Studies on Socialist Realism

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Anna Artwińska

Two Left Shoes: ‘The Marxist Breakthrough’ in Poland and Its Context¹

1.

Socialist realism, which by definition was to exert an influence on all domains of social and cultural life, also affected the course and methodology of humanities and social sciences, primarily philology, philosophy and history. Many literary critics were present at the 1949 Congress of Writers’ Union in Szczecin. One of the main speeches was that delivered by Stefan Żółkiewski. They also participated in the 1944–1948 discussions on socialist realism that rolled through the press. While acknowledging the difference between scholarly and artistic perception of the world, the legislators of socialist realism treated literary criticism as a space within which the rules of creating socialist realist literature should be hammered out, and as an arena for an evaluation and criticism of existing works. Marxism-Leninism was the methodological framework for socialist realism in literary scholarship. It served both as a scholarly and as a political methodology, binding in the USSR since the 1920s and gradually implemented in Eastern Bloc countries from the end of World War II. Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet variety was different from the Marxist tradition present in Polish literary criticism from the end of the 19^th century (and continued after the war on the pages of Kuźnica, for example).² This difference lay primarily – albeit not exclusively – in its political liaison, which ← 359 | 360 → earned it such appellations as ‘dogmatic’, ‘vulgar’, ‘aggressive’, ‘Stalinist’. In the fifties, both varieties of Marxism were present in research on the history and theory of literature, as well as in all humanistic studies; frequently, the two concepts mingled in the texts of a single author. Therefore, whenever speaking of the Marxist orientation of this era, it is important to remember its varied, ambiguous character, which often impedes the precise identification of its roots or points of departure.

The so-called ‘Marxist breakthrough’ in the literary studies, which has not yet been explored and described as much as socialist realism,3 often took various forms in Poland and had different degrees of intensity, depending on who introduced it, how and where. Immediately following the war, the centre of Marxist studies was located at the University of Łódź, which attracted numerous academics and students with Marxist inclinations (among others Stefan Żółkiewski and Jan Kott and from the younger generation, Maria Janion and Maria Żmigrodzka). The platform for the presentations of premises and concepts of ‘new literary studies’ was provided by the annual congresses of the delegates of Polish research groups, where specialists in Polish studies clashed and divided over ideology for the first time. When the Institute of Literary Research (Instytut Badań Literackich – IBL) was established in 1948 at the initiative of the Polish Workers’ Party and under the aegis of the Ministry of Education, most Łódź-based Marxists tied their academic fates with it. The Institute played a key role in implementing the Marxist breakthrough in Polish science and in shaping the Marxist historiography. In principle, this institution was to serve as an alternative to university-based Polish studies and contribute to the development of new works on the history and theory of literature.⁴ The first director of IBL was Stefan Żółkiewski: historian of literature and publicist, member of the Polish Workers’ Party, Editor-in-Chief of Kuźnica in the years 1945–1948. The Institute’s programme was adopted in February 1948 at a ← 360 | 361 → conference which continued the pre-war plans of modernization of literary studies aiming to approximate this field to theoretical sciences. According to Żółkiewski, the idea of the Institute was first formulated in the 1930s by Polish literary scholars Manfred Kridl and Franciszek Siedlecki.5 Among the employees of IBL in its early years were Kazimierz Budzyk, Jan Kott, Maria Renata Mayenowa, Wacław Kubacki, Kazimierz Wyka, Jan Baculewski: literary scholars born around 1900–1910, whose intellectual journeys had started in the interbellum period from a fascination with formalism and structuralism.⁶ Although the establishment of IBL did not have the character of a generational project,⁷ in order to give a reliable account of its genesis, we would have to explore the experiences, beliefs and motivations of individual researchers, which did not always amalgamate into a coherent whole. Tracing the differences in understanding and application of Marxist theory in individual cases ← 361 | 362 → could (and this is an observation I made when studying the various positions of Marxist mickiewiczology) contribute to a better comprehension of the forms, premises and dynamics of the Marxist breakthrough.

Before the Institute was absorbed by the Polish Academy of Sciences in the summer of 1952, it gradually started to change its scientific profile; it exerted a significant influence on the shape of humanistic research in Stalinist Poland and it contributed to the emergence of first Polish works on Polish studies, interpreting the history of literature from the perspective of Marxism-Leninism. This, on the one hand, comprised a new periodization of Polish literature, a class revision of the existing state of research, revaluation of the canon and placing emphasis on the connection between literature and social life (a literary work as an expression of the historical situation); on the other hand, it entailed the development of a language to allow for the communication of these changes.8 Soviet scholarship was certainly the model and source of inspiration in this regard, commencing with Stalin’s famous article ‘Marxism and problems in linguistics’, all the way to contemporary works of Soviet philologists, which provided examples of description and interpretation of specific texts, treated as an antidote to ‘bourgeois’ or ‘reactionary’ humanities. It is difficult to precisely determine the research and methodological positions that this term encompassed: in the fifties, ‘bourgeois humanities’ versus ‘reactionary humanities’ served as an umbrella term for all those traditions that represented a negative point of reference for Marxism. In the case of Polish philology, these were mostly the psychological orientation, the aesthetics of positivism, the historical philological method and formalism. The sheer existence of this grid of (negative) contexts seems to justify treating ‘new literary studies’ not as a ‘foreign’ research proposal, isolated from the cultural and methodological context, but rather as part of the Polish tradition of literature studies. Awareness of its political entanglements allows for considerations regarding its position within a broader synchronous and diachronous order.

Literature studies in the fifties revolved around a core of concepts and authorities that their representatives approved of, yet this does not mean that they ‘developed in near complete isolation from the scholarly world’.⁹ Although research then was dominated by Soviet models, by concepts developed by the Polish leftist movement of the 1930s and ’40s and by the ideas of György Lukács, while ‘world’ scholarship, ← 362 | 363 → that is scholarship of Western Europe and America, was indeed viewed as worthless, this statement remains overly general. Also in this case, it is necessary to draw a line between ideological works published after 1950 (e.g. Żółkiewski’s Spór o Mickiewicza (‘Argument over Mickiewicz’)10) and earlier works, such as Wacław Kubacki’s 1949 Pierwiosnki polskiego romantyzmu (‘Primroses of Polish romanticism’), where readers could (still) find numerous references to German and French literary studies of the ‘imperialist era’ (among others, Edgar Istel, Guido Adler, Karl Borinski, Henri Hauvette). The topic of reception and distribution of Polish non-Marxist literature of the subject and of contemporary texts on the history and theory of literature written in the West requires separate elaboration. Under Stalinism, despite censorship, the shelves of university libraries were stocked with books representing the opposite of Marxist theory. Even though they were not included in academic curricula, they were available to literary researchers. Therefore, instead of speaking of ‘isolation’ from world scholarship, it would be more fitting to speak of choices that resulted in its consistent negative valuation.

Polish Marxist scholars advanced new methodological and theoretical proposals relatively early on (Stefan Żółkiewski, Stare i nowe literaturoznawstwo (‘Old and new literary studies’, 1950); Henryk Markiewicz, Materializm historyczny a nauka o literaturze (‘Historical materialism and literary studies’, 1949); O marksistowskiej teorii literatury (‘On Marxist theory of literature’, 1952)). They also applied Marxist theory in practice (among others, Jan Kott, O “Lalce” Bolesława Prusa (‘On The doll by Bolesław Prus’, 1947); Kazimierz Budzyk, Z dziejów Renesansu w Polsce (‘History of Renaissance in Poland’, 1953); Stefan Żółkiewski, Spór o Mickiewicza, 1952)).¹¹ Their texts formed part of a larger (and never finalized) project of a new synthesis of the history of Polish literature. They thus played a pioneering role and, as such, ← 363 | 364 → especially as regards authorial self-declarations, they allowed a certain margin of error. What comes to attention is that, in the rhetorical plane, the loci communis of most texts is the statement that the presented contents ‘may not [yet – A.A.] be deemed an expression of mature Marxist reflection’,12 or that ‘in many sections insufficient preparation of progressive Polish studies’ may be noticed.¹³ This (self-)critical topos may be regarded as an equivalent of the motif of ‘falling behind’ which marked socialist realist art criticism.¹⁴ Another important part of the overhaul of humanities were organizational and structural issues. The new Party-approved literary theory was to aid the transformation of sciences (primarily of humanities, but not exclusively) and the reorganization of university structures, which were based on old models in the early post-war years. ‘The IBL, not having any formal competences in this regard, is in fact becoming the centre for planning and coordination of works related to Polish studies on the national scale’,¹⁵ asserted Stefan Żółkiewski. The scientific life of the fifties was marked by a revolutionary striving to change the academic forms and structures, to develop new practices in research and, importantly, to reorganize the school system and the existing methods of education. These were to be hammered out during the numerous conferences, congresses, scientific meetings devoted to Polish studies and training sessions for teachers. In Stefan Żółkiewski’s 1950 work/manifesto entitled Old and New Literary Studies, which had a print run of 10 000 copies, the idea of innovation was the central rhetorical figure that organized the entire text. It presented as innovative the methodological assumptions of Marxism: ‘these perspectives are unmatched in all of history’,¹⁶ its methods of practical application: ‘so far there has been no plan of humanistic research in Poland’ (p. 135), as well as the specific points of arrival: ‘We need a view of Polish Renaissance that would be different from the heretofore existing one’ (p. 83). Żółkiewski’s project had massive – if not utopian – ambitions. It stemmed from the conviction of a necessity and possibility of a fundamental transformation ← 364 | 365 → of sciences, from the belief in the agency of theoretical postulates and their influence on social reality. Żółkiewski demanded dedication and devotion from his colleagues, in line with the principle that ‘the Marxist breakthrough’ is about a project of involved science, by far exceeding the university walls. ‘The tasks of a researcher of literature are social tasks’ (p. 82). The force of this vision is evidenced by the fact that many young Polish literary scholars who joined the movement initiated by ‘generation 1910’ understood their work as a mission of sorts – especially in the context of the last war and the violence it entailed, as well as of the awareness of oppression of the system in the Second Polish Republic. Born in 1926, Maria Janion reminisced about the beginnings of her scholarly career:

This testimony is interesting because Janion does not consider accession to Marxism in categories of ideological enslavement, but rather as a matter of choice (although in the same interview she speaks very critically of her activities in that period and of the negative influence that her professors, Żółkiewski and Kott, had on her). In this sense, Marxist historiography, although undoubtedly subordinate to the ‘vision of a great hypotaxis with the ideological instrumental and the ancillary of historiography confirming ideological axioms’,¹⁸ using newspeak and turning it into its own pseudo-academic vernacular, availing itself of persuasion and allegation, often ignoring the rules of discourse, and on top of it being schematic and cognitively foreseeable, etcetera, etcetera, may be treated not only as a shameful slip-up of Polish criticism, but also as a project of the humanities attempting to understand and explain the world. The most serious obstacle to the evaluation of its significance stems from the divergence between the declared theory and the implemented practice. Methodological ← 365 | 366 → and theoretical assumptions of Marxism often proved unenforceable in practice; as an effect, the Marxist breakthrough in Poland resulted in a gush of works which were not so much about an interpretation of the work by György Lukács, as about proving – to use the ironic phrase of Antoni Słonimski – that ‘Hamlet is an exposing work, revealing the ugly methods of the fight for power in feudal systems (ear poison) and that the pessimism of Adam Mickiewicz’s sonnets was in direct relation to the grain crisis in Odessa’.19 Polish works devoted to history of literature written in the ’50s did not stand the test of time; after 1956, their role was limited to serving as a negative point of reference for ‘Marxism after Stalinism’. After 1989, they were not referenced by historians of literature interested in the broadly understood leftism in literary research (perhaps such reading is yet to take place). In her important article from 2012, ‘Marksizm ante portas!’, Katarzyna Chmielewska pointed out that the Marxist past is ignored almost as a matter of inviolable principle in contemporary Polish works on the theory of literature and that is needs to be reclaimed, yet she herself did not use the 1950s’ literary criticism as an argument to support Marxism, either.²⁰ The problem with evaluating this output is well illustrated by a discussion started already in the 1980s between Leszek Kołakowski and Andrzej Walicki, two outstanding philosophers, who not only referred to Marxism in their research but, what is more, analyzed its theoretical side. In Main Currents of Marxism (1976), Kołakowski advanced the following thesis: