Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Tolstoy, Cervantes and Shakespeare were not dialecticians but that did not stop them being great artists. They were great artists and their works reflected their epochs quite well. Those who argue that writers should learn dialectics do not understand that writers have to study the classics of literature as well as those of Marxism. [Lenin] taught us that without the knowledge and preserved experience of past human culture we won’t be able to build a new socialist culture.¹⁶

Romanticism, Stalin said, was ‘the idealisation, the embellishment of reality’ but Shakespeare’s romanticism was different from Schiller’s, and Gorky’s radical version had been that of a rising class, struggling for power and humanity’s future. ‘Revolutionary socialist realism must be the main current in the literature of our epoch. But that doesn’t exclude making use of the writers and methods of the romantic school.’¹⁷

Non-party as well as party writers were present during the second meeting at Gorky’s place a few days later. As he often did when he addressed two different audiences on the same topic, Stalin recycled the points and formulations he had used a week earlier, including the importance of writing plays. Then he said:

I forgot to talk about what you are ‘producing’. There are different products: artillery, automobiles, machines. You also produce ‘commodities’, ‘works’, ‘products’. Very important things. Interesting things. People’s souls. . . . You are engineers of human souls. . . . Production of souls is more important than the production of tanks. . . . Man is remade by life itself. But you, too, will assist in remaking his soul. This is important, the production of human souls, That is why I propose a toast to writers, to the engineers of human souls.

When someone asked about dialectics, Stalin responded that an artist might well be a dialectical materialist:

But I want to say that he will not then want to write poetry (general laughter). I’m joking, of course. But, seriously, you mustn’t stuff an artist’s head with abstract theses. He must know the theories of Marx and Lenin. But he must know life. An artist must above all portray life truthfully. And if he shows our life truthfully, he cannot but show it as leading to socialism. That will be socialist art. That will be socialist realism.¹⁸

It seems Stalin came to regret his engineering metaphor, since the statement attributed to him published by Literaturnaya Gazeta in August 1934 was deliberately omitted from publication in his collected works.¹⁹ Be that as it may, it featured front and centre at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, as did the concept of socialist realism.

Stalin didn’t attend the congress; he was on holiday. It opened on 8 August 1934 with a statement by the party’s ideology chief, Andrei Zhdanov:

Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls. What does that mean? In the first place, it means knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art. The truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic portrayal should be combined with the ideological remoulding and education of the toiling people in the spirit of socialism. This method is what we call socialist realism. To be an engineer of human souls means standing with both feet planted on the basis of real life. And this in turn denotes a rupture with romanticism of the old type. Our literature cannot be hostile to romanticism, but it must be a romanticism of a new type, revolutionary romanticism. Soviet literature should be able to portray our heroes; it should be able to glimpse our tomorrow.

One cannot be an engineer of the human soul without knowing the technique of literary work. You have many different types of weapons (genres, styles, forms and method of literary creation). The mastery of the technique of writing, the critical assimilation of the literary heritage of all epochs, represents a task which you must fulfil without fail, if you wish to become engineers of human souls.²⁰

Another prominent participant was Nikolai Bukharin, at that time back in favour and serving as editor of Pravda, who gave a report on poetry and socialist realism. Nothing that Stalin ever said about literature matched Bukharin’s depth, breadth, subtlety and rhetorical power. Socialist realism was not naturalism, Bukharin told the congress, because it ‘dares to dream’ about the new world and about the new men and women being created by socialism. Socialism was anti-individualistic but not anti-lyrical because it entailed the flourishing of personality and a growth of individuality that united rather than divided people.