literature in the world, and urges writers to become (in Stalin's plirase) engineers of the soul', Maxim Gorky, who as Russia's one outstanding novelist of time presumably is the richest literature in the world' in person, contributes a rambling account of Soviet literature, and believes that bourgeois Literature began With the disaffected puritanism peculiar to Stalinism upbraids as "shameless a Russian novelist who chose as his hero 'a lascivious two-legged goat in trousers. The ex-Trotskyist Karl Radek series of inferior writers who happen to be sempathetic co the Sovier Union. and launches his notorious attack on James Joyce, whose Glysser is subtly characterised as ta heap of dung crawling with (Radek also believes that Ulesses is set in 1916, an error of a mere Twelve vears. In a triumph of dialectical thinking, he claims on the one hand that 'Soviet literature is the best literature in the world, and on the other hand that proletarian writers simply have not mastered form as set? Form, it seems, is something of an optional extra. In contrast to the intellectual nullity of Zhdanov, Gorky and Radek, Nikolas Bukharin has real claims 1o he an aesthelician, His paper on pocery and poctics closcly analyses the nature of poetic language, although its case that poetry is thinking in images" was Revolution & Class Stuggle: A Reader in Marxist Politics Edited by Robin Blackburn Fontana paperback £1.95 Despite the buge expansion of Marxist publishing, there is still a real lack of cheap paperbacks in which the best of Marxist writing is made available to a wide audience. Anything which helps to fill this gap is more than welcome, and although Robin Blackburn's new collection may not seem cheap it really is good value with 12 major articles in its 450 pages.
Blackborn'sreader Din three parts. The first, "Origins", includes Blackburn on the politics of Marx and Engels, Colletti on lenin, Mandel on che Leninist Theory of Organization, Lowy on the National Question. The second. The Course of Revolution", has Colletti on Stalin, Deutseler on Maoism, Pelikan on Czechoslovakia, and Mandel on Peaceful Coexistence and World Reyolution". These two sections seem to me reasonably coherent; the third, Class Daughter of Farth Virago E1.95 There is a rawncas to Doughier of Earth which makes it almost painful to might be able to when it matters, they'll other woman. TI the movement s for - -including Slower than any finger al a sexua "Shame? Whiche to escape led he her flight: her w which ends the reason for its in it has lost nor meaning.
SOCIALIST CHALLENGE Review of Books i
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