New Leninist ghosts

When I arrived in Madrid to study, in a January that I remember was very cold and very cloudy in 1974, the book best placed in the windows of all the bookstores was a thick volume of Lenin.

It was titled

Materialism and Empyrocriticism,

and its very title already gives an idea of ​​its impassable thickness.

To those who did not live through that time it will seem incredible that in the midst of Franco's dictatorship an essay by VI Lenin could be published normally, and displayed so openly.

But the most striking thing was not the presence of that book with Lenin's name and face on the cover: it was the abundance, the omnipresence of essays and manuals on Marxism, of all kinds of revolutionary texts, of stories of the uprisings in the then called the Third World, of the Soviet revolution, the Chinese revolution, the North Vietnamese struggle.

The effigy of Lenin, that of Fidel Castro, that of Marx, that of Mao, were on many of the covers of the paperback books of that time, in which a strong aesthetic of socialist realism predominated.

To the Francoist bosses, drowsy and fed up after several decades of despotic supremacy, this overabundance of revolutionary literature must not have worried them much, or perhaps they were so bloated that they did not even know of its existence.

There was no mercy for left-wing militants, and even less so if they were workers and unionists, but the Marxism that reigned in bookstores and university classrooms must have seemed to them like an entertainment for children of good families temporarily astray, or lost in hallucinations that were too abstract as to offer some danger.

And all this without forgetting that a very considerable part of the intellectual energies and ideological fervors of the “conscientious” of the left, as they said then, were devoted neither to direct conspiracy nor to the denigration of the common enemy, the Franco regime. , but to the diatribe against the supporters of other revolutionary currents.

The fury with which Maoists and Trotskyists attacked each other in university assemblies was only less vehement than that of both against the Communist Party, the PCE, “the Party,” as its members said, in a boastful singular that He had a lot of single-party desire.

Trotskyists, Maoists, Leninists of various kinds, called the PCE revisionist and reformist, even before Franco's death, and exhausted themselves in anathemas and diatribes of ideological purity that closely resembled the disputes between the Christian sects of the first centuries. , fights to the death in the claustrophobia of the catacombs, accusations of impurity, rigors of punitive orthodoxy.

For the Maoists, Mao was the rebel who had emancipated himself from revisionism and Soviet domination, the poet-philosopher who called the imperialists paper tigers and said that a beautiful poem is best written on a blank sheet of paper.

There are sinister metaphors: Mao's blank slate was the extermination by hunger and persecution of millions of people in the name of the megalomaniacal follies of the dictator and his regime.

European intellectuals had made a pilgrimage to China in the midst of the bloody chaos of the Cultural Revolution and had only seen a prosperous country and a happy people.

Even Baltasar Porcel, years later a propagandist of the supremacism of the rich Catalans, published an enthusiastic travel book in 1974 entitled

China, a revolution on the rise,

which I read credulously, foolishly, as I read so many things, a needy guest in bookstores. from Madrid, infected with a doctrinal fervor that fortunately did not last very long, and from which I was cured, more than intelligence or common sense, by the love of literature and the love of freedom, both equally instinctive, the visceral and not yet intellectual rejection of ideological impositions and coercion.

He did not capitulate from those theoretical musings out of disagreement but out of boredom.

The seemingly most revolutionary ideas were expressed in cement-like prose, with the administrative monotony of a catechism or an instruction manual.

He read and creditably highlighted the

Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism,

by Marta Harnecker, mandatory reading at the time, and a guilty reluctance overcame me.

I lacked the political insight, the truthful information, the intellectual maturity that would have immunized me against the seductive dogmas of that left that, being anti-Franco, was also largely antidemocratic, and that had the same disdain for freedom of spirit as towards the public liberties then called “formal” or “bourgeois”.

But the sense of beauty and form can warn us of things that our conscious intelligence does not know how to notice.

He could accept that Lenin had been a hero of the revolution, a martyr whose premature death exonerated him of the horrendous crimes that could thus be attributed exclusively to Stalin.

What I couldn't do was read a single page of that Leninist prose with which theoretically it was my responsibility to agree.

And he was also incapable, no matter how good his will was, of enjoying novels, poems, plays, films, songs, whose main merit consisted of the crude pamphlet denunciation, in the “message”, no matter how noble it was.

The sartorial disarray in which we all lived corresponded to a painful aesthetic disarray in the works that were recommended to us or imposed on us.

The important thing was the content, not the form.

Worrying about shape was a frivolity comparable to paying attention to the clothes one wore, or to body hygiene.

And there were literary or musical preferences that made one suspicious of submission to imperialism, of reactionary decadence, of bourgeois sentimentalism, or worse still, “petty bourgeois.”

Lenin had taught that there was nothing and no one who should not be subordinated to the cause of the revolution.

He had even despised music because by stirring feelings it softened the revolutionary spirit.

I remember the instant impact that the first pages of

The Court of Miracles,

by Valle-Inclán, had on me, which had fallen into my hands by chance, in the midst of those months of disciplinary readings and seminars on historical materialism.

It was like an awakening.

I walked down the street with a drunkenness that was enough in itself, and that also allowed me to perceive more clearly the reality of the outside world, the voices I heard, the things I saw, my own troubled soul.

Reading Borges' El Aleph

for the first time

, I revived in me the primitive emotion of the literature of childhood and early adolescence, later anesthetized by the arid mental narrowness of an ideology that was too dogmatic to be liberating, and according to which Borges You didn't have to read it because you were a reactionary.

Long before having the information and maturity necessary to repudiate any form of totalitarianism, and to understand that equality and justice are always incompatible with tyranny, Borges and Rulfo and Proust and Raymond Chandler and Onetti and Valle-Inclán and many others They had freed me from Lenin.

Perhaps that is why it surprises me so much that now, after so many years, in the full custom of freedom, works of art are once again judged by ideological criteria and catechisms, new anathemas are imposed, political commissars have become so efficient. .

Once again, the variety and richness of the world and human life must be looked at through the narrow glasses of a recipe book of abstractions with a righteous appearance and a frown of censorship.

Nobody remembers Lenin's ghost and mummy anymore, not even in Russia. But again we have to defend the radical freedom of the creative spirit, the full fervent and free enjoyment of the things we like.

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