Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

In the Thirties Andr? Gide entered Russia an enthusiast and came out an opponent.

Andr? Malraux fought with the Loyalists in Spain and came out an anti-communist. John Dos

Passos was also shocked in Spain and hasn’t gotten over that shock to this day. In the

mid-thirties, many American writers lost their enthusiasm for Russia without losing their

enthusiasm for socialism. These joined Trotsky.

The Moscow Trials and Stalin’s Great Purge in the mid-Thirties and the assassination of

Trotsky in 1940 disillusioned many American writers, yet it is amazing how many remained

among the faithful in spite of the blood.

It was not till the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939 that there was general disillusion and a

general exodus of those intellectuals who in the Thirties had seen Marxism and the USSR as

the twentieth century embodiment of the basic dream with the changing name.

In World War II, Russia became our great and gallant ally and both President Roosevelt

and Winston Churchill paid Stalin the most extravagant compliments; a courtesy which

Stalin, not being bourgeois, failed to return. Under these circumstances new American

writers jumped on the pro-Soviet bandwagon. But the Nineteen Forties were something else

again. Now the vision centered on the war against fascism and many people hoped that after

the foe was defeated, the Allies would usher in a new era of peaceful coexistence and

peaceful construction. Instead we got the Cold War, the battle between East and West, the

threat of global atomic war and, in literature, an outburst of necessary but uninspiring

muckraking in which disillusioned radical writers denounced the Stalinite empire for its

barbarism and for betraying the vision.

In the Fifties came our own Great Persecution and writers lost interest in political

reform. The vision was forgotten or distrusted and freedom was sought in modern art, in

Zen Buddhism, in nothing.

But every night ends and gives way to morning. It’s the ying and the yang. I have a

feeling that we are about to see a new awakening, a new spirit that will flourish in the

Nineteen Sixties.

You are a fortunate generation because you are an uncommitted generation.

Forty years separate us from two key events which have shaped this epoch and its