Russian rhizome of American modernism: concerning the problem of Henry Miller’s anarchism

Astvatsaturov Andrey A.; Voytsekhovskaya Olga V.

СТАРЫЙ И НОВЫЙ СВЕТ

УДК 82 (091)

DOI 10.22455/2541-7894-2018-4-163-183

Андрей АСТВАЦАТУРОВ Ольга ВОЙЦЕХОВСКАЯ

РУССКИЕ КОРНИ АМЕРИКАНСКОГО МОДЕРНИЗМА: К ВОПРОСУ ОБ АНАРХИЗМЕ ГЕНРИ МИЛЛЕРА

Аннотация: В статье рассматриваются особенности оригинальной концепции Генри Миллера, возникшей в рамках англо-американского модернизма, поиски которого были направлены на «безличность» повествования и создание авторефлексивных текстов. Эмигрировав во Францию в 1930 г., Г. Миллер оказывается в литературной среде европейского модернизма, параллельно работает над романом «Тропик рака» и становится практикующим писателем. Он начинает обособляться от модернизма и занимает позицию литературного маргинала. Используя стилистические техники модернизма, Миллер работает не с текстом, а с собственным уникальным опытом, следуя традициям Г. Торо и У Уитмена. В статье предпринимается попытка доказать, что представления Миллера о назначении литературного творчества, заставившие его обратиться к основам американской литературы, обусловлены влиянием идей представителей русского анархизма, в частности - П. Кропоткина и его американской ученицы Эммы Гольдман. Их взгляды на мир, государство, историю, образование и критика буржуазного мира оказали значительное влияние на Генри Миллера.

Ключевые слова: Генри Миллер, Петр Кропоткин, Эмма Гольдман, модернизм, анархизм.

OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD

UDC 82(091)

DOI 10.22455/2541-7894-2018-4-163-183

ANDREY ASTVATSATUROV OLGA VOYTSEKHOVSKAYA

RUSSIAN RHIZOME OF AMERICAN MODERNISM: CONCERNING THE PROBLEM OF HENRY MILLER'S ANARCHISM

Abstract: The paper examines the way in which the completely different trend represented by Henry Miller emerged within the framework of Anglo-American modernism, which was aimed at literature and focused on impersonality and the creation of auto-reflexive texts (T.S. Eliot, E. Pound, J. Joyce). Having emigrated to France in 1930, Miller found himself in the context of European modernism; at the same time, he worked on the novel "The Tropic of Cancer" and became a practiced writer. He started to oppose modernism and held the position of a literary layman. Using the stylistic techniques of modernism, Miller dealt not with the text but with his own identity, following the traditions of Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman. This article attempts to prove that this interpretation of the use of literature, which made Miller return to the basics of American literary art, was formed under the influence of the ideas of Russian anarchism, as well as those of Peter A. Kropotkin and his American follower Emma Goldman, in particular. Their ideas about the world, state, history, education and criticism of the bourgeois world dramatically influenced Henry Miller.

Keywords: Henry Miller, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, modernism, anarchism.

It is difficult to overstate the influence of Russian culture on English-American modernism . Modern critics discuss this influence in detail and quite frequently. It is enough to remember Dostoevsky's role in W. Faulkner's and A. Huxley's works or the role of A. Chekhov, L. Tolstoy and I. Turgenev in the formation of V. Woolf and J. Joyce. We can easily spot the "Russian trace" in the texts of the representatives of high modernism. As a rule, it is connected not only with some figure of Russian art or with the common idea about "mystic Russian soul" but also with those ideological and political trends that are strongly associated with Russia, especially in its post-revolutionary period. Totalitarianism, marxism, leninism, trotskyism, stalinism, revolution, imperial ambitions - all such things were discussed and assessed, and they influenced modernists' aesthetic and political views.

There was one other political philosophy and practice in British and, very often, American currency that was absolutely a Russian invention: anarchism. Indeed, anarchism, born in Europe (W. Godwin, M. Stirner), acquired in Russia in the 19th century its most devoted adaptaters, theorists and practitioners, among whom M. Bakunin and P. Kropotkin were the brightest representatives. Nevertheless, despite their greatness and views, these figures were not very popular with high modernists.

However paradoxical it might seem, Russian anarchism influenced American literature and even helped it to overcome some stylistic entrance-ment with Europe and European pieces of art. In the current article, we attempt to trace the influence of Russian anarchism to an extremely important figure connected with American and European modernism who also defined the further development of American literature.

That figure is Henry Miller (1891-1980), the controversial author of the novels "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn". It is due to him that American literature received a powerful injection of Russian anarchism, which helped it to reconfirm its basics and reconstruct the tradition established by such writers as R.W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau and W. Whitman - not associated with anarchism per se, but clearly important figures for Miller.

The ambivalent assessment of Miller and his low popularity in American academia has been established or explained, considering his enmity towards academics [Decker 2005: 148], his weak links with American literary tradition and orientation towards European literary tradition [Decker 2005: 151], and the image of Miller as an aggressive sexist, which was set in many respects thanks to Kate Millet's critique [Millet 1970: 294-313].1 Neverthe-

1 According to Millet, the author of "Tropic of Cancer" is "a compendium of American sexual neuroses and his value lies not in freeing us from such afflictions, but in

less, for American modernism, he is one of the most important authors and his works influenced such considerable writers as Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, Erica Jong, and Cormac McCarthy.

We are primarily interested in Miller's position as an outsider and a "detour writer" in European and American modernism. It is our contention that his outsider status and his individualism are directly attributable to an early passion for Russian anarchistic ideas, and that Miller linked that anarchist tradition to the American tradition connected with such figures as R.W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, and W. Whitman, about whom Miller had been enthusiastic since his young years.

Miller in the context of English-American Modernism

Miller, who formed as an intellectual and writer while still in the USA, really discovered European modernism and avant-garde aesthetics after moving to Paris in the very beginning of 1930s. It was his Parisian friends-emigrants, the writers of the circle of Villa Seurat, Michael Fraenkel, Anaïs Nin, Alfred Perlès who drew his attention to a number of key figures of the modernist tradition, namely Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. In that period, Miller was born as a writer. It is not difficult to see that the texts of the "Paris trilogy" ("Tropic of Cancer", "Black Spring", "Tropic of Capricorn") reflect the influence of these authors; Miller furiously breaks with traditional novel forms and uses the innovations of his older contemporary modernist writers. He fills his texts with direct and indirect allusions, sending the readers to the texts of Hamsun [Miller 1961a: 4, 37], Proust [Miller 1961b: 128, Ma-suga 2011: 136-137, Nesbit 2005: 113, Hassan 1967: 76], and Eliot [Miller 1961a: 38, Ibarguen 1989: 199 - 204]. Miller's allusions and references to these writers are quite often ironic and controversial; however, the irony itself regarding M. Proust, T.S. Eliot, and T. Mann [Miller 1968: 82-83] reveals Miller as their disciple rather than their rival, a disciple who, according to Harold Bloom, feels the "anxiety of influence".

It is no wonder that Miller's first novel, "Tropic of Cancer" (1934), gained the approval of E. Pound, T.S. Eliot2, A. Huxley and W.C. Wil-

having had the honesty to express and dramatize them". [Millet 1970: 295] The response to K. Millet was the book "The Prisoner of Sex" by Norman Mailer [Mailer 1971], who was definitely influenced by Henry Miller. See as well: [Williams 1968], [Woolf 1989].

2 However, in 1937, Eliot, who had favorably estimated his novel "Tropic of Cancer", gave back to Miller his several "Hamlet Letters" sent to the magazine "Criterion" with ironic remarks that they could be of any interest only to Miller's admirers [Ferguson

liams [Ferguson 1993: 237-238], who were undoubtedly the leaders of English-American modernism. Even the paranoid L.F. Celine's strange reaction to the novel was also rather positive. Having read "Tropic of Cancer", he wrote to Miller a letter that can be called "approving" [Brassai 1995: 115]. All this proves the fact that Miller was "accepted" into the circle of professional men of letters and found his place there.

Miller's attitude to the world and his purely Bergsonian understanding of matter as a type of energy, a force giving birth to everything alive, explains his attachment to the traditions of E. Pound, T.S. Eliot, J. Joyce, and W. Faulkner [Miller 1941: 165]. Miller, like any modernist, is striving to reveal and verbalize the source of everything, the zone that cannot be expressed in words, and to find in a man the essence of his self, to attack his false elements. Hence, Miller's self-reflexivity, his aspiration to reveal the process of generating the text, his absorption with other texts - these preoccupations result in the drafty character of his first mature novel, "Tropic of Cancer". Trying to take words to their origins as high modernists did, Miller used all types of strategies, namely, he breaks with traditional novelistic narrative modes, uses surrealistic imagery [Hassan 1967: 66, Ibarguen 1989: 73]3, and constructs aphorisms, anecdotes [Jahshan 2001], and Whitmanian "catalogues" [Decker 2005: 65-66].

However, there is a more essential difference that seriously separates Miller from Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Proust. High modernists are literature centered. Testing literature and words, they remained within their limits and tried to restate and protect art rather than destroy it. They saw themselves as masters, professionals busy with a formal search, and removing any personal traits. The process of generating text was their aim, which subordinated the personality. In the programmatic essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), T.S. Eliot speaks out against self-expression and confirms the impersonal theory of poetry. The text is self-sufficient, true to life, and non-referential; the author is just a type of catalyst allowing the elements to unite [Parkin 1990: 91, Decker 2005: 71, Masuga 2011: 27].

As to Miller's literary independence, as R. Ibarguen correctly remarks, it started at the point when he broke with the principles of high modernism [Ibarguen 1989: 106]. Indeed, Miller used modernist strategies not to create a complete, perfect literary work of good quality like Pound, Eliot or Joyce. Miller let himself write in a willfully "bad" manner and fall into

1993: 254]; See as well [Durell, Miller 1963: 46].

3 Decker has all reason for calling Miller's narrative manner a "spiral" where there is a constant coming back to the same metaphysical principle by various techniques [Decker 2005: 8].

prolixity and graphomania. He did not care much about quality. The reason was that literature for him was not an end in itself but the way to self-understanding, like any other type of activity. Miller was concerned about his autonomous personality. His aim was his own changeable and spontaneous self and self-growth. Miller was interested in the very process of his own changing fixed by stream-of-consciousness and the vigorous revealing of his genuine self. At any rate, it was very important for him to speak on behalf of that very self and enjoy the way of expressing himself, removing all the obstacles, putting aside all sorts of decencies and conventional schemes standing in front of a personality, and probing the territory of literature. In "Tropic of Cancer", Miller writes, "Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no books to be written, thank God". [Miller 1961a: 1]. Hassan expresses this idea in his study of Miller [Hassan 1967: 51], and Decker also remarks, "In Tropic of Cancer, Miller sacrifices devices such as plot and characterization for a lyrically organized record of the supraself's transcendence of the worlds of both art and experience" [Decker 2005: 63].

In accordance with this approach, Miller hoped to gain a special perception of his work. When he started writing his first mature work, he apparently least of all wanted to write a novel or a book at any rate. The book became for him a way to make an avant-garde gesture. As Turner rightly notes, Miller wanted his text ".. ..to be an event that wounded and scarred, that was in every possible respect a profound and continuing offense for which no forgiveness was possible" [Turner 2011: 98]. Miller writes himself, "This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love Beauty. what you will" [Miller 1961a: 2]. Miller stands for his self and imagination that not only creates art but also changes life, representing new opportunities, the sacred "self", coming close here to the Dadaists and Surrealists [Schleuning 2013: 20].

R. Ibarguen has grounds for confirming that the principal instinct of Miller's writing is a discrepancy with artistic practices of modernism, parodying modernist principles of creating images and symbolism. The idea of European intellectual snob, subordinating life to an aesthetic or philosophical scheme, to whom J. Joyce and T.S. Eliot address their texts, becomes in Miller's work a direct object of mockery as in a comic sketch, where a character, a smart guy of this kind, always looks comical [Ibarguen 1989: 65]. Using Joyce and Proust's literary techniques, Miller at the same time, sharply criticizes them [Miller 1939b: 107-134], in ad-

dition to openly parodying Proust and being ironic about Eliot and Mann [Miller 1969: 40-41].

In his monograph "Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New", Rod Rosenquist provides a sociologically colored version of Miller's revolt against literature in general and modernist literature in particular. In his mind, this part of Miller's work on his image, which starts to form itself at the moment when June persuades him to move from proletarian Brooklyn to artistically bohemian Greenwich Village, corresponds to the writer's image [Rosenquist 2009: 118]. After some failures in the field of "serious literature", Miller, according to Rod Rosenquist, became sure of his professional unfitness in comparison to Joyce, Pound, and Proust and, following his friend Michael Fraenkel's advice, made incompetence his method and position in an avant-garde line way of criticizing literature, including modernist literature, from the perspective of a "spontaneous life" [Rosenquist 2009: 111-137].

Literature and Politics

The representatives of high modernism were frequently accused, especially by left-winged critics, of a lack of interest in politics. However, being literary centered, they still had a great interest in it. V. Woolf, E. Pound, T.E. Hulme, and T.S. Eliot starting in the 1910s, took active part in discussing problems of ideology and politics. In fact, the impersonality of their texts, even T.S. Eliot's early poems in particular, remained declarative. "The Waste Land" is pierced with antihumanism, antiliberalism, anti-romanticism and religiousness. Furthermore, the very aesthetic programs of Pound, Hulme, and Eliot of the 1910s-1920s, strictly speaking, can be traced from their philosophical and political views. In the discussions of the 1930s, the problems of form gave way to philosophical and political problems.

The avant-garde representatives had become radically politically-minded even before that. Dadaists, surrealists, and futurists initially spoke about their not only aesthetic but also political striving to change both the world and man in a fundamental way [Russel 1985: 5]. Their artistic gesture was charged with a type of political strain. The aesthetic appeared to be inseparable from the political. Surrealists aimed to have an active influence on political life and became involved in Marxism and Trotskyism as well as declared the revolution of their purpose; the surrealists became closer to the communists then, even as they were disillusioned by the USSR, and broke with the USSR in a public way; however, they continued to openly declare their political views.

Miller here held a special position that can be called "apolitical" at first sight. Presenting himself as a rebel and his books as gestures, he should have accepted the radicalism of the avant-garde representatives. Nevertheless, as James Gifford notes, Miller did not approve of surrealists' (Paul Éluard, in particular) being infected with communistic ideas [Miller 1939a: 152-153, Gifford 2010: 63-64], which suppress creative individuality and deny autonomy. During World War II, he stood for the position of isolationism that was so widespread in the USA before Pearl Harbor. In his individual gestures, he seemed to take himself out of history, both political and economic, the same way he took the character of "Black Spring" out of history, proclaiming in contrast to general history his personal one: "I am a patriot - of the 14th Ward Brooklyn, where I was raised [...]. The boys you worshipped when you first came down into the street remain with you all your life. They are the only real heroes. Napoleon, Lenin, Capone - all fiction. Napoleon is nothing to me in comparison with Eddie Carney who gave me my fist black eye" [Miller 1968: 9].

In the two-part essay-letter "Murder the Murderer" (1941), Miller, commenting on the events of World War II, even in this situation remained above the struggle and held the position of a pacifist. His criticism was aimed not so much at international aggressors, Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito, as at Roosevelt and Churchill, who proclaimed a fair war of liberation. However, Miller, staying true to himself, did not choose any of the sides; rather, he denied the very principle of war and the striving of democracies to impose their own values on all others, so to say, the striving to make all sorts of life subordinate to human (religious, moral, political) meanings.

As we can see, Miller holds a position far from modernists and avant-gardists, revealing in the writer an intellectual, a rebel-outsider even when it is impossible to evade political choice. Here, the very essence of his position, its genesis, and the initial instinct that dictated it is definitely more important. It can be easily explained with Miller's genuine "American mind-edness" and his links with the traditions of transcendentalism. However, it is necessary to note the way in which this tradition was accepted by Miller. In our opinion, it was shaped by Russian anarchist thought's influence on Miller. Let us remark that Miller, who was interested in transcendentalists, truly read R. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, and W. Whitman and learned their ideas after becoming acquainted with the ideas of anarchism, of which he grew fond after attending Emma Goldman's lectures. Having acquainted himself with the anarchistic instinct, Miller could comprehend Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman and not the other way around, as George Wickes believes [Wickes 1966: 7-8].

In her lectures and essays, Goldman quite often appealed to Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau [Goldman 1969: 56]. Partly it was a sort of strategy, a response to accusations of nationalists and reactionaries who proclaimed anarchism as a foreign infection, which had nothing in common with the American spirit and way of life. Nobody had any doubts that transcenden-talists were bearers of the American spirit who expressed specific features in their works. Even connecting the doctrines of anarchism with the ideas of R. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau and W. Whitman and deducing these doctrines from the philosophy of anarchism, Goldman disarmed her opponents and emphasized the inborn American features of anarchism, its being organically connected with American culture4. In fact, Goldman declared R. Emerson and H. Thoreau anarchists [Dodge 2004: 4] and even during one of her trials, told the judge that she remembered the story of H. Thoreau's short-term arrest [Dodge 2004: 5].

It is not difficult to notice that E. Goldman and her evaluation of transcendentalists' work influenced Miller's perception of them, which he shows in his essays. Speaking of Thoreau, for example, Miller works not so much with original Thoreau as with the image created by E. Goldman. It is not by chance that in the list of books that influenced him, Miller includes not "Walden", which is without a doubt Thoreau's pinnacle of artistic activity, but his political essay "Civil Disobedience". For Miller, Thoreau is first a socio-political thinker, definitely engaged with the project of self-creation, and Emerson is an intellectual leader who advocates the idea of "self-reliance" [Jackson 1971: 231-241, Ibarguen 1989: 110-112, 118], which is close to the ideas of anarchistic individualism. So to say, Miller's American mindedness, his link with the tradition of American literature, is defined, in our opinion, with his political position and a deep anarcho-individualistic instinct.

Henry Miller and Theoretical Anarchism

Anarchism in the USA has a long and rich history [Avrich 1995, Berkman 1970, Creagh 1983, Martin 1953, Reichert 1976]. Such figures as Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Benjamen Tucker, who translated works by P.J. Proudhon, M. Stirner and M. Bakunin into English and published the anarchist magazine "Liberty" for a long time, as well as E. Goldman and A. Berkman,

4 However, Goldman and Berckman's invectives against America that gave them shelter without any doubts were invectives of European intellectuals who judged the "New World" from the perspective of a cultured European, a representative of a thousand-year spiritual tradition. See [Ashbolt 2003].

inspired by the anarchist Johan Most, who moved to the USA, greatly influenced the formation of anarchism. anarchist ideas were very popular among representatives of the petite bourgeoisie, in large industrial workshops and emigrant ghettos [Nelson 1988]. The events at Haymarket Square in 1886 and the execution of the anarchists, the leaders of the labor movement, made this ideology in the eyes of intellectuals more popular and appealing. New York bohemia, to which Henry Miller with good reason could be attributed, was also involved with anarchist ideas. Its representatives read B. Tucker's magazine "Liberty" and quite often dropped in to his shop [Dowling 2007: 50]. This fashion for anarchism was mainly formed in bohemian societies among people who were close to art, partly considering European art movements such as neo-impressionism, futurism, and cubism, whose aesthetic programs reflected the influence of anar-cho-individualism and anarcho-communism, including M. Stirner and P. Kropotkin [Antliff 1998: 101-120, Aubery 1968: 39-47, Washton 1987: 38-45]. Such different figures of American culture as the artist Robert Henri [Antliff, Leighten 2001: 43] and the playwright Eugene O'Neill [Dowling 2007: 50-72] were also involved with the ideas of anarchism.

Miller became acquainted with anarchism in 1913, as he has stated in interviews. He set out from New York to Chula Vista's citrus groves with the romantic aim of getting in touch with the land and feeling the beauty of authentic labor. He struggled there, as a city dweller facing for the first time hard agricultural labor. On a day off, Miller, together with a friend went to San Francisco to visit a brothel, but on the way he saw an advertisement for lectures on European literature by the legendary anarchist Emma Goldman. The friend went to the brothel, whereas Miller attended the lecture, which dramatically changed his life. Miller, who frequently told this story, demonstrated an anarchic instinct: life, in his mind, was accidental, spontaneous, not planned beforehand, not subordinate to outside rules. It is quite important here that Miller, as his biographer R. Ferguson notes [Ferguson 1993: 25], was inventing everything. Goldman's lectures in San Francisco were cancelled and Miller rather consciously made up an artistic situation, emphasizing that an anarchistic instinct had been incorporated into his personality and had become his way of understanding life, which unconsciously drove narration. However, the fact is that approximately since that time, he started reading works by Stirner, Bakunin, and Kropotkin and the magazine "Liberty" published by Tucker.

Miller, first learned the very instinct of anarchism, the principle of a devastating revolt that is artistic, according to M. Bakunin [Schleuning 2013: 26]. At the same time, Miller, according to his latest statements, perceived anarchism as a political science that is able to attack the very basics of bourgeois life and the widespread ideology of USA liberalism based on the ideas of social-darwinism.

Anarchism helped Miller as well as Eugene O'Neill set up essential problems about the basics of the human "ego", culture, politics and the state and has become a type of pivot for his further thoughts and internal search. In addition, this involvement with the ideas of reconstruction of the world ended for Miller quite quickly. Miller chose the way of an artist, or better to say, a creator of life busy with self-perfection, and not a social reformer. In "Tropic of Capricorn" [Miller 1961b: 12], Miller gives his ambiguous thoughts on the assassination of President McKinley by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, which caused great public response [Fine 1955: 777-799]. For the Miller of that period, an anarchistic rioter such as Czolgosz, reminding him of himself in his young years, was a neurotic who could not accept the world. In anarchism, Miller saw an intellectual scheme that subordinates the world alienated from its initially anarchist instinct, recognizing that the world is spontaneous and as a result irrational.

It is Russian anarchism to which Miller is oriented, and this distinction is probably important . He remains absolutely neutral towards European anarchist thought. Miller never mentions Godwin or Proudhon and skeptically refers to Stirner.

It is traditional to understand anarchy as a society without ultimate authority and therefore anarchism as a doctrine stating this idea [Marshall 1993: 3]. Anarchists (social anarchists, anarchists-individualists, anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, spiritual anarchists) share in common the denial of all sorts of external power over a man that are an obstacle to his self-achievement, including the power of God, the state, social institutions, government, laws and the church. Miller is no doubt in complete accordance with this basic starting point of an anarchist's ways of thinking. In "Tropic of Capricorn" he unfolds his social project, which is anarchistic in its spirit and supposes the liquidation of government bodies and institutions: "If I were running the boat things wouldn't be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! [...] May be there wouldn't be macadamized roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million billion varieties [...] maybe people would kill each other when their patience was exhausted and may be nobody would

stop them because there wouldn't be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn't be any cabinet ministers or legislatures because there wouldn't be any goddamned laws to obey or disobey." [Miller 1961b: 281 - 282].

Miller and the Ideas of Anarcho-Communism

P.A. Kropotkin's (1842-1921) ideas were, above all, of great interest to Miller. The future author of "Tropics" read the book of the rebellious duke "Mutual Aid: Factor of Evolution" (1902) and later included it in the list of books that greatly influenced him. Kropotkin stood up for the principles of social anarchism or, more precisely, anarcho-communism. Relying on pos-itivistic ideas, Kropotkin, following Bakunin [Crowder 1991: 138], applies a "biological approach" and considers anarchy as a method of sciences, creating an image of a man rooted in nature [Marshall 1993: 302]. In his work, Kropotkin argues against darwinists [Avrich 1988: 58, Crowder 1991: 138], who supposed a struggle for survival to be the key factor of evolution and who transferred this logic to the laws of society and human life de-velopment.5 Opposing the intellectual tradition of Hobbes-Malthus-Huxley, which states that a man is condemned to fight for survival and power with those around him, Kropotkin rightly believes that it justifies the status quo, namely exploitation, competition, wars and state institution, a factor that is supposed to restrain man's brutal striving to set up himself as the only one [Woodcock 1989: 22-26].

Kropotkin opposes this line in the history of European thought to his own analysis of the animal world's evolution and shows that it cannot be developed on the basis of competition and war. Not the strong but those who can unite and support each other survive in the struggle with the severe natural environment [Kropotkin 1989: 57]. It is mutual aid and not competition that proves to be the basic natural instinct and the crucial factor of the evolution, progress and improvement of the world [Avrich 1988: 59, James 1979: 135-136, Marshall 1993: 319-322]. Therefore, the mechanism of natural life by no means conflicts with morality and includes wisdom and an artistic impulse, which do not need to be corrected by the authorities. Like the majority of theorists of anarchistic thought, Kropotkin firmly rejects the thesis of the right-wing of the initial imperfection of human nature [Osofsky 1979: 58] and a Christian premise of man's depravity. In his mind, these ideas ex-

5 He also debated with marxists who asserted the need for class struggle. See: Miller, M.A. Kropotkin. Chicago, 1976: 184 [Miller 1976].

cuse the infringement of power upon human liberty. Kropotkin consistently considers the way the principle of mutual aid was carried out in the animal world [Kropotkin 1989: 1 - 31], with "savages" [Kropotkin 1989: 32-75], with barbarians [Kropotkin 1989: 76-114], in medieval towns [Kropotkin 1989: 153-222], and in modern life [Kropotkin 1989: 223-261] and criticizes economic individualism protected by the liberal thought.

Miller was surely close to the anarchistic idea of accepting man's boundless opportunities, denying his depravity and aggressiveness. In the treatise "The World of Sex", he claims in Kropotkin's manner, "To suppose that, unless restrained by fear of punishment, men will set about killing and plundering, buggering and torturing ad infinitum, is to slander the human race. Given only half a chance, men will express the best that is in them" [Miller 1959: 121]. Miller condemns the Christian idea of humility and penance and urges man not to deny the world and his own deep nature but to accept them. This set of problems is interpreted by Miller in F. Nietzsche and O. Rank's m ode of reasoning.

According to his own utterances and to people who knew him well enough, Miller practiced the ideals of mutual aid and was charitable even to those he did not know well. In the novels of the "Paris trilogy", the struggle for survival with which all the characters are gripped and the history of mankind is imbued, is perceived by the writer as a distortion of natural instinct. Miller is still far from contrasting it with anarcho-communist ethics, the idea of mutual aid, free cooperation and solidarity. He remains an individualist and a Nietzschean. In the novel "Tropic of Capricorn", Miller practically reveals Kropotkin's concept of mutual aid as speculative and unrealizable within the limits of real-life circumstances, within the frames of culture entirely built on competition. Miller states that after having attained a high administrative post, he tries to help people, but all his attempts fail, and as a result, he rejects the idea of selfless assistance 6

In his later book "Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch", Miller slightly mitigates his individualism and, in a manner of Kropotkin's anar-cho-communism, calls mutual support the thing that is essential for survival in the world and self-fulfillment for an individual: "Reading my quaint biographical romances, people often ask how on earth I managed to keep my head above water during the black years of famine and drought. I have explained, of course, and in these very books that at the last ditch everyone always came to my rescue.

6 In practice, the situation was no better. It is enough to recall the story of his relationship with the astrologer Conrad Morican. Nevertheless, Morican's ingratitude by no means made Miller change his habit of providing selfless aid to people and being altruistic.

Anyone who has a steady purpose is bound to attract friends and supporters. What man ever accomplished anything alone?" [Miller 1957: 33]

In each of his works, Kropotkin denied the state, government, church, and God as forms of the spiritual, portraying them as ideas dominating life that are external and therefore unnecessary for a man. Being fairly religious, Miller, in his turn, does not deny God as such, unlike Kropotkin [Wickes 1966: 10]; he denies God who turned into an alienated ideal, a principle, an abstract scheme to which a man recourses. In "The Colossus of Maroussi", Miller states, ".the word God no longer having any meaning but used just the same, thrown out like counterfeit money" [Miller 1945b: 92 - 93].

Discoursing about the state, Miller holds the position of an anarchist. In the state he sees the institution of coercion, which is an obstacle to man's creativity and self-fulfillment. In his mind, the state is a gigantic machine made up of people, who are mechanisms and whose lives are formed and regulated by the authorities from the outside.

An impressive image of the state-machine is created in the novel "Tropic of Capricorn" in the description of the "Cosmodemonic Company", where workers turn into spineless creatures and their life is limited to performing one function.

In his work "The Books in My Life", Miller, developing the ideas of anarchists, mentions ancient Sparta, where, according to Plutarch, the power imposed a strict public order, and people who entirely dedicated themselves to serving the country had no privacy [Miller 1969: 167]. Sparta for Miller is a case in point of a disease typical for European mentality with the entrenched idea of power.

Miller and Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman, as well as her spouse, the anarchist Alexander Berk-man [Temple 1977: 30-42], notorious for his attempt to assassinate the manufacturer H.C. Frick, was to a greater extent an expert and a propagandist of anarchistic ideas rather than a profound theoretician [Marshall 1993: 396]. It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that Goldman created an original theory. Rather, both she and Berkman developed the ideas of their predecessors, expressing their original views concerning the particular social, cultural, and political conditions of United States in the early decades of the 20th century.

If Berkman was interested only in social and political matters, Goldman quite sufficiently discussed the problems of literature and theatre and was close to many representatives of the world of art. Neala Schleuning remarks,

"Of the two, Berkman was more committed to socialist and communist anarchist theories. Goldman was closer in spirit to the avant-garde bohemian individualist community" [Schleuning 2013: 56]. It is interesting that in spite of her interest in modern drama and Russian, American and European prose, Goldman focused on recent classical works (L. Tolstoy, M. Gorky, H. Ibsen) and was completely indifferent to the search for modernists, who were mainly inspired by the ideas of anarchism [Schleuning 2013: 60-61].

At the beginning of the 1910s, at the moment when Miller became involved with anarchism, Goldman was extremely popular. In 1910, she gave over 120 lectures in 37 American cities, performing for more than 25 thousand people [Schleuning 2013: 56].

Speaking about Goldman's influence, in particular on Miller and the role she played in the socio-political life of the USA, it must be noted that throughout the 20th century, the image of Emma Goldman changed several times within the context of culture. In 1910, in the public mind, there was an image of "Red Emma", an extremely dangerous, radical revolutionary calling for violence and indirectly responsible for the assassination of President McKinley. In 1919, both she and Berkman departed from the USA.

When Miller was staying in Europe in the 1930s, the image of E. Goldman in the liberal press slightly changed. It was caused by the campaign for her return to the USA, which ended with her short visit and a lecture series as well as the publication of her famous memoirs "Living My Life", where the story of her revolutionary struggle is interspersed with the intimate details of her sexual life. At this time, E. Goldman appeared as a thinker busy with the search for her identity and her true deep nature, and her political radicalism is perceived as a cost of this search [Frankel 1996: 907-913].

Finally, the third image of E. Goldman was created at the end of the 1960s, the most rebellious period in the history of American culture. It was the "wave of feminism" that buried Miller and revived the then almost forgotten Goldman at the same time. She was canonized as a martyr who struggled with repressive society guided by the principle of phallocentrism, as a fighter for free love, women's rights and so on [Frankel 1996: 919-923]7. Miller, who must have paid attention to these metamorphoses, without any doubt, was charmed with the first of three possible images, the image of the Goldman revolutionary, with which respectable Americans threatened their children. As R. Ferguson notes, Miller was encouraged by laymen's fear of anarchism [Ferguson 1993: 45].

7 It is the image created in 1960s as a parody of the icon of feminism that Goldman has in the novel "Ragtime" by E.L. Doctorow.

Being a bit eclectic and not quite a coherent thinker, Goldman was able to combine anarcho-communistic views and individualistic pathos, i.e., Kropotkin and Stirner.

Like all anarchists, Goldman denied transcendental ideals and institutions: God, Church, Government, the State and so on [Goldman 1969: 51-52]. Along with Stirner and Kropotkin, she firmly rejected the idea of a man as a feeble creature, dust and nothing [Goldman 1969: 51]. Miller shared these anarchistic ideas, stating that a man has to gain the feeling of being identical to himself, reveal his own deep self and perfect it.

Criticizing the State, Goldman relies on Stirner and Kropotkin's ideas, synthesizing them with the views of R. Emerson and H. Thoreau [Goldman 1969: 56]. In her mind, the State destroys genuine social relationship [Goldman 1969: 56-57], distorting human nature and misdirecting people's energy, and evokes destructiveness and aggression. In "Tropics" and then in his essays, Miller, criticizing the State, constantly highlights its aggressiveness and the instinct of violence with which it infects its residents. According to "Tropic of Capricorn", where the writer gives a gallery of neurotic criminals, Miller, like Emma Goldman, sees a crime as a distortion of life energy, as a mechanical reproduction of the thing that the State does with an individual. A criminal (rebel, destroyer, rapist, neurotic) in Miller's works hates life itself, mistakenly identifying it with temporary superficial circumstances. The State, weakening people's unity and estranging from the land that embodies its unity, evokes in them the spirit of competition, aggression and craving for extermination. By its very nature, the State is to wage endless predatory wars. In the novel "Tropic of Capricorn", the whole North American continent is seen by the writer as seized with the spirit of murder.

In her essays, Goldman, relying on Stirner's ideas and appealing to the invectives of Ibsen's Dr. Stockman concerning "the damned compact majority", firmly criticizes the spirit of uniformity, introduced by the State into people's life, and stands against their turning into an uncomplaining herd. She condemns the values of the crowd, the mass man, the inertness and automatism of his being, his adherence to the common opinion and accepted stereotypes, and the art that a mass man consumes [Osofsky 1979: 147]. Finally, she puts the blame for the current situation, for social injustice and exploitation, on the mass [Goldman 1969: 75]. An inert mass of humans is the most dangerous enemy of a free individual, according to Goldman. Here, she disagrees with the views of her teacher P. A. Kropotkin and, moreover, reveals "the myth of the virtues of the majority" [Goldman 1969: 78] attributing it, however, not to her older companion, but to some nameless "socialist demagogues" [Goldman 1969: 78].

As has been noted, Miller, following Stirner and Goldman's ideas, continuously emphasizes the role of the State in turning people into the masses, living mechanically in accordance with common stereotypes. Liberal individualism and economic initiative are interpreted by Miller as the mass strivings in a man. A humble, non-creative, obedient crowd, as is seen by Goldman, appears in all the novels of the "Paris trilogy". However, speaking about a mass man, a man of the crowd, recreating his psychology, Miller relies on Stirner and Goldman's ideas only partly, combining the concept of anarchistic individualism with the ideas of Nietzsche and Rank.

An important aspect of Goldman's social analysis was her sharp criticism of patriotism as a bourgeoisie prejudice, artificially imposed on people [Marshall 1993: 32-33]. The power benefits from the patriotism, separating people of different nations, playing them off against each other and calling for loyalty to the country [Goldman 1969: 130].

Goldman speaks about man's natural love for the place where he was born. She states that the majority of Americans can hardly be called "patriots" of their country as America is rapidly changing and there are now factories and mines where they used to live. Lore and legends do not tell about these places. Having changed on the outside, they are just as quickly being erased from our memory [Goldman 1969: 125]. It is worth noting that in the novels "Black Spring" and "Tropic of Capricorn", Miller follows the logic of Goldman's reasoning. In "Black Spring", he confesses his love to the street where he was born and even calls himself "the patriot of the 14thward" [Miller 1968: 9], radically emphasizing that his "native land" and the ward where he was raised are much more important than America. It is the district, the street, the ward that can evoke genuine feelings unlike an abstract image of the State alienated from a man. Miller recreates the spirit of the district that unites its residents and is depicted in legends, anecdotes and stories that the writer retells his reader. The same principle is the basis of some episodes in "Tropic Of Capricorn" connected with Miller's childhood memories. Miller tells about the way the world of his childhood is vanishing together with the changing of the townscape where he and his friends grew up.

Emma Goldman pays special attention to the problem of upbringing and education and speaks about it in the essay, "Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School". Here she relies on the views of Francisco Ferrer and Sebastian Faure. Quoting Ferrer, Goldman shares his idea of a repressive nature of traditional education, restricting the vision of the world, and stands for its reform and the creation of a new type of education. It must be based on the principle of freedom and contribute to man's self-perfec-

tion, reestablishing the link between the man and the world and nurturing immediate, spontaneous reactions coming from the depths of man's genuine identity.

In the novels of the "Paris trilogy" and his treatises, Miller firmly criticizes his education, which, as it seems to him, did not develop the individual, but rather consistently destroyed it, provided him with extrinsic and irrelevant knowledge. Miller frequently admits that what he was taught at school had so little in common with his self that he has absolutely no memory of it [Miller 1969: 85-87]. Furthermore, Miller believes that a one-size-fits-all program of education and the necessity to meet the requirements of the industrial world generates people-robots, looking like each other and thinking and living in accordance with the same stereotypes. In "Books in My Life", Miller, in Nietzsche and Goldman's manner, contrasts Western intellectual education to learning through play and labor, which lets a pupil feel the wisdom of his body and, at the same time, reveals the resources of imagination inherent in his deep self and an ability to react spontaneously: "Of course I expect the normal youngster to dance and sing from infancy. And to play games. I would abet this tendency with might and main. However, the reading of books can wait" [Miller 1969: 43].

School makes people dumb; it multiplies idiots and puppets: "Once again, I say, I plan to read Emile. What matter of Rousseau's theories proved a fiasco: I shall read him as I read the works of Ferrer, Montessori, Pestalozzi and all the others. Anything to put a spike in our present system which turns out dolts, jackasses, tame ducks, weather-vanes, bigots and blind leaders of the blind" [Miller 1969: 87]. An individual proves to be an artificial project, a programmed mechanism. In "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare", Miller gives the image of an average American: "He looks as though he were turned out by a university with the aid of a chain store cloak and suit house. One looks like the other, just as the automobiles, the radios and the telephones do" [Miller 1945a: 40]. Miller's thoughts concerning traditional upbringing and education system once again overlap with the concepts of anarchism theorists and the ideas of Emma Goldman, first of all.

An attempt has been made to prove that Miller's ethical and political ideas as well as the very nature of them are totally imbued with an anarchistic instinct and the instinct of a purely Russian origin. Criticizing the liberal value system based on the principles of social Darwinism, religion, education, and state, Miller thinks just as an anarchist and very often as an adherent and a proper disciple of P. A. Kropotkin and E. Goldman. As

it seems to us, it is this anarchism that let Miller to overcome the literary centrism of his teachers and his older contemporary modernists and come back to a purely American line in literature represented by such figures as R. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, and W. Whitman. The next generation of writers greatly focused on Miller; the generation of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Norman Mailer inherited Miller's experience together with the influence of Russian anarchism, which proved to be extremely fundamental for the literary history of the USA.

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