My Disillusionment in Russia by Emma Goldman (books to read romance txt) 📕

artists of the Kulturliga gave several one-act plays and presented also an unpublished work found among the effects of a playwright. The performance had an artistic touch and finish I had rarely seen before. The play is called The End of the World. The wrath of God rolls like thunder across the world, commanding man to prepare for the end. Yet man heeds not. Then all the elements are let loose, pursuing one another in wild fury; the storm rages and shrieks, and man’s groans are drowned in the terrific hour of judgment. The world goes under, and all is dead.

Then something begins to move again. Black shadows symbolizing half beast, half man, with distorted faces and hesitating movements, crouch out of their caves. In awe and fear they stretch their trembling hands toward one another. Haltingly at first, then with growing confidence, man attempts in common effort with his follows to lift himself out of the black void. Light begins to break. Again a thunderous voice rolls over the earth. It is the voice of fulfilment.

It was a stirring artistic achievement.

When the Liga was first organized the Bolsheviki subsidized its work. Later, when they returned to Kiev after its evacuation by Denikin, they gave very scanty support to the educational institutions of the Kulturliga. This unfriendly attitude was due to the Yevkom, the Jewish Communist Section, which intrigues against every independent Jewish cultural endeavour. When we left Kiev the ardent workers of the Liga were much worried about the future of the organization. I am not in a position to say at this writing whether the Liga was able to continue its work or was closed altogether. However, laudable as were the innovations of the Kulturliga and the attempts of the Kamerney and Semperante at new modes of expression, they could not be considered as having any bearing on the Revolution.

State support to so-called art is given mostly to Lunacharsky’s dramatic ventures and other Communist interpretations of culture. When I first met Lunacharsky I thought him much less the politician than the artist. I heard him lecture at the Sverdlov University before a large audience of workingmen and women, popularizing the origin and development of art. It was done splendidly. When I met him again he was so thoroughly in the meshes of Party discipline and so completely shorn of his power that every effort of his was frustrated. Then he began to write plays. That was his undoing. He could not employ the material of the actual reality, and the February Revolution, Kerensky, and the Constituent Assembly had already been caricatured to a thread. Lunacharsky turned to the German Revolution. He wrote The Smith and the Councillor, a sort of burlesque. The play is so amateurish and commonplace that no theatre outside of Russia would have cared to present it. But Lunacharsky was in control of the theatres⁠—why not exploit them for his own works? The play was staged at great cost, at a time when millions on the Volga were starving. But even that could have been forgiven if the play had any meaning or contained anything suggestive of the tragedy of Russia. Instead, it lacked all life and was rich only in vulgar scenes portraying Ludendorff, the renegade Social Democratic President, a degenerate aristocrat, and a princess of the demimonde. The drunken men frantically scramble for the possession of the woman, literally tearing her clothing off her back. A revolting scene, yet in the whole audience of teachers and members of the Department of Education not a single protest was voiced against the affront to the taste and intelligence of revolutionary Russia. On the contrary, they applauded the playwright, for those sycophants depended on Lunacharsky for their rations. They could not afford to be critical.

Vanity and power break the strongest character, and Lunacharsky is not strong. It is his lack of will which makes him submit, against his better judgment, to the galling discipline and espionage placed over him. Perhaps he avenges himself by forcing upon the public at large and the actors under his charge his dramatic works.

After a careful analysis of the educational and cultural efforts of the Bolsheviki the earnest student will come to the following conclusions: first, there is quantity rather than substance in the education of Russia today; secondly, the theatres, the ballet, and the museums receive generous support from the Government, but the reason for it is not so much love of art as the necessity of finding some outlet for the checked and stifled aspirations of the people.

The political dictatorship of the Bolsheviki with one stroke suppressed the social phase of life in Russia. There was no forum even for the most inoffensive social intercourse, no clubs, no meeting places, no restaurants, not even a dance hall. I remember the shocked expression of Zorin when I asked him if the young people could not occasionally meet for a dance free from Communist supervision. “Dance halls are gathering places for counterrevolutionists; we closed them,” he informed me. The emotional and human needs of the people were considered dangerous to the regime.

On the other hand, the dreadful existence⁠—hunger, cold, and darkness⁠—was sapping the life of the people. Gloom and despair by day, congestion, lack of light and heat at night, and no escape from it all. There was, of course, the political life of the Communist Party⁠—a life stern and forbidding, a life without colour or warmth. The masses had no contact with or interest in that life, and they were not permitted to have anything of their own. A people bottled up is a menace. Some outlet had to be provided, some relief from the black despair. The theatre, the opera, and the museum were that relief. What if the theatres gave nothing new? What if the opera had bad singing? And the ballet continued to move in the old toe circles? The places