Literature and revolution

Trotsky

pp. 86-113

in: Cliff Slaughter, Marxism, ideology and literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1980

Abstract

More than once Georg Lukács gave a purported summary of his own place in the history of Marxist work on literature and aesthetics. 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,¹ usually in opposition to neo-Kantian critics. However, Lukács (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 Lukács' 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.