Revolution in Modernism
You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we all want to change the world.
The Modernist heyday was a time not only for revolutionary scientific and philosophical theories… it was also a time of literal revolutions and uprisings.
Over in Russia, Czar Nicholas was a weak and ineffective leader. His government was corrupt and Russian soldiers fighting in WWI were unprepared and died in large numbers. Oh, yeah, and the poor were horrifically poor while the rich were absurdly, disgustingly rich. People weren't too happy… leading to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
In the good old US of A, the women's suffrage movement caught on like wild fire. This movement culminated in the passing of the 19th Amendment of 1921, finally giving women the vote.
Around the world, the working classes formed labor unions. After the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire called the public's attention to the need for reform.
And the Modernist writers weren't plugging their ears and singing "Happy Birthday" while all this political unrest heaved about them. Nope, they took sides.
Ernest Hemingway went to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War as a journalist… and ended up writing one of his most famous novels.
German playwright Bertolt Brecht and Vladimir Mayakovsky in Russia were both loud n' proud Marxists. Yeats and Joyce were Irish Nationalists.
Chew On This
Andrei Bely's famous novel, Petersburg, manages to create a literary equivalent of the Bolshevik Revolution using modernist narrative techniques. How does the influence of contemporary revolutions (or uprisings) appear in other Modernist works?
Pound and Eliot were both fairly politically conservative. Can this conservatism be seen in their work? How so?