Abstract
More than once Georg Lukács gave a purported summary of his own place in the history of Marxist work on literature and aesthetics. These accounts refer from time to time to the writings of Plekhanov and Franz Mehring in the period of the Second International, in which they had repulsed idealist attacks on historical materialism, and in the course of so doing had demonstrated the social and historical roots of literary works and tendencies,1 usually in opposition to neo-Kantian critics. However, Lukács (for reasons which are well-known, and to which we refer in our next chapter) took the greatest care to avoid any treatment of the one Marxist, Trotsky, whose work on literature was carried out after Lukács’ own entry into the communist movement, that is to say in the revolutionary wave which followed the Russian Revolution of 1917 and overwhelmed the reformist Second International.
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Chapter 3
See especially G. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1953), for the analysis of French eighteenth-century drama and the nineteenth-century aesthetic movement;
and F. Mehring, Die Lessing Legende (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953) and On Historical Materialism (London: New Park Publications, 1975).
L. D. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960).
Raymond Williams, for example, writes that ‘Marxism, in many fields, and perhaps especially in cultural theory, has experienced at once a significant revival and a related openness and flexibility of theoretical development’ Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977) p. 1.
L. D. Trotsky, Class and Art: Problems of Culture under the Dictatorship of the proletariat (Speech of 1924) (London: New Park Publications, 1974) p. 18.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. V (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976) p. 49.
L. D. Trotsky, Culture and Socialism and a Manifesto, Art and Revolution (London: New Park Publications, 1975).
K. Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, vol. II (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1942).
Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976) pp. 50–1.
P. Macherey, Pour une Théorie de la Production Littéraire (Paris: Maspéro, 1970).
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© 1980 Cliff Slaughter
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Slaughter, C. (1980). Literature and Revolution: Trotsky. In: Marxism, Ideology and Literature. Critical Social Studies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16298-7_3
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