“We Marxists have always lived in tradition,” Trotsky argued, “and we have not ceased to be revolutionaries because of it.” He opposed the notion that art and literature of past epochs reflected merely the economic interests of now-vanquished social classes. The book’s principal theme was the indispensability of tradition, even in the homeland of communism. Trotsky’s major contribution to this battle over the future course of Soviet culture was Literature and Revolution, a volume of literary criticism published in 1924. Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, whose personal taste in art was conservative-he enjoyed the works of Chekov, Pushkin, and Turgenev-resisted Proletcult’s agenda. An influential movement called Proletcult argued that prerevolutionary art and literature belonged in history’s dustbin along with the former ruling classes, replaced by proletarian art untainted by bourgeois influences. The idea of a proletarian culture was in vogue among writers and radical theorists in Moscow and Petrograd (now St. In the first decade of Bolshevik power, Trotsky’s reputation for tolerance in the arts left him vulnerable to charges of encouraging bourgeois individualism and spreading defeatism on the cultural front. In two early essays about Leo Tolstoy, he praised the novelist’s prodigious talent for invoking character and atmosphere-his “miracle of reincarnation”-but scorned the author’s focus on a world of aristocrats and peasants, as well as his flights into religion. Only socially conscious literature truly satisfied him. He had a strong preference for realist works-the French novelists Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola were among his favorites. “The novel is our daily bread,” Trotsky once remarked. When all was said and done, Trotsky argued, Gogol was the “father of Russian comedy and the Russian novel,” the first “truly national writer.” In an appreciative essay devoted to Nikolai Gogol in 1902, on the 50th anniversary of the writer’s death, Trotsky defended the author of Dead Souls from fellow radicals who found Gogol’s social criticism too timid. The young radical stood up for literary tradition. While in exile, he became a regular contributor to the Irkutsk paper Eastern Review. Trotsky began writing literary criticism in 1900 in the midst of a two-year exile in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, imposed by the czarist government for his role as a member of the South Russia Workers’ Union. Order Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary at a discount from the BC Bookstore.

Bertrand Patenaude’s website, from the Hoover Institution.

Trotsky art and revolution