ABSTRACT
The publication of active counter-revolutionary utterances was in the years of civil war and the staggering steps of reconstruction, of course, strictly interdicted. Nevertheless in the midst of the supreme fighting tension, the creative arts were far more free of pressure from the state power, or the state philosophy, than they have been since. However, taking a long view, there are reasons also why the protest against a state metaphysic and the protest against bureaucratic degeneration should be combined. This tendentious conception of “reality” and “all history,” this doctrine of an esoteric kind of “dialectic thinking” — “not inborn and not bestowed with ordinary everyday consciousness,” as Engels said—is but a new form of the old heavy weapon of mysterious belief with which all bureaucracies since history began have bewildered and beat down their critics. The artistic experience of the Soviet union can only properly be described as a failing struggle of the creative spirit against two forms of subservience.
