Kuda idet francuzskaja intelligencija [P020]

Concise description of the paratext-directives' relation:

In the long polemical article Kuda idet frantsuzkaya intelligentsia [Where is the French intelligentsia going] Lunacharsky traces the main stages of contemporary French culture for the readers of the newly founded literary journal ‘Literaturniy kritik’, in its second issue since its foundation. As stated in the paratext dedicated to him in the critic’s Sobranie sochineniy, the article in question originated from a transcript of a speech by Lunacharsky (8 February 1933) in response to the report of I.I. Anisimov on ‘André Gide and Capitalism’, delivered at a meeting of the USSR Organising Committee on 29 January 1933; both in the prolusion and in the article published in July 1933, we find ourselves in a historical moment in which, in the Soviet cultural-literary reviews, within a theoretical-formal and philosophical framework concerning the different souls of what would later become canonical socialist realism, defined after the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, we find various testimonies of a wide-ranging and still general debate, lively since the end of 1933 (see in this regard, in LitKritik, the articles by P. Judin Lenin i nekotorye voprosy literaturnoy kritiki D134; V. Kirpotin O socialisticheskom realizme D135, also V. Kirpotin’s article in “Literaturnaya gazeta”, D094 ). In this context Lunacharsky, at that time no longer the People’s Commissar for Education, but somehow ‘demoted’ following the Great Turning Point to ‘chairman of the Scientific Committee of the USSR’s Central Executive Committee’, places Proust in his article between the loyal French communist intellectuals Gide and Barbusse (the latter, moreover, not exempt from ‘unsuccessful books’, p. 58), and Paul Valéry, whose work is judged with words of admiration and praise (‘he is a jeweller’ p. 62). In this early 1933 paper, placed after the theoretical-programmatic section in which the aforementioned critics wrote, Lunacharsky’s ideas on Proust, and on certain other unorthodox French writers, e.g. the aforementioned Valéry, stand out for a certain autonomy of the critic’s judgement, for the freedom of style and manoeuvre with which they are expressed within the cultural orthodoxy of the time, and, at the same time, they do not differ substantially from the biographical-literary sketches that Lunacharsky had published during the 1920s, also often very critical: his was in fact the first Soviet publication concerning Proust, in fact, in a 1923 obituary (Marsel’ Prust, “Krasnaya niva”, 1923 no. 6/11 February), then dedicated an article to him in 1924 (K charakteristike noveyshey frantsuzskoy literatury, “Pechat’ i revolyutsiya”, no. 2, pp. 17-26), just as some considerations on the Recherche were published in Pis’ma s Zapada [Letters from the West] in 1926 (first published as Pis’ma iz Parizha. Pis’mo tret’e, in “Krasnaya gazeta” nos. 28 and 29, February 1 and 2); in the mid-1920s, from his post of Narkompros, he facilitated the first translations of the Recherche into Russian for the famous and prestigious publishing house Academia, still located in Leningrad: those edited by Adrian Frankovsky and Boris Griftsov, of which the first two parts came out (V storonu Svana, Pod tenyu devushek v tsvetu, L. Academia 1927 and 1928); another parallel translation of the Jeunes filles en fleur came out for Nedra (Pod senyu devushek v tsvetu, transl. edited by L.Ja Gurevich, S. Parnok, with the collaboration of B. Griftsov, M. 1927); it should be noted that separate excerpts from the Recherche, (in particular from the Swan’ way) came out as early as 1924 for the journal “Sovremenniy Zapad” (No.5, pp. 103-125, the journal was the responsibility of Gorky and the publishing house Vsemirnaya literatura), in translation by M.N. Ryzhkina. In the early 1930s, Lunacharsky was still the promoter of the future new edition of the Recherche (M. Goslitizdat, 1934-1938, incomplete, and stopped at volume IV, Sodom i Gomorra). In the article from ‘Literaturniy kritik’ that we quote here, the Soviet critic states that “what makes Proust fascinating more than anything else are his extraordinary stylistic impulses and his exceptional vividness in reproducing memories”; he then states that “this can only be achieved by developing an extraordinary and subtle sensitivity and imaginative productivity. It is very interesting that Proust captures in his great work profoundly different social strata, different manifestations of human nature”, p. 60, even if to such initial generous statements he then hangs a cumbersome fringe of improprieties: “But Proust is a desperate and despicable snob. Almost half of the content of his famous series of novels boils down to the fact that various members of a semi-known aristocracy and miscellaneous riffraff [shval’] try to get into this or that salon, whereby a certain lady X considers herself to be a lady of high rank, but is not allowed to go to the house of lady Y, because lady Y is too high-born” (ibid.). Again, adds Lunacharsky: “Proust describes, yes, the weaknesses of the aristocracy: […] but the fact that a certain lord duke is bald and that some duchess is stupid certainly does not change the fact that these are divine or almost divine beings, whom the snobs treat with exceptional subservience; and if we take into account all the refined and sophisticated culture with which Proust is endowed, this lackey psychology of his is repugnant – the meanest I have ever seen in a writer.” (p. 61). Lunacharsky expresses himself here with remarkable expressive immediacy and with the stylistic independence that often distinguishes him in his critical paratexts/writings, far from any slavish adherence to pre-packaged critical-Marxist directives or formulae, whereby he succeeds as much in praising as in crushing (with an impressionistic and often genuinely ironic style) the French writer; in the second part, Lunacharsky appears almost annoyed at the unforgivably deferential attitude he recognises in Proust, all the more annoyed because the Soviet also recognises his considerable literary mastery, but is forced to insist on the ‘mortal sin’ of Marcel (author and narrator) and his best-loved characters in the Recherche: being a snob, being a lackey (a word often used by L. in his paratexts, even in the most unthinkable contexts, e.g., in relation to Giorgio Vasari and his biography) in relation to the aristocratic and rentier aristocrats of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; a sin, this, which the Soviet justifies only, and only partially, in closing, with the writer’s illness and his life as a recluse: that detachment from reality that gave him “that terrible limitation and that stamped him with the hateful stigma of social conservatism” (p.61). However, it should be noted that the very fact that L. returned to the Recherche many times over the course of ten years, and that he welcomed and facilitated the publication of its works in the USSR in the 1920s and early 1930s (until his rather sudden death in December 1933) as much as he could, positively judging its stylistic talent, is indicative of a peculiar “odi et amo” mentality on the part of the Soviet critic, who could not easily conceal his admiration for this French writer (see also, in this regard, P023)

Alessandra Carbone