Suffering, the Precursor to Art

I was reflecting today on why old Soviet literature encompasses a large portion of my favorite novels.

Most of my favorite works were written under iron-fisted bureaucracies (or shortly prior to their arrival), within systems that repressed and compressed the human soul. I find it interesting that from a system that mashes the individual spirit into flattened dough, some of the finest breads were baked.

Soviet writers and painters were forced to hone their crafts within the narrowest boundaries, and despite not capturing what they likely dreamed of capturing, they created something magnificent within the confines of what was allowed. It was a negotiation in some sense, but then almost all art is. Artists were given a litany of things they couldn’t do, and so they perfected what they could.

This reminds me of modern Hollywood film, in a sense. The best works are created with minimal money and resources because the artist must focus on the visual aesthetic and storytelling as a craft. The added skill compensates for a lack of money. Contrarily, when films are given a limitless budget, they often materialize into disaster.

The Master and Margarita, one of my favorite Soviet novels, was not published until well after the author’s death, and several censored version floated around prior.

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, though written before Lenin, was a product of a rapidly changing time. The aura of the morally degenerating Marxist youths of the time are woven through the book’s pages.

It led me to think that great art requires limitation and perhaps even the total destruction of stability. Confines, therefore, are a precursor to great art, and art is always a negotiation between artist and society.

Yet in America, the best literature was often written in a much different system. I think back to Faulkner, Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot, and the Roaring 20s, and the crash that ensued.

It seems as though with affluence and fame and minimal limitations or censorships, great novels still arose, just with vastly different themes. There were still cultural criticisms to be found, but perhaps the artists themselves, with relatively less censorship, found ways to bring their own demons to the forefront. American authors had a propensity for gluttony and nihilism, and consequently a deep knowledge of the darkest parts of the human soul. Everything good, as shown both internally by the act of alcoholism and drug use, and externally by the Great Depression, will inevitably be destroyed.

Whereas Soviet artists constantly battled their system, the Americans battled their inner demons. Hemingway died of a shotgun wound to the head after decades of chronic alcoholism. Eliot and Faulkner were similarly fond of the bottle. All had ample turmoil within themselves, though of different types for each, which inevitably manifested in their pages.

Therefore it can be assumed that it is not necessarily a repressive system or set of limitations that sets the stage for great art, but rather the act of suffering itself, which can take many forms, both societally and internally.

It is suffering which gives art its meaning because to truly be sustainable, art must tell us something about ourselves that we did not otherwise know, or could not put into words. And to accomplish immortality, the artist must sink into the darkest nether regions of the human soul, and return sane enough to tell what’s down there.

Every artist, regardless of era or upbringing, is sacrificial in some sense because of this.