Proletarian novel

The proletarian novel is a popular genre that has been studied in universities during several decades (the 1950s, 1970s, and other periods). It is also a form of reading that was passed on from worker to worker, and it was seen as an instrument to foment a revolution among the working classes. Proletarian literature is the mainstay of writings created by communist authors. Its focus centered on poor, working-class individuals, and the majority of the proletarian novels were written in various parts of the world during the period of 1930 to 1945. The adjective "proletarian" comes from the Latin words "prole (meaning offspring) and proletarius (a citizen of the lowest class), and it is a term used to identify an individual of a lower social class identity. Often the group is referred to as the "proletariat". This use of proletarian implies that one is poor and hints at the lower classes being prolific in creating children. A member of such a class is proletarian. Originally it was identified as those people who had no wealth other than their sons. The desire of the writer of such literature is to lift the workers from the ghetto, by inspiring them to embrace to possibilities of a revolution giving them power to rule in society.

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Based on the political and literary ideas of Gorki (whom the Russians claim to have written the first proletarian novel), also inspired by the novels of the anarchists of the decade of the 1920s (Wobblies or Industrial Workers of the World [IWW]), and later promoted by Joseph Stalin as an important part of the movement called socialist realism, the proletarian novel had its greatest period of success between 1930 and the early 1940s. They were the years of the Great Depression and the writers with a Marxist inclination hoped to inspire and begin the social revolution that Marx and other thinkers had prophesied.

Proletarian novels were written in Germany, England, France, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and numerous other countries, as well as in the United States.

The most important American writers gathered in the First American Writers Congress of 1935 (see Hart's volume), which was supported by Stalin. See the League of American Writers which was backed by the Communist Party USA. Famous among the international writers were Georg Fink (pseudonym of the German writer Kurt Münzer), Mike Gold of New York (both of whom were Jewish), José Revueltas of Mexico, Nicomedes Guzmán of Chile, Jorge Icaza of Ecuador, and numerous others.

References

• Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Avon Books, 1965.
• Brown, Edward James. Russian Literature Since the Revolution. London: Collier Books, 1965.
• Empson,, William. "Proletarian Literature," in Some Versions of Pastoral, pp. 3–23. New York: New Directions Paperbacks, 1965.
• Ferrero, Mario. Nicomedes Guzmán y la Generación del 38. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Mar Afuera, 1982.
• Freeman, Joseph. Introduction to Proletarian Literature in the United States. Granville Hicks, et al., eds. New York: International Publishers, 1935.
• Hart, Henry, ed. The American Writer's Congress. New York: International Publishers, 1935.
• Lucaks, Georg. Studies in European Realism. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964.
• Pearson, Lon. Nicomedes Guzmán: Proletarian author in Chile's literary generation of 1938. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1964.
• Promis [Ojeda], José. La novela chilena del último siglo. Santiago: La Noria, 1993. See "http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomedes_Guzm%C3%A1n".
• Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States: 1900-1954. Some Interrelations of Literature and Society. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
• [Siniavskii, Andrei Donatevich] or Andrei Sinyavsky; also wrote as Tertz, Abram. On Socialist Realism. Introduction by Czeslaw Milosz. Trans. by George Dennis. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.