theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and Society 1 03
self, though on occasion he made some fanciful judgments, in
general acutely perceived the obliqueness of the relationship
between literature and society. In the Critique of Political Economy,
he admits that "certain periods of highest development of
art stand in no direct connection with the general development
of society, nor with the material basis and the skeleton structure
of its organization. Witness the example of the Greeks as com-
pared with the modern nations or even Shakespeare." 2T He also
understood that the modern division of labor leads to a definite
contradiction between the three factors ("moments" in his Hegel-
ian terminology) of the social process— "productive forces,"
"social relations," and "consciousness." He expected, in a manner
which scarcely seems to avoid the Utopian, that in the future
classless society these divisions of labor would again disappear,
that the artist would again be integrated into society. He thought
it possible that everybody could be an excellent, even an original,
painter. "In a communist society there are no painters, but at
most men who, among other things, also paint." 2S
The "vulgar Marxist" tells us that this or that writer was a
bourgeois who voiced reactionary or progressive opinions about
Church and State. There is a curious contradiction between this
avowed determinism which assumes that "consciousness" must
follow "existence," that a bourgeois cannot help being one, and
the usual ethical judgment which condemns him for these very
opinions. In Russia, one notes, writers of bourgeois origin who
have joined the proletariat have constantly been subjected to
suspicions of their sincerity, and every artistic or civic failing has
been ascribed to their class origin. Yet if progress, in the Marxist
sense, leads directly from feudalism via bourgeois capitalism to
the "dictatorship of the proletariat," it would be logical and consistent
for a Marxist to praise the "progressives" at any time. He
should praise the bourgeois when, in the early stages of capitalism,
he fought the surviving feudalism. But frequently Marx-
ists criticize writers from a twentieth-century point of view, or,
like Smirnov and Grib, Marxists very critical of "vulgar sociol-
ogy," rescue the bourgeois writer by a recognition of his universal
humanity. Thus Smirnov comes to the conclusion that Shake-
speare was the "humanist ideologist of the bourgeoisie, the ex-
ponent of the program advanced by them when, in the name of