How the union of Soviet writers was born. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia - the Union of Writers of the USSR An excerpt characterizing the Union of Writers of the USSR

Ukrainian National Union - Ukrainian National State Union - continued on June 24 brought UNSoyuz the first practical result: "six representatives of the UNS (us - members of the UPSF) arrived at the warehouse for the sake of the Ministers: Minister of Justice A. Vyazlov, Ministry of Defense.

Fiscal Union – Transfer Union If one compares the financial policy situation in the euro area or across the EU with the situation in federal states such as the US, Germany or Switzerland, a central difference is striking:

LETTER TO THE USSR SP

Many circumstances, historical cataclysms, institutions and persons contributed to the destruction of great Russian literature, and in their list, together with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the State Security Committee of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the Union of Writers plays a responsible role.

The emergence of a literary empire with a huge apparatus of legislators, executors, judges and executioners was inevitable and happened at the same time and for the same reasons for which the mass destruction of the 1930s was organized. The Union of Writers of the USSR was created in 1934, from which the chronicle of Soviet self-destruction begins: it begins with the murder of Kirov, which made it possible to kill everyone. It was necessary to destroy everything that bore the splendor of the gift, for the gift is intolerant of evil. The gravest evil was imposed on the country: the reign of mediocrity. The Writers' Union was invented in order to manage literature (which has finally become "part of the general proletarian cause"), that is, to get from it what the ruthless and intolerant, ignorant, all-devouring power needs. The authorities needed to educate vicious and devoted cattle, ready to unleash wars, kill dissidents and like-minded people, blow into the solemn fanfare of glory wonderful person who managed to exterminate the largest number of people on earth.

I never wrote a line that was required of a well-intentioned Soviet writer, and I never considered myself a loyal subject of a state of liars, tyrants, criminals and freedom-stranglers.

The Writers' Union is an institution of the police state, the same as all its other institutions, no worse and no better than the police or the fire brigade.

I do not share the views of the Soviet police state, its police, fire brigade and other institutions, including the Writers' Union.

I think that my stay in the writers' organization is completely unnatural. I just have nothing to do there. Drink cognac in the restaurant of the Central House of Writers (in the company of Kochetov and Fedin)? Thank you. I am a non-drinker.

I have never indulged in illusions and hopes that the Soviet government can improve. But since the arrival of the latter - the most stupid, most insignificant, most unintellectual government of Soviet power, it has become clear that a confident and inevitable restoration of Stalinism has come, that Stalinist leaders, slightly pinched in sensitive places, straighten their shoulders, roll up their sleeves and spit in their palms, waiting for their time. The return of Stalin-Beria-Zhdanov ideas began; stagnant revenge-seekers line up in columns and check lists of enemies. I think the time has come when this needs to be said out loud.

Soviet power is incorrigible, incurable.

Its meaning and goal is in undivided and unrestrained domination over people, and therefore it received its full and perfect expression in tyrants, of which Lenin could not do everything, because he did not have time to destroy the opposition, and Stalin could do everything, because he destroyed the opposition.

Stalin became the purest, highest and most expressive embodiment of Soviet power. He is her symbol, portrait, banner. And therefore, everything that happens and will happen in Russia will always turn out to be connected with a greater or lesser amount of Stalinism released into public life. The Soviet authorities could not discover anything better than Stalin in their bowels, because in him there was an exhaustive combination of the needs of a dictatorial state and the personal qualities of a villain. Therefore, everything that happened after it was connected only with a weakening or strengthening of the magnetic field, which then let go a little, then again pulled towards courts and reprisals, cave censorship, unbridled lies and Zamoskvoretsky complacency. And therefore, the heaviest blow of this powerful and predatory power fell on the person who was the first to take aim at the purest embodiment of the Soviet ideal.

Vengeful hatred for Khrushchev was based on the adoration of the best examples of Soviet power. Stalin was the best example. Khrushchev spat in the soul of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the police and the crowd, showing that their selfless love, feverish devotion and fitful adoration were given to a gloomy Marxist, stupid maniac, cunning intriguer, jailer, poisoner and possible employee of the tsarist secret police - the true and complete embodiment of Soviet power , its symbol, portrait and banner.

Country excommunicated from political life. A handful of political conspirators who have seized power decide the fate of the people crushed and deafened by the propaganda trumpet.

Only people who have not sold out, who have not been tempted, who have not been corrupted and who have not been intimidated in this class, hierarchical, class, subordination prejudice society, which has been declared “socialist”, only people who have understood that the time has come again to destroy the remnants of physical and spiritual freedom, resist . The unstoppable war of the free intelligentsia against the cruel, unchosen state began, and the state, severely wounded by the revelations of 1956-1962, realized that if it did not win this battle immediately, then it could lose it forever. And it began to win this battle. The methods were old, tested on Chaliapin and Gumilyov, Bulgakov and Platonov, Meyerhold and Falk, Babel, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky, Pasternak, Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. Knowing the former infallibility of the method, the state imprisoned professional writers and young writers who had just begun to work - Brodsky, Sinyavsky and Daniel, Khaustov, Bukovsky, Ginzburg, Galanskov and many others, put poetess Inna Lisnyanskaya, mathematician Yesenin-Volpin, general Grigorenko, the writer Naritsa and many others, forbade the composer Andrei Volkonsky from performing their works, expelled Pavel Litvinov from work, expelled from the party and expelled film critic N. Zorkaya, Karyakin, Pajitnov, Shragin, Zolotukhin and many others, dumped sets of books by Kardin and Kopelev and many others, sent out a black list of authors who were forbidden to publish to publishing houses and editorial offices, expelled Boris Birger from the Union of Artists, Alexei Kosterin, G. Svirsky from the Union of Writers, released with another predatory speech (for more he is not good) "the former writer , awarded with authority and becoming a scarecrow, Vendean, Cossack, drab ant, policeman of Russian literature" -Mikhail Sholokhov (I am proud that these words are printed in my book "Yuri Tynyanov", ed. 2nd, "Soviet Writer", Moscow, 1965, p. 56-57), published a three-volume book by Kochetov, a one-volume book by Gribachev, prepared and neatly put in a warehouse to wait in the wings a two-volume book of selected works of his luminary and teacher, the best friend of Soviet fiction, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.

For four years there has been a massacre due to the publication of the story “ cancer corps”and the novel“ In the First Circle ”by the great Russian writer Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn. This fight is not won, and I am not sure that the writer will win it in the Soviet publishing field. But there are great manuscripts - and it is no longer possible to destroy them. They are immortal and undeniable, in contrast to the frightened tyrannical power that the Nuremberg trials are inexorably waiting for.

How much has been done to destroy Russian culture, human dignity, physical and spiritual freedom! But the plan has not yet been fulfilled, the battle has not been won, the free intelligentsia has not yet been completely destroyed. Planted, expelled, removed, expelled, published, not published. Does not help. Why did it help so well in the old days, under Stalin, and help so poorly with this miserable, most unpopular government even in Russia, where cool power has always been adored since Ivan the Terrible? (Even Russia, which is accustomed to all kinds of governments, God forgive me, did not know such a mediocre and hopeless government. Alexandra III. Only, they say, historical sources found that there were more potatoes. Per capita.) Doesn't help. Does not help. Why doesn't it help? Because few. They plant little. And they are afraid to plant as much as necessary. Here is the former chairman of the State Security Committee Semichastny at a meeting of the Ideological Commission under the Central Committee of the CPSU (November 1960), when they discussed how the Soviet state (area 22.4 million square meters, population 208,827,000 people in 1959) should to organize a systematic struggle with the rhymes of the beginning poet, begged to be given to plant 1200 (1200 in total!) renegades, lackeys of the West and Jews, who are defiling our basically healthy society and corrupting its mostly healthy youth. But they didn't give it to him. He was “given” a little later: under a tender and overgrown place in a responsible Soviet service.

Afraid. They are afraid of the smart young man Khaustov, who dared to tell the draconian and wild Soviet judges that he rejects the Soviet faith (Marxism-Leninism), they are afraid of the wonderful artist of Russia Alexander Solzhenitsyn, they are afraid of America, they are afraid of China, they are afraid of Polish students and Czechoslovak non-rumors, they are afraid of the Yugoslav revisionists, Albanian dogmatists, Romanian nationalists, Cuban extremists, East German dullards, North Korean cunning, revolted and executed workers of Novocherkassk, revolted and shot from aircraft Vorkuta prisoners and crushed by tanks prisoners of Ekibastuz, Crimean Tatars expelled from their lands, and Jewish physicists, expelled from their laboratories, are afraid of hungry collective farmers and overdressed workers, they are afraid of each other, themselves, all together, each separately.

The hair on the back of the secretaries of the Central Committee stands on end. The chairmen of the Councils of Ministers of the Union republics squat on their hind legs. Fear shakes them. And if these lowly organized animals understood and remembered anything, it was how they were turned inside out from fear under Stalin. They look inquisitively at each other and ask themselves with horror: “What if this (Shelepin? Polyansky? Rustle?) is Stalin?” Need strong personality in order to finally curb these eternal enemies of the police state - these boys, artists, poets, Jews. And a strong personality really always starts by curbing them. And ends up killing everyone. Their predecessors also wanted to curb the opposition and called for this strong personality. A strong personality came and curbed. And having curbed, she began to destroy everything. And now they already know what a strong personality is. But there are such difficult times when a strong personality is better than boys, artists, poets and Jews.

Everything that I am writing now, my dear brothers from the Moscow branch of the Union of Writers of the USSR and sisters from the Peredelkino House of Creativity, is no different from what I wrote before. However, there is a difference. It lies in the fact that in my works published by Soviet publishing houses, when there was no other possibility, I called villainy Ivan the Terrible or Paul I, and now I call him by your name. From hundreds of letters I learned that my readers understand well who Ivan the Terrible is.

But Paul I and Ivan IV are not only allegories, analogies, associations and allusions. They are your source and root, your origin, your past, the soil in which you grew up, and the blood that flows in your vessels. I wrote about them because history and the people that have produced and tolerated villains have innate qualities that are ready to give birth to villains again. And so the history of this country and this people did what it could do: it replaced the most reactionary monarchy in Europe with the most reactionary dictatorship in the world.

I write so little about the mighty Union of Writers of the USSR and consumptive Soviet literature, because why write about secondary evil when you need to write about the main thing? The main evil is the bestial fascism of the Soviet socialist ideology.

The post-Khrushchev government, rehabilitating Stalin with growing bitterness, inevitably found itself forced to intensify repressions with growing bitterness. And Stalin's renaissance had this goal among the main ones. By birth and profession, I belong to the circle of people who are constantly attacked by the Soviet government, that is, to the intelligentsia, which does not tolerate violation of its sovereignty. Like many other intellectuals, I hear the same question in various variations: “Why should the most powerful state persecute people who do not agree with its ideology, a state that knows well that these persecutions are most annoying public opinion all over the world?" I have never understood this confusion.

Beings in charge Soviet state, strangle freedom, trample human dignity and destroy the national culture, not only because they are bad politicians, but also because they are doomed to strangle, trample and destroy. And if they do not choke, trample and destroy, then even in this country, with its gravest historical heredity and constant inclination towards absolutism, normal social relations can arise, that is, such that people who think no-one will not be able to destroy people who think differently. And then it will inevitably turn out that people who think differently are infinitely higher and more significant than the rulers, and this will inevitably lead first to a violent political struggle, and then because of the tragic features of Russian historical development, Asian hostility to democracy, the traditional habit of cruelty and sharply continental properties of the national character - to the civil war. And therefore it is catastrophic not only that at the head of this cruel and arrogant slave state there are bad politicians who are strangling freedom, trampling on human dignity and destroying national culture, but also the fact that others cannot stand in a state that has the form of Soviet power. And this is not a historical transient particularity, this is the regularity of the Soviet and any other fascist concept. And what happens in China or Spain, Albania or Egypt, Poland or South Africa, differs from the Soviet norm only in the national character of the absurdity and the amount of rapacity used.

Soviet power is incorrigible, incurable; she can only be what she is - vindictive, intolerant, capricious, arrogant and noisy.

I reject the prevailing middle-liberal opinion: we are for Soviet power, plus the electrification of the entire country, minus the completely unnecessary and even harmful petty guardianship of the creative intelligentsia. I affirm that Soviet power is incorrigible and must be fought against. With its ideology and politics, methodology and way of thinking. But the most dangerous thing is to forget her own terrible experience: to resort to methods (in the name of the "higher goal") in which there is at least a shadow of immorality and a shade of violence.

Now for the Soviet intelligentsia, that is, for that circle of it that does not serve destructive power, after the expulsions, arrests, reprisals and violence that began by decision of the Central Committee of the CPSU immediately after the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the possibility of resistance was significantly limited. The adored government triumphs over its eternal enemy - the thinking part of humanity. With narrowed eyes, it follows the history of persecution and is again convinced of the tried and tested fidelity of its method: to crush all resistance, while it has not yet realized its strength.

It crushes resistance from state and personal motives, which, as you know, can never be separated in a truly Soviet person.

And so it happened with two truly Soviet people - Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin, the acting classic of Soviet literature, and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, a simple Soviet man and metallurgist.

Simple soviet man and a metallurgist, having imprisoned, killed as much as he managed in the good Stalinist times (damn them), in liberal days (damn them), after exhausting training on humane attitude to people (training was carried out on six South Russian Shepherd Dogs), decided to become a wise statesman. Therefore, in the furious quarrels at the Presidium of the Central Committee (collective leadership and democracy!) after the arrest of Sinyavsky and Daniel, he defended the advantages of quietly strangling all anti-Sovietists compared to a loud trial of only two of them.

In order to strengthen his decision and bring the people as proof, Leonid Ilyich decided to arrange a historic meeting.

Konstantin Alexandrovich also attached great importance to the historic meeting. But the hero of Sinyavsky-Tertz's story "Graphomaniacs" Konstantin Alexandrovich Fedin groaned in his sleep from desire with his own false teeth gnaw out an eye (and then another, and then another!) from a vile anti-Soviet slanderer and in his insane blindness did not realize why a man with a metallurgical soul of truly Soviet production had come to him.

Konstantin Aleksandrovich, who to some extent managed to remain calm when discussing the question of imperialism and even found the physical and moral strength in himself to restrain himself when discussing urgent measures to sharply increase popular anti-Semitism, having heard the name of a renegade and slanderer, a former member of the USSR Writers' Union, in a rage jumped out of his own pants and, spitting at the First Secretary of the Central Committee, dentures of a girlish pale pink-white color, began to shout rabid words, repeating more and more such words as “rack”, “bonfire”, “wheeling”, “quartering ”, “acetic acid” and “sharks of imperialism”.

Then he came to his senses a little, got into his pants, stuck in artificial limbs and immediately became Chairman of the Society of Soviet-German Friendship and a classic.

So the first secretaries sat opposite each other in the literary drifts of the Peredelkino station. And the secretary who had no idea for a long time, persistently and convincingly proved to the secretary who had already realized everything the most urgent need in the era of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, the end of colonialism and the onset of revisionism, when discrimination in his face of Soviet literature is especially intolerable, in which the party and the people are entrusted to him difficult but honorable post of a classic, as soon as possible and as severe as possible reprisals against two vile anti-Soviet and renegades.

The trial postponed the day before was scheduled for February 10, 1966. On this day, one hundred and twenty-nine years ago, Pushkin was assassinated and Pasternak was born seventy-five years ago.

The Soviet government has always been mortally afraid of any overshadowing complications at the hour of its triumph. It hates those who can ruin its holiday. Therefore, in Stalin's time, on the eve of holidays, it stuffed the prisons into a frenzy, and in the present, it has arranged trials in Leningrad at which people were tried who allegedly plotted terrorist acts against it on anniversary days.

The Soviet government, having won (as it believes) over the intelligentsia, is celebrating the hour of its triumph. I think that just at this time it is best to spoil the bright Soviet holiday.

I am writing this letter to prove that the intelligentsia of Russia is alive, fighting, not for sale, not giving up, that it has the strength.

I am not in your party. I do not enjoy more privileges than those enjoyed by every working person in your state. I don't have your ranks and I don't have your awards. Don't shame me higher education, an apartment and a clinic, augustly bestowed by your government. Do not reproach me with the bread that I eat and the fat that I do not like. I worked out your bread, your shelter for 13 years in prisons and camps, number 1-B-860, which you awarded me. In order to study, to receive shelter and bread, it is not necessary to have Soviet power with prisons and censorship. Even the peoples groaning under the yoke of imperialism have all this. But you cannot help boasting, reproaching, judging, destroying. You burned my old books and do not publish new ones. But even you, even now, in the articles that blurted out in the first lines of my last book (whose title alone makes you cramp - the book is called "Surrender and death of the Soviet intellectual. Yuri Olesha"), you never said that I write badly or frivolous, or mediocre. You always said something else: "In your books," you said, "there is too much misplaced aversion to violence, intolerance to fanaticism." And you also asked, poking at the page about the Inquisition: “Is this a hint? Yes? this is about us? Yes?" A country of slaves, a country of masters... It is terrible to live next to you, to read your books, to walk along your streets. Fortunately, the only connection that exists between you and me is being in a shameless organization - the Union of Writers of the USSR, which, together with your party bishops, your secret police, your army, unleashing wars and enslaving countries, poisoned the poor, unfortunate, miserable obedient people. This connection, this only contact with you, disgusts me, and I leave you to admire unheard-of victories, unseen successes, invisible harvests, amazing achievements, amazing accomplishments and mind-blowing decisions - without me, without me. Separation will not bring bitterness and sadness to you or me. And you will have time to deal with me this night.

I am returning you a ticket for a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR, because I consider it unworthy an honest man being in an organization serving with canine devotion the most cruel, inhuman and merciless political regime all ages of human history.

Artists and scientists of this tormented, tormented country, all who have retained dignity and decency, come to your senses, remember that you are writers of great literature, and not waiters of a rotten regime, throw your writer's cards in their faces, take your manuscripts from their publishing houses, stop participating in the planned and malicious destruction of the personality, despise them, despise their mediocre and noisy, fruitless and merciless state, beating the incessant drum of victories and successes.

20.6.68, Tallinn - Moscow

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80 years ago, on April 23, 1932, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution "On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations." The document contained a directive according to which all writers' organizations that existed in the early years of Soviet power were to be dissolved. In their place, a single Union of Soviet Writers was created.

RAPP AND RAPPOVTS

The new economic policy pursued by the Bolsheviks from the spring of 1921 allowed some freedom and relative pluralism in all spheres of society, with the exception of politics. In the 1920s, unlike later times, different artistic methods and styles openly competed. In the literary environment, various directions, currents and schools coexisted. But squabbles did not stop in relations between the groups. Which is not surprising: creative people have always been arrogant, vulnerable and envious.

While the people were reading Yesenin's poems (judging by the requests in the libraries), organizations that preached a narrow-class, sociological approach to the tasks of literature began to take over in the intergroup struggle. The All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP) and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) claimed the role of spokesman for the position of power. Rappovtsy, not embarrassed in expressions, criticized all writers who, in their opinion, did not meet the criteria of a Soviet writer.

The claim to become an ideological taskmaster over writers was expressed by Rappov's journal On Post. Already in its first issue (1923) many famous writers and poets. G. Lelevich (a pseudonym of Labori Kalmanson) stated: “Along with the rupture of social ties, Mayakovsky is characterized by some kind of special sensitivity of the nervous system. Not healthy, even furious anger, not ferocious malice, but some kind of nervousness, neurasthenia, hysteria. Boris Volin was indignant at the fact that in the book “The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov” Ilya Ehrenburg “smeares the gates of the revolution with tar not only with large strokes, he splashes them with small splashes.” Lev Sosnovsky kicked Gorky, who lived abroad: “So, the revolution, and its most acute manifestation - the civil war - for Maxim Gorky is a fight of big animals. According to Gorky, one should not write about this fight, because one will have to write a lot of rude and cruel ... Let's read and re-read the old (i.e., more correctly, young) Gorky, with his battle songs full of courage and daring, and we will try forget about the new Gorky, who has become sweet for the bourgeois circles of Europe, and who toothlessly dreams of a serene life and of the time when all people will eat ... only semolina. However, it was not possible to forget Gorky. But more on that below.

In 1926, the magazine "On the Post" became known as "On the Literary Post". At the same time, a very colorful character, critic and publicist Leopold Averbakh, became its executive editor. It deserves special mention.

Averbakh was lucky (for the time being) for family ties that provided young man a comfortable life under the tsarist regime and a career under the Soviet regime. The future ideologist of the RAPP was the son of a major Volga manufacturer and nephew of the Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov, then he became the son-in-law of a longtime Leninist ally, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, and the brother-in-law of the all-powerful Heinrich Yagoda.

Averbakh turned out to be a brazen, energetic, ambitious young man and not without the talent of an organizer. Shoulder to shoulder with Averbakh, the RAPP ideologists and activists, writers Dmitry Furmanov, Vladimir Kirshon, Alexander Fadeev, Vladimir Stavsky, playwright Alexander Afinogenov, and critic Vladimir Ermilov fought against an alien ideology. Kirshon later writes: “It was in the journal Na Literary Post that the ideologists of bourgeois, kulak literature, the Trotskyites, the Vorontsy, Pereverzevism, leftist vulgarism, etc., were rebuffed.” Got it for many writers. In particular, Mikhail Bulgakov. They say that the unforgettable image of the house manager Shvonder was inspired by the author “ dog heart”Napostovtsy (from “At the post”).

Meanwhile, the curtailment of the NEP, begun in the late 1920s at the initiative of Stalin, was not limited to the complete collectivization of agriculture and the course towards socialist industrialization. It was also decided to place the activities of the creative intelligentsia under closer organizational, ideological and political control of the sole ruling party. In addition, the RAPP's claim to become the ideological organizer of Soviet literature was clearly not justified. Its leaders were not authoritative for the rest of the writers, who were called "sympathizers" and "fellow travelers."

THE RETURN OF THE “PRODICATED” GENIUS AND THE DEATH OF RAPP

The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks knew a lot about literature and cinema, which he treated more than carefully. Despite his busy schedule, he read a lot and attended the theater regularly. I watched Bulgakov's play "Days of the Turbins" 15 times. Like Nicholas I, in dealing with some writers, Stalin preferred personal censorship. The consequence of which was the emergence of such a genre as a letter to the leader from a writer.

In the early 1930s, the country's leadership had an understanding that it was time to end the confusion and grouping on the "literary front". To centralize management, a consolidating figure was required. Such, according to Stalin, was to be the great Russian writer Alexei Maksimovich Gorky. It was his return to the USSR that was the final point in the history of the RAPP.

Fate played with Averbakh bad joke. Thanks to Yagoda, he took an active part in the operation to lure Gorky out of Italy. The writer liked the distant relative, who wrote to Stalin on January 25, 1932: Need to study". In 1937, when Gorky had already died and Yagoda had been arrested, Averbakh was also arrested. In a statement to the new People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Nikolai Yezhov, the “well-gifted man” admitted that he “especially hurried Gorky’s move from Sorrento,” since Yagoda “asked me to systematically convince Alexei Maksimovich of an early full departure from Italy.”

So, the leaders of the RAPP were surprised to learn that Stalin no longer needed their organization, which evil tongues called “Stalin's club”. In the Kremlin "kitchen" a "dish" was already being prepared, which became known as the decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks "On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations." In the course of preparation, the document was redone more than once at the very top. It was also amended by a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee, the first secretary of the Moscow Committee and the Moscow City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Lazar Kaganovich.

On April 23, 1932, the resolution was adopted. It said that the framework of proletarian literary and artistic organizations became a brake on the growth artistic creativity. There was a “danger of turning these organizations from the means of the greatest mobilization of Soviet writers and artists around the tasks of socialist construction into a means of cultivating circle isolation, separation from the political tasks of our time and from significant groups of writers and artists who sympathize with socialist construction.” The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, recognizing the need to liquidate the organizations of the Proletkult, decided “to unite all writers who support the platform of Soviet power and strive to participate in socialist construction into a single union of Soviet writers with a communist faction in it.” And “to carry out similar changes in the line of other types of art (association of musicians, composers, artists, architects, etc. organizations)”.

And although the document did not bring joy to all writers, many of them accepted the idea of ​​creating a single union of writers with approval. The idea of ​​holding the All-Union Congress of Writers, put forward by the authorities, also inspired hope.

“I ASKED STALIN...”

The reaction to the decision of the Central Committee in the Rappov camp can be judged from Fadeev's letter to Kaganovich dated May 10, 1932. Fadeev lamented: eight years of his “mature party life was spent not on fighting for socialism, on the literary sector of this struggle, it was spent not on fighting for the party and its Central Committee against the class enemy, but on some kind of group and circle ".

After the Presidium of the Organizing Committee of the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers held its first meeting on May 26, Kirshon addressed Stalin and Kaganovich with a letter. This is a very daring message to the leaders for that time, worthy of a detailed quotation. The author of the poem “I asked the ash tree...” (a song written by Mikael Tariverdiev) was indignant:

“It was decided to change the editorial offices of all literary newspapers and magazines. This change, as is clear from the attached protocol, is aimed at the complete elimination of the former leadership of the RAPP and the writers and critics who shared its positions. Not only were the editors Averbakh, Fadeev, Selivanovsky, Kirshon removed, but the editorial boards were composed in such a way that only vols. Fadeev and Afinogenov were introduced into the editorial offices, where, in addition to them, 8-10 people each, comrade. Averbakh was left a member of the editorial board of the Literary Heritage, and the rest of the comrades - Makaryev, Karavaeva, Yermilov, Sutyrin, Buachidze, Shushkanov, Libedinsky, Gorbunov, Serebryansky, Illesh, Selivanovsky, Troshchenko, Gidash, Luzgin, Yasensky, Mikitenko, Kirshon and others were withdrawn from everywhere and are not included in this resolution in any edition.

I believed that by such a massive elimination from everywhere of a group of communist writers who for several years had defended, albeit with mistakes, the line of the party on the literary front, it would be impossible to achieve the consolidation of the communists in a single union. It seems to me that this is not a consolidation, but a liquidation...

Tov. Stalin spoke of the need to put us on "equal conditions." But in such a situation, not a “level playing field”, but a rout may result. The resolution of the Organizing Committee does not leave us a single magazine. Comrades from the philosophical leadership, who fiercely fought against us and supported the Panferov group, were approved as executive editors of the Organizing Committee ...

I did not think that communist writers had so discredited themselves before the party that they could not be trusted with editing a single literary journal, and that comrades from another sector of the ideological front, philosophers, should be invited to lead literature. It seems to me that the intended comrades, who did not conduct any literary work and are unaware of its practice, will manage journals worse in the new and difficult conditions than communist writers.

Kirshon was especially outraged by the fact that he could not “express his views” at a meeting of the Communist faction of the Organizing Committee: “The decision was made as follows: the bureau of the faction (comrades Gronsky, Kirpotin and Panferov) made all these decisions without any discussion whatsoever with communist writers, at least with members of the Organizing Committee, and then brought to the Presidium with non-party writers, where it was approved.

Concluding the letter, Kirshon asked: “We want to actively and energetically fight for the implementation of the decision of the Central Committee. We want to publish Bolshevik works. We ask you to give us the opportunity to work on the literary front, correct the mistakes we have made, and reorganize ourselves in the new conditions. In particular, we ask the Central Committee to leave us the journal At the Literary Post. Under the leadership of the Party, we created this journal in 1926, which for 6 years, on the whole, correctly fought for the line of the Party.”

The Stalin Secretariat of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks this time again unpleasantly surprised the Rappovites. Decree of June 22 “On literary magazines"prescribed" to combine the journals "At the Literary Post", "For Marxist-Leninist Art Studies" and "Proletarian Literature" into one monthly magazine." The members of its editorial board were appointed “T.T. Dinamov, Yudin, Kirshon, Bela Illesh, Zelinsky K., Gronsky, Serafimovich, Sutyrin and Kirpotin”. Fadeev became a member of the editorial board of the Krasnaya Nov magazine.

The share of Averbakh fell to another responsible assignment. In 1933, he became a member of the famous excursion of writers to the White Sea Canal (in 1931, the canal was transferred to the OGPU and its acting head, Yagoda). The fellow travelers were Alexei Tolstoy, Vsevolod Ivanov, Leonid Leonov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Lev Nikulin, Boris Pilnyak, Valentin Kataev, Viktor Shklovsky, Marietta Shaginyan, Vera Inber, Ilf and Petrov and others. Then the writers created a collective work - “The White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Stalin." Averbakh, who wrote only a few pages, had the dubious honor of editing the edition. His name as a co-editor appears on the title page of the book, along with the names of Gorky and Semyon Firin, the head of the Belomoro-Baltic corrective labor camp.

THE FIRST CONGRESS OF WRITERS: THE FACE AND THE INSIDE

Preparations for the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers dragged on for more than two years. The writers continued to sort things out and complain to Stalin about Gorky and each other. So, Fedor Panferov said “ to the best friend Soviet writers”: “Averbakh wants to break my back with Gorky’s hands.” Pravda published Gorky's article "On Language" (03/18/1934). About Panferov, he writes that he uses “meaningless and ugly words that litter the Russian language,” although “he is at the head of the journal (“Oktyabr”. - O.N.) and teaches young writers, himself, apparently being incapable or wanting to learn." Panferov turned to Stalin for support. And he, considering that the discussion had crossed the permissible limits, put an end to it.

The first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, which began on August 17, 1934, became a major event in the life of the country. Gorky greeted the delegates (377 with a decisive vote, 220 with an advisory vote): “With pride and joy I open the first congress of writers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the history of the world, embracing 170 million people within its borders (stormy, prolonged applause).”

The guests of the congress were Louis Aragon, Andre Malraux, Friedrich Wolf, Jakub Kadri and others foreign writers. It took 26 meetings to discuss all issues. Gorky made a report on Soviet literature, Marshak - on children's literature, Radek - on modern world literature, Bukharin - on poetry, poetics and the tasks of poetic creativity in the USSR. There were four speakers on dramaturgy - Valery Kirpotin, Alexei Tolstoy, Vladimir Kirshon and Nikolai Pogodin. There were also presentations on more specific issues. Nikolai Tikhonov spoke about Leningrad poets, and Kuzma Gorbunov spoke about the work of publishing houses with young writers. Representatives of all the union republics made presentations on the state of affairs in their literature (I wonder where and to whom they speak today?).

However, the "organs" were not left without work either. They found an anonymous anti-Soviet letter criticizing Stalin, and also recorded the words of Isaac Babel: “Look at Gorky and Demyan Poor. They hate each other, and at the convention they sit side by side like doves. I imagine with what delight they would each lead their own group into battle at this congress. Alexander Zharov reacted to Bukharin's critical statements about poets with an epigram:

Our congress was joyful

And bright

And this day was terribly sweet -

Old man Bukharin noticed us

And, descending into the coffin, he blessed.

The words turned out to be prophetic: four years later, the “old man” Bukharin, who did not live to be 50, was shot ...

On September 1, closing the writers' forum, Gorky proclaimed the victory of "Bolshevism at the congress." Socialist realism was declared the method of artistic knowledge of the world.

However, from the inside, the work of the congress did not look so rosy. Gorky's behavior caused serious discontent in the Politburo of the Central Committee. The fact that Stalin was not enthusiastic about his report is confirmed by a telegram received on August 30 from the General Secretary, who was on vacation in Sochi: “Gorky acted disloyally towards the party by silencing the decision of the Central Committee on the RAPP in the report. The result was a report not about Soviet literature, but about something else.”

In a report to Stalin on the results of the congress, Zhdanov wrote:

“Things with the Congress of Soviet Writers are over. Yesterday the list of the Presidium and the Secretariat of the Board was unanimously elected... Most of the noise was around Bukharin's report, and especially around the concluding speech. Due to the fact that the communist poets Demyan Bedny, Bezymensky and others gathered to criticize his report, Bukharin in a panic asked to intervene and prevent political attacks. We came to his aid in this matter by gathering the leading workers of the congress and giving instructions that comrade. the communists did not allow any political generalizations against Bukharin in their criticism. Criticism, however, came out quite strong ...

Most of the work was with Gorky. In the middle of the congress, he once again applied for his resignation. I was instructed to convince him to withdraw the application, which I did. The statement about the role of the decision of the Central Committee on RAPP, which he made in his closing speech, Gorky reluctantly made, orally, that he did not painfully agree with this decision, but it was necessary - that means it was necessary. All the time he was incited, in my deepest conviction, to all sorts of speeches, such as resignations, his own leadership lists, etc. All the time he talked about the inability of the communist writers to lead the literary movement, about the wrong attitude towards Averbakh (he was not at the congress. - O.N.), etc. At the end of the congress, a general upsurge seized him too, giving way to streaks of decline and skepticism and the desire to get away from the "squabbling" literary work”.

Numerous letters and appeals of writers to Stalin testified that the "storm petrel" could not fully "get away from the" squabblers "into literary work" even after the congress. However, this was already Gorky's personal problem. The “Leader of the Peoples” achieved his goal: the Union of Soviet Writers, created on his initiative, became an important and reliable element of the Stalinist system of power.

Oleg NAZAROV, Doctor of History

Direct speech

From the speech of Andrei Zhdanov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers on August 17, 1934:

Comrade Stalin called our writers engineers of human souls. What does it mean? What responsibilities does this title impose on you?

This means, firstly, to know life in order to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art, to depict it not scholastically, not deadly, not simply as “objective reality”, but to depict reality in its revolutionary development.

At the same time, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation must be combined with the task of ideologically reshaping and educating working people in the spirit of socialism. This method of fiction and literary criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism.

Our Soviet literature is not afraid of accusations of tendentiousness. Yes, Soviet literature is tendentious, for there is not and cannot be, in an era of class struggle, literature that is not class-oriented, non-tendentious, supposedly apolitical (applause).

Document

“On the situation in the Union of Soviet Writers”

To the Secretaries of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks - vol. STALIN, KAGANOVICH, ANDREEV, ZHDANOV, EZHOV

The current state of the Union of Soviet Writers is extremely alarming. The creative association of writers, called upon politically and organizationally to rally the mass of writers and to fight for the high ideological and artistic quality of Soviet literature, through the efforts of its current leaders, is increasingly turning into a kind of bureaucratic department for literary affairs.

The decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of April 23, 1932 has been virtually ignored by the leadership of the Union for the past two years. The Union does not conduct any serious work with writers. The focus of his attention is not the writer and his activities, but mainly only various economic affairs and near-literary squabbles.

The Union has turned into some kind of huge chancellery, in the depths of which there are endless meetings. The writers who do not want to break away from the Union, as a result of the incessant hustle and bustle of the meetings, in fact, have no time to write. Things, for example, came to the point that at one of the meetings of the secretariat of comrade. Stavsky offered to give the writer Vishnevsky a sabbatical. Vishnevsky, as you know, does not work in any institution and, therefore, "sabbatical leave" means for him a vacation from endless meetings in the Union.

As a result of such an organization of affairs in the Union, real writers face a dilemma: either they must “work” in the Union, i.e. sit or write...

The Party organization is not united, it contains incessant squabbles and bickering. Not trying or not being able to find a correct approach to non-Party writers, individual communist writers, in essence resurrecting Rappovism, are trying to take the path of indiscriminate slandering of non-Party people ...

Head Department of Press and Publishing of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks

A. NIKITIN

SOVIET LITERARY CRITICISM 1930 - MIDDLE 1950s

Features of the new literary era.- Creation of Soyufor Soviet writers. Party resolution "On the transferconstruction of literary and artistic organizations. First Congress of Soviet Writers. The role of M. Gorky in the literarylife in the 1930s.-Party literary kritika.- Writer's literary criticism: A.A. Fadeev,A. N. Tolstoy, A. P. Platonov.- Cree literary typologytic performances.-A. P. Selivanovsky. D. P. Mirsky.- Literary criticism in the light of party decisions.- V.V. Ermilov.-The Crisis of Literary Criticism.

The diversity of literary life in the 1920s, the pluralism of ideological and aesthetic attitudes, the activity of numerous schools and trends turns into its opposite in the new socio-literary circumstances. If in the 1920s it was literary criticism that shaped and determined the literary situation, then, starting from 1929, literary life, like life in the country as a whole, proceeded in the harsh grip of Stalinist ideology.

With the rooting and hardening of totalitarianism, literature constantly found itself in the zone of close attention of the party leadership. The role of literary critics was played by such prominent figures of Bolshevism as Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Bukharin, but their literary critical assessments in the 1920s were not the only possible ones, as it will happen in the 1930s-50s with Stalin's literary judgments.

The creation and implementation of the concept of socialist realism, which led to the unification of our culture, was carried out simultaneously with other campaigns that were called upon to commemorate the gains of socialism.

Already at the end of the 1920s, the search began for a term that could designate that big and unified thing that was to become common for

all Soviet writers as a creative platform. It is still unknown who was the first to propose how unconvincing in terms of the phrase and so successful in terms of longevity the concept of "socialist realism". However, it was this term and the ideas invested in it that determined the fate of Russian literature for many years, giving literary critics the right either to extend it to all works that grew on Soviet soil, up to M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”, or to reject writers, unable to fit into the strict canons of socialist realism.

Returning from emigration at the insistence of Stalin, M. Gorky managed to fulfill the social function entrusted to him by the leader, and together with a whole group of developers, among whom the Rappovites occupied a predominant place, he helped to think through to the smallest detail the process of “reunification” of Soviet writers who were members of different groups and associations . This is how the plan to create the Union of Soviet Writers was conceived and implemented. It should be emphasized that the Union was created not in spite of, but in accordance with the aspirations of many, many Soviet writers. Majority literary groups It was close to self-dissolution, a wave of studies by E. Zamyatin, B. Pilnyak, M. Bulgakov passed, the most prominent literary critics of the era - A. Voronsky and V. Polonsky - were removed from their editorial posts. Rapp publications (in 1931, another magazine appeared - RAPP) print articles with such titles: “Not everything is left that screams”, “Homeless”, “Bouquet of rat love”, “Class enemy in literature”. Naturally, the writers assessed such a situation as a manifestation of lack of freedom and sought to get rid of the RAPP's forcible guardianship. It is enough to read the feuilleton by I. Ilf and E. Petrov “Give him the italics” (1932) to imagine why many Soviet writers enthusiastically reacted to the idea of ​​the Union.

On April 23, 1932, the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations” was adopted. By this resolution, all existing organizations were dissolved, and the Union of Soviet Writers was created. Among the writers, the attitude towards the resolution was the most enthusiastic, the future members of the Union did not yet guess that instead of the RAPP, a literary organization of unprecedented power and unheard-of leveling opportunities was coming. The congress of Soviet writers was to be held very soon, but due to Gorky's family circumstances this event was postponed.

The first congress of Soviet writers opened on August 17, 1934 and lasted two weeks. The congress was held as a great all-Union holiday, the main character of which was M. Gorky. Presidio table-298

ma towered against the backdrop of a huge portrait of Gorky, M. Gorky opened the congress, made a report on it "On Socialist Realism", spoke with brief summaries, and concluded the work of the congress.

The festive atmosphere that prevailed at the congress was reinforced by numerous speeches by writers whose names had been unequivocally negatively assessed until relatively recently. I. Ehrenburg and V. Shklovsky, K. Chukovsky and L. Leonov, L. Seifullina and S. Kirsanov made bright speeches. General feelings were expressed by B. Pasternak: “For twelve days, from behind the table of the presidium, together with my comrades, I had a silent conversation with all of you. We exchanged glances and tears of emotion, made signs and exchanged flowers. For twelve days we were united by the overwhelming happiness of the fact that this high poetic language is born of itself in a conversation with our modernity.

The pathos of delight was interrupted when it came to literary criticism. Writers complained that critics have a red and black board and that writers' reputations often depend on critical self-will: "We must not allow a literary analysis of an author's work to immediately affect his social position" (I. Ehrenburg). It was about the complete and hopeless absence of serious criticism, about Rapp's manners preserved in criticism. And the satirist Mikh. Koltsov proposed an amusing project: “introduce a form for members of the writers' union<...>Writers will wear uniforms, and it will be divided into genres. Approximately: red edging is for prose, blue is for poetry, and black is for critics. And introduce badges: for prose - an inkwell, for poetry - a lyre, and for critics - a small club. A critic walks down the street with four clubs in his buttonhole, and all the writers on the street stand in front.

Gorky's report and co-reports on world literature, dramaturgy, prose, and children's literature were of an ascertaining nature. The turning point in the official solemn course of the congress came after the report of N. Bukharin, who spoke of the need to revise literary reputations, in connection with which Pasternak was named the leader of the new poetic era. Bukharin's report was unexpected and therefore explosive. During the discussion of the report, the congress participants demonstrated both the difference in views on the history and future of Soviet literature, and the difference in temperaments. Sharp polemical speeches succeeded each other, general calm and a sense of belonging to a single union for a while

"The First Congress of Soviet Writers: Transcript. M., 1934. S. 548.

me disappeared. But the excitement in the hall soon passed, because everyone understood what a significant and solemn finale the congress was approaching.

The final words that were spoken at the congress and belonged to Gorky determined the literary life of the country for several decades: “In what way do I see the victory of Bolshevism at the congress of writers? In the fact that those of them who were considered non-Party, "waverers", admitted - with sincerity, the fullness of which I do not dare to doubt - recognized Bolshevism as the only militant guiding idea in creativity, in painting in a word.

On September 2, 1934, the First Plenum of the Board of the Union of Soviet Writers, elected at the All-Union Congress, took place. M. Gorky became the chairman of the board of the Union. Until the death of the writer in 1936, the literary life in the country passed under the sign of M. Gorky, who did extremely much to root the proletarian ideology in literature, to increase the prestige of Soviet literature in the world. Even before the final move to Moscow, M. Gorky becomes the initiator of the publication and editor of the journal Our Achievements, the yearbooks Year XVI, Year XVII, etc. (the year from the beginning of the revolution), large-scale publications History of Factories and Plants , "Story civil war"- with the involvement of a large number of authors who had no relation to the writing profession.

M. Gorky also publishes the journal "Literary Study", designed to conduct elementary consultations for newly-minted writers. Since M. Gorky attached great importance to children's literature, in parallel with the already existing children's magazines "Hedgehog", "Chizh", "Murzilka", "Pioneer", "Friendly Guys", "Bonfire", the magazine "Children's Literature" is also published, where literary critical articles are published, there are discussions about the books of A. Gaidar, L. Panteleev, B. Zhitkov, S. Marshak, K. Chukovsky.

Realizing himself as the organizer and inspirer of the new literary policy, M. Gorky actively participates in the literary-critical process. At the end of the 1920s, Gorky's articles were devoted to the study of his own writing experience: "To the Workers' Correspondents of Pravda", "Reader's Notes", "On How I Learned to Write", etc. In the 1930s, M. Gorky reflects on the specifics of the literary business ( “On Literature”, “On Literature and Other Things”, “On Prose”, “On Language”, “On Plays”), the newly discovered artistic method of proletarian literature (“On the Artistic Method of Soviet Literature”, “On the Union of Writers”, “On the preparation for the congress”) and, finally, emphasizes the connection between cultural construction and the fierce class struggle (“Who are you with, masters of culture?”, “About anecdotes and something else”). 300

M. Gorky enthusiastically follows the new things that are revealed to him in the Soviet country.

Absolutely confident that the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal is a socialist "reforging" of yesterday's thieves and bandits, M. Gorky organizes a numerous landing of writers who, under the editorship of a humanist writer, created a huge tome - a book about the White Sea-Baltic Canal, in which the work of the valiant employees of the GPU (Main Political Directorate, later known as the NKVD, MGB, KGB), re-educating the "canal army" was sung. M. Gorky, probably, had no idea about the force with which the machine for the suppression of dissent in the Soviet country was being spun. The Gorky Museum (in Moscow) stores the only newspaper issues published for Gorky, in which materials about the political processes that were blazing with might and main in the country were replaced by neutral journalistic reports about the latest successes in industry. Meanwhile, the all-round support that M. Gorky provided to Stalin was connected not only with the fact that M. Gorky was protected from real life in Moscow and in the country. The fact is that M. Gorky believed in the need for a radical improvement of man.

M. Gorky more than once said and wrote that he did not feel pity for suffering, and it seemed to him that the state built in Russia would be able to raise people who were not burdened with complexes of sympathy and mental confusion. M. Gorky publicly repented that in 1918-21 he helped the intelligentsia not to die of hunger. He liked to feel like a Soviet person involved in great and unprecedented achievements. That is why he found high-flown words, characterizing Stalin and considering him a "powerful figure." Probably, not everything in the words and deeds of Stalin and his associates suited Gorky, however, in the epistolary and journalistic confessions that have come down to us, negative assessments of the activities of the party and state structures are not presented.

So, after the union of writers into a single Union, after rallying them around a common aesthetic methodology, a literary era begins, in which writers were well aware that they must obey a certain program of creative and human behavior.

The rigid framework of the writer's life was regulated by vouchers to the Houses of Creativity, apartments in prestigious writers' houses, extraordinary publications in major publications and publishing houses, literary awards, career advancement in writers' organizations and - most importantly - trust, trust

parties and governments. Not to enter the Union or leave it, to be expelled from the Writers' Union - meant to lose the right to publish their works. The literary and literary hierarchy was erected on the model of the party-government hierarchy. What is socialist realism, knew literary theorists and literary critics, who created a huge number of works on this topic. When Stalin was asked what the essence of socialist realism was, he replied: "Write the truth, this will be socialist realism." Stalin's most famous literary-critical judgments were distinguished by such concise and peremptory formulations: "This thing is stronger than Goethe's Faust (love conquers death)" - about Gorky's fairy tale "The Girl and Death", "Mayakovsky was and remains the best, most talented poet of our Soviet era". Stalin met with writers more than once, giving guidance and evaluating novelties in literature, he saturated his speech with quotations and images from world classics. Stalin, in the role of a literary critic and critic, assumes the functions of a literary court in the last resort. Since the 1930s, a process of canonization of Lenin's literary ideas has also been outlined.

♦ * ♦

For twenty years - from the beginning of the 1930s to the beginning of the 1950s, Soviet literary criticism was represented mainly by reports and speeches, party resolutions and decrees. Literary criticism had the opportunity to realize its creative potential in the intervals from one party resolution to another, and therefore can rightly be called partyliterary criticism. Its essence and methodology were forged in speeches, speeches, articles and official documents, the authors of which were I. Stalin, A. Zhdanov, literary functionaries A. Shcherbakov, D. Polikarpov, A. Andreev and others. The main features of such literary criticism are rigid certainty and indisputable unambiguity of judgments, genre and style monotony, rejection of a “different” point of view - in other words, an ideological and aesthetic monologism.

Even writers' literary criticism, usually marked by traits of bright individuality, presents in these years examples of speeches and speeches that correspond to the general spirit of the times. Alecsandr alexandrovich fadeev(1901-1956), who worked in 1939-1944 as secretary of the Presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers, and from

1946 to 1953 general secretary Union, he devoted his literary-critical speeches, as a rule, to the connections of literature and Soviet reality: “Literature and life”, “Learn from life”, “Go straight into life - love life!” "In the study of life - the key to success." Such monotony of titles was dictated by the needs of the Stalin era: it was necessary to write and talk about the social role of literature. Declarativity was considered a necessary attribute of journalistic literary criticism.

Actively engaged in literary criticism and returned from exile Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy(1882-1945). Having defended in previous years the principle of apolitical art, Tolstoy began to speak and write actively about the partisan nature of literature. His articles are devoted to the innovative role of Soviet literature, the establishment of the principle of socialist realism.

Another type of literary-critical reflections is presented in the works Andrei Platonovich Platonov (Klimentov)(1899-1951). It still remains a mystery why such a subtle artist, an outstanding writer of the 20th century, the author of "The Pit" and "Chevengur", presented a number of examples of literary critical articles in which Pushkin is treated as "our comrade" in the meaningless rhetoric of Soviet prose. features of artistic romance are distinguished, and the work of Gogol and Dostoevsky is interpreted as "bourgeois" and "backward". V. Perkhin believes that the specificity of Platonov's criticism lies in his secret writing - part of Russian secret speech and opposition to censorship conditions 1 . The true literary and critical abilities of the writer can be judged by his deep interpretation of the poetry of A. Akhmatova.

This is probably just one of the explanations. Another, obviously, lies in the peculiarities of Platonic writing in general. The original tongue-tiedness of the heroes of Plato's prose, passed through the author's irony and creating an explosive mixture of a dangerous literary game, could not but influence Plato's critical prose. One more thing should be remembered: Platonov resorts to literary criticism during the years of "non-printing", and his "reflections of the reader" become critical assessments of one of the many proletarian readers who have joined the great literature. And the fact that he is one of many, “a man from the masses,” Platonov constantly emphasizes, conducting literary reviews as if on behalf of one of his literary heroes.

"See about it: Perkin V. Russian literary criticism of the 1930s: Criticism and public consciousness of the era. SPb., 1997.

Literary criticism itself has often been at the center of attention of literary criticism. At one of the plenums of the Board of the Writers' Union in 1935, a well-known representative of this profession, I. M. Bespalov, spoke about criticism. In this and subsequent reports on similar topics, one can find the same structural components, the same clichés and formulas. The reports on the state and tasks of Soviet literary criticism clearly define the following key problems: the question of criticism is more relevant than ever; literary criticism - component socialist culture; it is necessary to fight against the remnants of capitalism in the minds of people; it is necessary to rally around the party and avoid groupism; literature still lags behind life, and criticism behind literature; literary criticism must emphasize the partisanship and class character of literature.

A remarkable chronicler of literary life, V. Kaverin gives a fragment of the shorthand report "Dispute on Criticism". The meeting took place in the House of Writers. Mayakovsky in March 1939. Eternal competitors, writers from Moscow and Leningrad, gathered here to discuss the “critical section of Soviet literature” (K. Fedin). And again - general phrases about the high purpose of criticism, about courage and fantasy in literary critical work.

Keeping the general concept of speeches and articles devoted to the tasks of Soviet literary criticism, the authors made an adjustment for time. So, in the 1930s, they wrote about such an obligatory quality of literary criticism as revolutionary vigilance.

In the literary criticism of the 1930-40s, the most notable were the speeches of I. Bespalov, I. Troisky, B. Usievich, D. Lukach, N. Lesyuchevsky, A. Tarasenkov, L. Skorino, V. Ermilov, Z. Kedrina, B. .Brainina, I. Altman, V. Goffenschefer, M. Lifshits, E. Mustangova. Their articles and reviews determined the real state of literary life.

Literary criticism of the Stalin era, in its summary form, was an inexpressive ideological appendage to great literature, although against the general bleak background one could distinguish both interesting findings and accurate judgments.

Alexey Pavlovich Selivanovsky(1900-1938) began his literary-critical activity in the 1920s. He was one of the leaders of the RAPP, collaborated in the magazines "At the Literary Post" and "October". In the 1930s, Selivanovsky published the books Essays on the History of Russian Soviet Poetry (1936) and In Literary Battles (1936), and was published in the journal Literary Critic. Like other former Rappovites, Selivanovsky emphasized: “We

straightened out and is straightening out by the Party. His most famous works are “The Thirst for a New Man” (about A. Fadeev’s “Defeat”), “Cunning and Love of Zand” (about Y. Olesha), “The Laughter of Ilf and Petrov”, as well as articles about D. Bedny, N. Tikhonov, I. Selvinsky, V. Lugovsky. These and other works are written from the standpoint of socialist partisanship, the literary text is considered in them in the context of vulgar sociological convergence with reality. So, for example, the critic calls on the creators of Ostap Bender to strengthen the features of a class enemy in him, and Selivanovsky sees the pathos of Soviet literature in "the artistic affirmation of the system of socialist relations on earth." At the same time, Selivanovskii's literary-critical works reflect tendencies that are not characteristic of the era: this applies to articles on poetry.

Selivanovskii's assessments here run counter to generally accepted ones. He tries to understand the rhythm and phonetic neoplasms of Khlebnikov, seeks to understand the essence of acmeism (while naming the name of Gumilyov), wading through the terminological tie of the era (“poetry of late bourgeois classicism”, “imperialist poetry”, “poetry of political generalizations”), the critic expands the poetic field at the expense of names seemingly hopelessly lost by the era of the 1930s. Selivanovsky was repressed. Rehabilitated posthumously.

The Soviet period of activity of the former émigré writer also deserves attention. Dmitry Petrovich Mirsky (Svyatopol-ka)(1890-1939). IN Soviet Russia In the 1930s, Mirsky published a number of articles and prefaces on foreign literature. He also owns articles about M. Sholokhov, N. Zabolotsky, E. Bagritsky, P. Vasiliev. Mirsky's articles and books stood out noticeably against the general literary-critical background: he was uninhibited in his judgments and often allowed himself assessments that did not coincide with those of official criticism. Thus, Mirsky was convinced of the unity of Russian literature of the post-revolutionary period 2 . Despite the fact that the creative individuality of criticism absorbed a variety of currents and trends, the element of vulgar sociological reading of texts was quite strong in Mirsky's works. Mirsky was repressed. Rehabilitated posthumously.

Intervention and control of party bodies led, as a rule, to a deterioration in the literary and social situation. WITH

Selivanovsky A. in literary battles. M., 1959. S. 452. 2 See about this: Perkin V. Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky // Russian literary criticism of the 1930s: Criticism and public consciousness of the era. SPb., 1997. S. 205-228.

In 1933, the monthly journal Literary Critic began to appear in the country, edited by P. F. Yudin, and later by M. M. Rozental. Of course, this magazine was also a publication of its era, far from always meeting the title. And yet, to a large extent, he filled the gaps in literary critical thought, since operational criticism - reviews, reviews, discussion articles - side by side here with more or less serious literary historical and literary theoretical works. As a result, the party decree of December 2, 1940 "On Literary Criticism and Bibliography" discontinued the publication of a one-of-a-kind magazine.

Even more sad in its consequences was the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of August 14, 1946 “On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad”. This document, which preceded its appearance, the discussion of the topic at the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and especially the report of A. Zhdanov at a meeting of writers in Leningrad, not only stopped the publication of the Leningrad magazine, but also contained shameless, insulting statements addressed to A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko. After the publication of the Decree, both Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were essentially excommunicated from the literary and publishing process; they had to print only literary translations.

It was party literary criticism in its primordial, clearly unilinear expression. Party decisions were made about I. Selvinsky's play "Umka - the Polar Bear" (1937) and the play "House" by V. Kataev (1940), about the play "Snowstorm" by L. Leonov (1940), and "vol. Fadeev A.A.” (1940), about the magazine "October" (1943) and the magazine "Znamya" (1944). Vigilant party control over literature took the place of literary criticism. Proof of this is a relatively recently published collection of documents testifying to rampant party censorship 1 .

Literary controversy in these conditions seemed out of place. However, the rudiments of literary discussions survived. Thus, for example, between 1935 and 1940 there were discussions about formalism and vulgar sociologism. In fact, these turned out to be echoes of the disputes of the 1920s, and the main actors- supporters of the formal school and representatives of sociological literary criticism - was given another, this time - the last - battle. Considering that 90% of writers who joined the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, by 1937-1938. was repressed, one can understand that the discussions of the late 1930s were organized from above and proceeded

The Literary Front: A History of Political Censorship: 1932-1946 M., 1994.306

extremely sluggish. If in the 1920s a “guilty” critic could lose the trust of his party comrades, then in the 1930s he lost his life. On this occasion, the character of Bulgakov's novel Azazello said to Margarita: "It's one thing to hit Latunsky's critic with a hammer and quite another thing - in his heart."

After the end of the publication of The Quiet Flows the Don by M. Sholokhov, literary criticism suddenly stirred up, and there were responses in which Sholokhov was reproached for the wrong end of the epic, that the writer crushed the image of Melekhov. There were short discussions about historical romance, about the prose of N. Ostrovsky and D. Furmanov.

During the Great Patriotic War, the attention of the party and government to literary criticism was weakened, and it did not give its own bright shoots. Another effort to "improve the quality" of literary criticism was made in 1947, when A. A. Fadeev spoke and wrote about its state and tasks. To general discussions, Fadeev added the idea that socialist realism may well include romantic elements. Fadeev supported Vladimir Vladimirovich Ermilov(1904-1965), the author of a phrase that was remembered by contemporaries, in which N. Chernyshevsky’s formula was only “slightly” altered: “beautiful is our life".

Written with catchy brilliance and increased expressiveness, V. Yermilov, a literary scholar and literary critic, began his performances as early as the 1920s and became infamous in the 1930s and 1940s. Yermilov has always remained one of the most notable odious figures in Soviet literary life. He was an indispensable active participant in all literary and party discussions of different decades. Long-liver of Soviet literary criticism, V. Ermilov passed big way and in journalism. In 1926-29, he edited the Rappov magazine "Young Guard", in 1932-38 he headed the editorial office of Krasnaya Nov, in 1946-50, Literaturnaya Gazeta was published under his leadership. Despite the fact that Ermilov was a member of the Rappov leadership, he easily abandoned the ideological aspirations of this organization and in the 1930s focused on monographic studies of the work of M. Koltsov, M. Gorky, V. Mayakovsky. In different years, from a opportunistic-dogmatic position, he spoke sharply about the prose of I. Ilf and Evg. Petrov, K. Paustovsky, about the poetry of A. Tvardovsky and L. Martynov, about the dramaturgy of V. Grossman.

In] 936, in the book "Gorky's Dream", written immediately after the writer's death, Yermilov proved the absolute connection between M. Gorky's work and the ideas of victorious socialism. At the end of the book, the critic analyzed in detail the merits of the Stalinist constitution, which, according to Yermilov, became a kind of apotheosis of Gorky's ideas.

In the 1940s, Yermilov was the author of a number of articles in which the idea of ​​the writer's and critic's party responsibility was rigidly declared. According to Yermilov, the literature of socialist realism can be considered the most democratic literature in the world. The suspicious "trends" that emerged in the work of Zoshchenko and Akhmatova are, of course, "deeply hostile to Soviet democracy."

Yermilov fought tirelessly against "political irresponsibility" and "decadence", against "mystical distortion of reality" and "pessimism", against "rotten scholasticism" and "theorists" "preaching Tolstoy's self-improvement". He was one of the creators of the tendentious and crackling literary-critical phraseology, diligently replicated in the 1930s and 50s. From the titles of Ermilov’s works alone, one can easily imagine what prohibitive pathos they were permeated with: “Against Menshevism in Literary Criticism”, “Against Reactionary Ideas in the Works of F. M. Dostoevsky”, “On a False Understanding of Traditions”, “A Harmful Play”, “The slanderous story of A. Platonov”, etc. Yermilov proclaimed literary works as a weapon necessary to protect “genuine partisanship” in art.

Yermilov enthusiastically supported the idea of ​​A. Zhdanov, expressed by him at the First Congress of Writers, that socialist realism should be a method not only of Soviet literature, but also of Soviet criticism. Yermilov played his part in the fight against "cosmopolitanism" - in the ruthless state action of the late 1940s. He announced the names of "cosmopolitan" writers who allowed themselves to perceive in Russian literature the artistic influences of world classics.

In the 1950s and 60s, Ermilov focused on historical and literary research, most of which he devoted to A. Chekho-

Cm.: Ermilov V, The World's Most Democratic Literature: Articles 1946-1947. M., 1947.

woo. Meanwhile, Yermilov attached considerable importance to literary and critical work. After the 20th Party Congress, in accordance with new trends, the critic began to write more freely, more relaxed, he approached the artistic text and began to pay attention to its poetic structure. 1 However, Yermilov remained true to himself and introduced endless references to party documents into the corpus of his articles, trusting, first of all, a timely expressed political idea, and not a literary and artistic discovery. In the 1960s, Yermilov the critic lost his former influence, and his articles were perceived as ordinary phenomena of a turbulent literary process that attracted the attention of readers with completely different names and artistic ideas.

V. Mayakovsky forever “introduced” Yermilov into the history of literature, having mentioned the critic with an unkind word in his suicide letter, and before that he composed one of the slogans for the play “Banya”:

do not evaporate

swarm of bureaucrats. Not enough baths

and no soap for you. And also

bureaucrats

helps pen critics -

like Ermilov ...

In 1949, a "struggle against cosmopolitanism" began in the country. In the sections of the Writers' Union, another wave of severe studies took place. The writers, of necessity, repented, and literary critics concentrated around the next "positive" facts, which manifested themselves in defiantly semi-official, reptilian literature. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Soviet literary criticism was dying. She was forced to “take into service” the theory of non-conflict known for its demagogic frankness. Criticism, like literature, went around sharp corners, joyfully, with cloying jubilation, welcoming the appearance of literary works, the very name of which was intended to inspire pride and optimism. The writers painfully agreed to the alteration of what was written. class

"See, for example: Ermilov V. Connection of Times: On the Traditions of Soviet Literature. M., 1964.

A classic example of tragic lack of will is A. Fadeev's reworking of the novel The Young Guard. Literary critics hostilely accepted honest literature - books that ran counter to the general mood. Negative reviews appeared about the poems of A. Tvardovsky, the novels of V. Grossman "For a Just Cause" and V. Nekrasov "In the Trenches of Stalingrad", novels and stories by V. Panova. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Soviet literary criticism was going through a severe crisis.