Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Vladimir Mayakovsky, the avant-garde poet who had committed suicide in 1930, was described by Bukharin as a ‘Soviet classic’: ‘The poetry of Mayakovsky is poetry in action. It is poles asunder from the “contemplative” and “disinterested” concepts contained in the aesthetics of idealist philosophers. It is a hailstorm of sharp arrows shot against the enemy. It is devastating, fire-belching lava. It is a trumpet call that summons to battle.’²¹

Among Mayakovsky’s works was the 3,000-line epic poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. A copy of the 1925 edition was part of Stalin’s library and he was present in January 1930 when the poet recited the poem at a Lenin memorial meeting in the Bolshoi Theatre.

In November 1935 Mayakovsky’s muse, Lilya Brik, wrote to Stalin appealing for help to save the poet’s revolutionary legacy. Mayakovsky’s memory, works, archive and artefacts were being neglected by the Soviet literary establishment, Brik complained, and his Lenin poem had been ‘thrown out of the modern literature textbook’ by the Enlightenment Commissariat. In response, Stalin instructed that Brik’s complaints be looked into because ‘Mayakovsky was and is the best and most talented poet of our Soviet era. Indifference to his memory and works is a crime.’²² Stalin’s laudatory comment soon surfaced publicly and the poet’s reputation and place in the Soviet canon were rapidly restored.

Stalin’s literary tastes were, like Lenin’s, conservative and conventional. From the 1930s onwards that attitude prevailed in Soviet culture as a whole, not only in literature but in architecture, music, film and the fine arts. Some historians describe this retreat from the avant-gardism of the 1920s as a cultural counter-revolution. Its self-conscious political aim, however, was to connect more effectively Soviet culture to the masses. That was also the point of socialist realism, intended to be both popular and accessible as well as politically acceptable.

When anti-fascist German writer Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958) met Stalin in January 1937 he asked him about the function of writers, noting that he had called them engineers of the human soul. ‘If he is in touch with the present needs of the masses, a writer can play an important role in the development of society,’ replied Stalin. ‘He captures the vague feelings and unconscious moods of the advanced sectors of society and makes explicit the instinctive actions of the masses. He shapes the epoch’s public opinion. He helps society’s vanguard realise its tasks.’

Asked by Feuchtwanger to differentiate scientific writers from artistic ones, Stalin said the former were concerned with concepts and analysis of the concrete and the latter were more interested in images and expressiveness. Scientific writers catered to a select audience, whereas artists aimed their works at the masses. Artistic writers were also less calculating and more spontaneous than their scientific counterparts.

Except for the ban on fascist and chauvinist works, said Stalin, Soviet writers were the freest in the world. But he agreed with Feuchtwanger you could learn from reactionaries and emphasised that a writer’s Weltanschauung should not be confused with their artistic works, one example being Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, whose title alluded to the status of serfs in Tsarist society, as well as to the characters that peopled his book: ‘Gogol was undoubtedly a reactionary. He was a mystic. He was against the abolition of serfdom. . . . Yet . . . the artistic truth of Gogol’s Dead Souls had a huge impact on generations of the revolutionary intelligentsia. . . . The world views of writers should not be confused with the impact of their works on readers.’²³

Stalin also quoted to Feuchtwanger Hegel’s well-known aphorism that ‘the Owl of Minerva flies out at dusk’. He was fond of this metaphor, and in his 1938 edition of Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History, he underlined this passage:

The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at night. When philosophy begins tracing its grey patterns on a grey background, when men begin to study their own social order, you may say with certainty that that order has outlived its day and is preparing to yield place to a new order, the true character of which will again become clear to mankind only after it has played its historical part: Minerva’s owl will once again fly out only at night. It is hardly necessary to say that the periodical aerial travels of the bird of wisdom are very useful, and are even quite essential. But they explain absolutely nothing; they themselves require explanation.²⁴