In her recent post about a conference on Futurism at SFMOMA, Marjorie Perloff raises several important literary-historical questions. One of them: To what extent do a writer's noxious political opinions require us to construe as suspicious his or her activities and affiliations earlier in life?
Her example is F.T. Marinetti, and she periodizes his involvement in Futurism, distinguishing a first, heroic, pre-World War One phase from a subsequent postwar phase involving a less talented dramatis personae. She wonders why critics have let the association between Futurism II and Italian fascism inhibit the full appreciation of the achievements of Futurism I.
As William Wordsworth said, the child is the father to the man, and there will always be scholars who want to find "antecedents," "prefigurations," "emergent traits," and other proto- or full-blown fascisms in Futurism I. For many people around the globe, World War Two remains a touchstone capable of separating good and evil. Once the word fascism has been uttered, you enter the realm of sacred history. As a result, any association with Marinetti, at any point in a person's life, makes him or her susceptible to intense moral and ethical and even religious scrutiny.
What if one shifts the question away from fascism? In this blog I have lately been talking about Afanasii Fet, a nineteenth-century Russian poet who first came to prominence in the 1850s as a member of the Sovremennik clique, which also included Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Nekrasov. The journal Sovremennik was leftist, pro-democracy, anti-totalitarian, anti-feudal, in short, recognizably progressive by then- and now-current standards. In the 1860s, the periodical radicalized further, moving closer to revolutionary socialism. Fet was tossed out of the coterie and subjected to merciless ridicule as a reactionary proponent of art for art's sake. He had the political self-awareness of a horse, one enemy wrote.
Fet was, yes, a hard-core conservative. His 1850s poetry might have exhibited a concreteness and precision that outwardly grouped him with realists such as Turgenev and Nekrasov, but that stylistic similarity could serve as "cover" among his more activist colleagues for only so long. He desperately wanted to be a landed aristocrat. He had grown up in such a family, but as a teenager he discovered that his biological father was German (blow one) and bourgeois (blow two), and he was forced to give up his last name Shenshin and the accompanying high social status (blow three). After flirting with reformist agitation as a student, he became a serious wannabe. He avoided engagement with contemporary political issues in his poetry, and in his letters and elsewhere he strove to act more like a stereotypical pomeshchik (a member of the land-owning class) than the pomeshchiki themselves.
Does Fet's post-1860 swing to the right somehow cast suspicion on the writings of other Sovremenniki in the 1850s? Maybe. It does render more interesting the question of how politics, poetics, and publication opportunities interrelated early in the reign of Tsar Aleksandr II. Why in the world would Nekrasov, a poet who firmly believed in literature as an agent for social change, declare Fet to be the best Russian poet since Pushkin? Was Fet such a good poet that Nekrasov suspended or modified his usual process of judgment? If so, by what criteria was Fet the "best"? Faute de mieux the best?
Perloff would surely find such a discussion valuable. Her point isn't to rule out of bounds the serious study of fascism or any other form of political ideology. She objects to overhasty thinking that considers affiliation or proximity alone grounds for condemnation. Dismissing the poetry and visual art of Futurism I as bunk because Futurism II has direct ties to Mussolini would be like bad-mouthing the novels Fathers and Sons and War and Peace simply because their authors were one-time bosom buddies with Afanasii Fet. With the proper blanks filled in and underlying assumptions teased out, the Fet connection might well make one think less of Tolstoy et al. But it would sound mighty peculiar if a group of scholars showed up at conference after conference "revealing" Fet's bad politics and concluding that Russian realism as a whole was guilty of complicity in a theocratic imperialist bellicose despotic regime.
Political opinions are not like the H1N1 virus. One does not have to isolate, quarantine, or ostracize potentially infected artists.
What about Marinetti and Fet themselves though? Should a critic exclude them and their ilk from consideration as major figures once they show their true colors, so to speak? Perloff is willing to drop-kick the Marinetti of Futurism II as inferior. In contrast, Fet's later poetry remained compelling and original, and he was a significant influence on a new generation of writers, the Symbolists. And you would make a poetry lover from Russia very huffy indeed if you suggested that Aleksandr Blok, for example, was irrevocably compromised because he learned a number of things about versecraft from a right-winger.
I have more to say about this, but I need to read up on the subject of Tchaikovsky's musical compositions based on Fet's poetry. Once published, a poem becomes available for many uses. Literature has a life of its own, and it laughs at our attempts to enforce taboos and boundaries. More soon.