Proletarian literature

Proletarian literature refers to the literature created by working-class writers for the class-conscious proletariat, published by the communist parties. It was a literature without literary pretensions.

The avantgardist Proletkult of the first years of the Russian revolution, was different from the later, traditional and realist Proletarian novel of the Stalin years. It florished in Russia, where many people needed to learn to read and write, and developed into a worldwide literary movement in Europe, Japan, China and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The genre was rediscovered at the end of the 1960s by the Maoist wing of the student movement.

United States

In the United States, Mike Gold was the first to promote proletarian literature, in Max Eastman's magazine The Liberator (magazine) and later in The New Masses. The party newspaper, The Daily Worker also published literature, as did numerous other magazines like The Anvil, edited by Jack Conroy, Blast, and Partisan Review.

American examples of the proletarian novels include Mike Gold's Jews without Money (1930) and Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth (1929), and Robert Cantwell's Land of Plenty (1934). James T. Farrell, Howard Fast, The Last Frontier (1941), Albert Halper, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur were other well-known proletarian writers.

Japan

The proletarian literature movement in Japan emerged from a trend in the latter half of the 1910s of literature about working conditions by authors who had experienced them, later called Taisho workers literature. Representative works from this period include Sukeo Miyajima's Miners (坑夫) and Karoku Miyachi's Tomizō the Vagrant (放浪者富蔵), as well as works dealing with military experiences which were also associated with the Taishō democracy, the emergence of which allowed for the development of proletarian literature in Japan. In 1921, Ōmi Komaki and Hirofumi Kaneko founded the literary magazine The Sowers (種蒔く人), which aimed to reform both the current literary scene and society. The Sowers attracted attention for recording tragedies that occurred in the wake of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake.

In 1924, Literary Front (文芸戦線) magazine was launched by Hatsunosuke Hirabayashi and Suekichi Aono, becoming the main magazine of the Japanese proletarian literature movement. New writing such as Yoshiki Hayama's The Prostitute (淫売婦) and Denji Kuroshima's A Herd of Pigs (豚群) also began to appear in the magazine.

In 1928, the Japanese Proletarian Arts Federation (全日本無産者芸術連盟, Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio, known as NAPF) was founded, bringing together the Japan Proletarian Artists Union (日本プロレタリア芸術連盟), the Labor-Farmers Artists Union (労農芸術家連盟), and the Vanguard Artists Union (前衛芸術家同盟). NAPF was largely the responsibility of two up-and-coming writers called Takiji Kobayashi and Sunao Tokunaga, and the organization's newsletter Battleflag (戦旗) published many influential works such as Kobayashi's Crab Canning Ship (蟹工船) and March 15, 1928 (一九二八年三月十五日) and Tokunaga's A Street Without Sun (太陽のない街). Another important magazine was Reconstruction (改造) which published writings from Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Yuriko Miyamoto, who had just returned from the Soviet Union.

Author Korehito Kurehara traveled secretly to the Soviet Union in 1930 for the Profintern conference, and upon his return in 1931, he started agitating for the democratization of literary organizations. This sparked the drive to organize literary circles in factories and rural areas, creating a new source of readers and writers there.

In 1931, the NAPF became the Union of Japanese Proletarian Cultural Organizations (日本プロレタリア文化連盟, Federacio de Proletaj Kultur Organizoj Japanaj, also known as KOPF), incorporating other cultural organizations, such as musicians and filmmakers. KOPF produced various magazines including Working Woman (働く婦人)

The Japanese government cracked down harshly on proletarian authors, as the Japanese Communist Party had been outlawed since its founding in 1922. Though not all authors were associated with the party, the KOPF was, leading to mass arrests such as the March 15 incident. Some authors, such as Takiji Kobayashi were tortured to death by police, while others were forced to renounce their socialist beliefs.

In 2008, Takiji Kobayashi's Crab Canning Ship (蟹工船) became a bestseller in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Literature

Anthologies

• The American Writer's Congress edited by Henry Hart. International Publishers, New York 1935.
• Proletarian Literature in the United States: an Anthology edited by Granville Hicks, Joseph North, Paul Peters, Isidor Schneider and Alan Calmer; with a critical introduction by Joseph Freeman. International Publishers, New York 1935.^[1]

Studies

• Aaron, Daniel: Writers on the Left. Harcourt, New York 1961.
• Denning, Michael: The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Verso, 1996.
• Foley, Barbara: Radical Representations. Duke University Press, 1993.
• Murphy, F.: The Proletarian Moment. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Ill 1991.
• Nelson, Cary: Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. Routledge, 2001.
• Rabinowitz, Paula: Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1991.
• Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States: 1900-1954. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1956.
• Steinberg, Mark. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. (On proletarian literature in late-imperial and early Soviet Russia)
• Wald, Alan M.: Writing from the Left. Verso, 1984.
• Wald, Alan M.: Exiles from a Future Time. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

References

1. ^ Joseph Freeman: Introduction to Granville Hicks and others (editors): Proletarian Literature in the United States, International Publishers, New York 1935.