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Lunacharsky and the formation of Marxist criticism

 

 Chapter IV. Lessons from Lenin
The principle of partisanship

It is known that it was Lunacharsky who, in his article "Lenin in Literary Studies," laid the foundation for the scientific study of Lenin's views on literature and art. In this article, Lunacharsky for the first time systematized all the material known to him by 1932 from the ideological legacy of the leader, memoirs (including personal memories), official orders of the Soviet government, and after a thorough analysis came to important conclusions about the fundamental importance of Lenin's ideas for the development of Soviet culture. . In the study of Lenin's aesthetic views, Lunacharsky rightly retains the merit of a pioneer. It was Lunacharsky who first pointed out the enduring significance of Lenin's article "Party Organization and Party Literature." Citing long excerpts from it, Lunacharsky wrote: “Despite the fact that that more than a quarter of a century has passed since the writing of this article, to this day it has not lost one iota of its deepest significance. Moreover, the basic principle of the partisanship of literature, which serves the cause of the socialist reorganization of the world, is just as relevant today as the most severe criticism of bourgeois literature developed in the article, as well as the fiery characterization of future socialist literature serving millions and tens of millions of working people.8 , p. 463).

 Soviet researchers, following Lunacharsky, convincingly refuted the revisionist attempts to limit the significance of Lenin's article to the solution of purely tactical tasks of the Bolshevik Party in the specific conditions of the first Russian revolution. In the works of V. R. Shcherbina, A. N. Iezuitov, G. I. Kunitsyn, I. S. Cherpoutsan and others, it is well shown that the principle of party membership was, first of all, a great theoretical discovery, that its significance cannot be limited to a specific situation of revolutionary struggle. Much less attention is paid to the literary-critical environment of the article, to those authors who came close to Lenin's positions. Meanwhile, a comparison of Lenin's article "Party Organization and Party Literature" (1905) with Lunacharsky's article "The Tasks of Social-Democratic Artistic Creation" (1907) is instructive in many respects, for it clearly shows both the similarity and difference in the views of the authors on the problems of the new art.

Lunacharsky never spoke of his acquaintance with Lenin's article immediately after it appeared in print. And yet it is unlikely that she was not known to him. It was published in the newspaper Novaya Zhizn, the first legal organ of the Bolsheviks, which was led by Lenin. Among the employees of the newspaper were Vorovsky, Olminsky, Lunacharsky, Gorky. A whole group of writers collaborated in Novaya Zhizn, from the symbolist N. Minsky, the official editor, to the realists-Znanievites V. Veresaev, L. Andreev, N. Garin-Mikhailovsky. It is possible that Lunacharsky was familiar with the main points of the article before it was published. In any case, in 1904-1907, Lunacharsky could not but know Lenin's views on literature and art. 1

Party membership, Lenin considered, is a direct, consistent and open connection between the writer and the liberation movement of the proletariat. By no means denying, on the contrary, emphasizing in every possible way and constantly taking into account the specificity of literature as a special type of spiritual activity that cannot be identified with other aspects of party work, Lenin asserts: “Literary work must become part of the general proletarian cause, “a wheel and a cog” one single, great social-democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the entire working class. 2

Anticipating objections, Lenin wrote about "hysterical intellectuals" who see the "bureaucratization" of the free ideological struggle and artistic creativity in the slogan of the Party. He pointed out that such statements are an expression of bourgeois-intellectual individualism - he contrasts it with a voluntary association of like-minded people on a Marxist ideological basis.

We find similar propositions in Lunacharsky. From the very beginning, he cites counterarguments from bourgeois critics and admits that the idea of ​​social democratic creativity may seem to them naive, supposedly denied by the laws of aesthetics. At the same time, the critic asserts that the art of the proletariat must exist and will continue to exist, that it already has its own special aesthetic tasks. “Social Democracy,” writes Lunacharsky, “is not just a party, but a great cultural movement. Even the greatest of the hitherto former ”(vol. 7, with. 154). Hence Lunacharsky's incessantly repeated and developed up to detail and detail conclusion: a Social Democrat cannot consider himself mature if he does not see an artistic creative system in his doctrine. Lunacharsky's article is devoted to the disclosure of this "world-renewing, thousand-sided system of ideas and feelings".

Lenin saw in party membership the most important aesthetic principle, organically connected with the question of understanding the leading socialist principle in art, with the question of the openly proletarian position of the artist in the creative process . Lunacharsky, following Lenin's thoughts, asserts that Social Democracy is not only a political and economic movement. “The struggle of socialism against capitalism is the greatest kulturkampf,” writes Lunacharsky. “If it is carried out primarily with political and economic weapons, this by no means means that the mental reflection of economic gigantomachy in philosophy and art does not play an enormous role” (vol. 7 , p. 155).

Lenin had no illusions about the immediate appearance of masterpieces of the new art created by the proletarians. According to the memoirs of A. Shapovalov, an acquaintance of Lenin in Siberian exile, Lenin, in disputes with the Narodnik Baramzin, “developed the idea that one can hardly expect that an oppressed worker returning from a factory, tired to the point of stupidity, could, without the help of the intelligentsia, who came out of the bourgeois environment create your own art and literature. 4 The main thing for Lenin was the struggle of the working class for their political and economic rights. Art is not an end in itself, but one of the most important means of helping the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle.

From this, however, it does not follow that the artistic experiments of the workers, no matter how imperfect they were at first, were of no interest to Lenin. No, as soon as the works of the pioneers of proletarian art began to appear after the first Russian revolution, Lenin treated them with lively sympathy. “Talent is rare. It must be systematically and carefully supported,” 5 he said and strongly objected to attempts to use a talented artist from the working environment in a role unusual for him. However, Lenin's thought was constantly turned towards the political struggle, and he saw the flourishing of proletarian art in the future, when the proletariat would take power into its own hands and create all the conditions for cultural development.

Lenin emphasized that proletarian culture does not arise in isolation from everything that has been done before, it is the heir to all the best that has been created by the mind and talent of people. Therefore, Lenin, in contrast to A. Bogdanov, considered the transition of scientists, artists, writers to the position of the proletariat as evidence of the strength of the proletarian movement. The degree of familiarization of the best representatives of the bourgeois intelligentsia with the proletarian worldview, their participation in the revolutionary transformation of the world may be different. Some, like A. Barbusse, completely switched to the positions of the proletariat, others - R. Rolland and A. France - became its closest allies, others - E. Sinclair, B. Shaw - acted as decisive exposers of the bourgeois way of life. We will find similar phenomena in Russian literature of the early 20th century.

Lenin's thoughts about proletarian culture were close to Lunacharsky. Thus, in his article, the critic cites an extensive quotation from R. Rolland's book about the painter Millet: the life of French artists, especially those who do not chase after fashionable fads, is a whole martyrology of the victims of an exploitative society. What to say about Russia! Everyday exhausting work, low wages, poverty, insufficient education, the influence of bourgeois ideology - all this is not conducive to the emergence and development of artistic talents among the working class. “So, will we have to wait until the luminary of a new art rises from among the labor-weary, ignorant Russian proletarians? Of course, it can rise from there, - says Lunacharsky. - But what difficulties stand in the way of a brilliant worker to artistic creativity! And not only external difficulties, you can be sure that nine-tenths of the geniuses of the proletarians, who have not died or faded in need, will go into politics. Their right instinct draws them there" (Vol.7 , p. 163).

It would seem that these arguments can be refuted by Gorky's example. But for Lunacharsky, Gorky, “the first Russian artist who took up a purely socialist theme and processed it purely socialistically” (vol. 7 , p. 164), is not the rule, but the exception. One by one, Lunacharsky considers and consistently rejects possible objections in order to come to the conclusion: “In general , it is easier, much easier for the intelligentsia to put forward a socialist artist from their midst than for the proletariat, in general it is more natural that the beauty of the new order of the soul, and through it and the beauty of the new world will be the first to be seen by the Marxes of fiction, the Engels of the brush and the Lassali of the chisel” (vol. 7 , p. 166).

In the understanding of Lenin and Lunacharsky, the problem of proletarian culture from the very beginning was not only aesthetic, but also political and philosophical. The denial of proletarian culture is a manifestation of bourgeois swagger and intellectual skepticism. One-sided singling out, pushing forward the idea of ​​proletarian culture to the detriment of other tasks of the working class is a vulgarization of Marxism, a politically incorrect slogan, culturalism.

Proving the need for a new art, Lunacharsky characterized its main features and inner originality. Being class, proletarian in content, it does not lose its artistry. The best achievements of the literature of the past, above all the realistic ones ("the path of realism is the path of real protest"), are synthesized in it. But, inheriting the traditions of classical literature, the proletarian writer in his attitude towards the people cannot be limited only to social compassion, “pity”. An active, combative, optimistic mood determines his outlook and creative work. This mood is made up of three elements: 1) hatred of the exploitative system and exposure of its vices, 2) struggle for a new world, 3) attempts to foresee it. In Lunacharsky's understanding, these elements are inseparable from each other.

The relevance of these provisions became especially clear in the Soviet years, when the practical construction of a proletarian culture became a real task of the time. Then it turned out that the thoughts expressed by Lunacharsky back in the period of the first Russian revolution were by no means outdated. As if repeating Lunacharsky, Gorky later more accurately and succinctly expressed the triune essence of the new literature: “Cheerfulness of spirit will give birth to that active romanticism that precedes the revolution and accompanies it. This romanticism is the basic property of a force that is aware of its place in the process of history and its right to create the conditions most free for its growth. A satirist in relation to the past, a merciless realist in the present, and a revolutionary romantic in foresight, in assessing the future - this, in my opinion, should be what a writer-promoter of the working class should be. 6

For Lunacharsky himself, the thoughts he expressed turned out to be programmatic. It is not difficult to discover a continuity between the article "The Tasks of Social Democratic Artistic Creation" and Lunacharsky's last speech to Soviet writers in February 1933, a report on socialist realism.

In the book "What are the "friends of the people" and how do they fight against the social democrats?" V. I. Lenin quotes the apt words of K. Kautsky about those times of the liberation movement in Russia, “when every socialist was a poet and every poet a socialist.” 7 Commenting on them, N. K. Krupskaya rightly notes that Vladimir Ilyich “merged together a social approach with an artistic depiction of reality. These two things he somehow did not separate one from the other. eightThe ability to see poetry in a tense political struggle, in the most everyday and inconspicuous work, to give art an ideological-political, consistently party orientation, Lenin tirelessly taught his comrades-in-arms. Lunacharsky's collaboration with Lenin during the period of the first Russian revolution was beneficial for the critic and contributed to the closeness and even coincidence of his statements with Lenin's.

There are also some differences. Lunacharsky clearly avoids the term "party art" and declares: "It will be in vain to talk about party art" (vol. 7 , p. 154). Why in vain, Lunacharsky does not explain, his statement hangs in the air and contradicts the entire content of the article. After all, if the author has recognized the need for social-democratic creativity, if he sets certain tasks for it, then the most important of them must be loyalty to the ideals of the Marxist party. Perhaps such a reservation was caused by a split in the ranks of the Russian Social Democracy: Lunacharsky did not accept the views of the Mensheviks on art.

Lenin connected the party nature of art with the freedom of artistic creativity. His entire article is a denial of the hypocritical bourgeois theories about the independence of art from social life and the assertion of genuine freedom of creativity in the proletarian, party sense of the word. For Lenin, a party artist is someone who freely expresses in his work the interests of the most advanced class. And although Lenin saw the flowering of such art in the future - hence his thrice repeated prophetic "it will be free literature ...", he considered it necessary to take up the creative and organizational work to create it immediately.

Exposing the bourgeois and anarchist slogans of "freedom of creativity" in an exploiting society, Lenin knew that their apologists would immediately join the battle. There is no need here to quote the statements of the Cadet press (D. Merezhkovsky, D. Filosofov, N. Berdyaev), which viciously distorted the content of Lenin's article. An unsuccessful attempt to refute it was the speech of V. Ya. Bryusov in "Balance" (1905, No. 11). The poet argued that the figures of the "new art", like Paul Gauguin and Arthur Rimbaud, despised the tastes of bourgeois society and therefore suffered hunger and deprivation. But with his polemics, V. Bryusov achieved the opposite goal. “These examples,” notes B. Meilakh, “only illustrate Lenin’s words about the artist’s dependence on the bourgeois public.” 9

K. Chukovsky also turned out to be an unwitting opponent of Lenin's ideas about the partisanship of literature. At the beginning of his literary career, he, by his own admission, was often fascinated by paradoxes of a dubious nature, and this “sometimes gave my writings a too cocky, passionate, noisy character, which I got rid of only in my mature years.” 10 This passion led him in 1906 to the ideas of "pure art", to the call to "leave the revolution alone", because the revolution and literature are incompatible. Such were the revelations of K. Chukovsky, published in the St. Petersburg newspaper "Freedom and Life" in a discussion order.

Answering K. Chukovsky, Lunacharsky showed that it is in the revolutionary element that a true artist will find an inexhaustible source of tragic conflicts, great ideas and images. Rejecting the revolution, the artist thereby renounces his vocation. Unlike Chukovsky, Lunacharsky did not sneer at the helpless responses of some writers (K. Balmont, I. Rukavishnikov) to the events of 1905: their weakness lies in ignorance of the subject. The critic even recognized for certain persons the "right" to the "familiar place of the sofa." He just did not want these "freedoms" to apply to all artists. “We will be free. More freedom, Mr. Chukovsky” (vol. 7 , p. 136), Lunacharsky finished ironically. elevenIt must be assumed that Lunacharsky's warnings did not pass by the talented critic and writer (and Lunacharsky highly appreciated Chukovsky's talent) and helped him get rid of ideologically immature paradoxes. 12

Lunacharsky stood at the origins of the doctrine of the partisanship of literature and actively supported Lenin's basic ideas. Modern scholars rightly assess The Tasks of Social Democratic Artistic Creativity and the works of Lunacharsky adjoining them as a significant contribution to Marxist aesthetics.

. Faces of Tolstoy
The great merit of Marxist literary criticism is the interpretation of the work of Leo Tolstoy, the determination of his place in the social and cultural life of Russia and mankind. Life, work and personality of "the most complex person among the largest people of the 19th century" 13only that criticism, which is based on the Marxist principles of knowledge of nature, society and art, was able to comprehend deeply and fully. The foregoing does not mean a denial of the well-known achievements of pre-revolutionary tolstoy studies, as well as valuable judgments in works written abroad. And yet, comparing Marxist criticism with non-Marxist criticism, K. N. Lomunov rightly points out a significant drawback of the latter: “the absence of concepts that give a deep, integral explanation of all of Tolstoy, with all the contradictions of his worldview and creativity, taken in their development, interpreted not abstractly, but in connection with reality, with the historical epoch that gave birth to them. 14

The famous articles of V. I. Lenin about Tolstoy opened a new stage in Tolstoy studies, which continues in our time. The very titles of Lenin's works brilliantly revealed the indissoluble connection between the thoughts and feelings of the great writer and Russian revolutionary reality. But these articles are important not only for the understanding of one writer. They are an example of the Marxist analysis of literary phenomena in general, and therefore their methodology, being applied by researchers of the regularities of the literary process, cannot fail to give brilliant results.

A. V. Lunacharsky in the work “G. V. Plekhanov as a Literary Critic" dwells in detail on a series of "truly brilliant articles by Plekhanov on Tolstoy" (vol. 8 , p. 294). However, he astutely noted that in Plekhanov "the negative Tolstoy was studied with much more thoroughness than the positive Tolstoy" (vol. 8, with. 294). The critic considered such an analysis one-sided and insufficient. Plekhanov's assessment of Tolstoy's class sympathies did not satisfy him either, and he found his answer, why we, that is, the Social Democrats, loved Tolstoy the artist "from here to there," quite general. “All the time we go around,” Lunacharsky concludes, “around and around some obvious and enormous artistic life value in Tolstoy as a writer, but what it consists in, this Plekhanov never told us” (vol. 8 , p. 300).

From what has been said, the inadmissibility of attempts by some researchers to "equalize" or at least "bring together" the works of Plekhanov and Lenin on Tolstoy is inadmissible. These trends were discovered by K. N. Lomunov in some books of recent years and subjected to fair criticism. There is no reason to question Lunacharsky's idea that "this relatively correct point of view (I. V. Plekhanov. - I. K. ) seems pale and dull when you compare it with Lenin's brilliant analysis" (vol. 8 , p . 442).

In the book of O. Semenovsky "Marxist Criticism about Chekhov and Tolstoy" even insignificant responses to the anniversary and death of Tolstoy (like I. Chuzhak-Nasimovich) are detailed, but not a word is said about the speeches of A. V. Lunacharsky. The informative work by K. N. Lomunov “Leo Tolstoy in the Modern World” summarizes the extensive material of critical literature on Tolstoy, including articles by Lunacharsky. However, in this detailed review, Lunacharsky appears only with performances from the Soviet years. “Here again, one must remember Lunacharsky, who wrote several articles about Tolstoy in the second half of the 1920s,” 15 remarks K. N. Lomunov.

Of course, it is good that Lunacharsky's articles of the 1920s are widely used by our Tolstoy scholars, but "it is necessary to recall" the critic's earlier speeches as well. Lunacharsky himself is partly to blame for the abnormal situation that has developed. In the Soviet years, he did a lot of reprinting of his pre-October works, but the collection On Tolstoy (1928) was compiled only from speeches of the 1920s. 16 Perhaps the critic forgot about his two early articles "On Tolstoy" and "Faces of Tolstoy" altogether.

The article "On Tolstoy" (1911) was published in the collection "Forward" - the printed organ of the faction of the same name, to which Lunacharsky also belonged. In studies on the history of the party, these collections, published from July 1910 to February 1917 (in total, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU has 9 thin brochures-collections published non-periodically), are rightly attested as anti-Bolshevik publications of the Vperyod group. Apparently, because the collections were not literary, they did not interest literary critics. The article is signed by the well-known pseudonym of Lunacharsky Voinov, stands out among other materials and, in content, does not at all resemble the writings of the “Vperyodists”. On the other hand, it is not difficult to discover that its author knows Lenin's articles on Tolstoy and shares their main provisions. This is another argument in favor of that even after the temporary philosophical and political break between Lunacharsky and Lenin in 1908, the deep ideological connection between them was not interrupted. The article closest in content to the critic was V. I. Lenin’s article “L. N. Tolstoy "(1910).

Articles by V. I. Lenin and A. V. Lunacharsky open with mourning beginnings. Both Lenin and Lunacharsky from the first lines emphasize the social significance of Tolstoy's activities. V. I. Lenin writes: “Leo Tolstoy has died. His world significance as an artist, his world fame as a thinker and preacher, both reflect, in their own way, the world significance of the Russian revolution. 17

Lunacharsky singles out in Tolstoy's legacy that which was the subject of a fierce ideological struggle: “Tolstoy died, and various demonstrations swept across the face of the earth like a Russian wave. Who was honored? An undeniably great artist in his talent, long recognized by all? This is what the government would like, and it would willingly reconcile itself to this. After all, even Nikolai Romanov wrote something unintelligible about Tolstoy's literary merits. But no, these thousands, tens of thousands of telegrams from various representatives of Russian society stubbornly brought to the fore Tolstoy , a thinker, a preacher, a public figure .

Unlike Lenin, Lunacharsky does not consider Tolstoy the artist, the creator of immortal works, considering this the most obvious and indisputable. True, by evading this topic and focusing on Tolstoy's philosophical and political views, the critic comes to conclusions that can easily be extended to the whole of Tolstoy, including Tolstoy the artist. Tolstoy's struggle, Lunacharsky shows, was directed against the four evils of the capitalist world: against the state as an instrument of oppression and exploitation, against private property, against the petty-bourgeois family and the Christian religion. “In the state,” Lunacharsky writes, “in any state, even the most constitutional, Tolstoy saw the organization of violence and energetically, unambiguously called for the destruction of the entire state mechanism. Someone wrote: Tolstoy was not a revolutionary. Of course, not true, he was. He called, as far as he had the voice, for a general anti-state strike, for the refusal to pay taxes, to serve military, judicial and all other duties. The proletariat may not agree with By this tactic, it may be considered impossible any real success on such a path, but the revolutionary hostility towards the state, the revolutionary desire to overthrow it once and for all, is here without a doubt. 19

The echo of Lunacharsky's thoughts with Lenin's thesis about Tolstoy as a mirror of the Russian revolution is quite obvious. Like Lenin, Lunacharsky sees Tolstoy's great merit in his denial of family relations in a possessive world - a source of selfishness, spiritual enslavement, lies and vulgarity. But the merciless exposure of the notorious sanctity of marriage was accompanied by Tolstoy's preaching of a direct rejection of love and childbearing. In other words, Tolstoy did not solve a huge problem, but cut it.

Following Lenin, Lunacharsky shows the contradictory and utopian nature of Tolstoy's worldview, where passionate protest was bizarrely combined with humility, and the struggle against all forms of human enslavement led to economically reactionary conclusions.

“Tolstoy denied the existing Christian _religion,” continues Lunacharsky. - Nothing will heal the scars that are carried out on the body of the impudent ruling church with the scourge of his satire ... But Tolstoy wanted to put another in place of the religion he had overturned, full of superstition and deceit. He recognized Christianity as a simple moral doctrine, he recognized God as the soul of the world, with which a person can blissfully merge by renouncing his egoism, by the highest love for everything that exists ... However, due to the mistakes of the teacher, which many great sages share with him, he (the proletariat) will not forget what terrible blows he inflicted on one of the most hated enemies of the proletariat - the clergy. 20

All of the above convincingly shows the coincidence of the opinions of Lenin and Lunacharsky. True, Lunacharsky is more declarative, straightforward in his definitions of the strengths and weaknesses of Tolstoy's worldview.

It must be said that the independent significance of Lunacharsky's article can be understood especially clearly when compared with the speeches of Lenin and Plekhanov. Thus, for example, Lunacharsky resolutely rejects Plekhanov's thesis: "I consider him a brilliant artist and an extremely weak thinker." 21 In Lunacharsky's aesthetics, although thought and image are distinguishable, they are never opposed. There is always internal unity between them, for thought and image are the fruits of man's spiritual activity, two sides of the same process. For Lunacharsky, a brilliant artist cannot possibly be a weak thinker, the weakness and insufficiency of thought in comparison with Marxism does not mean its absolute weakness: "Tolstoy the artist is inseparable from Tolstoy the thinker." 22

In contrast to Plekhanov, although without naming his last name, Lunacharsky asserted that "in his criticism of private property, Tolstoy is not a hair's breadth below Rousseau, Proudhon, and Henry George." 23 The last two names were intended to show the non-Marxist, utopian-naive nature of Tolstoy's worldview. The founder of French anarchism, a resolute fighter against large capitalist property (“property is theft”) P. J. Proudhon and an American publicist who preached a single progressive tax on land as a means of its nationalization, G. George were very popular in the democratic circles of Europe and America XIX century. Putting the Russian writer on a par with them, Lunacharsky thus showed the international significance of his work.

But Tolstoy, Lunacharsky believed, had a tremendous advantage over them, for neither Proudhon nor George were armed with that incomparable weapon that he possessed to perfection - the weapon of artistic genius. It is felt that the most difficult thing for Lunacharsky of those years was to determine the originality of this artistic genius. Only in the article “The Death of Tolstoy and Young Europe” does he directly try to characterize it: “... a thirst for inner peace, a desire to resolve the contradictions of a powerful individuality, mercilessness towards oneself and others in the name of truth - truth and truth - justice.” 24 But, apparently, feeling the approximateness of these definitions, the critic again goes into the field of philosophy and politics and here he makes a clear mistake, contradicting himself: "His works of art are all entirely moral and philosophical treatises." 25

Of particular interest in this case is the name of J. J. Rousseau, about whom Lunacharsky repeatedly spoke. Rousseau's strength, he argued, was not in logic, for among his contemporaries there were greater masters of it. Rousseau rarely sought to unwaveringly prove anything, he always tried to impress and captivate, and for this he resorted either to streams of sparkling eloquence, or to a network of cunning sophisms, or to stunning paradoxes, or to fiction. These discussions about Rousseau are directly related to the question of Tolstoy as a kind of thinker and brilliant artist. "Thinker?" Lunacharsky asked in the article “Faces of Tolstoy” and answered: “Yes, of course. This is the forehead of a great thinker. But this is not only a thinker. What a characteristic, what a disproportionate, what a strange back of the head, what a store of life-giving passion materialized in the brain, instinct, mysterious subconsciousness lies there in the deep inner chambers of this majestic skull. 26

But what are the social origins of L. Tolstoy's worldview and creativity? As is well known, Lenin and Plekhanov gave different answers to this complex question. Plekhanov believed that "Tolstoy was and until the end of his life remained a great gentleman."27 The critic convincingly showed the incompatibility of Tolstoyism and non-resistance with Marxism. He correctly pointed out the contradictions in Tolstoy's thought and stopped there. Lenin revealed the source of the contradictions of L. Tolstoy, a thinker, public figure, and writer. It was Lenin who first saw in the legacy of Tolstoy a reflection of the vast historical experience of the broad peasant masses, their age-old, not always realized dream: justice and truth, their hatred for the soullessness and falsity of the exploitative system. In the system of critical analyzes of Tolstoy's work and journalism, Plekhanov lacks the people, the peasantry, and therefore the critic was unable to understand the significance of Tolstoy in the socio-political struggle of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his place in Russian literature. Lenin took a different path, and this path turned out to be immeasurably more promising for Soviet literary criticism in general and for Tolstoy studies in particular.

Lunacharsky in his article "On Tolstoy" tries to combine these points of view. On the one hand, Tolstoy, says Lunacharsky, “was an old gentleman, a typical representative of pre-capitalist noble-muzhik Russia. Having become accustomed to it, he could not help but treat the advancing capital with extreme hatred, could not help but see with his keen eyes of the artist all the outrages of the impending new industrial era... autocratic-feudal system and the needs of the healthy development of bourgeois culture. 28

The excessive categoricalness and straightforwardness of this "explanation" in the spirit of Plekhanov's orthodoxy is quite obvious. But then Lunacharsky argues more correctly: “Gradually, in the fire of intense criticism, he (L. N. Tolstoy. - I. K. ) cleared old Russia for himself, and she appeared before him as the ideal of a purely peasant “evangelical” hostel, in which there was no there will be room for neither old nor new forms of predation and exploitation. It seemed to him that the peasant way of life withstood the test of fire, while the lordly element was incinerated by him. 29 Here Lunacharsky takes a step towards Lenin's understanding of Tolstoy, according to which a decisive turn took place in the writer's worldview in the 1980s: Tolstoy became the spokesman for the interests of the patriarchal peasantry.

Tolstoy's departure from Yasnaya Polyana, the illness and death of the great writer shocked the world. Numerous correspondence from Russia, biographies of Tolstoy, obituaries of prominent public figures, writers and scientists were published in the periodical press abroad. Summarizing this vast and impressive material, A. R. Lansky rightly states: “Without any exaggeration, we can say that the end of 1910 all over the world passed under the sign of Tolstoy.” thirty

Living in Italy, Lunacharsky closely followed this stream of sorrow and admiration, in which, as it seemed, all civilized humanity merged. He especially singled out the responses of A. Frans and G. Hauptmann. “Your loss,” A. Frans told the correspondent of Russkoye Slovo, “is the loss of all mankind. We, the writers of the present era, can be compared with him, like a microscope with a telescope ... I can compare Tolstoy with Homer. G. Hauptmann, who experienced the profound influence of Tolstoy in his best works, commented in the Berliner Tageblat: “The world has lost a second Savonarola. The only great Christian of our time is gone.” 31 In an interview with Russkoye Slovo, Hauptmann even compared Tolstoy to Buddha.

Lunacharsky picks up these comparisons and develops them in the article "The Death of Tolstoy and Young Europe". From his reasoning it is clear that in Tolstoy the objectivity, clarity and radiance of Homer are combined; subjectivism, fanaticism and the desire to put morality above aesthetics are features most clearly embodied in the sermons and appearance of Savonarola; and finally, Buddhist impersonality, elevation above the joys and sorrows of being. “To border on Homer, Savonarola and Buddha,” concludes Lunacharsky, “means to be immense.” 32

No matter how unhistorical these parallels are, they are inevitable even for progressive criticism: at first they most often try to comprehend and comprehend a grandiose phenomenon with the help of analogies. After all, Gorky, who knew Tolstoy not only from books, found in him “the inquisitive mischief of Vaska Buslaev,” “part of the stubborn soul of Archpriest Avvakum,” “Chadaev’s skepticism ” … little closer to him.

No matter how relatively few Lunacharsky's pre-revolutionary works on the Russian classics were, they contain fundamental provisions that are constant for his aesthetics. Lunacharsky always appreciated the classics and was a consistent opponent of nihilism.

Lunacharsky was not personally acquainted with Tolstoy, and personal impressions always meant a lot to him. In 1913, in Paris, the critic got acquainted with the works of the sculptor N. Aronson, made from life: a bronze bust of L. N. Tolstoy and pencil drawings, and saw a lot of dissimilar images. Hence the title of the article "Faces of Tolstoy". Tolstoy appeared on them either gloomy and sad, then angry and impregnable, then a schemer with a ghostly transparent face, then a majestic hero who “looks forward with titanic sorrow for the very roots of world grief.” Tolstoy seemed like either King Lear, or the prophet Jeremiah “with the same tart pride and unyielding, heavy, honest pessimism,” or an old Russian peasant: “so kind, so bright, like a winter sun, a gray-haired peasant.” 34

Among these "faces" again there is no Tolstoy - the creator of unsurpassed works of art, at best he is implied. The "face" of L. N. Tolstoy, an artist, a brilliant writer, Lunacharsky showed comprehensively in the 20s. The critic devoted many of his articles to revealing its inner beauty and dialectical complexity. Describing the best of them, Lunacharsky wrote: “Together, in my opinion, it gives a relatively multifaceted and correct assessment of Tolstoy, and his general assessment coincides with Lenin’s point of view on Tolstoy.” 35 This significant coincidence was prepared by Lunacharsky's pre-revolutionary speeches about the great writer.

From the prehistory of Proletkult
Between March 25 and April 11, 1911, Lunacharsky moved from Italy to Paris for permanent residence. 36 He quickly became involved in the cultural life of the Russian Social Democratic colony and took a leading place in it. The newspaper "Paris Vestnik" called him "one of our best art critics." 37 This progressive non-partisan newspaper 38 is a valuable source of information about Lunacharsky's varied activities in Paris on the eve of the First World War.

Lunacharsky's political work is represented by numerous reports, speeches at meetings and rallies, essays on various topics: 1) The current moment and the immediate tasks of the Social Democratic Party (May 8, 1911); 2) Elections to the IV Duma and the Petition Commission (May 23, 1911); 3) On the state of affairs in the RSDLP (July 22, 1911); 4) A rally dedicated to the memory of Paul and Laura Lafargue (November 22, 1911), at which “A. V. Lunacharsky made a deep impression on the audience with his brilliant strong speech”; 395) Honoring G. V. Plekhanov in connection with the 35th anniversary of his literary and social activities (January 5, 1912); 6) Speech at a rally dedicated to the memory of the Paris Commune (March 19, 1912). Lunacharsky focused on the personality of Auguste Blanca. The Mensheviks and Cadets often called the Leninists Blanquists. Lunacharsky considered it necessary to rehabilitate the great revolutionary and took it upon himself to defend Blanquism, which, in his opinion, "is an integral part of the methods of class struggle"; 40 7) Participation in a protest rally against the execution of a demonstration of workers at the Lena mines. In addition to Lunacharsky, J. Jaures and J. Guesde were invited (April 27, 1912); 8) Participation in a protest rally against the condemnation of the second Social Democratic faction (August 6, 1912).

Literary and critical activity of Lunacharsky in Paris began with the lecture “Maxim Gorky. The most important moments of his artistic evolution. The speaker counted five such "most important" moments: tramp; the period of great stories, early plays and philosophical lyrics; intellectual ("Summer Residents", "Children of the Sun"); proletarian (“Mother”, “Enemies”, “Confession”) and the last one, connected with “Summer” and the works adjacent to it, which, according to Lunacharsky, marked a regression. Therefore, in the final part of the essay, he spoke about the tasks facing the writer, his critics and readers. 41 This essay on Gorky is Lunacharsky's first attempt to outline the creative path of the writer as a whole.

Of great interest are also the abstracts "Lords of thoughts and hearts of timelessness", 42 where the works of V. Ropshin (B. Savinkov), M. Artsybashev and A. Verbitskaya, "The Crisis in Contemporary Art" 43 and Lunacharsky's speech at M Morozov "Revealers and Apologists of Eroticism in Contemporary Russian Literature". 44 Along with Lunacharsky, M. Morozov's opponent was the young I. Ehrenburg.

Lunacharsky always wanted to be not only read, but also listened to. He needed to see his allies and opponents directly. That is why in his legacy all genres and techniques of oratory are so widely represented. The Parizhsky Vestnik printed dozens of announcements about reports, speeches, speeches by Lunacharsky, summaries of his abstracts, correspondent reports, letters from the author to the editor, etc.

From a Parisian newspaper we receive information about two unpublished plays by Lunacharsky. The first one was called “Right to Left”. It was a New Year's satirical review, a revue; 45 The second play, The Struggle for a Share, was announced on April 27, 1912, on the stage of the Utility Social. 46 In the conflict and the characters of "The Struggle for a Share" the features of the later written "Arsonists" and "The Chancellor and the Locksmith" are guessed.

We should also point out some materials that can be attributed to Lunacharsky, but which in reality do not belong to him. These are reviews published in the Paris Vestnik in 1910 (Nos. 4, 5, 7 for December 10, 17 and 31) and in 1911 (Nos. 1, 2, 4 for January 7, 14 and 28) signed by A. V ., and also signed by the same initials and in the same newspaper (1911, No. 3, January 21) a correspondent report on V.I. N. Tolstoy and Russian society”. A. V. is the well-known pseudonym of Lunacharsky, 47 and therefore it is logical to assume his authorship. However, in December 1910 and January 1911, as already noted, Lunacharsky had not yet arrived in Paris and could not attend Lenin's lecture. These materials could have been written by A. Valentinov or, most likely, by S. Volsky (A. V. Sokolov). 48In the index "Proceedings of A. V. Lunacharsky" these works do not appear.

A frontal examination of newspapers and magazines, and Lunacharsky collaborated in dozens of them, presumably, would help to identify new articles, reviews, speeches, abstracts of abstracts, correspondent reports, etc. Such discoveries significantly complement our understanding of the truly inexhaustible creative energy of Lunacharsky. However, another way of research is also possible: into the depths of the questions that make up the essence of his aesthetic views. After all, Lunacharsky, with all the variety of interests, was very constant in his likes and dislikes, he had cross-cutting themes to which he constantly turned. One of them, begun back in the years of the first Russian revolution, was the theme of proletarian culture.

Now, in the critical literature, a view has been established that an unambiguous assessment of Proletkult, which was widespread in the works of the 30s and early 50s, is inadmissible. Starting from the mid-1950s, articles and studies appeared, the authors of which, drawing on previously unknown materials, give a concrete analysis of various aspects of the activities of the Proletcult, mainly during its stormy heyday of 1918-1920. Less attention was paid to the origin of proletcult ideas, the prehistory of Proletcult. 49

V. V. Gorbunov tried to fill this gap in the first chapter of his book “V. I. Lenin and Proletkult”, however, the inertia of thinking, against which the author rightly rebels, affected precisely this part of his meaningful work. V. V. Gorbunov sees the origins of proletarian views in the theory and practice of the “Forward” group (A. A. Bogdanov, A. V. Lunacharsky, M. P. Pokrovsky, V. L. Shantsler, M. P. Lyadov, etc. ). He opposes to it the true creators of proletarian culture in Russia - the first working prose writers, poets, artists. “So,” concludes V. V. Gorbunov, “the workers who grouped around Pravda and the theorists of the foreign group Vperyod approached the creation of proletarian culture in different ways. Moreover, these were two opposite positions. 50

But, firstly, it is hardly legitimate to completely oppose works of art to aesthetic and philosophical theories. Secondly, this opposition is incorrect because many working poets-Pravdists later became participants in the Proletcult and the Forge adjoining it. Thirdly, views close to Bogdanov's can be found among critics of the Menshevik orientation. The main mistake of V. V. Gorbunov is that he considers the Vperyod group as something unified, ideologically integral, while from the very beginning it was torn apart by internal contradictions. Having actively declared itself in 1911-1912, the group subsequently disintegrates due to the sharp ideological heterogeneity of its composition. The "total" approach did not allow V.V. Gorbunov to single out A.V.51 The short history of Proletkult is the history of the struggle of Lenin and the party against nihilism, sectarianism, and the vulgarization of Marxism. The People's Commissar of Education, despite some tactical mistakes (underestimating the hegemonic claims of the leaders of Proletkult and the autonomous position of this organization), on the whole took the right party positions. It is characteristic that among the opponents of Lunacharsky in the Soviet years and the most violent subverters of the ideas of proletarian art defended by him were many figures of the Proletcult (P. Kerzhentsev), and later of the RAPP (L. Averbakh). “This philosophy of liberalism is rotten through and through,” L. Averbakh wrote about Lunacharsky’s aesthetic position, “it is hostile to Leninism and has nothing in common with the doctrine of the partisan nature of science.” 52

The tradition of exposing Lunacharsky was continued in the book by K. Zelinsky "At the turn of two eras." With external complementarity, K. Zelinsky in essence does not accept the views of Lunacharsky and, repeating the Rappovites and Proletkultists, finds in him both "omnivorousness" and "petty-bourgeois liberalism." “To the greatest extent, Lunacharsky's deviations from Marxism,” writes K. Zelinsky, “made themselves felt in questions of the proletarian movement. Here Lunacharsky often found himself in the same company with Bogdanov and others who pretended to be proletarian theoreticians, but in fact preached non-Marxist theories. 53

However, Lunacharsky's belonging to the Vperyod group never meant complete solidarity with Bogdanov and his like-minded people on the question of proletarian culture. This circumstance should be fully taken into account.

Under the conditions of a revolutionary upsurge, the ideas of proletarian culture had to be defended against both intellectual skepticism and pseudo-Marxist vulgarism. The first position - bourgeois skepticism - was most fully expressed in the articles of A. Potresov (Starover) "On Literature without Life and on Life without Literature", "More on the Question of Proletarian Culture", etc. The Menshevik leader recognizes the existence of works reflecting the class struggle working people, and condescendingly notes the merits of the "old-time idealist" George Sand, the "sentimental" Dickens, the "sick" Heine. What they created, according to Potresov, is only "raw material for culture, but not culture." In modern times, he does not find anything worthy of attention and interest: "... the proletariat has created a great culture of practical action, and has not even begun to create a culture of art."54 The reason, the critic believes, lies in the inexorable laws of the class struggle, which absorbs the entire conscious life of the worker, leaving not a minute of free time for art. The proletarian culture is purely practical, not rich, lacking variety: "The psyche is being created ... of proletarian Sparta and Athens cannot be created." 55 A. Potresov stated the poverty of proletarian literature, but did not propose any measures to change the situation, which was generally a characteristic feature of the Menshevik methodology.

The article by A. Potresov initiated a discussion in which V. Valeryanov, Raf. Grigoriev, N. Cherevanin, J. Piletsky, I. Kubikov. However, since all of Potresov's critics saw in proletarian art only the feeble experiences of a few self-taught workers from among the workers, their arguments, often well-aimed, fell short. Declarative and unconvincing was the speech of V. Valeryanov (pseudonym of the future head of Proletkult V. Pletnev). And J. Pilecki spoke quite anecdotally: artists and poets, musicians and novelists will appear, "only the proletariat finds enough means to support them." 56 The whole point, it turns out, is the solvency of the working class.

A. Bogdanov also participated in the discussion, although his article “Is Proletarian Art Possible?” (1914), due to censorship conditions, was not published in Nasha Zarya and was published only after the revolution. 57A. Bogdanov correctly criticized Potres's idea of ​​art as the offspring of idleness and leisure, and argued that the proletariat had already created its own art. However, both Bogdanov and Potresov were related by the idea of ​​proletarian culture as something artificially created, isolated from the general course of human civilization. “The proletariat is alone in its struggle for socialism,” Bogdanov argued. - True, other people from other classes come to him and under his banners, those whom we are accustomed to call the socialist intelligentsia. But these are “white crows”, there are relatively few of them, and they are outcasts in the eyes of the society from which they came. And meanwhile, even in them there is a danger to proletarian socialism. 58

They were also brought together by the fact that both of them considered artistic creativity either the fruit of “a psychological subsoil, from which it is so difficult to get rid of, which cannot be borrowed, just as, in a certain sense, whole groups of ideas and programs can be borrowed” 59 (A. Potresov), or “the organizational form of a class life, a way of uniting the psychology of class forces” 60 (A. Bogdanov). Here bourgeois skepticism lends a hand to pseudo-Marxist vulgarism and the common basis for them was subjective idealism, intuitionism, understanding of the class psychology of the proletariat as a substance inaccessible and incomprehensible to the intelligentsia and people from other classes.

A. I. Ovcharenko rightly pointed out that in theoretical terms, the platform “occupied by the Menshevik liquidators did not fundamentally differ from the system of views defended by the right-wing German Social Democrats during the discussion that flared up on the pages of the Neue Zeit in 1912 . 61Continuing the comparison, it should be said that A. Potresov was the predecessor of Trotsky, who in the Soviet years repeatedly denied any achievements in proletarian literature, J. Piletsky in a peculiar way anticipated the Futurists with their theories of “social order”, and G. Aleksinsky - the Rappovites. A. Bogdanov and V. Pletnev in 1917 entered the leading core of the educated Proletkult, and this step logically followed from their previous activities. Thus, the discussion about proletarian culture on the eve of the First World War was a kind of test of strength, a rehearsal for those literary-critical battles that began soon after the October Revolution. How did Lunacharsky react to this dispute?

The Parizhsky Vestnik, from which we get much information about Lunacharsky, in 1911-1914 wrote only about his legal activities. There, for example, we will not find anything about his deeply secret work in the party school of Longjumeau. But on the other hand, there is information about Lunacharsky's teaching work in another audience. On October 1, 1911, a meeting of the Non-Party Workers' Club was held in Paris, at which the charter was adopted and the administration was elected. 62The workers' club was an educational institution, and Lunacharsky did not remain aloof from its activities. From the first days of January 1912, lectures for workers were announced on Wednesdays. The first was called "The Beginning of Art". In the 20th of January, a break was made in the lectures, since Lunacharsky undertook a trip to the Russian colonies in Switzerland, during which he was supposed to read a number of essays on literary topics. In the future, Lunacharsky continued to lecture.

Judging by the reports of the Paris Gazette, his participation in the Non-Party Workers' Club was especially intense in 1913. On January 29, February 5, 12, 24 and 26, and March 5, Lunacharsky gave lectures on art. Together with the workers, he visited the Louvre, an art exhibition in the Grand Palais, a porcelain museum in Sevres, made excursions to Meudon and Versailles. On April 2, 1913, he began lecturing on general literature. Lectures were given by Lunacharsky in October, November 1913, January and February 1914. The non-party workers' club ceased its work at a liquidation meeting on April 27, 1914. 63

About these lectures by Lunacharsky, we only know that they were read, their notes or plans have not been preserved; it is possible that they did not exist, and the lectures were free and unconstrained improvisation. Nevertheless, it must be considered that the lectures at the Non-Party Workers' Club of Paris were Lunacharsky's last attempt before 1917 to give a systematic exposition of the history of universal literature. Thus, it can be assumed that the lectures of 1913-1914 precede the courses that the People's Commissar of Education gave in the auditoriums of the Communist University, that in general terms the courses developed with him precisely then in Paris, and in 1923-1924 Lunacharsky, who was busy with many other things, I had to "mobilize old knowledge, only very relatively replenishing it by reading new materials" (vol. 4 , p. 7).

Speaking to the students of the Communist University, Lunacharsky pursued two goals: “On the one hand, to outline a Marxist approach to literature, to indicate the connection between writers and literary works with the characteristics of a given era and to reveal their class essence and, on the other hand, to instill in my young listeners a love of literature. , the ability to reckon with the legacy of the past not only as some kind of damned garbage of hated antiquity, but as a whole series of great efforts of thought, feeling and fantasy aimed at the victory of humane principles (which form the basis of modern socialism) over all kinds of darkness "(t 4 , pp . 7–8).

Evidently Lunacharsky was guided by the same ideas in his Paris lectures to the workers. From the listeners of Lunacharsky in the workers' club, a circle "Proletarian Culture" (another name is the "League of Proletarian Culture") arose. The participants in these meetings lived a difficult life, they were interrupted by odd jobs, in the past they had revolutionary work, prison, stages. The son of a railroad worker from near Buguruslan, later a famous poet M. P. Gerasimov, worked in the mines in Belgium, as a mechanic at the Renault plant, sailed as a fireman on ships in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and in general “did not walk all over Europe”. 64M. Gerasimov recalled: “But most of all I fell in love with Paris. Here, on White Queen Street, there was a workers' club where a circle of workers' writers met. A. Lunacharsky, P. Bessalko, F. Kalinin came there. They read their works to each other. Anatoly Vasilyevich was our head. 65

Other participants in the meetings thought so too. One of them, F. Kalinin (Arkady), made an attempt to outline the program of the Proletarian Literature circle. He wrote: “The intelligentsia in the labor movement plays the role of the head, it thinks, and sometimes even feels for the workers. But more and more often we see independent literary performances by genuine workers. The proletariat begins to speak for itself, it begins to organize its own thoughts and feelings... Only workers can be members of the workers' circle "Proletarian Culture". He makes it his task to organize a spontaneously growing literary movement among the workers. 66It was planned to publish a magazine in which the brightest works of the workers could be published. Due to lack of funds, this plan was not carried out. The address was indicated where manuscripts should be sent, not embarrassed by shortcomings: "Paris, rue Roli, 11, Anatole Lunatcharsky." Thus, it becomes clear who was the true organizer and leader of the Parisian circle.

The Proletarian Culture circle was created by Lunacharsky in the spirit of the ideas that formed the content and pathos of his correspondence with Gorky. Gorky's many-sided work with self-taught writers and Lunacharsky's Parisian circle, which brought together emigrant workers M. Gerasimov, A. Gastev, P. Bessalko, F. Kalinin, and others, are phenomena of the same order. And if in Russia A. Potresov and other Menshevik critics were an opponent of Gorky's cultural undertakings, then in Paris G. Aleksinsky spoke out against Lunacharsky. He immediately gave the character of a rough study to his polemic. He accused F. Kalinin and A. Lunacharsky of “blunting the class struggle”, of drawing closer to the liberals, and called the call for organizing a circle “counter-revolutionary”. 67G. Aleksinsky believed that within the framework of bourgeois society it was impossible to create a proletarian culture and any attempts in this direction were “politically harmful”.

Answering him, Lunacharsky declared that “the proletariat will not allow anyone to castrate itself in any respect”, that the activity of the proletariat in the cultural field is natural and necessary, because it does not oppose economic and political tasks, but, on the contrary, supports them. “And one more remark,” continued Lunacharsky. - Expressing his subjective judgments, G. Aleksinsky considered it necessary to provide his signature with the title: member of the RSDLP. Every time, as a writer, in his public speech, he emphasizeshis membership, he thus, as it were, claims the responsibility of the party for his act, acts consciously, as its representative. I am also a member of the RSDLP and vigorously protest against the use of this title to sharpen political arrows, made up of nit-picking and used in personal polemics, which are by no means on behalf of any collective. 68

Although Aleksinsky continued to attack the editors of the "Paris Vestnik" with new letters, 69his defeat was obvious. Lunacharsky sealed his victory with Letters on Proletarian Literature (1914), his last pre-revolutionary speech on the subject. Even a cursory glance at Letters on Proletarian Literature is enough to make sure that this work has nothing in common with proletarian theories. But on the other hand, it is not difficult to find much in common between the theoretical part of this article (letter one) and "The Tasks of Social-Democratic Artistic Creativity." In understanding the tasks and possibilities of proletarian literature, Lunacharsky, even in this “French” period, remained true to the ideas that he developed at the time of ideological closeness with Lenin and intensive cooperation in the Bolshevik newspapers Vperyod and Proletary.

The author of the Letters rejects the definitions of proletarian literature "literature about the proletarians" and "literature written by the proletarians" as irrelevant to the subject: both of them are incorrect, insufficient, because they exclude the role of ideology. “When we say - proletarian, then by this we say - class. This literature must have a class character, express or develop a class world outlook” (vol. 7 , p. 169).

In the understanding of Lunacharsky, both before and now, proletarian literature does not cease to be literature, where, along with worldview, the role of feeling, mood, fantasy and passion, an original attitude to the world, innate imagery is extremely important. The critic quite rightly places these qualities above external formal decorations and stylistic elegance: they do not determine the true talent of the artist.

The satiety of the bourgeois public is expressed in the predilection for precisely these external ornaments. An idol at the time described was, for example, D'Annunzio, whose play "Pisanella" about a holy prostitute and martyr, the infernal mistress of men, was staged in 1913 at the Châtelet Theater in Paris. Lunacharsky wrote that the rich staging and the participation of the famous Ida Rubinstein in the title role did not save Pisanella from failure, because the playwright, director and actors pursued not artistic, but advertising goals: “Yes, a magnificent performance! It was dazzling! It was intoxicating! What colors! What a kaleidoscope! Extraordinary. And terribly, terribly ashamed. 70

On the eve of the First World War, one of the most popular figures of the theatrical Paris was Sacha Guitry, the creator of plays in which cheerful wit easily turns into cynicism and immorality. Lunacharsky reflects on the dizzying career of this "minion of Paris": who is he - just a privileged jester or a serious artist who put on a comfortable mask. “If Sacha Guitry is really very talented, then what a pitiful use of this talent made him make a Parisian success. And if he made the best of his talent, then what an empty talent this "great young man of the big boulevards" has. 71

Lunacharsky's exceptional erudition was always combined with deep democratism and opposed snobbery in any form - hence his sharp criticism of A. Potresov's positions in Letters on Proletarian Literature. Lunacharsky refutes A. Potresov's assertion that the workers do not have enough time for any kind of cultural development and independent literary work. He refers to the publication of works of proletarian literature: "Awakening", "Our Songs", "Collection of Poems of Proletarian Poets", etc. Illustrations for the general provisions of the letter of the first were the second and third letters: an analysis of E. Barnavol's drama "Cosmos" and creativity S. L. Philip. For the publication of "Letters" in 1925 in the collection "Etudes Critical" Lunacharsky swapped these chapters and, I think, did it deliberately in order to emphasize the great social and artistic value of the works of S. L. Philip - the everyday writer of the mournful life of Parisian and provincial clochards - according to compared with Barnavol, whose play, with the undoubted socialist sympathies of the author, suffered from abstraction and abstract images. The critic compared Cosmos with Verharn's Dawns and L. Andreev's Tsar-Hunger. By including two such different writers in an article on proletarian literature, the author wanted to show the wide artistic possibilities of the latter, which cannot be limited to the framework of any one creative direction.

Of the planned series of letters, "I managed to carry out only a little," 72 wrote Lunacharsky. The war, which set the pepper as a critic, interfered with other tasks. It can be assumed that further work on the article would have gone along the line of including new names: Verhaarn, Andersen-Nekse, Gorky, Bibik, the poets-“pravdnsts”, about whom he spoke in articles of the pre-war years, considering them in the general mainstream of proletarian literature.

The objective significance of Lunacharsky's speeches on questions of proletarian literature in no way fits into the narrow framework of the Vperyod faction. We have every reason to distinguish Lunacharsky from this group and say that the ideas he developed generalized the experience of advanced literature of the early 20th century and opened up new prospects for development. Of course, in some articles, especially those that were published in the Vperyod collections, Lunacharsky's factional inclinations also showed up, which caused a negative reaction from V. I. Lenin. However, if we see differences between Bogdanov and the unprincipled intriguer G. Aleksinsky, then Lunacharsky had no less differences with both of them.

As for Lunacharsky's listeners from the League of Proletarian Culture, although M. Gerasimov and F. Kalinin called Anatoly Vasilyevich "their head", in reality Bogdanov turned out to be closer to them. However, he should not be considered the evil genius of the Proletkult and all the mistakes and errors of this movement and all its organizations should be attributed to him personally. It would be more correct to say that the tendency towards separatism and isolation, nihilism and belief in the exceptional possibilities of one's class were to some extent inevitable, it was a kind of "childhood disease" that the emerging literature of the new society had to get over.

“We, as revolutionaries,” wrote A.K. Gastev, a member of the League of Proletarian Culture, “were loaded with enormous work. But sometimes we seemed to be left out of work and had to take up an artistic pen. Hence the terrible hypertrophy of enthusiasm in this literature for something special, the claim to lead new paths that were baptized as proletarian, super-proletarian, etc.” 73 In 1925, when these lines were written, A. Gastev finally departed from literature for the sake of another, as he considered, more interesting and more important scientific and industrial work at the Central Institute of Labor (CIT). Yes, and Proletkult was living out its years, its stormy and short-term activity has become a thing of the past, so the explanation of the director of the CIT should be taken into account.

In the work of Gastev, it would seem, most of all from the theories of A. Bogdanov, unfortunately, Z. Paperny does not write about this in the preface to the collection of Gastev's works, published in 1964. A comparison of the "Poetry of the Work Strike" with the ideas of "manufacturing science" would lead to curious results. Nevertheless, Gastev nowhere mentions the influence of Bogdanov, but writes that his first literary experiments, read in the Parisian “League of Proletarian Culture” in the presence of Lunacharsky, Bessalko and Kalinin, “reflected that restless and truly romantic time that was felt in 1912 and 1913 among the Russian proletariat. 74

Apparently, that's how it was. The first poems and prose works of the future proletarian cult figures expressed in a peculiar way the mindset of a certain part of the working class during the period of a new upsurge of the revolutionary movement in Russia and initially had no connection with the theories of Bogdanov. Bogdanov tried to put a theoretical basis under these mindsets, but they arose independently of him and not only in Paris.

The informative article by I. Z. Baskevich “The Idea of ​​Proletarian Literature in the Aesthetic Searches of A. V. Lunacharsky” convincingly shows that, despite external similarities and a certain commonality, there were differences between Lunacharsky and Bogdanov on the fundamental issues of the new art. The author of the article comes to the conclusion: “In his (i.e. Lunacharsky. - I.K. ) views on proletarian culture, art and literature, as they developed in the pre-October years, there are indeed fruitful tendencies that should be fully taken into account ". 75

It can be added that in some cases Lunacharsky was aware of the incompatibility of his views on proletarian culture with the views of Bogdanov and even entered into polemics, though without naming Bogdanov. “We are told,” wroteLunacharsky in "Letters on Proletarian Literature" - of course, individual excellent people from the bourgeois intelligentsia are pestering the proletariat. But they stand far from the life of the true proletariat, it is difficult for them to sing truly proletarian songs. Difficult, no doubt. But there can be no doubt for a moment that an artist of high talent, fascinated by the ideals of the working class, the spectacle of its mighty upsurge, and imbued with contempt and hatred for everything terrible and worthless, with which the modern way of life is filled, can render enormous help to the proletariat in the cause of its organization of his feelings” (vol. 7 , p. 172). Lunacharsky knew well who "told us" this way, and objected to the denial and underestimation of the role of the best people from the intelligentsia in the creation of proletarian culture.

The above programmatic words of Lunacharsky are fully applicable, for example, to Mayakovsky, whose work the critic became acquainted with later. Lunacharsky - and this is well shown by P. A. Bugaenko, N. A. Trifonov and other researchers - was always sincere and principled in his tireless struggle for the liberation of Mayakovsky from futuristic influences, for the development of everything valuable in the great talent of the proletarian poet. But Bogdanov was always an opponent of Mayakovsky and, condemning the study of proletarian poets from him, he wrote: “It is sad to see a proletarian poet who is looking for the best artistic forms and thinks to find them from some grimacing intellectual advertising Mayakovsky.” 76

Examples of such deep ideological and aesthetic differences between Lunacharsky and Bogdanov can be greatly increased. Lunacharsky never said the last word about Bogdanov and the theories he developed, about his attitude towards them and about the evolution of this attitude in the Soviet years. Knowing the process of his spiritual development, we can only assume that it would be quite decisive and judgmental.

Much clearer was the case with the writers - members of the "League of Proletarian Culture" F. Kalinin, P. Bessalko, M. Gerasimov, A. Gastev. Lunacharsky saw their talent, sincere desire to create a new, socialist art, devotion to the cause of the revolution and the proletariat, and therefore placed considerable hopes on these writers. At the same time, the critic notes the very "Makhaevian views", "embitterment against the intelligentsia" (vol. 2 , p. 224) in P. Bessalko. F. Kalinin, completely devoted to the ideas of proletarian culture, understood them apart from the entire course of the proletarian struggle, and Lunacharsky noted this with condemnation: “Comrade Arkady was less interested in politics.” 77

A. Gastev, even before the revolution, acted as a kind of "machine-worshipper". Developing these ideas in the Soviet years, he argued that the activity of the proletariat associated with machine production determines its psychology as anonymous, devoid of individual features and characteristics. Gastev even suggested calling a separate "proletarian unit" letters or numbers. “In the future,” he wrote, “this tendency will imperceptibly create the impossibility of individual thinking, transforming itself into the objective psychology of an entire class.” 78 These theories of the "depersonalization" of the proletariat were always alien to Lunacharsky, and he opposed them repeatedly and with arguments. 79

Even before the revolution, Lunacharsky sought to help young proletarian writers expand their cultural horizons: lecturing on literature, speaking in print, discussing the works of art by beginning authors, excursions to Paris museums and exhibitions, etc. This multifaceted work of criticism opposed isolationism, sectarianism, nihilism , which were soon proclaimed as the program installations of Proletkult. The process of creating a proletarian culture, which was just beginning, seemed to Lunacharsky a new, debatable matter in many respects, and therefore he was in no hurry to draw categorical conclusions and assessments. Lunacharsky's activity never coincided and, in principle, could not coincide with the process of formation of Proletkult, its organizational direction and final results.

Europe in the dance of death

The war found Lunacharsky in the small seaside town of Saint-Breven, near the port of Saint-Nazaire. In Saint-Nazaire, he saw the landing of English troops on the continent, the mobilization of the French into the army and the first captured Germans. He described these events in the correspondence "Tommies have arrived" and "Through France", which opened his French reports.

The picture of seeing off the recruits made a painful impression on Lunacharsky, full of tearing pity and grief. Having not yet fully comprehended the scale of what was being done, he already understood its irreparability, understood what suffering and ruin the war brings to the people. War is a grandiose catastrophe that breaks the habitual way of life that has been established for centuries - this is how Lunacharsky initially perceived it. As a symbol - "something suddenly pricked my heart" - you perceive the detail seen by the gaze of the reporter: "the bayonet of one of the guns, in the very place where the flag is attached to the others, is decorated with a small dangling penny doll. Obviously, the girl gave her favorite toy as a keepsake to Pana as a farewell gift. 80

Already in the first correspondence, the tone of Lunacharsky's reports is determined, distinguishing them from the general background of the official propaganda of the Russian Empire. Circumstances in most cases did not allow him to say what he wanted, but did not force him to say what was contrary to his convictions. Hence the author's restraint, descriptiveness, details in detail, but without far-reaching political conclusions - qualities that are little characteristic of Lunacharsky's nature.

Lunacharsky was not at the front, he did not see the horrors of Verdun and Ypres, and yet, reading his essays, you get a fairly clear idea of ​​the life of France during the war years, of the mindset of various circles in the country. Lunacharsky wrote reports from Rouen, Le Havre, Saint-Andrés, Orleans, from the "affectionate city" of Bordeaux, where the capital of France had temporarily moved, from Paris, which "does not want to have fun." He wanted to visit Champagne - fierce battles took place there, the memory of which is still preserved by countless cemeteries of the French, British and Germans, the facade of the famous Reims Cathedral disfigured by German bombardment. But the authorities did not let him in, and he was forced to confine himself to translating a French report from the Journal de Geneve. Lunacharsky in the Bourbon Palace at meetings of parliament met and talked with the ministers - socialists M. Samba and J. Guesdom. He made it clear to the Russian reader that he did not approve of their cooperation in the bourgeois government.

The military theme occupies a central place in the literary-critical articles of Lunacharsky in 1914-1917. The attitude towards the war is the main criterion for evaluating the behavior of the European intelligentsia. He bitterly states: “The critical thought of the best representatives of the European intelligentsia could not withstand the pressure of the patriotic mood. You can count on your fingers those who have kept their conscience and their consciousness independent of addictions. 81

Of course, the extent to which these sentiments are shared by different artists is not the same. Yes, the reasons are different. It is one thing, the sincere delusions of a great poet like E. Verharn, another thing, the conscious attitude of all sorts of manufacturers of "patriotic stews." And Lunacharsky is not inclined to smear all writers with the same black chauvinistic paint.

Miruel's anti-German libel "Colette Bados" based on the plot of the novel of the same name by M. Barres and "Guardian Angels" by Marcel Prevost interested critics only as a kind of sign of the times. He knew well that one should not expect any "convictions" from these gentlemen. Moreover, works composed according to the recipes of “patriotic frenzy” (A. I. Herzen) were almost always artistically weak and psychologically unreliable. Lunacharsky constantly notes that talent often leaves the artist who has become under the banner of reaction. "Such artistic strength, such meticulous work, such convinced conscientiousness were expended on such vileness," 82 Lunacharsky wrote of the production of Guardian Angels on the Parisian stage.

This metamorphosis upsets Lunacharsky most of all: after all, many of the writers were the flower of the European intelligentsia, were the heroes of his pre-war articles. The critic had a right to expect that they would justify his predictions and hopes. Lunacharsky was critical of P. Faure, found in him a lot of Lamartine vagueness, but appreciated his sincerity and spontaneity, considered him an original democrat artist (“The Prince of Poets at the People’s University” - 1913). And so P. Faure, the “prince of poets”, in his warlike verses, forgetting about elementary decency, attacked the Germans as a nation with the most obscene abuse (“Poetry and War” - 1915). G. Hauptmann responded to Romain Rolland's call to speak out against the German bombing of the ancient Belgian city of Louvain with the same rudeness. Genuine poetry can only be inspired by humane, emancipatory ideas. Having shown the artistic inconsistency of the “uniform” writings, Lunacharsky did not disregard the journalistic responses of the writers. He revealed the internal inconsistency of Maeterlinck's book "Fragments of War", the author's balancing between abstractly understood love and hatred ("Maeterlinck's Thoughts on War" - 1916), gave an assessment of the nationalist statements of the German playwright H. Sudermann, his attempts to idealize German imperialism and the Kaiser himself .83

It is known that for many of those who in 1914 joined the common jingoistic choir, although on different sides of the front, nationalism and chauvinism turned out to be an accidental and temporary blindness. The merit of Lunacharsky is that he worked tirelessly to open the eyes of artists and their readers to the nature, causes and consequences of the imperialist war.

The roads of war brought Lunacharsky to Emil Verhaern. Their first meeting took place in Le Havre in the autumn of 1914, and the second in Lausanne in September 1916. 85 The critic did not approve of Verhaarn's "Belgian" position, but he treated it with understanding and believed in the moral rebirth of his beloved poet. It didn't arrive...

On the pages of the little-known Parisian newspaper Nachalo, Lunacharsky's article "Emile Verharn" was lost - a vivid example of party journalism and literary criticism, the first attempt to fully comprehend the poet's tragically cut short life and creative path. 86 The French censorship (just like the Russian censorship a little earlier in the article "Maeterlinck's Thoughts on the War") diligently worked on it: In four places it produced banknotes, and in total 77 lines of newspaper text were cut out! Apparently, we will never read this wonderful work in its entirety.

From the first days of the war, Lunacharsky searched among the European intelligentsia for those who, in an atmosphere of national-chauvinist bacchanalia, managed to resist official policy and propaganda. He found them in Romain Rolland, Karl Spitteler and Henri Barbusse. The war for the author of "Jean Christophe" became a huge spiritual crisis, which led to the renewal of his worldview and creativity. In the article “Farewell to the Past” (1931), R. Rolland calls August 1914 the beginning of the road he set off on, not imagining which horizons he would lose and which ones he would open. The slogan “Above the fight” proclaimed by R. Rolland at the beginning of the war (after the title of his famous article “Audessus de la melee”) did not in any way mean the position of a passive observer who evaded the everyday and social storms of the hermit, although this is how they tried to interpret it in France (for example , J. B. Barrer).87 In reality, as shown by Soviet literary critics, 88 Rolland never shied away from public life. That is why his call to rise up and fight against the madness of war aroused such hatred for him in the ruling circles of France and Germany. “Above the fray” meant for Rolland to be in the fray on the side of reason, progress, and the great values ​​of European culture.

The trouble is that this was the position of the noble loner, "the urgent struggle of the individual conscience against the instinct of the herd." 89Moreover, R. Rolland was well aware of the tragedy of isolation from anti-militarist forces and organizations, but at that time he treated the Social Democrats with distrust and pinned his hopes on “aristocrats of the spirit” like himself. The meeting with Lunacharsky opened up new prospects for him. “At the end of January 1915,” R. Rolland later wrote, “Anatoly Lunacharsky, the future Soviet commissar of public education, came to me. He was for me, one might say, the ambassador of the future - the herald of the coming Russian revolution, calmly, as if something had been decided, predicting its coming to me at the end of the war .. It is easy to understand that I felt a point under my feet, I felt that a new Europe, a new humanity , and my step became more confident and firm. 90

Commenting on this confession, V. E. Balakhonov notes that "in 1931 Rolland somewhat exaggerated the influence that this visit to Lunacharsky could have had on his train of thought." 91 Indeed, R. Rolland's "Diary of the War Years" and Lunacharsky's memoirs show that the first meeting revealed both the unity of views of the two interlocutors and their serious disagreements. Both Rolland and Lunacharsky agreed that the future of humanity was socialism. But is the new system capable of providing a wide scope for creative individuality? Will it not be another, more economically organized way of leveling the personality? Finally, is it really only violence and suppression that is needed for the advent of such a system?

Here Lunacharsky began to diverge from Rolland, whose humanism, for all its nobility, seemed to Lunacharsky abstract, akin to Tolstoy's non-resistance. Lunacharsky constantly felt the ground that Rolland was just gaining in 1915–1916 under his feet, and the reasoning and doubts of the French writer did not convince him. "It was sad to hear" (vol. 5 , p. 711) - this is how he later conveyed the impression of the conversation with Rolland.

However, ideological differences did not lead to alienation; on the contrary, they aroused a keen interest in each other and a desire to continue a written or oral discussion of the problems that were of interest to both of them. The friendly relations that began on January 29, 1915 continued until the death of Lunacharsky.

Under the influence of Rolland, Lunacharsky became deeply interested in the work of Karl Spitteler. 92 How did this poet, practically unknown in Russia, attract Lunacharsky? First of all, with his essay "Our Swiss Point of View" (December, 1914), in which he "stroked imperialism in general, German imperialism in particular" (Vol. 5 , p. 365). translated The Olympic Spring and The Bell Maidens, trying to reveal to the Russian reader the poetry and personality of the great Swiss, whom he, together with R. Rolland, put on a par with Goethe and Milton? Answering these questions, L. M. Yuryeva names such aspects of Spitteler's work as "the majesty and scale of his poetry, the world of high beauty and great passions." 93It is true that Lunacharsky is deeply close to the main idea of ​​Spitteler's poem "Prometheus and Epimetheus" that a person should strive for the full development of his natural talents. To what L. M. Yurieva said in her informative article, it should be added that Lunacharsky had been prepared earlier for the perception of Spitteler. The articles "Idealist and Positivist as Psychological Types", "In the Face of Doom", "Russian Faust" were written long before the acquaintance with Spitteler's work. In them we will find ideas that formed the content of Spitteler's works, while reading which Lunacharsky experienced "a feeling of delight and happiness" (vol. 5 , p. 362).

The stamp of Spitteler's influence is borne by some of Lunacharsky's dramas: not only The Magicians, Vasilisa the Wise, and Ivan in Paradise—here the author himself acknowledged his influence, 94 as well as Faust and the City, which was written at the time when K. . Spitteler. Noting the commonality - the revival of the characters of literary classics, the creation of synthetic images-symbols - we also see differences. First of all, this is the revolutionary nature of Lunacharsky, a quality that was not clearly expressed in Spitteler and was dissolved in his cosmogony and mythology.

Henri Barbusse's novel "Fire" Lunacharsky read in the original immediately after its publication in 1916. In a letter to the famous Swiss scientist A. Forel, he hurried to share his impressions: “Have you read a wonderful anti-militarist novel, rather a literary chronicle, Barbusse's Fire? It's a great thing, and I don't understand how the French censorship, usually ferocious, missed it? Perhaps it was the crowning of the book by the Academy of Goncourt that forced her to do so. So much the better, anyway. Unfortunately, there is little hope that a translation of this marvelous book will be published in Russia.” 95

After the February Revolution of 1917, when many censorship restrictions were lifted, Lunacharsky had the hope of seeing Barbusse's novel in Russian, and he, anticipating the translation, hastened to acquaint the reader with the novel in the article "The book is a feat." He called it a feat for many reasons. First, Barbusse, having volunteered for the front, described what he personally saw and experienced in the front lines. This circumstance alone would be enough to consider "Fire" as a reliable eyewitness account, a kind of "relation from the battlefield." Secondly, Lunacharsky was attracted by the deep democratism of Barbusse's book: its characters are ordinary soldiers, its content is "a diary of one platoon." Finally, and this is the most important thing for the critic, Barbusse's novel shows how the revolutionary idea unites the front-line soldiers, and they, previously immersed in everyday life, the hardships and horrors of combat life rise to a high level of class consciousness. It turns out that the coarse and ignorant mass of soldiers are able to put forward personalities like Corporal Bertrand with his curses on military glory and soldier's craft, with his glorification of the real hero who rose above the war - Karl Liebknecht. The episode with Bertrand's prophecy especially attracted Lunacharsky. He is also mentioned by Rolland in his review of Fire (March 1917),96 and Gorky in the preface to the first Russian edition of Barbusse's novel.

“It is true, but this truth is not yet for us,” says Bertrand, expressing the thoughts of the author, who “always thought so too.” 97 The realist artist Henri Barbusse doubts that the soldiers who are the heroes of his book, to whom he dedicated it, and other readers, could understand the whole truth about the war. But when that happens, wars will be impossible. High moral and ethical considerations forced Barbusse to write a book where each chilling scene of cruelty, abuse, mass murder is at the same time a scene of class insight and understanding by the characters who are their friends, who are enemies, who they are.

Truth is the highest law for Barbusse. Explaining his intention, the narrator declares: "I will put harsh words where necessary, because it is true." And when his platoon comrade soldier Bark says that “different gentlemen there will call you a pig” if the book is truthful and honest, he replies: “But I will write it that way. I don't care about these gentlemen." 98 The soldier's truth of Henri Barbusse was the truth of the workers and peasants, it opposed the bourgeois rhetoric and differed essentially from the ineffective appeals of the pacifists. “Barbusse,” Lunacharsky defines his position, “rests here on the heights of objective humanity, on the heights of the sharpest criticism of what is happening” (vol. 5, with. 379). In assessing the novel "Fire" as an outstanding phenomenon of socialist literature, Lunacharsky's thoughts completely coincided with the thoughts of Lenin and Gorky. 99

K. Spitteler, R. Rolland, A. Barbusse are three great writers who attracted Lunacharsky's special attention with their courageous behavior and loyalty to progressive ideals. One is tragic and heroic, the creator of the modernized myth of the 20th century, the second is the conscience of the European intelligentsia, a rebel, “the enemy of our enemies” (vol. 5 , p. 713), the third is “friend”, “brother”, “artist-warrior of the renewing the world of the proletariat” (vol. 6 , p. 282).

During the First World War, Lunacharsky wrote about literature and art, about the social life of France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, England, and Switzerland. And only about Russian literature, he wrote almost nothing. The share of Russian art in the critical activity of Lunacharsky during the war years is insignificant. The critic, however, strove, even within this circle, to raise and, if possible, to discuss questions of broad public interest. The phenomena that Lunacharsky observed and condemned in the cultural life of Western European states also took place in Russia. This means that Lunacharsky's conclusions about the "uniform" statements of Western writers, about the literature of "protective color" could also be transferred to Russian soil.

It is known that many Russian writers, to a greater or lesser extent, for a long time or for a short time, found themselves in the thrall of defencist sentiments. I. Bunin, A. Kuprin, L. Andreev wrote not the best pages in their biographies during these difficult years. A. N. Tolstoy, a correspondent for the Russian Cadets’ Russkiye Vedomosti, visited “in a wagon and on a horse, on foot and in a car, on all fields of the war, from the deep rear to the forward trenches.” 100 But everything he saw on the Russian-German front and captured in the talented book of essays “At War” A. Tolstoy subordinated to the idea: “The people went to war not for the sake of glory, but for the common cause of defending the fatherland.” 101A. Tolstoy, like many others, was guided by the false slogan of class "peace" in the face of the enemy of the "entire" fatherland. Democracy saved the writer from chauvinism, but did not save him from defencist illusions. 102

A. Blok's views on the war were more sober, although they did not take shape immediately. After a difficult year for the Russian army in 1915, in a notebook on March 6, 1916, the poet left the following characteristic entry: “Today I finally understood clearly that the distinguishing feature of this war is smallness (low). She is just a huge factory in operation, and this is her fatal meaning ... Hence the impossibility of inflating patriotism; hence the special deception of these little ones. 103

Gorky stood closest to Lunacharsky in understanding the nature of the war. However, Gorky's opportunities in the conditions of tsarist Russia were very limited. His article "Untimely", exposing chauvinism, was completely cut out by the censors from the newspaper "The Day" and was published only after 1917. A number of other anti-war plans of the writer were not destined to come true. However, Lunacharsky was not completely satisfied with his articles for the Russian press: "In many cases I had to say not what I had to say, not quite say what I wanted." 104

Lunacharsky was more frank and free in articles published in the Parisian newspapers Golos, Nashe Slovo, and Nachalo. He exposed the policy of social betrayal and called on the internationalists of Europe to unite. These brilliant pages of Lunacharsky's struggle with the madness of war, like all of his journalism, have not yet been fully studied, the vast majority of articles and correspondence have not been collected or published. 105

About one brochure
At the beginning of 1907, Lunacharsky was warned by his comrades about the impending arrest for his anti-government activities. 106 He was forced to leave his homeland. In February 1914, on the eve of the war, Lunacharsky went to Germany to read essays, but was arrested and spent several days in the royal prison in Berlin. This arrest was discussed in the European press. “Our colleague A.V. Lunacharsky,” wrote the Paris Vestnik, “will return from his tour of essays in Germany earlier than he expected. He was arrested in Berlin and honorably sent, accompanied by policemen, to the Belgian border. Thank you for not speaking Russian.” 107

And in 1915, Lunacharsky expected the same from the authorities of republican France. “At the beginning of 1915, it became stuffy in Paris. If I hadn't left there, I would probably have been expelled,” he later recalled . Where did Lunacharsky rush from "stuffy" Paris? Let's try to trace his routes through the countries of Western Europe in 1915.

December 30 (January 11) Lunacharsky writes in Paris an obituary for V. V. Krestovsky, 109 published in Kievskaya Mysl on January 20 (February 2). In the interval between January 11 and February 2, he left for Switzerland: on January 23 he delivered an essay in Geneva, 110 and on January 26 in Geneva he wrote his first letter to R. Rolland. 111 In addition to Geneva, Lunacharsky visited Bern and Basel, as evidenced by his articles "In an International Country", "From German Moods", "Next to War".

Lunacharsky was also in Switzerland in the first half of February, and then, not later than Sunday, February 21, 112 he returned to Paris. The second letter to R. Rolland was written in Paris on March 2. In it, Lunacharsky thanks Rolland's friends from the POW Aid Bureau and promises to use the sent documents in his next article. 113 In all likelihood, Mercy International, published in Kievskaya Mysl, was such an article. From February 21 to April 19, Lunacharsky was in Paris, as can be seen from his articles: “In Kraguevets”, under which is the place of writing - Paris; "Artists during the war" - Paris, March 30; "Declos Trial" - Paris, April 15; "Holiday 1916" - Paris, April 17; "Two essays" - Paris, April 19.

But the very next article, “Trip to Italy,” is marked Lugano, April 24. This means that between the dates of April 19 and 24, Lunacharsky arrived in Italy. Italian impressions were reflected, in addition to the above, in the articles "International Corner" and "The Tragedy of the Conquerors" - about S. Benelli's play "The Wedding of the Centaurs", which Lunacharsky saw in Turin. Lunacharsky did not stay long in Italy and returned to Paris at the end of April. On May 1, he was supposed to participate in a literary and musical evening, and on May 8, in a discussion of K. Zelevsky's essay. 115

Apparently, somewhere in May, Lunacharsky visited one of the hospitals in Paris, where Z. A. Peshkov, whom he knew from Capri, was being treated. 116 The article “At Z.A. Peshkov” tells in detail about the visit to the hospital and the conversation with Peshkov. “Before going to Switzerland, I tried to see him,” writes Lunacharsky. And the article itself is marked - Lausanne, June 3. This means that Lunacharsky went to Switzerland for the second time in 1915 in May, no later than June 3rd.

Apparently, this was the final move. Since that time, Lunacharsky's name has been found on the pages of Nashe Slovo in the lists of people who donate certain amounts from their essays to the newspaper's fund, but the newspaper does not say where Lunacharsky's essays took place. Previously, such announcements were regularly published. In a shop in 1915, Lunacharsky's last articles were published in Kievskaya Thought - the newspaper became more and more right-wing, and Lunacharsky's cooperation in it became impossible. 117 The article "The German-Roman skirmish in Bern" (published in Kievskaya Mysl on June 26) was already written in Switzerland. And all the articles of the second half of 1915 (the majority were published in the newspaper The Day), judging by the content, were not written in France.

The above dates and travel routes give an idea of ​​Lunacharsky's organizational work to rally the anti-militarist forces of Europe - after all, each trip was accompanied by articles, reports, essays, abstracts. After all, each publication in the Russian press at least partially opened the reader's eyes to the true causes and nature of the military catastrophe, to its consequences in the spiritual life of European states. The war sharpened Lunacharsky's sense of responsibility for the preservation of the cultural values ​​of mankind and the consciousness that only a revolution could save culture and art from destruction, from the corrupting spirit of imperialist propaganda. It was the war that helped Lunacharsky free himself from god-building; in its fire, the artificial paper building of an atheistic "religion" burned down. After moving to Paris, he stopped active propaganda of Machist views. Arguments in the spirit of the philosophy of Mach-Avenarius, interspersed in some literary-critical articles of the "Russian" and "Italian" periods, are encountered less and less in the future and completely disappear during the war years.

Of course, even in the Soviet years, we will find individual errors, cases of inconsistency, contradictions, etc. in Lunacharsky’s socio-political and literary-critical activities. 1914 and 1917. It is much more correct to associate them with the difficult situation on the literary and literary-critical front after the October Revolution, with the special position of Lunacharsky: both participant and arbiter in the literary movement of the 1920s.

The First World War, therefore, was an important period in the spiritual development of Lunacharsky, which predetermined his future path.

After moving to Switzerland and settling in the small town of Sainte-Legier near Bolomey, 118 Lunacharsky still lives the intense life of an internationalist revolutionary, publicist, critic, and writer. In December 1916, he created an original variation of Goethe's famous tragedy, the reading drama Faust and the City. Anticipating the imminent revolution in Russia and his place in it, he included pedagogy and public education in his circle of constant studies.

Between Lunacharsky and Lenin lay Lunacharsky's inexhaustible "forward leadership". Therefore, Lunacharsky, despite his internationalism and spiritual closeness to Lenin, was in opposition to the Bolsheviks on some issues. And this prevented direct contacts with Lenin even after Lunacharsky moved to Switzerland. 119 Under the leadership of Lunacharsky in Geneva, since August 25, 1915, factional collections Vperyod were published, in which articles were published both against Plekhanov and the defencists, and against the Bolsheviks, who were reproached for insufficient revolutionary spirit. Subsequently, Lunacharsky quite accurately described his views: “We took an international position, very close to the Leninists, although we tried in some trifles and details to dissociate ourselves from the left Zimmerwald, i.e. Lenin and Zinoviev.” 120

The prejudice of the "Vperyod" attacks against the Bolsheviks is quite obvious and needs no refutation. However, even in these articles we find Lunacharsky's important confessions: "The social-democratic trend led by Lenin is dear to us, too much is connected with its future in the near future of the Russian proletariat." 121

This was said just on the eve of the February Revolution of 1917. It was the revolution, for which Lunacharsky fought so hard to bring about, that swept away the artificial constructions of the Geneva Vperyod group and opened the way to Lenin's party for its best representatives. However, the differences and isolation between the Bolshevik-Leninists and the "Vperyodists" did not prevent them in some cases from acting together as a single political force. Solidarity with the leader of the revolution was clearly manifested in Lunacharsky's pamphlet "Italy and the War" - his largest work of the war years. This work has an interesting creative history, the characters of which, along with the author, were V. I. Lenin, A. M. Gorky and M. N. Pokrovsky. 122

In 1915, Gorky conceived the idea of ​​publishing a series of pamphlets under the general title "Europe before and during the war." The pamphlets, according to the writer, were supposed to "draw up an indictment against capitalism as the causative agent of the catastrophe experienced by the world." 123 MP Pokrovsky undertook to conduct negotiations from Paris. On November 7, 1915, he sent a letter to Lunacharsky in Switzerland with the following content:

“Dear Anatoly Vasilyevich!

A publishing house has been set up in Petrograd, whose task it is, among other things, to acquaint the working-class and general democratic public with the causes and significance of the crisis that Europe is experiencing. This is supposed to be done in the form of a series of pamphlets under the general title "Europe before and during the war." Each pamphlet should focus on one of the countries involved in the conflict and explain to the reader the conditions that brought that country to war. Brochures are supposed to be quite thorough, with specific examples, figures, etc. In a word, the maximum size of brochures can be increased to 5 sheets of 40,000 letters.

You can judge the direction of the publishing house by the fact that the topics, as M. Gorky writes to me on this subject (through him this matter came to me), should be developed “quite objectively, from the point of view of economic materialism, without any equivocations to the side chauvinism, nationalism, etc.” It can be seen from this letter, by the way, that the rumors about Gorky's own nationalism are, in any case, greatly exaggerated.

Would you take on the theme "Italy before and during the war" in this series. You know the plot like no one else, you write very quickly, and the deadline of February 1 of the old style probably does not frighten you. 124

The proposal coincided with the interests of Lunacharsky, he was pleased with any opportunity to speak to the Russian reader, and he agreed (the letter is dated November 11, 1915). 125 In a second letter dated November 16, 1915, M. Pokrovsky reports that Lunacharsky received a reply, that Rothstein would write a pamphlet about England, Zinoviev about Austria-Hungary, and he himself, Your Obedient Servant, about France. “General economic information (growth of financial and industrial capital in the present crisis in a special pamphlet), continued Pokrovsky, undertook to write Vl. Ilyin 126 (one of the pseudonyms of V. I. Lenin. - I. K. ) ".

Indeed, by this time, V. I. Lenin also received an invitation from Pokrovsky, he agreed and set to work. The result was the famous book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 127

It can be seen from the correspondence between Pokrovsky and Lunacharsky that in February 1916 Lunacharsky's work on the pamphlet was completed and in March the manuscript was sent to Paris. Lenin had to solve more complex problems - the preparatory materials for the book of 5 printed sheets made up a large volume of Notebooks on Imperialism, ten times larger than the book itself, so the pamphlet was written later, in the summer of 1916.

The authors of the pamphlets faced the difficulties of censorship. Pokrovsky’s letter of March 17, 1916 speaks quite eloquently about them: “I read your excellent brochure with great pleasure, dear Anatoly Vasilyevich, and the pleasure is enhanced by the consciousness of the aristocracy of my position: for this pleasure will hardly be available to many. It is too clearly written for the Russian military censorship to doubt its duty in this case. 128

Lunacharsky's manuscript made an ambivalent impression on Gorky. In fact, he liked her. In form, he found it somewhat feuilleton and wordy. 129

The pamphlets of Lenin and Lunacharsky were detained at the printing house and saw the light only after the Provisional Government abolished the old censorship legislation, that is, in the summer of 1917. Moreover, the first edition of Lenin's work did not go without removing those passages that contained sharp criticism of Kautsky and Martov. In its entirety, Lenin's book "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" saw the light of day only in the Soviet years. Lenin's work is one of the outstanding works of creative Marxism. The correctness of Lenin's conclusions has been irrefutably proven by the subsequent development of human society. M. N. Pokrovsky wrote that Lenin's book gave "the meaning and illumination of the entire series of pamphlets on imperialism." 130With regard to Lunacharsky, this is especially true. His pamphlet fits well into the general Leninist picture as a kind of addition and confirmation on the example of one European country.

In the pamphlet "Italy and the War" the author set a rather modest task: to give a "historical and social analysis of Italian patriotism" 131Lunacharsky convincingly shows that the history of Italy since the middle of the 19th century has been a constant balancing act between Scylla and Charybdis, i.e., between monarchist Austria and republican France. The policy of maneuvering and concessions infringed on national pride, and it acquired either a democratic, socialist coloring, or a crudely chauvinistic one. The policy of the governments is regarded as an expression of the economic interests of the Italian bourgeoisie, which is fully consistent with the basic provisions of Lenin's work. The reader passes through a whole gallery of heroes of Italian history: from the brilliant figures of Garibaldi and Mazzini to the insignificant in every respect Cavour and the "Cavourics". Moving on to the present and depicting the situation in Italy during the war years, Lunacharsky talks about the press and the labor movement in the country. The critic's political intuition showed itself in a sharply negative attitude towards any "left" phraseology and its bearers in the ranks of the socialist movement. Lunacharsky writes: “These are bawlers, intoxicated by the sounds of their own voices and the sonorous phrases of their articles. Offended by society, unsatisfied, but full of temperament, they are always ahead of the proletariat, like a lively dog ​​ahead of the hunter, and everything is not revolutionary enough for them ... But they are extremely unbalanced and, with the ease of a tightrope dancer, can flutter from one position to the opposite.132 A striking type in this respect is Mussolini. The portrait of the future leader of the Italian fascists is drawn by Lunacharsky with pamphlet sharpness.

"Italy and War" is a publicistic work. And yet this work is also indicative of Lunacharsky's literary-critical activity. Lunacharsky's literary criticism was never closed in on itself, it was always turned to public life. And although in this case the literary and artistic life of Italy is not shown - it is implied, and since the brochure gives the impression of being unfinished, the addition of a separate chapter on the culture and art of pre-war Italy, apparently, was part of Lunacharsky's plan. It can even be said that a number of Lunacharsky's articles on Italian art and aesthetics ("Theatrical Impressions" - 1905, "Italian Fiction" - 1910, "The Newest Italian Drama" - 1911), articles about Sem Benelli, E. Corradini, B. Croce, D'Annunzio, Marinetti and others. and there is a kind of supplement to the pamphlet "Italy and the War." Marxist critics have always considered aesthetic activity and aesthetic cognition as part of human social activity. This is the fundamental achievement of Marxist thought in comparison with all previous aesthetic schools.

Perhaps the historian will find certain gaps in the picture drawn by Lunacharsky of the complex and variegated Italian reality on the eve of the war. However, it is indisputable that this bright and expressive picture is drawn from Marxist-Leninist positions.

Lunacharsky's work irritated the Kadet "Russian wealth". In an anonymous review of it (the review was published after the October Revolution), Lunacharsky is called "one of the noisiest representatives of the Soviet government." 133 "Naturally, one cannot expect an impartial attitude towards the life he depicts" 134 - the reviewer stated. Perhaps the most remarkable thing in this review is an attempt to justify the renegade Mussolini, to whom, it turns out, Lunacharsky also reacted “biasedly”. 135

Lunacharsky's "partiality" was Bolshevik partisanship, giving him the opportunity to see phenomena in development and foresight to foresee their future. Thanks to this quality, brilliantly manifested in the best pre-revolutionary works, he naturally and organically became one of the leaders of the October uprising of 1917.

O. V. Semenovsky rightly writes about this: “It is quite possible that the idea of ​​the article “The Tasks of Social-Democratic Artistic Creativity” was born by Lunacharsky as a result of an exchange of views with Lenin on these issues” (see: Semenovsky O. V. In the struggle for realism, Kishinev, 1976, p. 191).
Lenin V.I. Full. coll. cit., vol. 12, p. 100–101.
Of course, party membership for Lenin is a concept with many contents, and he used it not only in articles on literary topics. But in the article “Party Organization and Party Literature”, the aesthetic essence of party spirit as a quality of advanced literature is brought to the fore (see: Jezuitov A. N. V. I. Lenin on the party character of literature. - In the collection: V. I. Lenin and questions of literary criticism, M.–L., 1961, pp. 75–78, and Kuzmenko, Yu. , On the party spirit of criticism, in: Methodological problems of modern literary criticism, M., 1976, pp. 37–54.
Memories of V. I. Lenin, vol. 1. M., 1956, p. 180. _
Lenin V.I. Full. coll. cit., vol. 48, p. 182. _
Foreword by M. Gorky "A few words" to the book: Virtanen Ya. Poems. L., 1933, p. 6. This article by Gorky was not fully used by our literary criticism, although its theoretical value is beyond doubt.
Lenin V.I. Full. coll. cit., vol. 1, p. 271. _
V. I. Lenin on Literature and Art. M., 1967, p. 633.
Meilakh B. S. Lenin and problems of Russian literature of the late XIX - early XX century. L.. 1956, p. 156. _
Chukovsky K.I. Sobr. soch., vol. 1. M., 1965, p. 17. _
In his memoirs about Lunacharsky (1959), Chukovsky did not say a word about the collision with him in 1906.
Lunacharsky supported K. Chukovsky in his work on preparing for publication a collection of works by Nekrasov, free from censorship distortions. He wrote an afterword to Chukovsky's book about Walt Whitman (1918).
Gorky A. M. Sobr. soch., vol. 14. M., 1951, p. 307.
Lomunov K. II. Leo Tolstoy in the modern world. M., 1975, p. 427.
Lomunov K. N. Leo Tolstoy in the modern world, p. 451. _
True, he included the article "The Death of Tolstoy and Young Europe" (1911) in the collection "Literary Silhouettes" (1923), although he made large cuts in it.
Lenin V.I. Full. coll. cit., vol. 20, p. 19. _
Warriors. About Tolstoy, - In Sat: Forward. Collection of articles on current issues. Paris, 1911, No. 3, stb. 17. _
Warriors. About Tolstoy. - In Sat: Forward ..., Stb. 18. _
There.
Plekhanov G. V. Art and literature, p. 655. O. Semenovsky repeats this idea of ​​Plekhanov with great sympathy in his book "Marxist criticism of Tolstoy and Chekhov" (Kishinev, 1968, pp. 241-243).
Lunacharsky A. V. The death of Tolstoy and young Europe. - "New Life", 1911, No. 2, stb. 118. _
Warriors. About Tolstoy. - In Sat: Forward ..., Stb. 18. _
Lunacharsky A. V. The death of Tolstoy and young Europe. - "New Life", 1911, No. 2, one hundred. 119. i
There.
Lunacharsky A. V. Faces of Tolstoy. - "The Day", 1913, March 28, No. 84.
Plekhanov G. V. Art and literature, p. 662.
Warriors. About Tolstoy. - In Sat: Forward ..., Stb. 20. _
Same place, stb. 21. _
Literary heritage, vol. 75, book. 2. M., 1967, p. 361.
Ibid, p. 386, 415.
Lunacharsky A. V. The death of Tolstoy and young Europe. - "New Life", 1911, No. 2, stb. 222. _
Gorky A. M. Sobr. soch., vol. 14. M., 1951, p. 290. _
Lunacharsky A. V. Faces of Tolstoy. - "The Day", 1913, March 28, No. 83.
Lunacharsky A. V. About Tolstoy. M.–L., 1928, p. 4. 10 Law. 344 145
The date is established according to the reports of the Paris Bulletin. On March 25, 1911, the newspaper wrote: “After some time, A. Lunacharsky arrives in Paris, who will read an essay on the topic: “Maxim Gorky. The most important moments of his artistic evolution. On April 8, Parizhsky Vestnik specified: "Lunacharsky's lecture will take place on April 11 at the Salle des Societes Savantes."
"Paris Bulletin", 1911, December 2, No. 48.
The newspaper "Paris Vestnik" was published from November 19, 1910 and was closed in the first days of the World War. Initially, the editors (redacteur en chef) were V. Belaya and V. Dyachenko-Tarasov. Several issues in 1911 were released by G. Khrustalev (Nosar). Under him, the newspaper made attacks against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. However, Khrustalev was soon expelled from the newspaper for embezzling money from the editorial cash desk. Since 1912, the Parizhsky Vestnik was published by M. Morozov, a participant in the collections Literary Decay, critic, poet, member of the RSDLP since 1901.
"Paris Gazette". 1911, December 2, No. 48.
"Paris Bulletin", 1912, March 23, No. 12.
Ibid, 1911, April 8, No. 14.
Ibid, 1912, December 21, No. 51.
There. The outline of the abstract in No. 44, November 2, and the correspondent report in No. 45, November 9.
Ibid, 1913, March 1, No. 9.
“Paris Vestnik”, 1912, January 6, No. 1. “The hall could not accommodate all those who came to the evening - more than 1000 people. I especially liked the review "Right - Left" (Ibid., 1912, January 20, No. 3).
"Paris Bulletin", 1912, April 20, No. 16.
He signed some of his articles: for example, “Letter to E. Verharn” (“Our Word”, 1915, April 18).
Masanov I.F. Dictionary of pseudonyms, vol. 1. M., 1956, p. 33, 35.
In the book of V. V. Gorbunov “V. I. Lenin and Proletkult ”(M., 1974) describes in detail the history of the study of Proletkult by Soviet historians and literary critics (pp. 7-12). The books of A. S. Malinin “Lunacharsky on proletarian writers” (Minsk, 1965), P. A. Bugaenko “A. V. Lunacharsky and Soviet literary criticism” (Saratov, 1972), N. A. Trifonova “A. V. Lunacharsky and Soviet Literature ”(M., 1974), A. I. Ovcharenko’s brochure “Our Lunacharsky” (M., 1976). They are not named in VV Gorbunov's book.
Gorbunov V. V. V. I. Lenin and Proletkult, p. 36. _
This shortcoming was pointed out in a review by Yu. Surovtsev:

“One should have wished for a more versatile coverage of the huge figure of Lunacharsky. Its scale is felt, but sometimes the tone that speaks of his weaknesses is unnecessarily “revealing” and, most importantly, the aesthetic aspects of his work as a critic, an art theorist, should have been described more fully than it has been done.

(Surovtsev Yu. Proletkult and proletkultism. - "Questions of Literature", 1975, No. 4, pp. 261–262).


Literary heritage, vol. 1. M., 1931, p. 4. _
Zelinsky K. L. At the turn of two eras. M., 1959, p. 308.
Potresov A. About literature without life and about life without literature. - "Our Dawn", 1913, No. 4–5, p. 70. _
Ibid., 1913, No. 6, p. 70. _
Piletsky L. Proletariat and culture. - "Our Dawn", 1914. No. 1, p. 09. _
Bogdanov A. About proletarian culture. L. - M., 1924.
Maksimov (Bogdanov A.). The proletariat in the struggle for socialism. - In Sat: Forward, 1910, July, stb. 4. _
Potresov A. About literature without life and life without literature. - "Our Dawn", 1914, No. 2, p. 95. _
Bogdanov A. About proletarian culture, p. 105. _
Ovcharenko A. I. Our Lunacharsky, p. 20–21.
"Paris Bulletin", 1911, October 7, No. 40.
Ibid, 1914, April 25, No. 17.
Gerasimov M. Poems. M., 1959, p. 9. _
There. The house where the meetings of the Non-Party Workers' Club (rue de la Reine Blanche, 12 bis) were held has not been preserved.
"Paris Vestnik", 1913, March 22, No. 12. In a letter to the editors of the "Paris Vestnik" (1912, April 19, No. 16), F. Kalinin wrote that the appeal was written by him on behalf of the Proletarian Culture circle, and Lunacharsky asked to stylistically straighten and edit it.
"Paris Bulletin", 1913, March 29, No. 13.
"Paris Bulletin", 1913, April 5, No. 14.
Ibid., 191.3, Nos. 14, 17 for 5 and 26 April.
Lunacharsky A.V. Pisanella. - "The Day", 1913, June 5, No. 148; see also: He. "Pisanella" and "Magdalene". - "Theatre and Art", 1913, No. 15.
Lunacharsky A.V. Minion of Paris. - "Paris Bulletin", 1913, October 18, No. 42.
Lunacharsky A. V. Critical studies, p. 7. _
Gastev A. K. Poetry of the working blow. M., 1004. p. 20. _
Ibid, p. 25. _
Problems of the development of Soviet literature, vol. 2(6). Saratov, 1975, p. 71. _
Bogdanov A. About proletarian culture. M.–L., 1924, p. 170. Here the author made a note, an indistinct reservation: "The undoubted talent and strength of Mayakovsky, of course, is not in these specific features of his form."
Lunacharsky A. B. Memories and impressions, p. 236. _
"Proletarian Culture", 1919, No. 9–10, p. 44–45.
See, for example: Lunacharsky A.V. An alarming fact. - Pravda, 1928, June 2, No. 127.
Lunacharsky A. V. In the rear. - "Kievskaya thought", 1914, October 16, No. 285.
Literary heritage, vol. 82, p. 295. _
Lunacharsky A. V. "Beat the foreigners." - "The Day", 1913, October 22, No. 286.
CPA IML , f. 142, op. 1, unit ridge 27. The article against G. Suderman has not been published, except for a few passages in Literary Heritage (vol. 80, p. 634).
Lunacharsky A. From Belgian moods. - "Kievskaya thought", 1914, November 9, No. 309.
Lunacharsky A. Verharn in Switzerland. - "The Day", 1916, October 2, No. 271.
"Nachalo", 1916, December 24, No. 73. The article "Emil Verharn" is not recorded in any of the bibliographic indexes of Lunacharsky's works. Published with our comments on Sat. "AND. V. Lunacharsky. Research and materials” (L. 1978, pp. 200–206).
See the objections of I. I. Anisimov in the introductory article to the 13th volume of the collected works of R. Rolland (Moscow, 1958, pp. 6–7).
See: Balakhonov V.E. Romain Rolland in 1914–1924. L.. 1958; Motyleva T. L. Romain Rolland. M., 1969; in others
Rolland R. Sobr. soch., vol. 13. M., 1958, p. 7. Rolland's autobiographical novel Clerambo, begun during the war, originally wanted to be called One Against All.
Rolland R. Sobr. cit., vol. 13, p. 244. Lunacharsky intended to translate Rolland's anti-war articles into Russian and publish them with his own commentaries. However, this intention was not destined to come true, and Lunacharsky limited himself to a brief summary of the conversation in the newspaper Kyiv Mysl (1915, No. 72, 73, March 13 and 14). In the comments to the Collected Works of Lunacharsky (vol. 5 , p. 709) it is erroneously stated that their meeting took place in March 1915, while from the above quotation it can be seen that Lunacharsky and Rolland first met at the end of January 1915.
Balakhonov V. E. Romain Rolland in 1914–1924, p. 51. _
R. Rolland and K. Spitteler first met in April 1915. Rolland described friendly relations with the seventy-year-old poet in “Memoirs of Karl Spitteler and conversations with him” (see: Rolland R. Sobr. soch., vol. 14. M., 1958, pp. 400–507).
Yurieva L. M. Karl Spitteler. — In: Literature of Switzerland. M., 1969, p. 210. _
Lunacharsky A. V. Memories and impressions, p. 53. _
Cit. according to Art.: Lunacharskaya I. A. Accomplishments and plans. - "New World", 1975, No. 11, p. 255. IA Lunacharskaya reports in this article that Lunacharsky's letters are stored in the Forel archive in Zurich. They haven't been published yet.
R. Rolland's review first appeared in Russian in Lunacharsky's authorized translation (The Day, 1917, January 21), and then in French in the Journal de Genève (1917, March 19).
Barbus Henri. Fire. Clarity. True stories. M., 1907, p. 158. In the comments to this edition (p. 663), Lunacharsky's article "The Book is a Feat" (The Day, April 9, 1917) is not named among the first responses to Fire.
Barbus Henri. Fire. Clarity. True Stories, p. 158. _
V. I. Lenin expressed his opinion about the novel “Fire” in a conversation with Lunacharsky (see: Lunacharsky A. V. Memories and Impressions, pp. 319–320). A. M. Gorky in 1919 wrote a preface to A. Barbusse's book "On Fire".
Tolstoy A. N. Full. coll. soch., vol. 3. M., 1949, p. 475. _
There.
Y. Andreev wrote that pre-revolutionary A. N. Tolstoy’s love for the people “was more of a liberal, consumerist kind, and democracy was declarative” (see: Andreev Y. Revolution and Literature, ed. 2nd M., 1975 , pp. 41–42).
Block A. Notebooks. M., 1965, p. 283. _
Lunacharsky A.V. Europe in the dance of death. M., 1967, p. 8. _
See: IP Kokhno. The slogan of an energetic struggle for peace. — In: Great October and fiction. Minsk, 1977, p. 33–48.
The tsarist censorship was interested in the following works by Lunacharsky: "Three Cadets" (St. Petersburg, 1906), "Responses of Life" (St. Petersburg, 1906), "Royal Barber" (St. Petersburg, 1906), as well as those translated by him and published under his editorship in 1906 and 1907 books by K. Kautsky and A. Labriola. They were arrested, and a court case was initiated against the author and editor-translator (see: V. N. A. V. Foinitsky and Tsarist censorship. - Russian Literature, 1975, No. 4, pp. 145-147 ).
"Paris Bulletin", 1914, February 28, No. 9. See also Lunacharsky's essay "My Berlin Adventure" ("The Day", 1914, February 20). Lunacharsky explained the arrest as a denunciation of some "truly Russian soul." An appeal to the documents, if only they were preserved in the police archives of Berlin, would clarify a lot in this story.
Literary heritage, vol. 80, p. 471. _
V. V. Krestovsky - the son of a Russian writer, a young artist, a student of Bourdelle, exhibited in Paris. Died as a volunteer at the front. Somewhat earlier, Lunacharsky published Krestovsky's letters with his preface in Kievskaya Mysl.
"Our Word", 1915, February 18, No. 18.
Literary heritage, vol. 82, p. 467.
On this day, his essay “The Conquered Belgium, Its Economic and Political Situation in Modern Europe” (“Our Word”, 1915, February 21, No. 17) was announced in Paris.
Literary heritage, vol. 82, p. 469.
"Our Word", 1915, April 29, No. 77. Repeated in No. 78, April 30.
Ibid, May 6, No. 82.
Z. L. Peshkov (1884-1966) - adopted son of Gorky, brother of Ya. M. Sverdlov. During the First World War, he volunteered for the front, was seriously wounded, lost his arm. He took French citizenship and was in diplomatic work at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The name of Z. Peshkov is often found in Gorky's correspondence (Archive of A. M. Gorky, vol. 14. M., 1976). Gorky's correspondence with Peshkov has not been published.
Complaining about the material difficulties of the war years, Lunacharsky wrote on November 11, 1915 to M.N. Pokrovsky:

“As a small example of what frightened me, I will give you at least the behavior of Kievskaya Thought: by special agreement with it, I carefully sent 6 articles a month for 4 months. Result: due to external and internal censorship, the articles were not published ... "

( TsPA IML , fund 147, item 57, sheet 1).


In connection with the 100th anniversary of the birth of A. V. Lunacharsky, a memorial plaque was installed on the house in Saint-Legier, where he lived in 1915-1917. The ceremony was attended by representatives of local authorities, employees of the Soviet embassy, ​​I. A. Lunacharskaya. The local newspaper devoted a selection of various materials to this event. Lunacharsky's speech on the work of M. Gorky on March 8, 1917 ("Fenille d'Avisde Vevey", 1976, 16 Janvier, No. 72) was published, in particular, in a presentation.
Let us point out another mistake from Lunacharsky's memoirs: “When I moved to Switzerland ... I immediately came to Lenin with an offer of the most complete union. The agreement between us took place without any difficulty ”( Lunacharsky A.V. Memories and Impressions, p. 52). The memoirist "transferred" the meeting with Levin from 1917 to 1915. There is no evidence to support this claim by Lunacharsky.
Literary heritage, vol. 80, p. 741.
Forward. Geneva, 1917, February 1, No. 6, p. 2. _
The material relating to this story is mostly known. This is a letter from V. I. Lenin to Pokrovsky (see: Lenin V. I. Poli, collected works, vol. 49), Pokrovsky’s correspondence with Gorky (see: Archive of A. M. Gorky, vol. 14. M. , 1976), Pokrovsky's memoirs (On Lenin. Collection of memoirs. M., 1927). We present unpublished documents related to the participation of Lunacharsky.
Gorky A. M. Sobr. soch., vol. 24. M., 1953, p. 173. _
CPA IML , f. 142, unit ridge 572, l. 1–2. The basis for judgments about Gorky's "nationalism" was his signature under the collective letter of writers, artists and artists against the "German atrocities". This appeal was published in the newspaper of the right-wing Cadets Russkiye Vedomosti (1914, September 28, No. 223) and condemned V. I. Lenin (see his letter to A. G. Shlyapnikov on October 31, 1914). After the collective letter, rumors began to circulate that Gorky had signed up as a volunteer in the Russian army and was on the Galician front, which, referring to the Daily Mail and with "great reservations", was reported by Golos (1914, September 30, No. 16 ). However, the protest signed by Gorky "in a hurry" did not fully express his attitude towards the war and was an accidental act. Soon the writer took a consistently internationalist position.
CPA IML , f. 147, units ridge 57, l. 1. _
There, f. 142, unit ridge 572, l. 3–3 vol.
The history of V. I. Lenin’s work on the book “Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism” can be traced in the “Biographical Chronicle of V. I. Lenin” (vol. 3. M., 1972, pp. 404, 453, 506, 543, 556, 560, 581). See also: Evzerov R. Ya. From the history of the creation of V. I. Lenin's book "Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism." - "Questions of History", 1969, No. 2, p. 19-31.
CPA IML , f. 142, unit ridge 572, l. 7. The same warning is contained in his letter of March 9, 1916: “It turns out that one can now write about Europe during the war only if possible without mentioning either Europe or the war, because censorship does not like” (l. 6 ).
Archive of A. M. Gorky, vol. 14. M., 1976, p. 138–139.
About Lenin. Collection of memories. M., 1927, p. 78. _
Lunacharsky A. V. Italy and war. Pg., 1917, p. 3. _
Lunacharsky A. V. Italy and war, p. 108–109.
"Russian wealth", 1918, No. 4-6, p..350.
Ibid, p. 359.
Ibid, p. 351.