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To follow Lenin on the London Hippodrome in TQ40 (1981) and Wedekind on the Middlesex music hall in NTQ16 (1988) – here now is Trotsky on Wedekind. As Edward Braun, Professor of Drama in the University of Bristol, points out in a brief introduction, this assessment by Trotsky follows in a thin line of dramatic criticism by Marx, Engels, Mehring, Plekhanov, and Lunacharsky, and dates from Trotsky's involvement with a number of radical journals during his exile in Vienna. The article first appeared in the Neue Zeit in April 1908.
1. Quoted in The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (London, 1954), p. 50.
2. Reprinted in Russian in Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (Moscow, 1923).
3. My Life (New York, 1970), p. 229.
4. Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), was a leading Marxist theorist of the Second International who worked closely with Engels.
5. The Tsarist political police, established in 1880.
6. ‘How sad that all beauty fades, even your splendour. Puberty makes you like all the other louts. The fragrance is gone and you are commonplace’. (Transience.)
7. Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936) was a Russian symbolist poet.
8. I have been unable to identify this figure.
9. Constituted in May 1905, this was a federation of intellectual unions, academic, engineering, technical, clerical, accounting, teaching, legal, pharmaceutical, writers, etc. Its ‘platform’ is the transformation of the state system on the basis of ‘constitutional democracy’ (Trotsky).
10. Famous satirical paper.
11. French author and critic (1848–1917), who wrote Diary of a Chambermaid.
12. French satirical journal.
13. ‘I love love, that solemn art, that age-old science’ (Lulu). ‘I had a hundred women in my pay, and squandered my wealth and health on them, the loveliest nymphs of the modern Babel. And I was left empty from crown to navel’ (The Dead Sea).
14. Written 1890–1891, first performed in Berlin 1906.
15. Written 1892–1895, first performed in Leipzig 1898.
16. Written 1892–1902, first performed in Vienna 1905.
17. ‘Seize eagerly upon sin: therein lies delight’ (Earth Spirit).
18. Death and Devil: a Death Dance, written in 1905, and first performed in Nuremberg, 1906.
19. Written 1907, first performed in Munich 1909.
20. ‘And if my spiritual life is bereft of women, then all the lamps are extinguished. And what is left for me is not worth a penny’.
21. ‘I always hoped my anguish would be soothed by another. But always I found only bitterness and never peace. For it was always fiendish desire which left no joy in its aftermath’.