D.H. Lawrence might have had the John Thomas of a degenerate, but he had the soul of an artist. I guess it’s no surprise. His father was an illiterate, hard-drinking coal miner. His mother was educated and refined. It made him earthy but reflective. He appreciated cutting-edge ideas but declined to let them ruin his art.
Nathaniel Hawthorne hated the Transcendentalists, once greeting Ralph Waldo Emerson with a growling, “How is your oversoul this morning?” The Transcendentalists were phony. They were about ideas, not reality. It’s no surprise an earthy fiction writer like Hawthorne despised them. Fiction is reality dressed up as unreality.
Flannery O’Connor was so real, she was surreal. Her first published story revolved around a potted geranium. “Gothic realism.” She told would-be fiction writers to ditch ideas and work on the earthy details. Those details provide the soil and pot where the story grows.
Socialist Realism
Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Turgenev. The Russian realist masters. We still read them today, nearly 200 years later.
And then a few decades later, in that same Russian soil and blood, we get Russian unrealism. “Socialist realism,” Stalin called it: literature (and art) in service to the Marxist ideal.
Quick: Name a Soviet-era author who didn’t end up in exile or the Gulag?
I couldn’t do it either.
There was Maxim Gorky, of course. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize and said “Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear,” but no one reads him today and most critics say he wasn’t great.
Soviet literature didn’t suffer because it was Marxist. It suffered because it started with the Marxist ideal. If Soviet literature worked with real details that naturally flowed into a Marxist denouement, that would’ve been fine, but that couldn’t happen anymore vodka can naturally flow into sobriety.
The great critic Hugh Kenner showed that economic forces shape literature. It’s not surprising. Poverty is real and fiction writers have traditionally harvested it for more stories than immigrants have harvested grapes in central California. Few things are more real than finances.
Soviet writers were required to produce a Socialist harvest, which means they were told to use real details to produce an unreal message. It’s impossible to do it well. Reality can’t lead to unreality. A fiction writer who works with real details is going to reach a real conclusion. Whatever that conclusion is, it won’t be Marxist, unless the writer swindles his prose.
Eric Scheske
