(Read part 2 here).
In the 1830s, Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky identified a type of poetry which “is true to reality; it does not create life anew, but reproduces it”, in contrast to “idealistic” work which “harmonizes with feeling”. The first theorist of the concept of realism in French, art critic and novelist Champfleury, writing in the 1850s, linked realism to his praise of sincerity, and in various places emphasized the importance of observation of contemporary life, prioritization of observation over the imagination, simple plots without inexplicable events, inclusion of what might previously have been seen as trivial elements, succinct and precise prose, including descriptions of people, physical settings and nature, and the use of direct dialogue.
It is not difficult to see how such a movement would grow during an era which had seen not only the failure of the idealism which informed the 1848 revolutions (even though realism originated a little beforehand), but also the growth of industrialization and science. Realism went hand-in-hand with the establishment of the new discipline of sociology, which, in the hands of its founder August Comte, promised a scientific understanding of the workings of society.
Frequently realist work is linked to portrayals of the lower classes or minorities. While there is no reason why a portrayal of an haut-bourgeois artistic salon should be any less "real", nonetheless a link with class is not arbitrary, as there are long cultural traditions which portray noble figures as mythical, in contrast with the more "realistic" portrayal of the lower classes.
There is certainly some sociological work past and present that seems to take an almost voyeuristic pleasure in chronicling and detailing human misery, more so than in searching for new analyses of causes, or developing policy ideas such as might alleviate such misery. Metaphors of “holding up a mirror to reality” (originating in Stendhal’s definition of a novel as “un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route”) can be so commonplace as to be banal. But do today’s concerns of “realism” adequately reflect the ideas of all socialist and communist thinkers on these matters?
In 1924, Leon Trotsky gave a speech entitled “Class and Art”. It was made during a discussion at the Press Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party relating to policy on literature. Trotsky acknowledged the cultural-historical importance of verses contained within pre-revolutionary workers’ publications, newspapers and periodicals that expressed revolutionary sentiments. But he denied that this “inartistic doggerel” could be regarded as representing a new “proletarian literature” (in the specific context of the post-revolution Proletkult movement). On the contrary, he saw such verses as “a political event, not a literary one”, thus emphasizing the distinction between the two. For Trotsky, what mattered was that there were new possibilities for “changing the cultural state of the working masses” in the wake of the Revolution, which would “create the real basis for a new art”.
Trotsky acknowledged the importance of verses contained within pre-revolutionary workers’ publications that expressed revolutionary sentiments. But he denied that this “inartistic doggerel” could be regarded as representing a new “proletarian literature”.
Trotsky was a revolutionary, not a simple realist or empiricist. He believed in radical change, and could thus find some value in such artistic movements as the Futurists (whose Russian wing, which emerged in the 1910s, did not have the same symbiotic links to fascism as the Italian movement). While he argued that Futurism constituted at least in part a “Bohemian revolutionary off-shoot of the old art”, nonetheless Trotsky saw positive ways in which it could inform a new post-revolutionary art. The extent to which he had learned from Futurists’ ideas is demonstrated in his 1924 essay on “Literature and Revolution”. In that text, he claimed that there could be a new dissolution of boundaries between art and nature. Trotsky made clear that he was not echoing the Romantics (he mentions Jean-Jacques Rousseau), but argued instead that “nature will become more ‘artificial’”, to the extent of cutting down and relocating mountains, or doing the same with rivers (environmental considerations did not feature in Trotsky’s thought here).
