17.147 the hammer of art

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 02:06:25 EDT

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 147.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                         Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

             Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 06:54:57 +0100
             From: Joel Goldfield <joel@cs.fairfield.edu>
             Subject: Re: 17.133 the hammer of art (or computing, for that matter)

    The Mayakovsky quotation sounds like a Bolshevik's interpretation
    of Stendhal: "Un roman : c'est un miroir qu'on
    promène le long d'un chemin" (_Le rouge et le noir_, I, Ch. 13, pub. 1830).
              Regards,
              Joel Goldfield
              Fairfield University

    --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
               Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 10:21:44 +0100
               From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>

    With regards to the authorship of "Art is not a mirror held up to reality
    but a hammer with which to shape it", as requested again in Humanist
    17.131, I've turned up the following from Leon Trotsky, "Futurism", in
    Literature and Revolution (1924; rpt. New
    York, 1957), online at
    http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1924/lit_revo/. (I have
    corrected a few typos but not checked this against a hardcopy edition.)
    Note that Trotsky himself cites it as something like a proverb, though in
    this translation the words are not quite what was asked for.

       ....



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