Engels over literatuur

Referentie:

Engels, Friedrich, Letter to Minna Kautsky, 26.11.1885, transcribed by Andy Blunden, Marx and Engels Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_11_26.htm (geraadpleegd op 27.11.2011).

 

Plaatskenmerk:

Mijn Documenten/Filosofische bibliotheek

 

Extract:

"The novel (Die Alten und die Neuen) itself reveals the origins of this shortcoming. You obviously felt a desire to take a public stand in your book, to testify to your convictions before the entire world. This has now been done; it is a stage you have passed through and need not repeat in this form. I am by no means opposed to partisan poetry as such. Both Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the father of comedy, were highly partisan poets, Dante and Cervantes were so no less, and the best thing that can be said about Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe is that it represents the first German political problem drama. (...) I think however that the purpose must become manifest from the situation and the action themselves without being expressly pointed out and that the author does not have to serve the reader on a platter — the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he describes. To this must be added that under, our conditions novels are mostly addressed to readers from bourgeois circles, i.e., circles which are not directly ours. Thus the socialist problem novel in my opinion fully carries out its mission if by a faithful portrayal of the real conditions it dispels the dominant conventional illusions concerning them, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world, and inevitably instils doubt as to the eternal validity of that which exists, without itself offering a direct solution of the problem involved, even without at times ostensibly taking sides." (s.p.)