Zolja i Narodnyj front vo Francii (di E. Gal'perina) [26-09-1937] - [D054]

Concise description of the directive:

In recent years, Zola has been cited with increasing frequency in the speeches and discourses of progressive French writers. The Soviet reader may be surprised that Zola’s name is mentioned more often than the great French realists of the 19th century, even more often than Balzac. The cause is as follows: Zola shows a profile of great courage and civil honesty, as well as that of an author of great novels with social themes. Forty years after the Dreyfus affair, French writers are fighting for justice as Zola once did. After a sterile formalist and psychologistic imitation dominated in the field of French literature for a decade, the writers of the popular front are beginning to put literature back on the paths of the great social realist novel by taking Zola as their model, with his optimistic pathos and his faith in the progress of reason, science and justice that seem to be revitalised after the domination of the devastating art of decadence in France. His democratic themes, concepts, structures, language and the vitality of his books appear to be a breath of fresh air after the decades of the cult of ‘measure’, which instead appears sophisticated, refined and detached from real life. Zola’s weaknesses cannot be ignored: for instance, the writer is passionate about the cult of capital associated by him with progress. Engels, in fact, considers him a less profound writer than Balzac. Therefore, if we need examples of a profound analysis of social life, we always go back to the pinnacles of 19th century bourgeois realism, namely Balzac and Stendhal. Yet Zola, who arrived a few decades later, has the advantage of belonging to the dawn of the revolutionary workers’ movement. Therefore, he succeeded in introducing the new themes of capitalism and the contemporary proletariat into the social novel, which make it very topical. Our critics are used to describing him as the last realist of the 19th century, transforming the great realist tradition of Balzac and reducing it to naturalism. This is of course true, but we cannot reduce the significance of Zola, artist and fighter, to the vulgarities of the naturalist novel theory. Many of our critics did not understand what the progressive French writers, who saw in Zola the anticipation of a new literature and a new epoch, understood well.