what is often referred to as “literary anarchism”—i.e., the broad swathe of avant-garde writers, from Apollinaire to Artaud, influenced by and expressing sympathies for anarchism.126 With a few exceptions, these names almost never appear in the anarchist press during the period of their ascendancy (a couple of decades on either side of 1910, that year Virginia Woolf arbitrarily selects as the one in which “everything changed”)—except as occasional objects of derision. However, a survey of the worldwide anarchist press during the same period would find the names of a number of non-anarchist literary figures repeated disproportionately: especially Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, and Émile Zola, but also Leonid Andreyev, Anatole France, Maxim Gorky, Gerhart Hauptmann, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, William Morris, Ada Negri, Friedrich Nietzsche, Romain Rolland, Percy Bysshe Shelley, August Strindberg, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde. What do these writers have in common? Obviously, all but one are male, though this is not unlike other canonical selections then or since.127 Some are classified as Naturalists (Hauptmann, Zola; and more problematically, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Rolland), or as representatives of some brand of Realism (Andreyev, France, Gorky, Negri, Tolstoy); others are in the line of Romanticism (Heine, Hugo, Morris, Poe, Shelley, Whitman) or Aestheticism (Nietzsche, Wilde)—tendencies commonly seen as diametrically opposite to one another. Indeed, this embrace of opposites signals something important about anarchist tastes in literature, as we shall see. We might further observe that each of these writers is valued by anarchist critics for qualities usually associated with writers in the opposite camp: e.g., Zola for his ability to stir passion, Wilde for the concrete protest of his Song of Reading Gaol. In any case, the works of all of these writers have been, to some extent, adopted, appropriated, or, to borrow Sandra Jeppesen’s terms, “consecrated” as anarchist, despite their refusal of anarchist commitments, by repeated inclusion in anarchist “spaces.”128
A similar process of “consecration” takes place in Asia, where translations of many of the same Euro-American writers take the same place, but where there are also efforts to develop a native corpus of classics untainted by the authoritarian aura. We can see such a project under way in the curriculum developed by anarchist educator Sun Lianggong (1894–1962) for a course at the National Labor University in Shanghai (1927–1932) in “Labor Literature”—“a kind of proletarian-populist literature,” as Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik describe it, “with a major aim of reflecting and revealing social realities, especially the authors’ grievances and criticism of social ills.”129 In other words, it constituted something like what Japanese anarchist critic Akiyama Kiyoshi called anakizumu bungaku (a “literature of anarchism” or “literature of opposition”) as distinct from anakisuto no bungaku (“literature written by anarchists”).130
In addition, then, to works consecrated by inclusion in anarchist spaces, written by
a) committed writers from the middle classes (Octave Mirbeau, Bernard Lazare, Florencio Sánchez, Avelino Fóscolo, etc.) and
b) non-committed writers adopted or appropriated by anarchists (Émile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Henrik Ibsen, etc.), we find circulating in the same media
c) works written by working-class anarchist militants without literary training or credentials (e.g, Luisa Capetillo or Gigi Damiani, but especially anonymous works, often signed in ways that signal this identity—e.g., “anonymous hatter”).
We might further distinguish between anarchist works directed partially or primarily at non-militants and those written by and for militants—a truly self-directed literature. Of the works produced for non-militant audiences, there is often a palpable difference between those intended for working-class readers (urban and rural manual workers) and those intended for a middle-class readership (urban intellectual workers). This difference is sometimes manifested in terms of genre: thus, the forms of the dialogue story and the serial novel may have more often been directed toward manual workers, while the novel written for publication in book form, as Flávio Luizetto notes, was often meant “to attract followers to the anarchist cause among public servants, journalists, lawyers, writers, teachers and students—people who form part of what are called, for lack of a more precise term, the urban middle classes.”131 It is possible that these genres were at times also gendered: in a study of the anticlerical journal A Lanterna, Walter da Silva Oliveira suggests that “there was, in the period studied [1909–1916], a strong link between short stories and novels [published in its pages] and an audience of female readers,” whom the editors considered to be those most harmed by religious discourse.132
Michel Ragon reminds us, too, that there are differences between, on the one hand, an “anarchist literature” written in a spirit of commitment by credentialed intellectuals, and on the other hand, “proletarian literature” without a clearly signaled sectarian identity as anarchist, destined for working-class readers without further qualification, written by workers without any credentials (e.g., Henri Poulaille [1896–1980] or Albert Soulilou [1905–1967]):
The worker-writers are often possessed of a libertarian spirit; some are even anarchist militants. But anarchist literature per se merits its own study. If its themes are frequently evoked in the course of these pages, it nonetheless expresses a particular vision of the world that is not always of a proletarian spirit. It is more philosophical than descriptive, more rebellious than constructive. It counts in its ranks more essayists than novelists, more journalists than poets.133
Works of pure “proletarian literature,” too, are to be found in the anarchist world, from Japan (where puroretaria bungaku was one of the more lasting legacies of an anarchist movement largely crushed in the 1920s) to France (where Poulaille becomes one of its first champions).
To all of these complications in the authorship and readership of anarchist literature, we must add another: at several points in the history of anarchism, conditions are hostile enough to incur serious censorship and reprisal against anarchist writers and publications. In these situations—e.g., in Spain following the infamous political trials at Montjuich (1897), or under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930)—it became impossible to openly publish and distribute works directly advocating anarchism. One of the ways in which anarchists adapted to this was to further “culturalize” their media, to camouflage politics under the guise of social science and aesthetics. Thus, as David Ortiz notes, anarchist journals benefited from “avoiding use of the words ‘anarchism’ and ‘anarchist,’” taking on oblique, politically “blank” titles such as Revista Blanca (1898–1905, 1923–1936) Ciencia Social (1895–1896), or Natura (1903–1905), presenting anarchist texts under the lofty, academically consecrated rubrics of “sociology,” “history,” “letters,” “art,” “science,” and so on. Taking another direction, the wildly popular “Novela Libre” and “Novela Ideal” book series issued by Revista Blanca disseminated anarchist ideas in the form of novelas rosas, i.e., paperback romances. Other popular novel series authored by anarchists adopted different genre identities, all while gesturing discreetly, in the words of an advertisement for the anarcho-syndicalist “Novela del Pueblo” series, toward “criticism … of some aspect of modern society” and certain “hints and anticipations of a better human society.”134
The use of established genres of “culture”—both high and low, erudite and popular—as protective coloration for the continuation of political propaganda under repressive conditions poses some possibilities and some problems. On the one hand, softening the sectarian political content, presented as either edification or entertainment, might reach audiences otherwise beyond the range of anarchist ideological messages (say, middle-class intellectual workers interested in cultural trends, or depoliticized manual workers seeking distraction and relaxation). On the other hand, stripping away the symbols that distinguish anarchism, that establish it as a political identity, might allow readers to walk away unchanged—or worse, to appropriate the text for some other ideological purpose. The contents of La Revista Blanca might leave no room for such misunderstanding, but what about the paperback melodramas? The relative openness to interpretation that makes for the “literary” might work against the anarchists’ radical agenda. If a text is always, as Umberto Eco has it, “a lazy
