¹ Granich, Irwin, “ Towards Proletarian Art, ” The Liberator, 4 (02 1921), 20–25Google Scholar. The phenomenon of “ party names ” in this period is worth noting. In modest emulation of Stalin (Djugashvili), Trotsky (Bronstein), Lenin (Ulyanov), Radek (Sobelsohn), and Martov (Tsederbaum), we get Philip Rahv (Ivan Greenberg), Wallace Phelps (William Phillips), Obed Brooks (R. G. Davis), V. F. Calverton (George Goetz), Fielding Burke (Olive Tilford Dargan), Robert Forsythe (Kyle Crichton), to say nothing of Christoper Caudwell (C. J. S. Sprigge) and George Orwell (Eric Blair). Louis C. Fraina seems to have gone the other way, emerging as the economist Lewis Corey after leaving the party.

² Folsom, Michael, ed., Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (New York: International Publishers, 1972), p. 62Google Scholar. There is an excellent description of Gold's taste and aesthetic in Pells, Richard H., Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression years (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 176–77Google Scholar, and in Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left (1961; rept. New York: Avon-Discus, 1965), passimGoogle Scholar.

³ Bogdanov's role in the history of Russian Social Democracy and his work as theoretician of proletarian culture, has come under increasing scrutiny. There is a monograph by Grille, D., Lenins Rivale: Bogdanov und seine Philosophic (Koln, 1966)Google Scholar, and a comprehensive bibliography by Yassour, Avrahm in Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique, 10 (1969), 546–84Google Scholar. A recent selection of his work has appeared in French, as l'Art, la science et la classe ouvrière, trad. Blanche Grinbaum (Paris: Maspero, 1977)Google Scholar, with an introduction by Dominique Lecourt which is reprinted in Lecourt's Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenkp, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977). Other than a series of lectures delivered in 1920, which appeared in Labour Monthly between May 1923 and Sept. 1924, and his Short Course of Economic Science (London, 1923)Google Scholar, Bogdanov has not been translated into English. His thought is described in Kolakowski, Leszek, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution, vol 2, The Golden Age, trans Falla, P. S. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 424–47Google Scholar. Of use is Utechin, S. V., “ Philosophy and Society: Alexander Bogdanov, ” in Labedz, Leopold, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962)Google Scholar. Elsewhere, Bogdanov appears mainly as Lenin's opponent in a series of fairly obscure philosophical battles. The most detailed treatment of this topic is James White, “ The Philosophical Background to the Lenin-Bogdanov Dispute, ” a paper delivered to the conference of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution, Birmingham University, January 1978. I am grateful to Dr. John Biggart for letting me see this paper, and for his helpful comments on the Proletcult.

⁴ Lecourt, , Proletarian Science?, p. 143Google Scholar.

⁵ Bernard, J.-P. A., Le parti communiste français et la question litteraire, 1921–1939 (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1972), p. 37nGoogle Scholar. V. Poliansky, chairman of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Council of Proletcult, gives a figure of membership of over 300, 000 in “ The Banner of the ‘ Proletcult ’, ” The Plebs, 01 1921, p. 4Google Scholar.

⁶ Quoted by Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Commissariat of the Enlightenment. Soviet Organization and the Arts Under Lunacharsky (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 95Google Scholar. According to Poliansky in The Plebs, Jan 1921, “ the part played by sympathising but non-proletarian elements must be more than anywhere else purely technical and auxiliary. ” Koiakowski writes: “ The culture of the proletarian [in Bogdanov's thought] must borrow nothing from the tradition of the privileged classes but must make a Promethean effort to create ex nihilo, paying attention to its own needs and to nothing else whatever. ” Main Currents, 2, 443.

⁷ On the Proletcult International, see Bernard, , Le p.c.j. et la question littéraire, pp. 52–53Google Scholar, Poliansky in The Plebs, Jan. 1921, and Goriely, Benjamin, Les Poetes dans la revolution russe (Paris: Gallimard, 1934), pp. 122–24Google Scholar. The failure of the Proletcult International left the various communist parties without guidance, and without an agreed interpretation of proletarian literature. In France, as Bernard shows, the critics of l'Humanité displayed “ du bon goût littèraire et du beau style, ” but took an essentially apolitical stance on literary questions. A similar phenomenon is evident in Eastman's Liberator. Lenin's draft resolution to the Proletcult Congress on 8 Oct. 1920 is reprinted in Lenin, V. I., On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967), pp. 154–55Google Scholar. See on this topic generally Palmier, Jean-Michel, Lénme, l'art et la revolution (Paris: Payot, 1975), vol. 1Google Scholar. Louis Fischer quotes a characteristic comment by Lenin, from Pravda 4 Jan. 1923: “ While we are talking about proletarian culture and comparing it with bourgeois culture, statistics show how bad things are in the field of plain reading and writing. … ” Men and Politics (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941), p. 67Google Scholar.

⁸ Simmons, Ernest J., “ The Origins of Literary Control, ” Survey, No. 36 (04-06 1961), 78–84Google Scholar, and No. 37 (July-Sept. 1961), 60–67. There is an extended discussion of this article in Palmier, , Lénine, pp. 96 ffGoogle Scholar, and in Polonsky, Vyacheslav, “ Lenin's View of Art, ” trans. Eastman, Max, The Modern Monthly, 7 (01 1934), 738–43Google Scholar.

⁹ Quoted in Fischer, Ernst, Art Against Ideology, trans. Bostock, Anna (London: Allen Lane, 1969), p. 177Google Scholar.

¹⁰ See Howe, Irving, with Libo, Kenneth, The Immigrant Jews of New York, 1881 to the Present (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976) esp. part 3Google Scholar, “ The Culture of Yiddish. ” Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) is of obvious importance, though it was criticized in the party press for its lack of explicit political content. The same criticism was made of Roth, Henry's Call It Sleep in 1935Google Scholar.

¹¹ See Murray, Robert K.. Red Scare: A Study of National Hysteria 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Howe, Irving and Coser, Lewis, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957)Google Scholar; and Kolko, Gabriel, “ The Decline of American Radicalism in the Twentieth Century, ” Studies on the Left, 6 (09 10 1966)Google Scholar.

¹² Calverton, V. F., The Newer Spirit: A Sociological Criticism of Literature (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925), pp. 147–48, 149Google Scholar.

¹³ See Daily Worker [New York] Special Magazine Supplement, 21, 28 Aug., 4 Sept. 1926; The Communist, June 1927, Mar., Apr., June 1928.

¹⁴ Kazin, Alfred, Starting Out in the Thirties (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1966), p. 65Google Scholar. By 1929 the party view of Calverton became increasingly hostile, and may be traced in Magil, A. B., The Communist, 05 1929Google Scholar; Foster, William Z., The Communist, 02 1931Google Scholar; Landy, A., The Communist, 10 1931Google Scholar. The party summa on Calverton was by Ramsey, David and Calmer, Alan, New Masses, 01 1933Google Scholar. Confirmation from Moscow came in Stork, A., International Literature, 1934, No. 3Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Calverton, V. F., “ Can We Have a Proletarian Literature? ” Modern Quarterly, Autumn 1932Google Scholar, and “ Proletarianitis, ” Saturday Review of Literature, 9 01 1937Google Scholar. On Calverton see Aaron, Writers on the Left, passim, and Genizi, Haim, “ Disillusionment of a Communist: The Case of V. F. Calverton, ” Canadian Journal of History, 04 1974Google Scholar, and “ The Modern Quarterly: 1923–1940: An Independent Radical Magazine, ” Labour History, Spring 1974Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Lelevitch, G. [Kalmanson, L. G.], “ Proletarian Literature in Soviet Russia, ” Daily Worker [New York] Special Magazine Supplement, 21 03 1925Google Scholar, and, in the same periodical, Robin E. Dunbar, “ Mammonart and Communist Art, ” 23 May 1925.

¹⁷ Freeman, Joseph, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), pp. 539–42Google Scholar.

¹⁸ New Masses, July 1928.

¹⁹ Quoted from VOKS, 1931, by Borland, Harriet, Soviet Literary Theory and Practice During the First Five-Year Flan 1928–32 (New York: King's Crown Press, 1950), p. 38Google Scholar. See also Brown, Edward J., The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature 1928–1932 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1953)Google Scholar, Ermolaev, Herman, Soviet Literary Theories, 1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1963)Google Scholar and Eimermacher, Karl, Dokumente zur sowjetischen Literatur politik. 1917–1932 (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1972)Google Scholar.

²⁰ See Draper, Theodore, “ The Ghost of Social Fascism, ” Commentary, 47 (02 1969), 29–42Google Scholar. Draper's analysis of the Third Period in the American CP appears in American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (New York: Viking Press, 1960), pp. 300–14Google Scholar.

²¹ See Maguire, Robert A., Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920's (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968)Google Scholar, McLean, Hugh Jr, “ Voronskij and VAPP, ” American Slavic and Eastern European Review, 8 (10 1949), 185–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar. With the exception of Voronskii's autobiographical novel, , Waters of Life and Death (London, 1936; rept. Westport, Conn., 1975)Google Scholar, nothing by this influential critic and editor has been translated into English.

²² See Cohen, Stephen F., Buhjiarin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), pp. 205, 272, 355–56Google Scholar. Trotsky's address to the Press Division debate is reprinted in Trotsky, Leon, On Literature and Art, ed Siegel, Paul N. (New York: Pathfinder, 1970)Google Scholar. The full text of the resolution of 18 June 1925 is reprinted in James, C. Vaughan, Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 116–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ This is the cogently argued view of Brown in The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature.

²⁴ The text of the decree of 23 Apr. 1932 is in James, Vaughan, Soviet Socialist Realism, p. 120Google Scholar. See Nadezhda Mandelstam on Averbakh in Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans Hayward, Max (London: Collins/Harvill, 1971), pp. 164–65, 233Google Scholar.

²⁵ Fischer, Louis, “ A Revolution in Revolutionary History, ” New York Herald Tribune Booths, 27 11 1932, sect. 10, p. 10Google Scholar. See also The Times, 27 Apr. 1932.

²⁶ The account of the John Reed Clubs which follows is based upon reports in the New York Times, The New Masses and Daily Worker, as well as JRC publications like the early volumes of Partisan Review. The Soviet journal International Literature is an indispensable source of information about leftwing literary activity. Aaron's Writers on the Left is a primary source of information about the JRC, and is especially valuable on the national conventions. I have emphasized their role rather more than Aaron, and placed the clubs in a different context. Rideout, Walter B.'s The Radical Novel in the United States 1900–1954 (1956)Google Scholar, and Gilbert, James B.'s Writers and Partisans (1968)Google Scholar, are also useful. The JRC periodicals have been neglected by previous scholars, and little is known about the activities of the clubs outside New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

²⁷ Interview with Ella Winter, 21 Mar. 1979.

²⁸ Webb, Constance, Richard Wright: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1968), pp. 128 ffGoogle Scholar. Webb's account of the Chicago JRC closely follows Wright's contribution to The God That Failed, ed Crossman, R. H. S. (1950)Google Scholar, but has the advantage of filling in the names which Wright omitted.

²⁹ Daily Worker (New York), 3 06 1932, p. 3Google Scholar.

³⁰ Some JRC periodicals, published 1933–35: The New Force (Detroit), The Cauldron (Grand Rapids, Mich.), The Hammer (Hartford, Conn.), Midland Left (Indianapolis, Ind.), The Partisan (Hollywood and Carmel, California), Left Front (Chicago), Left Review, formerly Red Pen (Philadelphia), Leftward (Boston), Folio (Los Angeles), and Partisan Review (New York). The JRC magazines are best viewed in the context of the numerous politically unaffliated left wing literary magazines of this period, such as Anvil (Moberly, Missouri), Dynamo (New York), Left (Davenport, Iowa), Left Writers (New York), Morada (Albuquerque, N.M.), Revolt (New York), 1933 (Philadelphia) and Rebel Poet (Holt, Minnesota). This kind of literary activity was much less common in England in the early 1930s. A single exception is Storm: Stories of the Struggle (three numbers published in 1933).

³¹ Interview with Ella Winter, 21 Mar. 1979.

³² Oppen, Mary, Meaning a Life: An Autobiography (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978), pp. 151–63Google Scholar.

³³ Lafer, Steven, “ Toward a Biography of David Alfaro Siqueiros: His Life, Art and Politics ” (unpub. Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Irvine, 1977), p. 105Google Scholar. Letter to author from Dr. Lafer, 3 Jan. 1979.

³⁴ International Literature, no. 6 (1934), 146Google Scholar.

³⁵ Bernard, , Le p-c.f. et la question litteraire, pp. 61–66Google Scholar. See also Barbusse, Henri, “ Literature of Tomorrow, ” The New Freeman, 2 (5 11 1930), 182–83Google Scholar. Barbusse, who did not attend the Kharkov congress, played an equivocal role afterwards. He was unhappy about the sectarianism of Kharkov, and used his immense prestige within the PCF to prevent the Kharkov programme from being implemented in France. See Klein, Wolfgang, “ Barbusse et le mouvement litteraire communiste autour de la conference de Kharkov (1930), ” Europe, 575–76 (mars-avril 1977), 187–93Google Scholar, and Field, Frank, Three French Writers and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 69–70Google Scholar. The Bureau of the IURW was constantly plagued by backsliders (like Barbusse and Istrati), and by the need to root out deviations. In the case of the United States there was a need to deal with leftism and, in the eyes of Moscow, a persistently low level of theoretical work. There was no American equivalent of the debate over modernism between Brecht and Lukacs within the League of Revolutionary Proletarian Writers in Germany. It might be argued, however, that the most important American contribution to Marxist critical thought between the wars appears in the early work of Kenneth Burke.

³⁶ The account of the Kharkov congress which follows is based on the reports, resolutions and debates published as a special number of the IURW journal, Literature of the World Revolution, in 1931.

³⁷ Freeman, , An American Testament, pp. 539–42Google Scholar.

³⁸ Eastman, Max, Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), pp. 8–9Google Scholar. Eastman's account of Kharkov first appeared in Calverton's Modern Monthly, Aug 1933. William L. O'Neill describes the reception of Artists in Uniform in The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 153–63Google Scholar. The most extended attack on Eastman's version of events in Russia, which was overlooked by O'Neill, is Freeman, Joseph's column “ What a World! ” in the Daily Worker [New York], 22 11–7 12 1933Google Scholar. Eastman's summary of the Kharkov programme was reprinted, and given much wider currency, in Spender, Stephen's The Destructive Element (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Ellis, Fred, Gold, Michael, Gropper, William, Kunitz, Joshua, Magil, A. B., Potamkin, Harry Alan, “ The Charkov Conference of Revolutionary Writers, ” The New Masses, 6 (02 1931), 6–8Google Scholar. There is a tantalizingly brief memoir by Josephine Herbst, who attended the conference in an unofficial capacity, “ Yesterday's Road, ” New American Review, No. 3 (1968), 84–104Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Magil, A. B., in a letter to The New Masses, 16 01 1934Google Scholar.

⁴¹ In “ Notes from Kharkov ” in The New Masses, Mar. 1931, Gold alluded to the fact that “ our leftists ” had not accepted the Kharkov resolutions in their entirety. He then quoted several Russian critics of the policy of tolerating fellow travellers. Howe and Coser fail to note the struggle within the American delegation, and thus tend to over-simplify Gold's role. See The American Communist Party, p. 278.

⁴² Magil, as the IURW representative in America, “ was in fairly frequent contact with the comrades of the IURW. ” He subsequently “ began to realize ” that the attitude of the majority of the delegation at Kharkov had been “ schematic and inflexible, ” which would in turn lead to the alienation of fellow-travellers and the isolation of party intellectuals (The New Masses, 16 Jan. 1934). In a letter to the author of 14 Feb. 1979, Mr. Magil explained in greater detail the background of the split: “ He [Gold] held himself rather aloof from the club and rarely attended meetings. He was regarded as individualistic, undisciplined and only nominally a party member. In our dogmatic, ultra-left fashion we even criticized Jews Without Money as petty-bourgeois and anarchistic. Mike, however, had great prestige among the rank and file of the party and its sympathizers, as well as in the Soviet Union. He was the American proletarian writer. ” There is a photograph of Magil, and a biographical note, in The New Masses, Sept. 1930. Whittaker Chambers remembered Magil, 's “ humorless ponderosity ” in Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 241Google Scholar. Further detail on Magil may be found in Dvosin, Andrew James, “ Literature in a Political World: The Career and Writings of Philip Rahv ” (unpub. Ph.D. diss., New York Univ., 1977), p. 38nGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Rahv, Philip, “ The Literary Class War, ” The New Masses, 8 (08 1932), 7Google Scholar, and Magil, A. B., “ Pity and Terror, ” The New Masses, 8 (12 1932), 16–19Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ John Howard Lawson to Dos Passos, n.d., quoted in Diggins, John P., Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 85–86Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Gold's review of Wilder appeared in the New Republic on 22 Oct. 1930. The review of MacLeish was in the same periodical on 26 July 1933. The idea that the work of MacLeish revealed a “ fascist unconscious ” rapidly became one of the commonplaces of leftwing criticism in America. It was repeated by Strachey, in Literature and Dialectical Materialism (New York: Covici Friede, 1934)Google Scholar, and, inter alia, by Obed Brooks [Robert Gorham Davis] in Partisan Review, Feb–Mar. 1934. In England, however, MacLeish was not identified with the class enemy. See Edgell Rickword's review of MacLeish, 's Public Speech in the Daily Worker [London], 4 11 1936Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ International Literature, No. 1 (1932), 107–14Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Mathewson, Rufus W. Jr, “ Soviet-American Literary Relations 1929–1935 ” (unpub. Master's Thesis, Columbia Univ., 1948)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ See the review of Du Von, Jay's periodical Left, in International Literature, Nos. 2–3 (1932), 145–52Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Freeman, Joseph, “ Ivory Towers-White and Red, ” The New Masses, 11 09 1934, pp. 20–24Google Scholar. This view of Freeman is supported by Ella Winter (interview, 21 Mar. 1979), Gregory, Horace in The House on Jefferson Street: A Cycle of Memories (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), pp. 182–84Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ There is a detailed analysis of “ American Exceptionalism ” in Draper, , American Communism and Soviet Russia, pp. 268–81Google Scholar. See also Howe, and Coser, , The American Communist Party, pp. 163–73Google Scholar. Lovestone was identified with a Bukharinite view that in the late 1920s American capitalism was “ on the upgrade. ” The consequence for party policy was a lowering of revolutionary expectations, and an increasing “ Americanization ” of the party. After the fall of Trotsky in 1927, Stalin rapidly moved to the “ left ” and emphasized that “ we are on the threshold of new revolutionary events ” (Draper, p. 279). Bukharin's cautious realism about America was attacked within the Comintern. His increasingly precarious position jeopardized his supporters, such as Lovestone.

⁵¹ Aaron gives a definitive account of the 1934 JRC convention in Writers on the Left. For contemporary accounts, see the Daily Worke [New York], 11 10 1934Google Scholar; Johns, Orrick, “ The John Reed Clubs Meet, ” The New Masses, 13 (30 10 1934), 25Google Scholar; Partisan Review, 1 (11–12 1934), 60–61Google Scholar; Calmer, Alan, “ A New Period of American Leftwing Literature, ” International Literature, No. 7 (1935), 75Google Scholar. See also Webb, , Richard Wright, pp. 131–33Google Scholar.

⁵² Pells, for example, in the course of an extensive discussion of “ Literary Theory and the Role of the Intellectual ” in Radical Visions, pp. 151–93, seriously underestimates the Russian influence on American left wing literary activity in this period.