Volume 14, Number 12 · June 18, 1970
Revolutionary Aesthetics
By John Willett
Literature and Revolution: A Critical Study of the Writer and Communism in the Twentieth Century
by Jürgen Rühle, translated and edited by Jean Steinberg
Praeger, 520 pp., $12.50
Literature and Revolution is hardly an unfamiliar combination of words. Half a century ago Trotsky wrote an important book under that title, followed in 1932 by Victor Serge's Littérature et Révolution and soon after by a speech on the same theme by Gide. For all of these, but particularly for Trotsky, it was reasonable to concentrate on the revolution in hand and the pressing problem of the new Communist Party's relation to the arts. Since then, however, the problem has become a very much wider one, and its purely Soviet or communist aspects have begun to recede in importance.
Review, 3080 words
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