a notable domestic literary and cultural scene of which the West only catches a glimpse in a sea of “literally everything is determined by Kim Jong Un”. Meanwhile in the other countries there are certain limits imposed by the state—limits which incidentally I believe are counterproductive and oppose—but there is wide circulation of foreign, Western-made cultural productions, from films to books, alongside a vibrant domestic scene. Even in a country like Iran you can buy pretty much any book and film you like. Ironically as you can see in the linked clip, one of the major obstacles are the sanctions and copyright laws. This points to the different forms in which censorship can be imposed. It is not only the state that can and does officially censor, but also capital. In fact, the censorship imposed by capital far exceeds the former, as it is the predominant form of censorship under capitalism and strikes at the root of cultural production, whereas the latter typically tries to prevent its circulation (something which with the internet has become increasingly difficult if not impossible). This is the point made so well by George Lucas, who personally experienced the censorship of capital and contrasted it with the Soviet Union.
The point is this: there is no mass socialist movement anywhere in the world that seeks to impose a narrow, puritanical conception of the cultural onto the mass of the population. The only place where this actually exists is in the fevered minds of pseudo-radical teenagers who live in some suburb in New York or LA and conjure up fantasies of living in 1930s Soviet Russia without even knowing anything about its real history. Oh you like this band? You like this movie? You like this writer? But they’re a lib. They’re a reactionary. They had a bad position on this topic and that topic. How can you possibly like that and still call yourself an anti-imperialist socialist? Lenin would never! These self-proclaimed radicals have embraced the propaganda model of “totalitarianism”, except they present it as virtuous and good.
Whenever I post about anything related to the cultural, there is guaranteed to be at least a couple of these puritanical freaks in my replies, reminiscent of the online meme group known as the Maoist International Movement, although using the term “group” is very charitable for two or three people and their pets. For those unaware, they specialized in writing “Maoist” reviews of popular movies, criticizing them for their lack of revolutionary discipline (although bizarrely ascribing it to some of them as well). If you’re ever bored it’s worth taking a look at. This is what happens when affluent Westerners with too much time on their hands get into socialism as a hobby purely by accident—they could have just as well fallen into Star Wars or Star Trek fandom or some game franchise—and then decide to devote their lives to making everyone around them as miserable as they are, in the name of “the revolution”. What better hobby is there where you can larp as a brave hero, the main character of the world (you are after all the only really class conscious proletarian), and denounce others for not living up to your standards. Just going around calling everyone impure, and by that act calling yourself pure and good and holy. It must be an intoxicating feeling, and unfortunately the internet has allowed these isolated freaks to impose their narcissistic derangements onto the world via social media.
But do not confuse this with the historical and present reality of mass socialist movements and their leaders, who had nothing but contempt for this kind of pseudo-radical puritanical mindset. The aim of socialism if you boil it down to its core element is to emancipate, to free people from the constraints imposed by the tyranny of capital, which actually does closely conform to the totalitarian model. This emancipation does not narrow, but vastly expands the scope of cultural production, for it will no longer be required to conform to the limiting logic of profit, which dictates: Only what makes money is of value. There is no more actually soul-crushing, art-destroying, immiserating, authoritarian, censorial act than this, and it governs the world.
There's, of course, Lenin's famous remark to Gorky about being wary of the Appassionata's cozening beauty, which threatened to sap him of combative energy. As far as it's possible to tell, he rarely turned off the analysis engine to focus on the pure aesthetics of literature, either, be it with Tolstoy or Goethe.
I have a little sympathy for the "Maoist" list-makers. It's a common streak in the activist approach to art (and life), easily mistaken for puritanism but best described as obsessive urgency, understandable given the monumental size of the task. 'Only what makes money is of value' becomes 'only what advances the cause is of value'. Which... isn't a bad thing, but it demonstrates how closed-off their options for meaningful action are, when all this energy and drive gets channeled into larping, sideways-punching, and pedantry.
This is a clarifying perspective for me as someone who struggles to grasp how socialism could relate to art. I hope to learn more about it.