ARTISTS IN UNIFORM
By Max Eastman
"This is a sombre book, and will be denounced as counter- revolutionary ' by those who think the world can be saved by Soviet ballyhoo . . . I am on the side. of . . . the proletarian class struggle. But I think that critical truth- speaking . . . &c." Mr. Eastman, best known here as a translator from the Russian, but memorable also for an un- decided dispute with Dr. L A. Richards (in which Mr. Eastinan was at least the politer disputant) has written now a deter- mined, lucid and convincing study (Allen and Unwin, 7s. Od.) of the forcible regimentation of poets, novelists and critics in the U.S.S.R.—with the aim of introducing that element of " critical truth-speaking." into the cultural deliberations of communist orthodoxies in Anglo-Saxondom. His book falls naturally into three parts :- a view, casual enough, of the machinery by which the John Reed Clubs in America and similar organizations on the Continent are brought to grovel before the aesthetic dictates of Kharkov, an acute and well- documented analysis of the ways in which Soviet writers of distinctive quality, from Trotsky to Pilnyak, have been humiliated and either forced to recantation or driven under- ground by critical mass-attacks from R.A.P.P. and Moscow Bureaucracy (Mayakowsky's suicide, for instance : that great symbol of conflict. to the death between the- creative soul the mass-man) and as good a popular criticism of Marxist Art-philosophy as can be found. Mr. Eastman overstates his case—is overgoaded by private indignation ; the remarkably simple, apparently un-Marxian attitude of Lenin towards " proletarian culture " has not been wholly smothered by Stalin (whom Mr. Eastman hates out of all containment); as the survival of Pasternak shows (Mr. Eastman only mentions this resolutely unpolitical poet once, and that casually) ;- but the whole thesis is relevant here now that England has its own branch of the Writers' International, with the allegiance of several considerable young writers ; and there is every reason why Artists in Uniform should be• placed, on Christmas Eve, in the stocking of every bright-shirted Bolshevik in Bloomsbury.
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