Love and Hunger. (1920)

From the September 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was a vision . . .

Two angels appeared to me . . . two genii.

I say angels, genii, because both, had no clothes on their naked bodies, and behind their shoulders rose long, powerful wings.

Both were youths. One was rather plump, with soft, smooth skin and dark curls. His eyes were brown and full, with thick eyelashes ; his look was sly, merry, and eager. His face was charming, bewitching, a little insolent, a little wicked. His full, soft, crimson lips were faintly quivering. The youth smiled as one possessing power — self-confidently and languidly; a magnificent wreath of flowers rested lightly upon his shining tresses, almost touching his velvety eyebrows. A spotted leopard’s skin pinned up with a golden arrow, hung lightly from his curved shoulder to his rounded thigh. The feathers ot his wings were tinged with rose colour; the ends of them were bright red, as though dipped in fresh-spilt scarlet blood. From time to time they quivered rapidly with a sweet, silvery sound, the sound of rain in spring.

The other was thin, and his skin yellowish. At every breath his ribs could be seen faintly heaving. His hair was fair, thin, and straight; his eyes big, round, pale grey . . . his glance uneasy and strangely bright. All his features were sharp; the little half- open mouth, with pointed fish-like teeth; the pinched eagle nose, the projecting chin, covered with whitish down. The parched lips never once smiled.

It was a well-cut face, but terrible and pitiless! (Though the face of the first, the beautiful youth, sweet and lovely as it was, showed no trace of pity either.) About the head of the second youth were twisted a few broken and empty ears of corn, entwined with faded grass-stalks. A coarse grey cloth girt his loins; the wings behind, a dull, dark grey colour, moved slowly and menacingly.

The two youths seemed inseparable companions. Each of them leaned upon the other’s shoulder. The soft hand of the first lay like a cluster of grapes upon the bony neck of the second; the slender wrist of the second, with its long, delicate fingers, coiled like a snake about the girlish bosom of the first.

And I heard a voice. This is what it said:

“Love and hunger stand before thee—twin brothers, the two foundation-stones of all things living.

“All that lives moves to get food, and feeds to bring forth young. “Love and Hunger—their aim is one; that life should cease not, the life of the individual and the life of others—the same universal life.”

Ivan Turgenev.

* * * * *

In the foregoing, Turgenev has, in his allegorical way, personified very strikingly the two forces to which can be traced the motive-power of all animal activities. The desire to live and the desire to propagate the species are common to all animals; but beyond this, the animal man, since he has developed along the lines which have set him apart from, and ahead of, the lower animals, has evolved further desires, to live as easily and safely as possible, and to be in such an economic position as will allow of his breeding and rearing offspring who shall develop a healthier physique and a higher intelligence than his own.

Let us examine shortly man’s place in nature and society looked at from this point of view. A society is defined by Professor Edward Jenks as “a group or mass of people, bound together by a certain common principle or object.” A political society, which is the particular type of society we are dealing with at present, the type of society, that is, in which the civilised peoples of the World are to-day grouped and organised, he defines as not being formed for any special or limited objects, but which has grown up, almost spontaneously, as part of the general history of mankind, and which is concerned with its general interests.

The last part of this definition must, however, be taken in a very limited sense. We shall see how far, and in what way, society—present-day capitalist society—is concerned with the general interests of the group of people of whom it is composed. While you have—as you now have —society divided into two classes, of which one is the dominant class and the other the class dominated, you must necessarily have a clash of interests ; in which case the advantage of the one section can only react to the disadvantage of the other. To-day, the members of the dominant or master class, by virtue of their possession of all the means of life, are able to maintain their position, as individuals and as a class, only by keeping down, and pressing ever harder upon, the class they dominate—the working or wage-slave class.

So you have a comparatively small number of people who are only able to satisfy their desire to live (as easily and as safely as possible) and their desire to breed and rear a progeny (healthier and more intelligent than themselves) by keeping the rest of society—i.e., the great majority of the people—in an enslaved, unhealthy, and mentally inefficient condition.

Hunger and love are quite as powerful in their effect upon the workers as they are upon the masters, but owing to the latter’s more intelligent conception of their class position, the one class is able easily and satisfactorily to obtain the necessaries and luxuries that make life for the individual, and the extension of that life in the form of the breeding and maintenance of offspring, worth the having; whereas all that the other class—the working class—can do is simply to lead a precarious existence, with little or no outlook for themselves or for the children whom the forces of nature compel them to bring into the world. Hence the paradox that instead of the life of the individual and the maintenance of the race being the concern of society as a whole, one section is fighting another section to the death because only by so doing can it satisfy the insistent demands that the forces of hunger and love make upon the units that compose that particular section.

To the Socialist, with his knowledge of the fundamental forces of nature and their relation to the individual and to society, it seems that such a paradoxical and unnatural condition of things must inevitably end in disaster unless some way can be found by which the equilibrium between man and nature can be satisfactorily adjusted. The contention of the Socialist is that the remedy is to be found in the abolition of the master or capitalist class. It is indisputable that a certain quantity of food, clothing, and shelter is necessary to human existence; without such food, clothing, and shelter mankind would vanish from the face of the globe ; but as all the necessaries of life are the product of human energy applied to nature’s resources, so it follows that actually the only necessary people in society are the people who do the work of the world—that is, the members of the working class.

The master class might very well go out of existence and yet all that is requisite for the maintenance of life still be produced. Food would still be grown and manufactured, clothing still be made, houses still be built, even though such a calamity (!) happened as the extinction of the members of the capitalist class, who, while themselves performing no useful function in society, yet manage to secure for themselves and their dependents the major portion of the wealth produced by the men and women of the working class, without whose efforts mankind would soon pass into oblivion.

The abolition of the capitalist class can only be accomplished by the strenuous efforts of a class-conscious working class. It is obviously futile to expect the capitalist class to abolish itself. Therefore it is that the Socialist Party, by oral and written propaganda, is striving to implant in the minds of the workers the consciousness of their real position in the society in which they live. Not until they have been brought to an appreciation of their position as wage-slaves and a further appreciation of the overwhelming power they possess as a political force, will it be possible for them—by organising with us, in a class-conscious political party—to wrest from their masters the power which will enable them, not only to win their freedom from class-domination, but also enable them, by harmonising their economic position with their desire or will to live and to maintain and develop the species, to secure for themselves and their children initial entrance to the vast and unexplored wonderland of life, only fleeting glimpses of which are at present vouchsafed to them when they are perhaps able to contemplate nature in its pristine grandeur ; to watch the demonstrations of a great scientist; or to study the works of a great imaginative and creative artist.

F. J. Webb

Seeing beyond the particular (1999)

Theatre Review from the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev. Royal Shakespeare Company, touring.

Standing in the queue for interval refreshment I couldn't but overhear the conversation. "Isn't she awful?" said the woman to her friend. "Terrible," came the reply, "simply terrible. She's so selfish."

At one level this seemed an appropriate reaction. Natalya Petrovna, wife of wealthy Arkady, is self-centred, scheming and manipulative; a woman only too aware of her power and influence, and with a ruthless inclination to use both for her own ends. And predictably, because this is a nineteenth century Russian drama constrained by the conventions of the time, having decided that she is in love with her son's tutor, she sets in train a series of actions which are to have calamitous consequences for most of the household.

Put like this Brian Friel's adaptation of Turgenev's play sounds much like a trite Mills & Boon paperback: a view which is encouraged by the synopsis given in the programme. "Both Natalya and her ward Vera fall in love with the young man: Natalya entranced by his youth and energy but deeply confused by her own reaction, Vera awakening to her first adult emotion."

Fortunately Friel's dialogue is much more weighty and substantial than this kind of hushed tone would suggest. Full of irony and no little cynicism it paints, for those inclined to look beyond the immediate, a mordant picture of a society hastening towards instability: of landed gentry who live shallow, empty lives; local dignitaries trying to ingratiate themselves with their lords and masters; and of apparently feckless servants. As Natalya and her household pursue their dull, impoverished lives, a crippling sense of listlessness is evident. It's a picture of bourgeois life that Chekov was later to paint even more vividly in such plays as The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard.  

It is often observed, I think validly, that people's reaction to experience—whether the shock of being declared redundant, a newspaper photograph of some member of the royal family skiing in Switzerland, or—in this instance—a play about a family of Russian landowners in the 1840s—will depend upon what they bring to the experience. Thus a trade union negotiator going to see the redundancy of some union members in the context of local and national demands for labour, the state of the economy etc; a particular employee is going to view his or her redundancy as a personal calamity; and a member of the Socialist Party is likely to place both points of view in the context of an over-arching understanding of how capitalism works.

So, too, Turgenev's play. It is suspect that some of the audience saw the play almost exclusively in terms of a "human interest story"; the particular tale of a wife of a wealthy Russian landowner, her ward, and her son's tutor. Others in the audience, familiar with other plays by Turgenev and Chekov, perhaps saw in the lives of Arkady and Natalya much that reinforced a more general picture of life in Russia in the nineteenth century. Whilst those disposed to analyse events on stage in the light of other perspectives might have reflected further. About the way that nineteenth bourgeois life imprisoned not only the working class, but also—at the level of being usefully involved in life, and of using their skills and talents to achieve personal satisfaction—many of the bourgeoisie, men and women alike. About the similarities between Natalya and some of Chekov's and Ibsen's heroines, and the way that women's abilities were demeaned by bourgeois life. (Natalya's only task is, seemingly, to choose the menu for dinner.) And about the way that capitalism breeds selfishness, as surely as a tropical swamp breeds mosquitoes.

This is the second time that Brian Friel has adapted Turgenev for the stage. I remember seeing Friel's play of Fathers and Sons, "after the novel by Ivan Turgenev", when it was produced at the National Theatre in 1987. On that occasion Friel, so it seemed to me, managed to place his characters in a much more multi-dimensional context, so that the audience couldn't but be aware that in some significant sense the various protagonists were not only speaking for themselves, but also as representatives of particular classes and groups. I judge Friel to be less successful on this occasion. In spite of a quite magnificent cast and an admirable production, the audience—encouraged by the programme note—was apparently being invited to see the play in uni-dimensional terms. As a result I concluded that whatever the two friends I heard talking at the interval paid for their admission and refreshments, they were finally being short-changed.

Michael Gill

Turgenev's "Virgin Soil" (1965)

From the July 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a popular misconception of Marxist materialism that it can be used to establish a rigidly determining link between economic factors and appearance of, for example, works of literature. This is a vulgar and mechanistic interpretation of what materialism sets out to explain. There is no law of economic inevitability that provides a formula for a determining link between economic factors and the creative ability that appears from time to time uniquely in the personality of one artist. Nevertheless, the social framework provides the possibilities within which the talent of artists expresses itself and comes to fruition.

Moreover, the whole history of literature, its form, and subject matter, can be shown to have a developing relationship with the development of all other aspects of society and ultimately hinges upon economic evolution.  Especially can the work of 19th century Russian writers present a clear and explicit example of how literature can be closely involved in political controversies and can reflect the conflict of social forces which are ultimately of a class nature.

Due to the intolerance and authoritarianism of Russian life, there was a complete absence  of freedom of speech in print. There was no freedom whatsoever for the kind of political pamphleteering that was common in Western Europe. Even so, great controversies did rage and the tradition grew up that viewpoints were expressed through the medium of fiction. Turgenev was one writer who used his art as a vehicle for polemics and pamphleteering, so much so, that after incurring the Tsar's displeasure for his polemical tone, he went into exile in 1855 and spent the remainder of his life in Baden and Paris.

In Turgenev's novel "Virgin Soil", the major forces of Russian 19th century society are shown interlocked in close conflict. The character of Kollomietzev personifies the rigidity of the established landed aristocracy and typifies what Engels described in 1874 as " . . . oriental despotism whose arbitrariness we in the west simply cannot imagine. A despotism which from day to day comes into more glaring contradiction with the views of the enlightened classes and in particular with those of the rapidly developing bourgeoisie."

In drawing the character of Kollomietzev, Turgenev describes the affected arrogant postures of the landed nobility. "The only principle that I acknowledge," remarks Kollomietzev, "is the whip." He holds the toiling masses in complete contempt, regarding than as less than animals, and sees the church and the government as necessarily oppressive instruments of upper class authority. He sees his own social role as that of upholding privilege, and leading a life as remote as possible from useful production. He despises even what he considers to be the vulgarity of the capitalists' interest in factories and commercial profit.

Sipiagin is a man of property who is interested in factory production. In outlook, he is more flexible, liberal minded and free from the stultifying prejudices of his fellow landowner. In the novel he goes to some lengths to win over into his own employment an efficient factory manager. Such competent technical men in Russia were rare.

The novel also includes a collection of revolutionaries who are referred to as "socialists." They are forced to operate underground, as a secret society. Though they are inspired and dedicated, they conduct their conspiracies with a completely false and unrealistic view of Russian social consciousness. One of the revolutionaries insists that soon " . . . there would be nothing to hinder them from making a 'beginning' as the masses refused to wait any longer!"

They cannot come to terms with the general ignorance that precludes any useful point of contact between the peasants and their own well-developed ideas, and cover failure with self-reproach, lamenting their own inadequacies. "He wrote a long letter to his friend Silin about the whole thing, in which he bitterly regretted his incapacity, putting it down to the vile education he had received and his hopelessly aesthetic nature." In the book, the activities of the revolutionaries inevitably end in failure and disillusion.

In his essay "Social Relations in Russia", Engels predicted revolution in the offing, but it must be said that he did not extend its possibilities to the introduction of Socialism. The farthest that he would go was in saying that "  . . . it will destroy at one blow the last, so far intact, reserve of the entire European (landed) reaction," which of course it did.

Turgenev's "Virgin Soil" is about the unresolved nature of 19th century Russian politics, and its stifling effect upon the historical demand for industrialisation. The longer the balance of economic forces that underlay this political indecision continued, the more critical became the dislocation between dynamic European capitalism and the faltering vacillation of Russian society. At the same time the Russian state was inextricably involved in Western Europe, whether it desired it or not, especially about the waging of war.

It is a matter of history now that the discrepant relationship between Russia and Europe reached its critical climax in October 1917. With the decisive shock of the Bolshevik revolution, Russia at last became unreservedly committed to the building of industrial capitalism.

Although the characters in Turgenev's novel represent economic and political forces, except for two who are deliberate caricatures, this does not diminish them as human personalities. As the novel unfolds itself, they act and react with convincing realism. This is history in microcosm, with men, seldom conscious of their historical role, clashing as individuals in specific situations, prejudiced, bigoted, pragmatic, idealistic, but ultimately intelligible within a framework of material struggle and class conflict.

Pieter Lawrence

This article has been compiled from notes taken at a recent discussion at the Bromley Group.