HISTORY OF COMMUNIST LITERATURE

MANISH PARASHAR VISHNU SURESH

Communism in the Ancient Times

Plato’s The Republic was the first idea of a classless society.

Describes a state where people shared all their property & wealth.

"The private and individual is altogether banished from life and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions."

Christian Communism

The Bible suggests that the Apostles formed a communist society.

Jesus Christ asked His followers to share their wealth equally with others.

Believes that concern with private property was a distraction from religious service to God and neighbor.

Modern Communism

Karl Marx along with Friedrich Engels brought out the Communist Manifesto.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".

Founded the basis for modern Communism.

Communist Manifesto

Advocated irreligious model for the society for the first time.

World’s most influential political manuscript.Religion, the “opium for the masses”—Marx.First Communist state, USSR formed on the basis of

Marx’s works.

Das Kapital

A critique of the Capitalist order.Capitalism’s driving force is

“exploitation of labor for profit”.“Poverty in the midst of plenty” the

consequence of Capitalist materialism.

Maxim Gorky

Founder of Socialist Realism.“Literature is less of aesthetics than

that as a tool to change the world.”The Mother, Children of the Sun,

Through Russia are some of his influential works.

Socialist Realism

The official type of art in the USSR and other Communist countries.

To glorify the meek working class and work for emancipation through revolution.

Sculpture depicts—Stone, the real weapon of the worker.

Socialist Realism—notable works

Spread to Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland and later China, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea.

Louis Aragon—French novelist and poet.Pablo Neruda—won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Composed poetries in praise of Stalin and Fidel Castro.

Open book—Communist symbolism

The coat of arms of Mozambique.Communist Party of the Russian Federation.Communist Party of Ukraine.

Cuba and Latin America

Nicolás Guillén and Jose Z. Tallet from Cuba focused on literature as a social protest.

Nicolás Guillén is the National poet of Cuba. Motivos de son, West Indies Ltd., Poemas de amor are some of his noteworthy works.

Wrote on the subject of Black Poetry.

Che Guevara

Marxist revolutionary, physician, author and diplomat.

Back on the road: A Journey through Latin America. The book based on his famous Motorcycle Diaries.

"Our revolution is endangering all American possessions in Latin America. We are telling these countries to make their own revolution."

Other countries

People’s Republic of China, Laos, Vietnam and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Literature on the lines of socialist realism.Vientiane Times, Pyongyang Times.British writer Anthony Daniels’ Utopias Elsewhere.

An account of Marxist states’ day-to-day life.

Mao’s Little Red Book

One of the most printed books during the Cultural Revolution in China.

Comprises 427 quotations, forming the basis of Maoism.

Famous quote—“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Communist literature in India

Before Independence, Communist parties were banned and their literature confiscated.

E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Kerala’s first Communist Chief Minister established the Kerala Literary Society.

Harkishan Singh Surjeet published Desh Sewak, a Punjabi newspaper.

Contemporary Indian Literature

Arundhati Roy’s Booker Winning novel, The God of Small Things.

Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Laugh.Both examines India’s deep-rooted caste barriers

and exploitation of the underclass.

Thank you