The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1932-07-14
Hated Misery

Life plays such malicious tricks
Oh us, that those who are incapable
81 real hatred are incapable of real
love also. This fact alone, distort-
ing human nature at the root, this
unavoidable division of the soul,
the inevitability of love through
hatred, condemns the modern con-
ditions of life to dissolution.
1 have never met in Russia, the
country where the inevitability of
sufferil 3 is preached as the gen.
eral road to salvation, nor do l
know of, any man who hated,
loathed and despised so deeply and
strongly as Lenin, all unhappiness,
grief and suffering. In my eyes,
these feelings, this hatred of the
dramas and tragedies of life exalted
Lenin more than anything, belong
ing as he did to country where
the greatest masterpieces have been
gospels written in praise and sane
LITIGATION of suffering, and where
youth begins its life under the in
fluence of books which are in es-
sence descriptions of petty, trivial
dramas monotonously unvarying.
The literature of Russia is the most
pessimistic in Europe. All our books
are written on one and the same
theme-how we suffer in youth and
middle-age from our own fool
ishness, from the oppressive weight
OF autocracy, on account Of women,
from love Of ones neighbor, from
the unsuccessful structure of the
universe, how We suffer in old age
from consciousness of the mistakes
we have made in our lives, from
lack OF teeth, from indigestion and
the imminence of death. Every
Russian who has. passed month
in prison for some political offense,
and year in exile, considers it
his sacred duty to present Russia
with a book of "reminiscences of
his sufferings. But a happy life
no one has ever thought of putting
into the form of memoirs. AS Rus
slams are in the habit of thinking
out what their lives shall be, but
cannot make them very VII, may
be such a book woua teach them
how to devise a happy life.
Lenin was exceptionally great, in
my opinion, precisely because Of
this feeling in him of irrecon-
ciliable, unquenchable hostility to-
wards the. sufferings of humanity,
his burning faith that suffering is
not an essential and unavoidable
part of life, but an abomination
which people ought and are able to
sweep away.
In the years 1917-18 my rela-
tions with Lenin were not what I
would have wished them to be, but
they could not be otherwise. He
was politician. He had to per-
lection that clear sighted directness
OF vision which is so indispensable
in the helmsman of so enormous
and heavily burdened a ship as
Russia with its dead weight of
peasants. have an organic dis
taste for politics, and little faith
in the reasoning powers of the
masses, especially of the peasants.
Reason without ordering ideas is
yet far from being the force which
lives in creative activity. There
can be no ideas in the minds Of
the mass until the community Of
interests Of all the separate indi-
viduals is realized.
The mass has been striving for
thousands Of years towards tho
good, and this striving gives rise to
beasts OF rapins out of the flesh
OF the mass, which enslave it. and
live on its blood; and so it will be,
until it realizes that there is only
one force which can free it from
the thraldom Of the beasts, the
force Of the truth which Lenin