How It All Got Started
In the beginning was the Class Struggle. Well, according to Marxists, it was there all along—but it took Karl Marx to point it out to everyone. You've probably heard of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. No? Well that was the Big Bang of Marxism. And it's no dry lecture; it opens with Kasper the unfriendly German ghost proclaiming: "A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism." Uh oh.
Ever since, Marx has been the bogeyman to tubby Monopoly men in top hats everywhere.
In 1917, the Russian Revolution made Marx's dream a reality. The workers rose up and took power and outlawed capitalism and Jamba Juice and Abercrombie. (Well, they would have, if they had had them.) No more bosses, no more inequality, right?
Well, not exactly. Things turned ugly pretty quickly: in this case, achieving equality kind of meant killing off or sending into exile everyone who seemed a little more equal than others. Still, for a few years in the 1920s, the Soviet Union was a giant experiment in Communism, and no idea was too wacky to be given a shot.
It was also around this time (the 1920s) that Marx's ideas started to get applied to literature, and Marxist literary theory was born. In the Soviet Union, there was Leon Trotsky heading the roster of Marxist critics. He was a curly-haired genius who later got offed with a pickaxe in Mexico (rough times). In the West, brilliant thinkers like György Lukács and Walter Benjamin were inspired by the world's first Marxist state.
Hey, from a distance, the Soviet Union looked like quite the party.