“Literature and Revolution”: Leon Trotsky: Optimism and Freedom

Leon Trotsky was considered the Bolsheviks’ best orator. Because he knew this, he was perhaps too unsuspecting when it came to Lenin’s successor after his death in 1924. He was outbid by Josef Stalin and others, from which ultimately only Stalin benefited – because “the traitor, Stalin, is you!”, as Willi Münzenberg put it in 1939, who, like Trotsky, was unlikely to survive this position: both died in 1940 Exile, Münzenberg under dubious circumstances, Trotsky was murdered by a Soviet secret agent.

Trotsky was a professional revolutionary, an activity that hardly anyone is able to do these days, because the next necessity is always the most difficult. This is how the left-wing parties apologize if they are represented in parliament and are happy to be allowed to run on the sidelines. Trotsky, on the other hand, was in the opposition all his life, except from autumn 1917 to early 1925, when he was a member of the revolutionary government.

He did not complain about practical constraints, but was an unshakable historical optimist. In 1901 he published a text about the beginning of the 20th century that condemned the optimist to “absolute pessimism”: “Death to utopias! Death to faith! Death of love! Death of hope!’, booms the twentieth century with gunfire and the thunder of cannons. ‘Give up, poor dreamer! Here I am, your long-awaited twentieth century, your ‘future’!…’ ‘No!’ replies the indomitable optimist: ‘You are only the present!'”

Based on this attitude, Trotsky initiated the founding of a new International near Paris in 1938 with almost 30 people. Since he had been declared persona non grata in France, he could not be present in person and was in exile in Mexico. This was where the problems of this “Fourth International” began, which split into caricatures instead of growing.

In the same year he published the manifesto “For an Independent Socialist Art” with the writer André Breton, the head of the Surrealists, and the painter Diego Rivera. In it they emphasized that the revolution does not fear art, on the contrary: the socialist economy should “establish and secure an anarchist regime of individual freedom for intellectual creation from the start.” One could also say: socialism in production, anarchy in thought – an approach that communist parties worldwide hated, whether they were in power or not.

Trotsky was a man of practice and theory alike who read a lot and thought about whether and how his reading could be made productive for the emancipation of people. Since 1900, when he was 21 years old, he wrote various articles: essays, reports and literary-sociological studies for the Irkutsk-published “Vostochnoje Obosreniye” (Eastern Review) under the pseudonym Antid Oto. The latter have now appeared under the title “Literature and Revolution”, edited by Helmut Dahmer, Wolfgang Feikert and Julijana Ranc, as the eighth volume of the “Trotsky Writings”, the edition of which Dahmer has been involved in since the late 1980s. A task that is both worthwhile and arduous since Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who saw himself as a Trotskyist in his younger years, stopped funding. The explanatory footnotes in this volume in particular are a philological and sociological masterpiece.

In 1900, Trotsky was exiled to southern Siberia and lived there with his first wife Alexandra L. Sokolovskaya and their two daughters, 6,000 miles from Odessa, where he had co-founded the South Russian Workers’ Union in 1897 and was arrested just a year later. In exile, but also in prison – according to his own estimate, he was imprisoned 20 times in his life – he read a lot of books, which he then turned into essays and books. “To relax, I read the classics of European literature,” he remembers in his autobiography “My Life” about a stay in prison in 1906: “I lay on the cot and devoured the works with such a physical feeling of pleasure that gourmets sip fine wine.”

It contains 69 texts by Trotsky from the years 1900 to 1916, and the editors hope to publish another volume with his literary writings from 1919 to 1940 “in the foreseeable future.” Trotsky deals here, among other things, with Nietzsche, Ibsen, Herzen, Gorky, Gogol, Schnitzler, Wedekind, but also with the demolition calendar, the Munich satirical magazine “Simplicissimus”, exhibitions of the “Vienna Secession” and the end of the “thick journals”. Russian monthly magazines of the 19th century, whose political non-committal nature seems to have been out of date for him. Trotsky shrewdly examines all these authors, products and works for their political content. He wants to look for the answer to the questions of the effectiveness of art “in social conditions, in their historical development,” as he writes in the text “New Year’s Conversation on Art.”

He praises Ibsen for “the truly glorious slaps in the face” that he gave to the “philistine face shining with self-satisfaction.” For him, Schnitzler is “an esthete and only an esthete” and “Tolstoy does not recognize history.” The latter also applies to Gogol, who freed Russian fiction from its second-rate status so that “our writers no longer wanted to be duplicates of European geniuses,” but who then found himself “suddenly, defenseless and unprepared before a mass of interrelated questions.” what made him resort to the “miserable thought models” of mysticism.

When Trotsky met the leaders of Austro-Marxism in Vienna in 1908, he was perplexed that they wanted to be pure theoreticians, far removed from practice. “They were very educated people who knew more than me in various areas,” he writes in “My Life,” but they “were not revolutionaries” and incapable of applying the “Marxian method.” They were already happy when the workers addressed them as “Comrade Doctor.”

Trotsky also thought little of Futurism; the “deification of the word” and the “form detached from content” seemed violent to him, since “an enormous amount was demanded of the word – far more than it is capable of giving by its nature.” And yet throughout his life he was for the autonomy of art, a principle that was condemned by many on the left and right. He was also convinced by the Russian Futurists that this “historical fertilizer (…) will undoubtedly make something new possible in due course.”

Leon Trotsky: Writings 4.1: Literature and Revolution 1900–1916. Edited by Helmut Dahmer, Wolfgang Feikert and Julijana Ranc. New ISP Verlag, 749 pages, hardcover, €70.