isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

THE PROPHET ARMED
Agriculture; he was the local agent for the Department of Justice,
and for the Ministry of Education and Religious Denominations.
Only the Navy and the Foreign Office left him in peace;
but even this was not sure. Financial agent, statistician, agronomer,
road engineer, architect, notary, legal officer, all in one
person, the clerk did not even receive his salary regularly. The
result? 'The half-fictitious statistical figures he supplies to higher
authority are processed there, made the basis of many an official
... survey or investigation, which then becomes the object
of passionate polemics for the responsible leaders of opinion.''
A series of Bronstein's articles was devoted to the 'martyrdom of
the womenfolk': the muzhik beat his wife mercilessly, and so
did the wealthy Siberian merchant.
Half a century later these essays still retain their documentary
value, and one can imagine the effect they produced at the time.
The censor pored over them with increasing suspicion and more
and more often cut out paragraphs or entire sections. The writer
was constantly compelled to resort to new tricks of evasion and
to convey his purpose by hint and allusion. When his 'unprotected
fingers' were no longer able to grasp the nettle of
fact, he would, with an apology, make his style shade off into
semi-fiction.
Opposition writers often found in literary criticism some refuge
from the assaults of censorship. This was so with Bronstein,
yet to him literary criticism was much more than a convenient
pretext for expounding political views. He was a literary critic
as by vocation. Even his first attempts to approach literature
from the Marxist angle were untainted by that narrow political
utilitarianism which so-called Marxist criticism often makes its
chief virtue. His approach was analytical rather than didactic,
and it was enriched by a vivid appreciation and enjoyment of
aesthetic values. He was a voracious reader. In the course of his
two years in Siberia he wrote on Nietzsche, Zola, Hauptmann,
Ibsen, D'Annunzio, Ruskin, Maupassant, Gogol, Herzen, Belinsky,
Dohrolyubov, Uspensky, Gorky and others. The range of
his historical and litcnuy reminiscence and allusi