Pour la défense de la culture: les textes du Congrès international des écrivains. Paris, juin 1935 (review)

The international congress of writers held at the Mutualité in Paris in June 1935 has often been presented as a sorry example of the relations between Communism and the intellectuals: Moscow is behind an intitiative which seeks to consolidate control over Communist intellectuals, while instrumentalizing naïve and idealistic compagnons de route, from Gide to Malraux to Huxley and even Hemingway. However, this extraordinary, richly documented and analytically lucid volume, the fruit of many years of work by Teroni and Klein, shows the complexity of the Congress and the events surrounding it. Certainly, this Congress is haunted by the victory of Nazism, and, on a French but no less symbolic level, the suicide of Surrealist René Crevel. Yet we are not dealing here with a propaganda stunt dreamed up by the Kremlin. Instead, newly accessible documents in the Comintern archives in Moscow and Germany show that the Congress happened in many ways despite Moscow: a key role in the preparation is played by the German exile Johannes Becher and Jean-Pierre Bloch, with the more 'official' Henri Barbusse playing a secondary role. Stalin and his representatives seem to be running after events, rather than controlling them: the organizers successfully demand that Boris Pasternak be included in the Soviet delegation, whilst public pressure will also lead to the liberation of Victor Serge, imprisoned in the USSR for 'espionage'. The many speeches and discussions at the Mutualite display diversity of opinion: Julien Benda and André Gide assert their attachment to autonomy, exasperating Paul Nizan in the process, whilst it should be remembered that Louis Aragon's own intervention, on 'réalisme socialiste et romantisme révolutionnaire', begins with a quotation from Lautréamont before moving onto a eulogy to Mayakovsky. Outside the confines of the Mutualité, Stalin's cultural representative in Paris, Ilya Ehrenbourg, would literally come to blows with André Breton. Teroni and Klein demonstrate that it is only really after the Congress that the dead hand of Stalin's Comintern really begins to make itself felt, with such different characters as E. M. Forster and the Surrealists quickly distancing themselves. The newly created Association internationale des écrivains pour la défense de la culture would be starved of the funds deemed necessary to 'defend culture', as Soviet foreign policy, after the failure of the Popular Fronts in France and Spain, was increasingly oriented towards an inevitable world war. The story of the 1935 Congress is a very informative episode. It also throws into relief the many changes in the last seventy years: debates over the role of the intellectual and especially the writer seem as anachronistic now as Paris being the natural venue for such debates.