This is not a Progress book. The title page reads "RADUGA PUBLISHERS MOSCOW", the reader's card asks that "Raduga Publishers would be glad to have your opinion of this book, its translation and design", and the six times the words "Progress Publishers" occur in it are all footnotes citing Progress editions of Marx, Engels and Dostoevsky. Raduga was the Soviet state's literary export house, and it gave this one a proper production: translated from the Russian by Laura Beraha and Alex Miller, designed by Sergei Getta. The spine says 1983 and the front matter bears it out — the latest quotation-edition in the notes is a Progress Karamazov Brothers of 1982 — but the book was written earlier and reads like it. Its author, Yuri Davydov, tells you in the first paragraphs that its two themes grew "all the more acute as I read about the Maoist cultural revolution in China on the one hand and the New Left movement in the West on the other," and the most recent Western source he leans on is Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). It is a book of about 1980, arriving in English in 1983: the counterculture examined in the past tense, at fifteen years' distance, by a man who watched it happen and disapproved.
And unlike most of the volumes in this series, it is the work of a real specialist writing on his own subject. Davydov lists his own books in the "Note from the Author", and the list is a career: Art and the Elite (1966), The October Revolution and the Arts: Tolstoy, Blok, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein (1967), Art as a Sociological Phenomenon (1968), then a second series aimed squarely at the West — The Aesthetics of Nihilism: Art and the New Left (1975), A Critique of the Socio-Philosophical Views of the Frankfurt School (1977), Neo-Marxism and Problems in the Sociology of Culture (1980), The Sociology of the Counter-Culture (1980). This was the man the Soviet Academy sent against Adorno, Marcuse and the New Left, and he had read them. The subject of Myth, Philosophy, Avant-Gardism is the intellectual history of the twentieth-century avant-garde as a "nihilistic" revolt: Spengler's Decline of the West, Nietzsche's death of God, the Frankfurt School's aesthetics, surrealism, the "committed literature" debate, left-wing Freudianism, the LSD counterculture, and what Davydov, borrowing Lionel Trilling's phrase, calls "the adversary culture."
Because so much of this series turns on a single test — when a Soviet author names a Western opponent scores of times, does he ever cite a work of his, or only characterise him from Soviet secondary sources? — it has to be said at once that Davydov passes it, and passes it more emphatically than anyone yet examined. Adorno is named 155 times, and the bibliography cites him across seven German volumes: Minima Moralia, Klangfiguren, Noten zur Literatur III, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Kritik, the Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1949), a 1969 Spiegel interview. Benjamin is there in the German original — Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit — and Davydov summarises its argument fairly, that in mechanical reproduction a painting "lost its aura, a kind of mystic radiation, like the golden halo round the heads of the saints on the icons," and was "ultimately demystified." Marcuse's Versuch über die Befreiung is quoted from the Frankfurt edition by page; Sartre's existentialism and Breton's Manifestes du surréalisme are read in French; Bell in English. The pattern the series keeps meeting is inverted here. In an earlier volume, Batalov's The Philosophy of Revolt, Adorno was named some sixty-seven times and never once cited to a work of his own — every footnote ran through a Soviet middleman, and one of the middlemen the checkers named was Davydov himself. Here is the source. The relay in that book is the original in this one, and it should be credited plainly: on the Western material, this is scholarship, not ventriloquism.
It is also, in places, real criticism, and the honest course is to say where. The line Davydov draws — from Nietzsche's "self-overcoming", which he calls "one if not the most insidious of the forms of nihilistic personal and cultural disintegration", through Spengler's cultural pessimism to the counterculture's cult of ecstasy — is a genuine piece of intellectual history, and the terrain is one Marxists have every reason to hold. The reactionary politics latent in some avant-garde irrationalism is not a Soviet invention: Davydov is right that the roll of "falsifiers of the socialist ideal" runs through "Sorel, Mussolini, Spengler and Hitler", right that D'Annunzio was "that philosopher of Fascism and the avant-garde to boot", and right that a "death-of-man" slogan should trouble anyone who remembers "the nightmare of Fascist barbarism". His engagement with the Dialectic of Enlightenment — with myth and Entzauberung, disenchantment, as reciprocal rather than opposed — is serious, and it is why the word myth stands first in his title. When he turns on the New Left's erotic politics and asks, in a chapter title, whether what is on offer is a "politicisation of eroticism" or a "sexualisation of politics", he is pressing on a real weakness in Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, and he is not alone on his own side in pressing it. The Fourth International reached a neighbouring verdict from the opposite bank: its Ninth World Congress, in 1969, wrote that "the ideologies of Fanon, Marcuse, and Sweezy are only adaptations to this kind of mentality, which is objectively petty bourgeois even if it is inspired by the sincerest revolutionary motives" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 7 no. 26, 1969). An introduction that convicted Davydov merely for judging Marcuse petty-bourgeois would be convicting him of a judgement the anti-Stalinist left had already published. That is not the charge.
The charge is what he does with the diagnosis, and where he stops. Davydov's governing move is to fold the entire Western revolt — Adorno and the flower children, Sartre and the surrealists, Enzensberger and the acid tests — into a single "anti-culture wave", and then to set that wave beside fascism as its twin: "the new leftist movement of the 1960s was an act of retribution, much like the many anti-culture waves (such as Fascism) visited upon this twentieth century of ours." He is too intelligent to make the equation crude — he calls the wave "both inevitable ... and glaringly unjust" — but the amalgam is the engine of the book. The New Left and fascism become two expressions of one nihilism, and the effect, as always with an amalgam, is that the specific political content of each is dissolved into a shared essence that no evidence can touch. It is worth noticing which figures the essence requires him to leave out. The two clearest cases of an avant-garde that actually marched into fascism — Marinetti, who wrote the Futurist manifestos and then the fascist ones, and Ernst Jünger — do not appear in the book at all. The avant-garde-to-fascism argument, which is the strongest one available to him, is gestured at through Sorel and D'Annunzio and never made, because the book's fire is trained almost entirely leftward, on the Marxists and quasi-Marxists of the West. Fascism is in the book as a term of comparison for the New Left, not as a subject in its own right.
And then there is the silence that a specialist in this field cannot have kept by accident. Myth, Philosophy, Avant-Gardism is a book about avant-gardism that does not discuss the avant-garde. Not the one that matters most to its own argument, at any rate. The Russian avant-garde — the movement the October Revolution released and the Soviet state then destroyed — is simply not here. Malevich: zero. Tatlin: zero. Rodchenko: zero. Kandinsky: zero. Meyerhold: zero. LEF: zero. There is no Russian Constructivism (the single occurrence of the word is about German expressionist music) and no Russian Formalism (the seven "formalist" hits are all the ordinary adjective, applied to Western abstraction and twelve-tone music; Shklovsky and OPOYAZ are nowhere). Futurism appears once, and it is the generic European kind. Eisenstein is named three times and every one is in the front matter, never in the body. This is not a gap a foreign reader would notice and not one Davydov could have failed to notice, because he is the author of a book called The October Revolution and the Arts: Tolstoy, Blok, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein. He wrote the study of the Soviet avant-garde and then wrote a general history of avant-gardism from which it is absent.
Mayakovsky is the exception that proves how the exclusion works. He occurs three times: once in the "Note from the Author", where Davydov lists his own earlier title; once in the Name Index, keyed only to that page; and exactly once in the argument — where a line of his, the "whirlwind" that runs "from thought to trigger", is produced as "Mayakovsky's poetic image of petty bourgeois violence", an illustration of the anarchist ecstasy Davydov is condemning in Enzensberger and the bohemian revolutionaries of the 1960s. The greatest poet the Russian revolutionary avant-garde produced enters the book once, as a specimen of the disease. It is a small thing, but the volume's own jacket copy completes it: advertising Davydov's back catalogue, it renders the 1967 title as "Tolstoy. Blok. Eisenstein" and drops Mayakovsky's name from it altogether. That is very probably a Raduga copywriter's compression rather than a policy; but a book that can only place Mayakovsky as an image of petty-bourgeois violence, appearing beside a jacket that edits him out of a title he was in, is a fair emblem of the whole.
The reason the Russian avant-garde could not be discussed is not obscure, and it is the same reason the two most important Marxist theorists of exactly Davydov's questions are also missing. Georg Lukács does not appear in this book: not once, under any spelling, in a hundred and four thousand words. Nor does Ernst Bloch. This is extraordinary on its face. Lukács was the twentieth century's major Marxist theorist of realism against modernism; his Die Zerstörung der Vernunft is a Marxist genealogy of German irrationalism from Schelling through Nietzsche to fascism — Davydov's precise subject and nearly his precise thesis — and Wider den missverstandenen Realismus is a frontal assault on Kafka, Beckett and the modernist cult of Angst, which are Davydov's targets to the letter. Bloch was Lukács's antagonist in the Expressionism debate of the 1930s and the author of Das Prinzip Hoffnung, the great Marxist book on utopia, in a volume whose second half is titled "From the End of Utopia to the Beginning of Anti-Utopia." Davydov conducts the entire argument in a vocabulary these two men forged, against the writers they chose, and names neither. The disqualification is political and it is datable: Lukács joined Imre Nagy's government in October 1956 and went into exile with it when it fell; Bloch left the German Democratic Republic for the West in 1961. Both were Marxists who broke with the bloc, and a Marxist who breaks with the bloc becomes, for a book like this, not an interlocutor to be answered but a name that cannot be set in type. The companion volume in this series, Suchkov's A History of Realism (1973), has the identical hole — Lukács absent from a book built on his architecture — and the two silences together are a finding about the operation, not about either author's reading. They had read him. They were not permitted to have.
The single mention of Trotsky belongs to the same machinery. It occurs where Davydov describes the left-wing Freudians' attempt "to make libido turn the wheels of world revolution", and adds that this was "an effort supported by Trotsky", by way of the surrealists' claim on Breton. The reference is to the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, which Breton and Trotsky wrote together in Mexico in 1938. But that manifesto argued for nothing of the kind. Its demand was the total independence of art from both party and state, and it was drafted in the same weeks as Trotsky's letter to Partisan Review, "Art and Politics in Our Epoch" (18 June 1938), which states the principle without ornament: "Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them", and "a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of 'leading' and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power." Davydov has taken a defence of artistic freedom and re-described it as an incitement to erotic revolution — the one move that lets the argument for freedom be filed under the nihilism the book exists to condemn. It is worth adding, because a tradition that holds this house to the evidence must hold itself to it, that Trotsky in the same 1938 essay overreached badly, writing that it was "impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust"; that verdict does not survive the century's Russian poetry and it should be quoted with its excess showing. But his first principle stands against Davydov's whole book. Where Davydov derives art's crisis from nihilism and completes the cure with cultural guardianship, Trotsky derives art from need and unrest — "a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work" — and refuses the guardianship on principle.
There is a deeper irony still, and it is the reply this book most needs. Davydov's diagnosis of the avant-garde as a recurring, essentially bohemian revolt was Trotsky's too. In the same 1938 essay Trotsky ran through the cycle — "classicism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, symbolism, impressionism, cubism, futurism" — as a succession of bohemian revolts each absorbed in turn by the academy, and he judged the political adventurism of the artistic left as sceptically as Davydov does. The difference is not in the diagnosis but in what each man will let the state do about it. Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (1923) — written by a member of the Politburo, published in Moscow, and then removed so thoroughly from Soviet intellectual life that Davydov could write the history of avant-gardism sixty years later without acknowledging that it existed — engaged the Russian Futurists directly and critically, as living opponents to be argued with, precisely because it refused to hand the argument to the police. That book is the one Myth, Philosophy, Avant-Gardism is shadowing and cannot name, on the subject it is most qualified to discuss and least free to touch.
What, then, is this volume? It is the most sophisticated attack on Western modernism the Soviet export list produced, and it does not need to be answered by pretending it is stupid. Davydov read the Frankfurt School in German, saw real weaknesses in the New Left, and wrote an intellectual history that a serious reader can learn from and argue with. The cost of the enterprise is not measured in what he got wrong about Adorno; it is measured in what a specialist of his equipment was obliged to leave outside the covers. A history of avant-gardism with no Malevich, no Tatlin, no Meyerhold, no LEF; with Mayakovsky admitted once as an emblem of the violence to be deplored; with Lukács and Bloch, the two Marxists whose questions the book is asking, struck out for the crime of having left; and with Trotsky present in a single clause that inverts what he actually said about the freedom of art. The book is called Myth, Philosophy, Avant-Gardism. Read it for its command of the Western material, which is real; read it, above all, for the shape of the avant-garde it cannot bring itself to describe — the one its own state made in 1917 and had shot, silenced or driven into exile by 1940 — because that shape, traced entirely by its absences, is the truest thing the book contains.