Vladimir Lenin’s article “Leo Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution” first appeared in print 90 years ago.
Shamefacedly, I must admit that I read nothing by Count Leo Tolstoy in school. His giant works were no match for my favorites at the time: John Wyndham, Clifford Saymak, and Robert Sheckley. Like most of my generation, I read about Tolstoy in a textbook where the lion’s share of the text consisted of quotations from Lenin as the indisputable authority in all fields of knowledge.
And so I knew that Tolstoy was a “mirror of the Russian Revolution,” because he “reflected the boiling hatred and mature aspiration for better things, a desire to rid oneself of the past, as well as the immature dreaminess, political ill-breeding, and revolutionary spinelessness” supposedly holding back millions of peasants prior to the “Russian bourgeois revolution.” He and his work literally embodied the “crying contradictions” of the “peasant bourgeois revolution.” In a word, a student did not to have to read Tolstoy, just remember to tell the teacher that the author “understood neither the workers’ movement, nor its role in the struggle for socialism the Russian Revolution.” And to earn a straight A’s, add that his works are not hopeless trash, because of his “ruthless criticism of capitalist exploitation, exposing acts of violence by the government, the farce of court proceedings and the state administration, revealing the entire depth of the contradiction between growing wealth, attainments of civilization and the increasing misery, debasement, and tortures of the working masses.”
Lenin wrote his article in January 1908, in commemoration of the great writer’s eightieth birthday. It was used as a procedural guideline for all subsequent “Marxist-Leninist” literary studies, exerting Herculean efforts to fit all (or as much as possible) of classical literature into the narrow-party utilitarian-propaganda confines. This method proved so simple that, using it, lazy 9-graders received straight As and less than mediocre literary critics became Ph.D.s and academicians.
In fact, the entire “dialectics” boiled down to the ingenious thesis that such-and-such writers (Tolstoy, Gogol, Shevchenko, Balzac, Dickens — all the way back to Aeschylus and Euripides) failed to fully comprehend the proletariat’s decisive role in the successful culmination of the class struggle. Of course, none of them could have predicted the appearance of the Communist Party as the vanguard force of the proletariat, armed with the most advanced Marxist-Leninist teaching. On the other hand — and this was the antithesis — such-and-such writer, being, of course, extremely talented, with a developed creative intuition, did objectively portray the discrepancies of the existing political system, exposing its antipopular essence, thus facilitating (often quite unwittingly) the coming of the bright communist future.
In other words, any more or less gifted author could be easily referred to as a harbinger, if not an ally, of the Bolsheviks, since each and everyone exposed and championed something or other, and this could always be interpreted as “struggle for social justice.” And so, while Bolshevik literary critics admitted only socialist-realist literati to their communist paradise (e.g., Maksim Gorky and Demian Bedny), all the rest were sentenced to a term in Purgatory.
It would not be necessary to remind oneself of that Bolshevik three-layer iconostasis today, let alone its chief deity’s article (we have a generation in Ukraine that has never read Lenin and cares nothing for his teaching one way or the other), except that Bolshevism has not disappeared in this country. We must face it. The Communist Party seemed to have disappeared in 1991 and Marxism-Leninism was no longer the officially binding ideology, but not so the spirit and specific mentality inherent in the Communist elite. Rather on the contrary, so that everything we now have in politics, economy, and culture is the logical continuation of Bolshevism, no longer sectarian-revolutionary, bloodthirsty, fanatically resolved to change the world, but fat and lazy, infinitely cynical and firmly resolved to change nothing.
We must rejoice at the current regime doing nothing about literature and the arts, because in previous decades its “fraternal care” for Ukrainian culture was far too dear. And its indifference is explained not by discarding the previous vulgarly utilitarian approach to culture (initiated not by Lenin, but by Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov, and Pisarev), but precisely because from the utilitarian standpoint culture is irrelevant and immaterial in retaining power.
“To us the cinema is the most important of all arts,” said the great politician (although bad writer) Ulianov-Lenin in the early 1920s. He could not have known that ten years later silent movies would be replaced by talkies and in another decade television would appear. Today, he would have certainly stated that television is the most important of all arts. His followers now taking a firm hold at the Verkhovna Rada are only too well aware of this. Proof? Tune in any channel, especially UT-1, and what you see will convince you.






