Artists and Power: Le Monument by Elsa Triolet

I will try another time to understand why society is so harsh on intellectuals who embraced the communism - including its Stalinist version - but rarely sanctions with the same violence the far right suppoters. At least, there were many able to figure out of the ideological errors and eventually analysed in a critical way their support. For instance, there are many literary confessions and novels inspired by the failures of communism, particularly the one applied in the Soviet Union, signed by French or Spanish intellectuals, among others. How many righ-wing writers went through such a reflective process of acknowledging their blindness? There is something to think about it in this case.

Talking about the French intellectual realm, all eyes were so much on Sartre and de Beauvoir, with their betrayals and separate yet together lives, but there is hardly half of this amount said about another literary couple: Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon. Triolet and Aragon who also fought together in the French Resistance, were together for 42 years, supported each other´s works and, were supporters of Soviet/Stalinist Russia.

Aragon was a founder of surrealism, and before, a Dadaist. His poems that I had the chance to read in French have a rich imagery and an unique language. His wife and muse, Elsa Triolet was born in Moscow in a middle-class intellectual Jewish family and had an equally famous sister who spent her life in Russia though, Lilya Brik, who was a member and supporter of the Russian avantgarde and, among others, the beloved of Mayakovsky. It seems that Aragon first met Triolet in the company of Brik and her lover, as well as of the film director Sergei Eistenstein, of Potemkin fame. 

I´ve re-read Le Monument after many many years and it wasn´t easy to do it. My mother - of blessed memory - loved both Triolet and Aragon and we often used to read and talk together about their works. Especially Le Rossignol se Tait à l'Aube (I wish I can find my copy lost during frequent movings, probably an impossible mission). How I wish after I finished the book to be able to hear her opinion and exchange some heated arguments about art and politics, as we used to. This post is for you, Ima.

Le Monument is inspired by the events that shaked the Communist Party - in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, following the revelations about the personality cult after the death of Stalin. After so many years, I am still trying to figure out the fascination of Stalin for so many intellectuals, altough he was not an ideologue and overall a grotesque cruel dictator. Maybe due to his success during the war...Another food for thought. There is also a specific episode who nurtured Triolet´s intellectual curiosity and expanded her understand of the clash between art and artists on one side, and ideology, on the other side. On the occasion of Stalin´s death, Picasso sent to the official newspaper of the French Communist Party L'Humanité, a drawing of Stalin which was considered licentious and worth a harsh proletarian critique.

Lewka, the main character in Le Monument, is going through a similar experience, but he is unluckily so invested into and inebriated by his mission as an artist that he will end up killing himself. A French-educated artist, with connection with Cubists, he was commissioned by comrade Torsch, a former political prisoner.

In a purely literary, not ideological way, Triolet is revealing the struggles, limitations and absurdities of the artist quest to create a realm for his arts and interpretations. The political weight of the momentum is as overwhelming as in the ´old times´ the church´s authority. The interpretation of art is done through standards foreign to the art and therefore, the artist himself is alienated from the source of his contentment: the free creativity.

The action of the book takes place ´somewhere´ in a popular democracy, in Central and Eastern Europe. The exact geography is irrelevant because Lewka´s self-questioning under the empire of political ideology was shared by many local intellectuals. Not surprisingly, the book was only translated in Hungary, one of the countries that enjoyed certain levels of intellectual freedom. 

I am planning to spend more time in my happy place of French leftist delusions in the coming months and Le Monument is one of the most lucid acknowledgements of the impossible marriage between talent and politics. An artist is not a teacher or a prophet able to inspire and nurture masses. Art is elitist in its inner composition and the failures of the supporters of popular democracies like the imaginary yet so real Lewka, can teach us a whole lot about it.