The communist revolution in Russia, the Great War, the Stock market crash in 1929, the Spanish
civil war and the imminent threat of a new war during the 1930s.
These events certainly influenced literature published during these years.
New literary movements erupted, and writers sought a beacon of hope for the future of
mankind.
Several became convinced Communists, though as we will see, many writers in the Soviet
Union met a fate more horrible than any writer in the Western world.
-intro-
The 1920s was the decade marked by self-conscious artistic experimentation.
The literary world saw the following writers publish their distinguished works (though
there are many others) T.S.
Eliot with “the wasteland” and “the hollow men”, James Joyce with “Ulysses”,
Marcel Proust with “A la recherche du temps perdu” and Ernest Hemingway with “The
Sun Also Rises”.
The writers of the modern movement sought a new movement in order to express the horrid
conditions the twentieth century had so far brought with it, both physically and psychologically.
As the thirties came closer, the experimental movement started to fade as the world started
to glide towards extremes on the political spectrum and the threatening atmosphere did
not spare the writer.
The Beurskrach in 1929 severely affected Europe, and the world.
Marxists proclaimed that capitalism had passed its peak and now was the time for Communists
to unite in order to push capitalism over the edge…
The Soviet Union, to many, was a beacon of hope, a new egalitarian society.
The fact that the Soviet Union allowed no place for traditional freedoms that western
intellectuals ought to cherish, was often neglected.
In Western Europe, these values were threatened more directly by fascism, and the 1930s saw
many writers turn to communism as the last option to defend human values…
Looking back at this period, it is rather… ironic.
Spain’s civil war in 1936, at that time, showcased a unique struggle between democracy
and fascism.
From all over the world, writers supported the side of the Spanish Republic.
George Orwell even travelled to Spain to fight on the Republican Side.
But, before that, pacifism and an aversion to war were widespread during the ‘20s and
early ‘30s.
In various countries, writers that had the sheer fortune to survive the Great War documented
their experiences in novels and memoirs that emphasized the horrors and futility of war.
In the United States, Ernest Hemingway published A Farewell to Arms, England saw Siegfried
Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Robert Graves’
Goodbye to All That and Richard Aldingtons’ Death of a Hero.
In Germany, Erich Maria Remarques’ Im Westen Nichts Neues was published.
A novel which describes a German soldiers extreme mental and physical stress during
the Great War.
Definitely a recommendation if you want to be able to picture what the war was like for
young men.
There was another German novel, Ernst Jüngers “In Stahlgewittern” that was published
in 1929.
This book was proof that the traditional stance towards war has not yet died out.
It emphasized the righteousness of the Germans during the Great War and glorified the German
soldiers’ courage.
The book concluded with a call for the military spirit and a yearning for the arrival of national
socialism.
Kafka laid the basis
Franz Kafka, widely regarded as one of the major figures in 20th-century literature,
embodied a near-prophetic element in his works about the totalitarian regimes that would
come to threaten and dominate several countries the next decade.
Though Kafka, a Czech Jew, passed away in 1924, his works give a rather surprisingly
accurate view in the issues that were present early-20th century, his works nearly predicting
totalitarianism.
Kafka used an allegory, metaphors, throughout his story, to emphasize the belief that individuals
were suppressed by unjust, unfair and arbitrary powers.
Der Prozess tells the tale of Joseph K arrested for a crime which is never revealed.
Joseph is subjected to humiliation and interrogations, only to be executed, never finding out what
he was tried for.
Kafka did not propagate an overtly political stance with his works, though Der Prozess
seems like a prediction - describing the atmosphere in which totalitarian regimes operate, both
Fascist countries, and the Soviet Union.
There is a reason, why the word “Kafkaesque” entered the English vocabulary in order to
describe an arbitrary, alien and terrifying bureaucratic process.
Literature in the Soviet Union
The Russian Revolution in October 1917 was a giant leap towards the “liberation of
humankind”, at least, to Russian writers, poets and artists.
Alexandr Blok, whom Maxim Gorky referred to as “Russia’s finest poet”, wrote a poem
about the revolution.
He named it Двенадцать, the Twelve.
It did not take long for Blok to become disillusioned with the Russian Revolution, passing away
four years later, in 1921.
The years after saw the Soviet Union crack down on literary freedom and writers became
disillusioned with the Communist revolution.
Sergei Yesenin, one of the most renowned poets of the Soviet Union, committed suicide at
the age of thirty, leaving behind his last poem До свиданья, друг мой,
до свиданья; Goodbye my friend, goodbye.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, another well known Russian playwright, poet, actor and artist, committed
suicide at the age of thirty-six.
His funeral became the third largest public mourning event, only after the funerals of
Lenin and Stalin.
The Russian-Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam disappeared during the Great Purge, passing away in a
Soviet gulag in 1938.
It is wry that he once exclaimed: "Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people
killed.
Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"
Isaac Babel, one of the greatest Russian prose writers, fell victim to Stalin’s purges
as well, shot… in 1940.
He was dragged down by Yezhov, the head of the secret police after he himself was arrested.
And yet…
The Soviet Union seemed as if it was the shining example to many writers in the world - representing
a certain form of… hope for humanity.
Some writers became convinced communists, such as the German poet and playwright Bertolt
Brecht and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
British literature
While a leftist worldview in literary circles was rather normal in Great Britain, Communism
had never been a strong intellectual force.
The dominating figure in British literature was W.H.
Auden, who published his first book, Poems, in 1930.
Auden was known as a poet with a gift and yet with a young man’s temper.
His early works saw him attempt to unite the techniques of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud
in order to analyse what was “wrong” in the country, as he was well aware of the economic
decay following the 1929 Beurskrach.
Known for love poems such as “funeral blues” and his political works, Auden was a Communist
for a short while, probably in the same way that a youth feels the urge to rebel against
authority:
Stephen Spencer, Auden’s friend and admirer, cemented his reputation as a poet in the 1930s
as well.
A short-lived communist, just like Auden, his social observations were milder and less
judgemental.
Spencer, Auden, and other associated English poets had the tendency to use machinery and
other technical tools in their poetry.
It earned them the name the “pylon poets”, after Spencer’s poem “the Pylons”.
France
In contrast to England, surrealist poets in France were more prominent and more energetic
in their dedication to the revolution.
Surrealism was launched in the 1920s as an artistic movement that attempted to discover
the Freudian unconscious (though, Freud himself said that poets discovered this before his
own work).
Surrealists wanted to blend the contents of the unconscious with everyday reality in order
to create a new ‘super-reality’ that was akin to a dream.
Andre Breton was a poet that embodied this style, and Salvador Dali’s paintings are
known to all of us.
The movement attempted to shock, while occasionally it reached strange bewildering beauty, at
its core, it was pestilent to the general literary standards.
While surrealism was not a French movement as a whole, Paris was the centre of the movement
and surrealists became part of the French tradition of radical non-conformism, a tradition
that always wanted to shock the bourgeoisie.
During the 1930s this movement was affiliated with the left-wing, claiming that their own
anti-traditionalist and anti-bourgeois feelings and their connection to the new reality corresponded,
in its core, with the goals of the political revolutionaries.
Surrealist poets such as Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard were prominent communist intellectuals,
though the French communist party did not really… know what they had to do with these
surrealists.
And the French government?
Had no idea either, it refused to organise a national funeral for Eluard, citing “political
reasons”.
Aragon, later in his life, became a literary bureaucrat of the Communist party.
Eluard was an outstanding lyrical poet, whose art rose above his political affiliation.
Prose
Prose demonstrated a similar awareness of the depressing and confusing times.
Novelists that followed the tradition of naturalism were occupied with the situation of modern
urban life.
George Orwell was the representative figure of these novels in England.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying portrays a young intellectual that attempts to be a poet but
gets crushed by economic distress.
Coming up for air, published in 1939, expresses Orwell’s deep-seated hate against life in
England, romanticizing a longing to the period before 1914 and a deep-seated fear for a new
war that seemed inevitable.
In university, a professor once recommended me to read Orwell’s essay “six rules for
great writing” and hang it on my wall.
It still hangs there to this day.
Orwell can be considered an essayist and journalist, rather than a novelist.
The Road to Wigan Pier documents the harsh situation of life among the working class,
the poor and the hungry in the impoverished area of Lancashire.
A part of Orwell’s personality seems to seek out dreadful conditions.
We can find this element in the works of Louis Ferdinand Céline as well.
His novel “Voyage au bout de la nuit” shows us a saddening, intellectual autobiography
disguised as a novel.
As in the works of Sassoon and Remarque, the main character, Ferdinand Bardamu, describes
his experiences during the Great War.
He paints the life that followed in Africa and as a factory worker in the United States,
eventually returning to France where he lived in misery and filth in a poor neighbourhood
of Paris.
Despite all the nasty elements of Celine’s novel, it shows us a courageous chronic of
surprising strength that accomplishes its task: describing and revealing many of the
attitudes of his day.
Contrary to other writers that flirted with the left during these years, Céline had a
fascination to the right, overtly supporting the Axis powers when the Second World War
broke out.
The American Ezra Pound, whose work “the Cantos”, are definitely worth an attempt
to read, was a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement.
Pound remains controversial, and was already during his lifetime, due to his antisemitism
and overt support for both Mussolini and Hitler.
Regardless, Hemingway wrote: The best of Pound's writing—and it is in the Cantos—will last
as long as there is any literature."
Novels
One of the most important intellectuals that rose in the 1930s was the French philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre.
His first novel La Naussée, published in 1938, was brilliantly constructed.
He detailed the futility of modern city-life, though the underlying thought of the novel
was spiritual, not necessarily political or social.
The novel precedes Sartre’s influential philosophical works, where he describes us
humans, doomed to “absolute and terrifying freedom, where nothing is preordained.
Thus, anything is possible”.
The phrase “existence precedes essence” is associated with Sartre’s philosophy:
human beings—through their consciousness—create their own values and determine a meaning for
their life because the human being does not possess any inherent identity or value.
That identity or value must be created by the individual.
This is contrary to, among other things, the belief of predestination, the doctrine that
states all events have been willed by God.
Sartre’s greatest existentialist works of fiction are found in a short story collection
he published, which includes the story “L’enfance d’un chef” or “the childhood of a leader”,
in which he describes the younger years of Lucien Fleurier, who searches for his identity.
Eventually, Fleurier joins a fascist movement in the hopes of finally giving meaning to
his life
Fin
This video has become a bit longer than I expected, literature and poetry, especially
interlinked to the political systems around them, provide so much ground to cover that
there will be another video which will detail the literary events surrounding the Spanish
civil war from 1936 to 1939.
George Orwell travelled to Spain in order to fight on the Republican side, and he soon
became disillusioned.
Talented and prominent poets and writers such as Federico Garcia Lorca, Hemingway, Spender
and Malraux were inspired by the Spanish civil war.
The follow-up video to this, though I do not yet know when I will be done with the research
as this does take a bit longer than researching historical events, will be about the literary
works the Spanish civil war has sparked.
Thank you very much for watching, I hope it was an interesting video.
If you have any questions surrounding the topic feel free to leave a comment!
Until next Friday!