THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 206bearing such indicative titles as Literature for the People and Censored Articles.^6
What al-Majalla al-Jadida was doing in Cairo was being done by the Leftist
reviews al-Tafi'a( 1935-48) in Damascus and al-Tanq( 1941) inBeirut. Leftist
and Marxist ideas were propagated in Syria by 'Umar Fakhuri who attacked
the literature of the ivory tower and in the Lebanon the distinguished critic
Ra'if Khun (1912-67) strongly advocated a consistently Marxist view of
literature over a number of years. In the early 193 0s the time was not ripe for
Musa's teachings to produce immediate and spectacular results in Egypt.
It was during the war years, in fact, that the young Egyptian and Arab
intellectuals in general became increasingly interested in Marxist philosophy.
As Russia was one of the allies, favourable information about Russian
literature and the Soviet regime became available for the first time (though
still on a very small scale) in the cultural centres of the Middle East, obviously
as part of the war propaganda effort.^7 At the same time the passionate interest
in Marxism which young European intellectuals showed in the 1930s, and
which culminated in the experience of the Spanish Civil War, was trans-
mitted to young Arab intellectuals almost a decade later. Among the contri-
butions to Taha Husain's al-Katib al-Misri (1945-8), one of the finest cultural
periodicals ever to appear in Arabic, were the influential articles by Luwis
'Awad (b. 1915) on modern English writers (in particular his article on T. S.
Eliot) in which he put forward a clearly Marxist interpretation of literature
inspired by certain Marxist English literary critics. In 1947 'Awad published
his Plutoland and Other Poems (later to be suppressed by the censor) with a re-
volutionary introduction calling for the need to write the poetry of the
people and to overthrow the dominant traditional metrical forms, although
the poems themselves have been aptly described by one perceptive critic as:
'caught in the paradox of popularism and elitism'.^8 In 1945 a greater and
more influential critic, Muhammad Mandur (1907—1965), gave up his
academic career in order to engage in active Leftist politics and was later
(after the 1952 revolution) to become editor of the Arabic Soviet cultural
periodical al-Sharq and one of the apologists for a mild form of socialist
realism.
From 1944 onwards a stream of heavily documented n;yels of angry
social protest began to pour out, much more detailed and infinitely more
concerned with the horrors and degradation of Egyptian urban life than
anything that had appeared before. Social injustice and class struggle were
now added to national independence as political themes. The tendency to
write in a socially realistic strain in the 1940s was by no means confined to the
younger generation of novelists like 'Adil Kamil and Najib Mahfuz. It can be
found in the work of older authors like Yahya Haqqi and Taha Husain as well