Trotsky, the literary critic

I'm always interested in the relationship between tradition and innovation.  It's especially interesting in Russia, where people still struggle to decide what they can take from their past and how they can use it to define their future.  Against this backdrop, the following quote from a Boston College Magazine article on Trotsky's fight to save Russian literature inevitably caught my eye...  Although it didn't exactly work in the early Soviet framework, perhaps it should be revived in a new independent Russian one?

Trotsky’s major contribution to this battle over the future course of Soviet culture was Literature and Revolution, a volume of literary criticism published in 1924. The book’s principal theme was the indispensability of tradition, even in the homeland of communism. “We Marxists have always lived in tradition,” Trotsky argued, “and we have not ceased to be revolutionaries because of it.” He opposed the notion that art and literature of past epochs reflected merely the economic interests of now-vanquished social classes. Great art, he declared, was timeless and classless. The proletariat’s rule, too, he said, would be brief and transitory, giving way to a classless socialist society and a universal culture.

At the moment, however, the Russian worker was a cultural pauper, in Trotsky's estimation.  The proletariat's immediate challenge was not to break with literary tradition but rather to absorb and assimilate it, starting with the classics.  "What the worker will take from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, or Dostoevsky," he wrote, "will be a more complex idea of human personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and of the role of the subconscious...In the final analysis the worker will become richer.

Meanwhile, stated Trotsky, the central task of the Bolshevik Party was to exercise "watchful revolutionary censorship" against any artistic movement openly opposed to the revolution.  In the absence of such a threat, however, the Party should assume no leadership role.  Art, Trotsky insisted, "must make its own way and by its own means."