The Prague Speech of Louis Aragon

In September of this year, the great French writer, publicist and critic Louis Aragon was awarded the title of Doctor of Philosophy Honoris Causa by Charles University in Prague. Aragon's speech, delivered during the solemn ceremony, is anything but a traditional speech-response in which the new doctor thanks for the honor bestowed upon him. As Aragon himself says, in Prague he did not want to deliver the usual academic speech, suitable for Paris or Oxford, but to share his thoughts on things that excite him. Aragon's speech is dedicated to the most vital problems of contemporary realistic art, to the Question of the Theory and Practice of Socialist Realism. "As you know," Aragon addresses his listeners, "I belong to that category of men and women who for a century have thought and acted in accordance with the principle of the inseparability of theory and practice." "This principle - the writer continues - so universally recognized in all fields of science, in the field of art for some reason has not yet taken deep enough roots. Here it is often believed that the leading role belongs to theory, that first the representatives of literary science establish the theoretical premises of the work, and then the writers take them into account. That is, that it is not the artistic work that is a phenomenon that theorists must take into account, but on the contrary, that in this field the phenomena, the works must obey the theories. As a result, critics have been given the freedom, when faced with a phenomenon, a book, to measure it with the measure previously established by theorists, as if the theory were a foot and the work a shoe."