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Poets and novelists are not political beings because they are not essentially rational. Political intelligence, based though it is in the revolutionary’s case upon a deep idealism, demands a scientific and pragmatic armor, and subordinates itself to the pursuit of strictly defined social ends. The artist, on the contrary, is always delving for his raw material in the subconscious, in the preconscious, in intuition, in a lyrical inner life that is rather hard to define; he does not know with any certainty either where he is going or what he is creating. If the novelist’s characters are truly alive, they function by themselves, to a point at which they eventually take their author by surprise, and sometimes he is quite perplexed if he is called upon to classify them in terms of morality or social utility. Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Balzac brought to life, all lovingly, criminals whom the Political Man would shoot most unlovingly. That the writer should involve himself in social struggles, have enriching convictions, that his potency will increase to the extent that he identifies himself with the rising classes, thus communicating with masses of individuals who carry within them a precious potential all this does not significantly alter the simple psychological truths that I set out above. [...]
[...] I shall never forget the way in which some of the sick people gazed at me when I was brought such food, or their deference when they took their share of it. Nor, for that matter, shall I forget how on the most wretched of our days of misery we all heard a radio broadcast from a regional meeting of kolkhoz workers. Passionate voices went on endlessly thanking the Leader for “the good life we lead,” and twenty or so patients tormented by hunger, half of them kolkhoz workers themselves, listened to it all in silence.
My heart was utterly ravaged as I left; I was severing attachments of a unique quality. I should have liked to have those dear faces, that I would never see again, imprinted on my brain, and those landscapes of white countryside, and even the image of our vast Russian misery, lived out by this brave, gritty, patient people. If I could have believed in any reasonable chance that I should not ultimately have been obliterated in a voiceless struggle that was already sterile, I would have been content to remain there even if it were in some little Mongol fishing village inside the Arctic Circle. But we do not live for ourselves; we live to work and fight.
also tag - why left or something [not quite the same as inspo/anticapitalism?]
The press is still making reassuring remarks—“The Weygand Line will hold fast!”—meanwhile “German infiltration” has got as far as the Somme, reaching Forges-les-Eaux ... In the June sunlight, the Champs-Elysees still keeps its smiling face. I am resolved to put off leaving until almost the last train, for I still feel some vague hope that the situation will mend, and I have practically no money. When Paris ends the world ends; useless to see the truth, how could one bear to acknowledge it? On Sunday the 9th, I see Cabinet ministers moving house. Cars, blanketed with mattresses and overloaded with trunks, hurry off towards the city’s southern gates. Shops close. The Paris of these last evenings is splendid. The great empty boulevards enter into the night with an extraordinary nobility. The darkened squares exude an air of calm and dormant power. People, too, are calm, showing greater fortitude in disaster than they seemed to before. The idea arises that they did not deserve this defeat. History had turned against them and the government of this people was so different from the people! What could the man in the street do if the French metal industry was crumbling away for lack of investment? What power did he have over capital?
I have outlived three generations of brave men, mistaken as they may have been, to whom I was deeply attached, and whose memory remains dear to me. And here again, I have discovered that it is nearly impossible to live a life devoted wholly to a cause which one believes to be just—a life, that is, where one refuses to separate thought from daily action. The young French and Belgian rebels of my twenties have all perished; my syndicalist comrades of Barcelona in 1917 were nearly all massacred; my comrades and friends of the Russian Revolution are probably all dead—any exceptions are only by a miracle. A ll were brave, all sought a principle of life more noble and more just than that of surrender to the bourgeois order, and except perhaps for certain young men, disillusioned and crushed before their consciousness had crystallized, all were engaged in movements for progress. I must confess that the feeling of having so many dead men at my back, many of them my betters in energy, talent, and historical character, has often overwhelmed me, and that this feeling has been for me the source of a certain courage, if that is the right word for it.