Bolshevism in English Literature

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Excerpt from Bolshevism in English Literature: Being an Inaugural Lecture During the war many new words were added to our language. An ingenious person in the old country made a little dictionary of these terms, most of which were coined in the trenches, but his book was published too soon, for it makes no mention of the prize tit-bit for the dictionary of the future, the word Bolshevism. Everyone of to-day is familiar with this Russian noun which has now winged its way into the remotest sections of the Englishspeaking world. Owing to the frightful excesses of the Bolshevist, it is a sinster and menacing term. Originally the word was applied to a political theory, but with the passing of the months it has become more and more suggestive. It not only conjures up before us those proletarian ogres, Lenin and Trotsky, with their unwashed swarm of commissaries stained with the blood of their tens of thousands of victims, but it has also been domesticated in Canada, perhaps particularly in Winnipeg, and has come to be applied by us to any gust of unrest, passion for change, or opposition to the present order of things. So fond have we become of this word out of Russia that we are willing to apply it to almost any movement or doctrine which would sweep away old landmarks and introduce a new state of affairs either in politics, in religion, in education, or in literature. It is to several of the innovators or Bolshevists who have figured in the history of English literature that I propose to direct your attention to-day. These Lenins and Trotskys of the world of letters committed no acts of violence except in a linguistic way, but they were rebels against convention, made a great noise in their day, stirred up no end of controversy, set up Soviets of their own, and, in some cases, changed the whole current of English thought. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.