Who are you, masters of culture?

On March 22, 1932, the newspapers Pravda and Izvestia of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee published an article by Maxim Gorky “Who are you with, masters of culture? Reply to American Correspondents. During this period, Gorky was not only an accomplished, but a world-famous writer, who from the late 1920s was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for several years in a row (Ivan Bunin, in the end, received it).

In his pamphlet, the petrel of the revolution notes that the writer always represents someone’s interests, the question is which ones – the ruling class or the people.

First of all, Gorky indignantly attacks the intelligentsia:

“The work of the intelligentsia has always been reduced – mainly – to the business of decorating the life of the bourgeoisie, to the business of consoling the rich in the vulgar sorrows of their lives. The nanny of the capitalists – the intelligentsia – for the most part, was engaged in diligently darning with white thread the long-worn, dirty philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie, richly stained with the blood of the working people.

Meanwhile, for M. Gorky, who lived abroad for a long time (according to the official version, because of the mild climate necessary for his health), in exile in a mild form, with a Soviet passport, “it is undeniable that the bourgeoisie of Europe and America, the mistress world, becomes every year more and more ignorant, intellectually weak, barbaric.

“The bourgeoisie would not like to believe in the process of cultural and revolutionary development of the working people, but they see it, feel it,” writes Alexei Maksimovich.

And why serve a class doomed to destruction and deserving of this destruction? Why should the intelligentsia play the role of consolers of the bourgeoisie, “to entertain and console people tired of the robbery of the world, troubled by the ever sharper resistance of the proletariat to their vile goals, people whose insane thirst for profit has taken on the character of violent insanity”?

Gorky’s picture of what is going on in spiritless Europe and America looks gloomy:

“Photography and cinema are killing the art of painting, artists, in order not to die of hunger, exchange their paintings for potatoes, for bread, for worn-out clothes of the bourgeoisie. (…) Cinema is gradually destroying the high art of the theater. There is no need to talk about the corrupting influence of bourgeois cinema, this is quite clear. Having used all the themes of sentimentalism, he begins to demonstrate physical deformities: “An original troupe has gathered at the Hollywood studios of MGM to work on the film “Freaks”. It consists of Ku-Ku, a bird-girl who bears a strong resemblance to a stork; P. Robinson, human skeleton; Born with one arm, Marta is a skilled lace knitter with her feet. Delivered to Schilze’s studio, nicknamed “hairpin head” is a normal-bodied woman with an unusually small hairpin-like head; Olga – a woman with a man’s bushy beard; Josephine-Joseph, half woman, half man; Siamese twin sisters Gilton, dwarfs, midgets. (…) In the field of art, the bourgeoisie is quite satisfied with collecting postage stamps and tram tickets, and at best they collect fake paintings by old masters. In the field of science, the bourgeoisie is interested in methods and methods for the most convenient, cheap exploitation of the physical forces of the working class; science exists for the bourgeoisie to the extent that it is capable of serving the purposes of enriching it, regulating the activity of its gastrointestinal sphere and raising its sexual energy of the libertine.

Gorky also got “monotonously sentimental and dull Charlie Chaplin,” who heads “other magicians.”

Realizing that culture is no longer an internal necessity of the capitalist world, part of the intelligentsia began to wonder where to go? With the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, or with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie? For Gorky, the answer seems to be obvious, but in the West, most intellectuals continue to be content with serving capitalism, despite the fact that the “master” openly despises the “servant” and doubts that he is needed.

Addressing Western “masters of culture,” Gorky writes:

“You intellectuals (…) should understand that the working class, having taken political power into its own hands, will open before you the widest possibilities of cultural creativity. Look what a harsh lesson history has given the Russian intellectuals: they did not go with their working people and now they are decaying in impotent rage, rotting in emigration. Soon they will completely die out, leaving the memory of themselves as traitors.

And further:

“The press of Europe and America is diligently and almost exclusively engaged in lowering the cultural level of its readers, a level that is even low without its help. Serving the interests of the capitalists, their employers, skillfully able to inflate a fly to the size of an elephant, journalists do not aim to tame the pig, although, of course, they see that the pig is mad and furious. (…) The entire bourgeoisie of Europe lives in an atmosphere of mutual hatred. (…) This hatred of everyone for everyone, growing, is becoming thicker, sharper, it swells among the bourgeoisie like a purulent abscess, and, of course, it will break through, and, perhaps, rivers of the best, most healthy blood of the peoples of the whole earth will flow again.

So what does the “petrel of the revolution” offer to those intellectuals who consider themselves capable of serving the universal culture and obliged to protect it from degenerating into barbarism?

“The teaching of Marx and Lenin is the pinnacle reached by scientific thought that honestly investigates social phenomena, (…) only from the height of this teaching is the direct path to social justice, to new forms of culture, clearly visible. (…) It’s time for you to decide the question: with whom are you, “masters of culture”? With the labor force of culture for the creation of new forms of life, or are you against this force, for the preservation of a caste of irresponsible predators, a caste that is rotten from the head and continues to act only by inertia? (…) Nothing but the victory of the proletarians will free the world from hatred, concludes Gorky. — The history of the bourgeoisie is the history of its spiritual impoverishment. What talents can she be proud of in our time? She has nothing to be proud of, except for various Hitlers, except for pygmies suffering from delusions of grandeur.
Meanwhile, “the peoples of the Union of Soviets are entering the Renaissance. The October Revolution brought to life tens of thousands of talented people, but there are still not enough of them to achieve the goals that the working class has set for itself. There are no unemployed in the Union of Soviets, and everywhere, in all areas of the application of human energy, there is not enough strength, although they are growing rapidly, as they have never grown anywhere.

The “dictatorship of the proletariat” should not frighten the Western intelligentsia, since this is a “temporary phenomenon”, “it is necessary in order to re-educate, turn tens of millions of former slaves of nature and the bourgeois state into the one and only master of their country and all its treasures”:

“Violence” (…) is a misunderstanding, but more often than that it is a lie and slander against the working class of the Union of Soviets and its party.”

For the “masters of culture”, as Gorky sees the situation, there are two ways: the first is to rot, continue to serve “the bourgeoisie, mad with hatred and fear of the future, where idiots are being born more and more”, and the second is revival, namely to support the cause of cultural revival humanity, which is being accomplished in the Soviet Union, because the goal of the party is “to convert in the shortest possible time the greatest amount of physical energy into intellectual energy in order to give scope and freedom to develop the talents and abilities of each unit and the entire mass of the population”, “to create in the Union one owner, which has 160 million heads and 320 million hands.

One gets the impression that while working on the article, Gorky not only responded to his American counterparts. Quite possibly, he tried to answer himself: what to do next? How to live? And no matter how you remember another phrase, just like “Who are you with, masters of culture?” that went down in history, namely Lenin’s “The intelligentsia is not the brain of the nation, but shit”? Vladimir Ilyich wrote it in a letter to Gorky, sent on September 15, 1919, opposing “intellectuals who imagine themselves to be the brain of the nation” to the growing intellectual forces of the workers and peasants.

Sergei Ishkov.

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