The Fiddler's Prerogative: J. W. Krutch and the "Class Wars"
2002; Antioch College; Volume: 60; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/4614314
ISSN2326-9707
AutoresRamona Grey, Theodore L. Putterman,
Tópico(s)Soviet and Russian History
ResumoA lthough it is now hard to fathom, the reaction of many Western intellectuals to the Russian Revolution was extremely positive. have been over into the future, Lincoln Steffens boasted, it works! The Russian people and their leaders would not, he prophesied, succumb to the debilitating skepticism and despair that had gripped liberals the West during the Great War. In fact, their malaise, according to Steffens, had nothing to do with the slaughter the trenches but was merely symptomatic of bourgeois society at the end of its tether. You see, he remarked after the death of John Reed (the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, whose sympathies for the Russian Revolution were chronicled the film Reds), in Moscow, Soviet Russia, where there are lice and hunger and discipline and death; where it is hell now; they see-even a non-Communist can see-something to live and die for. They can see that life isn't always going to be as it is now. The future is coming, and soon. And it is good. They can see this with their naked eyes, common men can; I did, for example. So to a poet, to a spirit like John Reed, death Moscow must have been a vision of the resurrection and the life of man. Steffens wanted to believe that change-radical change-was still possible. Now he had proof. The corrupt bourgeois world, so vividly depicted by him The Shame of the Cities and his Autobiography, had met its match. There really was a new world coming. Unfortunately for Steffens, the hope kindled by the Russian Revo-
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