– Jan Drda, 1949 –
The decay and absolute corruption of bourgeois culture is taking place before our eyes day after day, and each day the result is more striking. The capitalists in the West, whose criminal policy threatens peace, freedom and the very existence of many peoples, have invented the fetish of “Atlantic culture” after the model of Hitler and Goebbels.
Not so long ago, the European peoples heard the boasts of the Nazi ruffians about “Aryan culture” and their claims of defending “Atlantic culture” from the invasion of Eastern barbarism. The enemies of culture who are doing a fine wholesale and retail trade with cultural treasures, the advocates of the prostitution of all treasures — material and spiritual — are now taking to culture as a talisman. They are fastening it to their clothes as a decoration, thinking that it can be bought at any shop.
They are ready to export culture like refrigerators and canned horse-meat to these people who unfortunately are still economically and politically under their thumbs.
It is becoming quite clear that the working class is the true heir, alone capable of carrying on the unified and indivisible culture of mankind. Victorious socialism clearly means that culture can develop unrestricted. At the same time, everyone who is not blindfold can see that the collapse of everything spiritual is complete wherever there is bourgeois influence, that bourgeois art and culture have lost their clarity of purpose and have become aimless, resulting in the degeneration of art and in its loss of cultural attributes.
If we consider what this old doomed world is now manufacturing in the name of culture, we can see complete moral poverty, the primitive nature of American gangster thrillers, both in literature and on the screen, which coarsely act on the nerves and imagination of people thirsting for sensation. On the other hand, we can see a hopeless pessimism, the pessimism of despair of Western existentialism.
These are the two sides of the same coin — a bad coin let it be said — with the help of which they try to deceive the world. This is the last visiting card of bourgeois “culture.” Murderers, social morons, hard-drinkers, freaks, suicides and degenerates are today the heroes of bourgeois art. It makes no difference whether this art is created through the blatant methods of a newspaper hack-writer or through the help of sophisticated formalist tricks bordering on perversion, of the so-called great artists. The same hysterical convulsion, the same immorality and the lack of any human feeling show without any doubt that they are of the same origin. The pathologically degenerate heroes, indifferent to good or evil, bereft of any noble human quality, without courage, dishonest both to themselves and others, with not the least sign of genuine feeling of love or humanism, are the last product of bourgeois literature. They are undeniable evidence of the speeding corruption that is dragging down the whole of bourgeois culture.
What a contrast are the words of Maxim Gorky, blazoned on the shield of socialist culture — “The word ‘Man,’ rings proud.” The free, honest, proud socialist man who works with his companions to free all the creative forces of society — that is the meaning of socialist culture.
We have only to look at the vast, many-sided Soviet culture which is enthusiastically striving to build the happiness of the whole of mankind and which is resolutely and unswervingly marching toward this aim, only to see how the thirst for culture is growing among the recently liberated peoples of the new democracies, and our hearts beat with joy.
Here are the true heirs to world culture. It is here that the new optimism, justified by history itself, is being born; it is here that the culture which rejects moral indifference is growing. Here the last achievements of science become the property of the broad mass of the people.
Here art gives new life and teaches a new morality that carries with it the joy of life.
As a result, culture becomes a strong, effective weapon against all the forces of negation and evil. It becomes a fraternal link between the peoples, a glorious banner of the future of mankind.
The Great Patriotic War and the years of the tremendous new construction in the Soviet Union have shown how great are the moral possibilities of this new culture, how surely it can educate man and what a noble lire it strives to kindle in him.
And we, who are living in the people’s democracies, can daily see with joy how the freedom of society brings victory, how steadily the creative forces of the people are growing, how a new consciousness, a new morality and new friendship are growing where the power of the capitalist class has been broken.
Instead of the crooked smile and convulsions of a corrupt bourgeois hero, there flourishes the open smile and self-confidence of a healthy, free man, the creator of a new epoch.
This new hero develops not through pathological sensations but by discovering new life through struggle and labour heroism in the cause of society. He is an industrious patriot of his native country. He has confidence in himself and is steeped in the feeling of internationalism which binds him with comradely ties to the working people of the world, to all industrious and progressive mankind.
Who is it that must be and will be the inheritor of world culture? On which side of the barricade stand Shakespeare, Whitman, Romain Rolland, Pushkin and Beethoven? Are they on the side of those who oppress and rob the peoples, threaten freedom and frustrate progress, or are they on the side where freedom of man and human society extends and deepens daily, where the people, one generation after another, grow richer morally and spiritually, where new concrete socialist humanism is coming into being?
The answer is clear. The fetishes of “Atlantic culture” are ridiculous compared with the glorious and powerful perspective of socialist culture, the crown of all the cultural efforts made through the centuries of the history of mankind.
(“For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy!,” No. 1 (28), January 1, 1949)