Comrades

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As companions ( попутчики , poputschiki, "travel companions") in the years after the October Revolution, Russian writers who were not considered communists and were usually not members of the Communist Party , but who nevertheless took a fundamentally positive view of the revolution and socialism. The term was coined by Leon Trotsky in his book Literature and Revolution of 1922, the second chapter of which deals with the "literary companions".

The comrades insisted on a far-reaching autonomy of art over politics. In doing so, they set themselves in opposition to two other groups of writers from the first years of the Soviet Union: the Proletkult authors, who later organized themselves into the RAPP , and the Left Front of the Arts around Vladimir Mayakovsky . In contrast to their comrades, these two groups actively sided with the Bolshevik revolution and pursued the goal of translating literature into politics, albeit from extremely different aesthetic points of view.

Among the best-known representatives of the comrades were the Serapion brothers in Petrograd, in particular Evgeni Zamyatin , Konstantin Fedin , Weniamin Kawerin , Mikhail Soschtschenko , Vsevolod Ivanov , Nikolai Tichonow , Lev Lunz and Jelisaveta Polonskaya . Furthermore, were Alexander Voronsky , Boris Pilnyak , Mikhail Bulgakov , Marietta Shaginyan and occasionally Isaac Babel attributed the Poputschiki. An important organ of the Popuchiki was the literary magazine Krasnaya now , which was headed by Voronsky.

The term was used in its English (fellow travelers) , occasionally also French translation ( compagnons de route ) much later, namely during the Cold War , in the West often in a derived meaning. In this sense he referred to intellectuals who were not communists, but - so it was assumed - acted objectively in the interests of the Soviet Union .

Web links