The Mind and Face of Bolshevism by René Fülöp-Miller

Author:René Fülöp-Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Muriwai Books
Published: 2017-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter VIII — THE MECHANIZING OF POETRY

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THE endeavour to mechanize and “de-soul” art perhaps appears at its crudest in revolutionary poetry and literature, in which the radical innovators were not content with “liquidating Pushkin, Gogol’, Dostoevski, and Tolstoi,” as one of their propagandist pamphlets puts it, but in which they attempted to eradicate entirely the old meaning and nature of the poetic, and to replace it by something completely new. But they were mainly concerned with removing the ancient, erroneous idea that there was such a thing as genius, intuition, vocation, or any “mystical junk” of the kind.

With dry objectivity the Russian physiologists, by innumerable experiments on dogs and many other animals, have shown that every apparently independent and direct expression of the intelligence is a motor reflex, a reaction to a nerve stimulus. From the behaviour of a dog, which had acid dropped into its mouth in various attendant circumstances, they drew a number of conclusions about the connection between external irritations and their alleged “soul reactions,” and finally arrived at the position that every spiritual act, however apparently spontaneous, is nothing but the effect of a sense stimulus, and will occur every time in the same way in the same conditions with an exactness which may be calculated beforehand. By this doctrine of “conditioned reflexes,” talent, genius, monomanias, flashes of insight, and intuitions were all explained in the same way on purely mechanical lines. Zavis, a pupil of the famous physiologist Pavlov, attempted to prove in an exhaustive investigation that the figure of Don Quixote is a perfect example of such conditioned reflexes. In an analogous way the adherents of this school then endeavoured to represent the whole art of poetry, in all its forms, as “mere data for the physiological law of conditioned reflexes.”

Here, as in other cases, the Russian materialists have drawn absurd deductions from physiologically correct observations: for the recognition, quite true in itself, that every process of thought is derived from a mechanic-chemical alteration in the brain, does not, of course, bring us a step nearer to the nature of the artist or the genius. But to the Bolshevik metaphysicians, this physiological evidence seems to solve completely the whole problem of the art of poetry: intellectual production to them is no longer an unconscious, mysterious process of the human mind, but a physiological, mechanical process, calculable beforehand, and thus to be regulated at will. Therefore, not only is every creative process to be conceived physiologically and rationally, but it is subject also to exact formulae which, it is claimed, make possible the “artistic production of poems, plays, and other literary output of all kinds.” The view of some revolutionary poets is in conformity with this rationalist basic conception. They hold that “a poem is nothing but a mere conjunction of sounds, a painting merely a mechanical combination of flecks of colour,” so that the laws of art are “merely the laws of putting words together and combining flecks of colour.”

This view of the nature

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