Here, in the turmoil of unprecedented social changes, Marxist theory and practice were put to the decisive test. Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, together with a number of other articles and speeches of the 1920s, was concerned primarily to lay the basis for a Marxist response to the cultural problems raised by the Russian Revolution, and in particular to answer those who advocated a programme of ‘proletarian culture’.

However, Lukacs (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 Lukacs’ 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. 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, usually in opposition to neo-Kantian critics. More than once Georg Lukacs gave a purported summary of his own place in the history of Marxist work on literature and aesthetics. Transcribed: Harrison Fluss for, February 2008. Source: Marxism, Ideology, and Literature Humanities Press, 1980

Literature and Revolution: Trotsky by Cliff Slaugther 1980Ĭliff Slaugther 1980 Literature and Revolution: Trotsky

Art and revolution trotsky