Marx-Engels |  Lenin  | Stalin |  Home Page

 

Lunacharsky and the formation of Marxist criticism

 

Chapter III. The Science of Assessment
Classics - contemporaries

In the widely known and brilliantly written memoirs of Lunacharsky, K. I. Chukovsky not only talks about meetings with him, about his speeches and manner of holding, innate democracy, passion for what he loves and the ability to infect other people with his enthusiasm. The memoirist often gives way to a literary critic: Chukovsky discusses the peculiarities of Lunacharsky's critical method. The first and main feature of Chukovsky calls dialectic, the ability to grasp the phenomenon - whether it be the anniversary of the Bolshoi Theater or "Petersburg" by A. Bely, the work of Dostoevsky or G. Hauptmann - in the development and struggle of opposites. “Everywhere there is a frank conversation,” writes Chukovsky, “everywhere the pluses, so to speak, are mated with the minuses, and before the eyes of the reader—or rather, with the participation of the reader—they wage a struggle among themselves, which by no means always leads to the victory of the pluses.” 1

  The judgment is fair, but equally applicable to G. Plekhanov and V. Vorovsky, to P. Lafargue and F. Mehring. Dialecticity is a distinguishing feature and an organic quality of Marxist criticism in general, and not of one of its individual representatives.

Along with dialectic, Chukovsky noted in Lunacharsky the elegance of thought, the ability to give lightness to any, even amorphous and heavy material. It cannot be said that Chukovsky has exhausted all the variety of Lunacharsky's critical manner, but in the main he is right. It is also correct to refer to such an "ancestor" of Lunacharsky, another master of the all-conquering style, as D. I. Pisarev. Revolutionary conviction and fine artistic taste helped Lunacharsky with grace and mathematical precision to arrange the pros and cons in critical analysis - then he won convincing victories. There have been cases of incorrect placement. Chukovsky writes: “Of course, something in his books has already become outdated. For example, articles about Korolenko, about Chekhov, about the personality and work of Blok now require major corrections. 2It is rightly said that “has become obsolete”, that is, for their time, these articles contained certain discoveries. True, the memoirist does not explain why he does not like the article about Chekhov, he does not even explain which one he is talking about. Apparently, about the most famous - the preface to the Complete Works of A.P. Chekhov (1929), but, I think, he would repeat the same judgments with even greater decisiveness in relation to the early pre-revolutionary speeches of Lunacharsky: to a review of A. Volzhsky's book "Essays about Chekhov" (1903), to the response to the production of "The Cherry Orchard" by the Kyiv theater "Solovtsov" (1904), to the article "About the artist in general and about some artists in particular" (1903), etc.

The modern researcher of Marxist criticism O. Semenovsky claims that in "criticizing the lack of will and passivity of Chekhov's intellectuals, Lunacharsky relied to a large extent on the abstract biological criterion in art, closely connected with his passion for Machist philosophy." 3 Indeed, Machian tendencies are present in these articles. Lunacharsky believed that motives of sadness and sadness prevail in Chekhov’s works, and since “we allow melancholic art only as an episode or as a transitional state before an explosion of active indignation” (vol. 7 , pp. 21–22), the works themselves evoked partly dislike, and partly bewilderment.

At the same time, the critic was well aware that before him was a great world-class writer. “I don’t know if there is now in Europe a talent equal to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, except, of course, L. Tolstoy, who proved with his brilliant Resurrection that he still stands out from all competition” (vol. 7 , p. 23 ). In The Cherry Orchard, Lunacharsky sees "a highly artistic and truthful picture of life" (vol. 3 , p. 17). But Chekhov's extreme objectivity seems to him a shortcoming. As a result, articles about Chekhov turn into articles against Chekhov's "creamy" heroes in defense of life-affirming ideals and advanced art that will go the other way.

There are many moments in Lunacharsky's quest that bring him closer to Gorky. Both of them, on the eve of the first Russian revolution, when one was a political exile and novice writer, and the other a famous writer, expressed dissatisfaction with the state of literature and turned to romance as the most promising direction in art. So, in February 1900, Gorky spoke enthusiastically about E. Rostand's romantic melodrama Cyrano de Bergerac: “I really like this“ sun in the blood ”. That's how to live - like Cyrano. And you don’t have to - like Uncle Vanya and all the others, like him. ” 4

It is not difficult to find similar thoughts in Lunacharsky. In his review of A. Volzhsky's book Essays on Chekhov, Lunacharsky, following the author, identifies various types of idealism, 5 which are represented in Chekhov's work. This is pessimistic idealism - the ideal is unrealizable, and bitter disappointments remain for man; optimistic or pantheistic idealism - one must live as one lives, and there everything will come to the best; heroic idealism is a very indefinite world of dreams and beauty. “All idealisms,” Lunacharsky continues, “oppose creative idealism, believing that to live means to rebuild life according to the desires of your creative being, otherwise it’s not worth living ... This creative, militant idealism, truly tragic and heroic idealism - in Chekhov No". 6

Analyzing the gallery of Chekhov's types compiled by A. Volzhsky, Lunacharsky dwells in particular on the "actively protesting" type. “This interested us,” he remarks, “because we did not meet such people in Chekhov, although we repeatedly read it with pleasure.” 7

The abstractness of the reasoning is evident here. The critic does not attempt to explain the origin of such feelings, moods, and types, but O. Semenovsky clearly exaggerates the Machist tendencies of these articles. 8 When taking into account the "special meaning" of Lunacharsky's terminology, his articles acquire a content close to the statements of Gorky and other critics who are far from Mach and Avenarius. It can be said that Lunacharsky, "starting" from Chekhov's works, sought to show what progressive art should be like and how a person should behave in difficult circumstances in order to achieve victory. So, reviewing the play of the playwright Weinberg, he speaks with dislike of the “Chekhovian” direction in dramaturgy: “A play of the Chekhovian type. For some reason, when you watch such plays, you always feel that life is not hopeless at all, and the fault of the senselessness of existence lies entirely with the heroes of the play ... It is a pity that the author's talent and the good play of the actors are so aimlessly spent on depicting the well-deserved misfortune of uninteresting people. 9

Just like Gorky, Lunacharsky sees the renewal of theatrical art in melodrama. This genre was vulgarized by the bourgeoisie, and therefore the critic was ironic about melodramatic heroes and conflicts. It was not about the revival of the old melodrama with its characteristic simplification of the feelings and relationships of the characters, but about the creation of a new one, in which "rise and efficiency would be combined with the depth of content." 10 The value of the new melodrama, Lunacharsky considered, is in the democratism of content and form: "This is a play specially designed to touch, stir up the mass audience by all means that the stage gives." 11 It is significant that, in proclaiming these ideas, Lunacharsky directly refers to Gorky, to his story "How I Was Shaved." This is his first printed review of the writer.

Subsequently, Lunacharsky's thoughts on melodrama took on a clearer form and became an essential part of his aesthetic views. In the new melodrama, he saw a genre that could most fully embody the heroism of the revolutionary era, he saw a kind of synthesis of realistic drama, symbolic drama and tragedy. 12 He wanted to see stage life condensed, bright and sharp in its outlines.

Gorky agreed with such ideas, but in practice, in his plays, he did not follow them. Lunacharsky was a romantic artist in dramaturgy. His best plays, such as The Royal Barber, The Artist King, Don Quixote Liberated, Thomas Campanella, Oliver Cromwell, Faust and the City, are the artistic embodiment of the ideas of the romantic and heroic theatre. 13 Chekhov's dramaturgy was the first phenomenon of spiritual life in terms of time, significance and popularity, which needed not only to be accepted, but also to be critically rethought.

Lunacharsky’s serious mistake was an attempt to bring Chekhov closer to his heroes: “Chekhov went to meet the Chekhovite and began to help him justify himself, convince himself of his subtlety, nobility and his beauty, began to decorate his melancholy with his wonderful gift” (vol. 7 , p. 23). Gorky solved the problem of "the author and his heroes" more correctly and perspectively. Gorky creates a literary portrait of Chekhov on the principle of contrast, draws the image of a great worker - a commoner, a delicate and charming person against the background of "an innumerable string of slaves and slaves of his love, his stupidity and laziness, his greed for the blessings of the earth." 14 This sharp characterization coincides with Lunacharsky's judgments about Chekhov's heroes. Only the main conclusion does not match. Gorky wrote: “A large, intelligent, attentive man walked past this boring, gray crowd of powerless people ...” 15

Soviet Czech studies (G. Berdnikov, G. Byaly, A. Derman, V. Ermilov, Z. Paperny, Yu. Sobolev, K. Chukovsky and others) followed the path outlined by Gorky and achieved considerable success. And in the works of the Lunacharsky Soviet period, the erroneous judgment from the earlier article “On the Artist in General and Some Artists in Particular” was no longer repeated.

Of course, Chekhov's worldview, for all its democratic character, was politically vague even in his mature years. 16 Chekhov himself willingly explained who he was not: “I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a gradualist, not a monk, not an indifferentist,” and was very stingy with explanations of who he was: “I would like to be a free artist and - only". 17 Hence the attempts of critics from different camps - from the populist N. Mikhailovsky to the "modernist" V. Burenin - to find something close to themselves in the writer's work. Chekhov had every reason to say that contemporary criticism did not understand the peculiarities of his talent.

V. Vorovsky also turned to Chekhov's work in the article "Superfluous People" (1905). Vorovsky did not disagree with Gorky and Lunacharsky in the general characterization of Chekhov's heroes: the critic explains the pettiness of their ideals and life tasks with social causes. "Chekhov's heroes," he argues, "are the epigones of generations that played a major historical role in their time, their death is the final episode in the life of a whole social movement." 18 Vorovsky sees in Chekhov's heroes real people snatched from life itself. Vorovsky's article is a kind of sociological study about the "superfluous people" of the newest formation, about "neither peahens nor ravens." Of course, in this way the critic treated the realist writer with great confidence. However, with this approach, Chekhov, the artist, with all his unique originality: humor, elegiac, penchant for small forms, peculiarities of the composition of his works, etc., faded into the background, and sometimes even disappeared from Vorovsky's field of vision. Aesthetics gave way to sociology. True, not always. In some cases, they go hand in hand, helping to understand the creator of the "superfluous people" gallery. For example, Vorovsky lists Chekhov's ways out of the world of inactive vegetation: artistic creativity, productive labor, social activity - and convincingly shows that the first two paths taken by themselves cannot change anything in the fate of the heroes. “But there is still a third way out of the environment of “superfluous” people,” Vorovsky continues, “a way out, however, also sketched by Chekhov only in general outlines. And on the way to this exit are a strange, semi-cartoon "eternal student" and Anya ("The Cherry Orchard"). This is the surest way out, but also the most difficult ... "19 The critic reacted with great sympathy to these attempts, not quite definite and clear to the writer himself, to draw new people, evidence of Chekhov's artistic and social sensitivity.

Unlike Vorovsky, Lunacharsky denied Trofimov and Anya the ability to open a third exit. For this, he believed, they have neither the strength nor perseverance: "Trofimov is a holy fool, he evaded the burden of life through a happy and innocent psychosis", and Anya is "a straw thrown without any support among the turbulent sea of ​​\u200b\u200blife" (t 3 , p . 18).

However, these discrepancies are not fundamental, they related to the interpretation of the complex and ambiguous heroes of Chekhov. As for the peppy notes that sounded in the last works of the writer, especially in The Bride, Lunacharsky, like Vorovsky, drew attention to them and welcomed them. 20 Both critics approached the interpretation of the work of the great writer from Marxist positions, and the results of their analyzes do not, in the main, contradict each other. However, Vorovsky's sociological analysis clearly lacks aesthetics, and he partially makes up for this deficiency in a later article, A. P. Chekhov "(1910). Lunacharsky's judgments, on the other hand, suffer from abstraction; their social and political meaning is felt more by the reader than is clearly expressed by the critic himself.

Already in the Soviet years, Lunacharsky staged Korolenko next to Chekhov. He dedicated his sixteenth lecture on the history of Russian literature to both writers, showing their ideological and artistic commonality and significant differences. 21 Both writers began in the era of the 80s, both became disillusioned with populism, but did not join Marxism, and both remained enlighteners in understanding the historical destinies of Russia. If not for his untimely death, Lunacharsky argued, Chekhov "would have taken a position approximately similar to that of Korolenko" (vol. 1, with. 369). Korolenko is the flesh of the flesh of the old classical literature, the great master of the language, the successor of the Turgenev school. Chekhov, on the other hand, to a large extent heralds a new direction in Russian and world literature of the 20th century. These are mature judgments, and it is all the more interesting to show how the critic began and how he went to them.

Lunacharsky's article about V. G. Korolenko "What V. G. Korolenko teaches" (1903) is very benevolent, although methodologically close to the critic's judgments about Chekhov. A. Lebedev, on the whole, correctly assessed this article. True, he wrote that the first general theoretical part "represents a fictionalized exposition of Machian and God-building dogmas", 22 which is only partly true. In addition, A. Lebedev considered an abridged version of the article "What V. G. Korolenko teaches", placed in the collection "Etudes" (1922). In its entirety, the article does not consist of three, but of five sections, and in order to understand Lunacharsky's views in the pre-October period, the first printed text from the journal Obrazovanie is preferable. 23

"Every artist teaches us to evaluate life, to evaluate it positively or negatively" 24 - with this statement the critic opens his article on Korolenko. There is nothing macho here. However, Marxist criticism believes that an assessment can be correct if it is historically concrete and has a class character. In mature articles, Lunacharsky gave examples of such assessments, which were built on a solid foundation of philosophical, sociological and aesthetic analysis. In his early articles he still sinned with one-sidedness and abstract judgments.

Leopardi's gloomy sorrow, Swift's cold contempt, Dickens' good-natured sad humor, Ouspensky's painfully concentrated attentiveness and suffering indecision, Balzac's naturalistic calmness, Goethe's balanced cheerfulness and Pushkin's enthusiastic admiration - these are examples of that grandiose rock of life assessments that human art represents. . 25 Here the heroes of many of Lunacharsky's later critical speeches are named and the main features of their creative appearance are indicated. Only named, but not disclosed, as in his mature works. This inconsistency haunts throughout the article.

Lunacharsky is undoubtedly right when he sees "the beauty of harmony in Korolenko's works" (second chapter of the article). We can agree with him that Makar ("Makar's dream") and Gavrila ("Not terrible") live in harmony with nature due to their primitiveness, that nature in Korolenko in some cases heals and helps to forget mental fatigue at least for a while and social diseases (“The river plays”), while in others it is indifferent and even cruel to a person. Her face is changeable, leaving her, a person can no longer return to nature, except on the basis of spirituality and consciousness. The insurgent Diaz, who escaped into a storm from a prison-fortress (“Instant”), turns such a higher harmony, and it is possible only in the future: “Peace cannot be bought otherwise than by struggle.” 26

A remarkable master of psychological analysis, Korolenko portrayed his heroes from the people at critical moments in their lives, when they unexpectedly turn out to be capable of great spiritual movements and decisive actions. Lunacharsky called them impulses and correctly pointed out that they are beautiful (third chapter). Poor Makar, “impressively powerful killer” Fyodor Silin, Alexei Ivanovich, who is “ready to die for the truth”, Stepan and Marusya are rebels and truth seekers, protesting against lawlessness, striving for a new full-blooded life. But these wonderful qualities turned out to be muffled in Lunacharsky, the critic left aside the social factors of their behavior.

Let us note that there was also a share of the positive, for, excluding social analysis, Lunacharsky also excluded its vulgar variety, which, like an ulcer, corroded young Marxist criticism. In general, however, the exclusion of social analysis is a serious mistake. In relation to the work of Korolenko, it meant that Lunacharsky did not fully use the rich material that it provided.

V. O. Kapustin clearly exaggerates the significance of this early speech by Lunacharsky when he writes: “The section on the beauty of impulse, despite the fact that the author of the article more often operates with abstract philosophical and moral categories, at the time the article was printed - 1903 - was undoubtedly perceived as a definite political program as a hymn to the beauty of a revolutionary feat. 27Lunacharsky later understood the abstractness and abstractness of his reasoning and, apparently, therefore excluded the last two chapters from subsequent editions. In the fourth “Sorrow and indignation in the works of V. G. Korolenko”, a significant place was occupied by the analysis of the story “In Bad Society”. Following the young heroes of the story, without any comments, Lunacharsky repeats the words about the "gray stone" as the true culprit of their unfortunate situation. However, Korolenko, and even more so the idea of ​​fate, of the fatal predestination of human existence, was absolutely alien to the Totem political exile Lunacharsky. Only social causes can explain the mournful history of Marusya and Valk, the buffoonish bravado of the outcast Tyburtsiy Drab. Lunacharsky removed the polemic with A. Volzhsky, which had lost its relevance (chapter five).

To the question posed in the title of the article, the critic answers: “Korolenko, like a Greek, admires the harmony of nature ...” and, “like a romantic, he admires, often with pain, with tears in his eyes, the tragic beauty of human impulses and thereby teaches you to love a person, love life in its spiritual beauty." 28 For Lunacharsky, Korolenko is a "teacher of life." 29 In these rather vague definitions lies the germ of the critic's later judgments about the humanism and democracy of Korolenko's work.

Along with Chekhov and Korolenko, Lunacharsky, especially in the "Russian" period of his activity, showed great interest in the work and personality of Gleb Uspensky. And here, as in the case of Chekhov and Korolenko, Lunacharsky spoke out against liberal populist criticism, against A. Volzhsky and G. Novopolin. In the articles “The Experience of Gleb Uspensky’s Literary Characteristics” (1903), “Social Psychology and Social Mysticism” (1906) and other works published in Education, Lunacharsky shows the connection between Uspensky’s work and the ideas of raznochinny democracy and draws the image of a painfully sensitive to people’s suffering writer. “It is true,” notes a modern researcher, “the critic in these years made serious mistakes in assessing the literary activity of the writer, not noticing its revolutionary orientation.” 30

L. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Korolenko, Uspensky are senior contemporaries of Lunacharsky. He perceived their work as a lively response to the events of Russian life. It is significant that other, distant classics of Russian literature hardly appear at all in Lunacharsky's pre-October articles, and if the critic remembers them, it is more or less by accident, "on occasion." So it was, for example, with Dostoevsky. In connection with the noisy process of Countess M. Tarponskaya, the feuilletonist of the Kievskaya Thought Homimculus (pseudonym of D. Zaslavsky), finding something supernatural in the adventures of this noble adventurer, pathetically urged the new Dostoevskys to look into the secrets of her soul. Arguing with him, Lunacharsky declared that Tarnovskaya herself is a colorless person and is interesting only as an indicator of the degeneration of the exploiting class. Dostoevsky will not help to comprehend her soul, for Russian writers were primarily interested in individual psychology, while Western writers, E. Zola, were interested in social psychology. A comparison of Russian literature with Western literature from such an angle could lead to curious conclusions, and then it would be found that Lunacharsky's statement is unnecessarily categorical. Unfortunately, the critic breaks off his thought here and gives a further detailed description of Dostoevsky's work: “Yes, Dostoevsky traveled to the pole of the human soul. Yes, he saw its heights and failures, and with terrible truthfulness, with supernatural clairvoyance, he described the terrible labyrinth of the human soul, showed the monsters inhabiting it, dwelling with particular love on the most strange and bizarre contrasts, on the mysterious, explosions of passions that are not amenable to reasonable analysis or snake coils of underground moods ... But an explanation? where is the explanation? After Dostoevsky it became even darker, he only proved that the "darkness of the soul" is thicker than we think.31 This is one of the first approaches to a big topic, which in the Soviet years the critic dealt with a lot.

Lunacharsky took part in the celebrations on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of A. I. Herzen (April 7, 1912). "Paris Vestnik" wrote: "Lunacharsky delivered a lengthy speech devoted to the evaluation of Herzen's theoretical views." 32 Written on the basis of the Paris speech, the article "In Memory of A. I. Herzen" is not only a portrait of the great thinker and writer, but to a certain extent also a self-portrait of Lunacharsky himself. His words about Herzen as "an inexorable enemy of all dogmas", a fighter for the emancipation of feelings, for "feeling must be left to spontaneous self-determination, it must be educated" (vol. 1, with. 131), characterize the essential aspects of his own worldview. This emphasizes the idea of ​​the continuity of Herzen's ideas in the new historical conditions.

Herzen for Lunacharsky is a revolutionary by conviction, “a revolutionary not in the name of his passion, but in the name of personal aspirations, but in the name of the objectively understood contradictions of society, the objectively foreseen ways of its development” (vol. 1 , p. 134). And this reasoning can be understood in an autobiographical way. Lunacharsky considers Herzen as a romantic and a realist at the same time, giving these concepts a broad social meaning. On the whole, Lunacharsky's article is a good addition to everything that Lenin and Plekhanov wrote about Herzen.

Russian classics in the system of aesthetic views of Lunacharsky in the pre-revolutionary period did not occupy a large place, and after the departure of critics abroad, they recede into the background in comparison with contemporary Western, especially French, literature. Lunacharsky's critical reflection on Pushkin, Gogol, Nekrasov, Ostrovsky, Turgenev, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Dostoevsky took place after the October Revolution. However, it was prepared earlier. Even in the pre-October articles on Chekhov, Korolenko, Uspensky, Herzen and Tolstoy, we will find vivid and expressive characteristics of their work, which became the basis for the later mature judgments of the Marxist critic. And most importantly, the aesthetic system of Lunacharsky, always alien to nihilism, was widely open to Russian classics, which occupied one of the main places in it.

Caliphs for an hour
Plekhanov rightly linked the emergence of modernism with the disintegration of bourgeois society. He pointed out the characteristic features of this current (more precisely, a whole complex of currents): individualism, a fundamental rejection of knowledge of the surrounding world, a tendency to formal experiments to the detriment of content, eroticism as "an extreme, but also a natural expression of individualism" 33etc. All this is true as a sentence to the hostile realism of the phenomenon of spiritual life, it is true on the theoretical plane. Plekhanov was primarily interested in the manifestos and declarations of the modernists, and then in their creative practice. If Plekhanov referred to examples, he took them from Z. Gippius, D. Merezhkovsky and other writers, in whose works the features of a reactionary ideology hostile to the proletariat are most pronounced. For Plekhanov, modernism and decadence are equivalent concepts, synonymous words.

The insufficiency of Plekhanov's critique of modernism becomes especially evident if the range of specific observations is expanded. From the point of view of the highest possibilities of art and its centuries-old experience, cubism is really only "nonsense cubed." But what about, for example, the work of P. Picasso? Plekhanov rightly shows the groundlessness of the theories of the Symbolists, but is it possible to extend this criticism to the entire creative activity of the Symbolists and to attribute his harsh words entirely to the poetry of A. Blok, V. Bryusov, A. Bely? The work of modernist artists often turned out to be broader than the aesthetic principles that they proclaimed, and therefore the categorical and unconditional attribution of any of them to the camp of modernism is unacceptable. Among the modernists, Plekhanov did not see a single major artist. Plekhanov considered the world of Symbolists worthy only of parody, - notes V. I. Kuleshov. "He didn't take him seriously."34

Before analyzing Lunacharsky's views on modernist art, it should be said that the critic arrived at them quite independently in the articles of 1902-1910, while Plekhanov presented them mainly in 1912. Like Plekhanov, Lunacharsky is convinced of the bourgeois origin of decadence (or, as he sometimes put it, decadentism). In a long article "Maurice Maeterlinck" (1902), he recalls the enterprising and greedy for life Mayakin from Gorky's story "Foma Gordeev", giving this image a broad generalizing meaning. Lighthouses are always busy with “business”, i.e., adding "new and new zeros to the numbers", and they can't do anything else. But what about the second generation of the Mayakins, the sons of those who won a place "under the sun"? The degenerate sons of almighty fathers shift the center of gravity from production to consumption, and since their tastes are undeveloped, barbaric, and their capital is large, they begin to play the fool and squander money. “Imagine a degenerate bourgeois, from childhood surrounded by luxury and debauchery, with miserable nerves that soon get tired, he doesn’t know any goals in life, he can’t think of them, he not only doesn’t know how to enjoy life, but in general any healthy pleasure is more likely for him pain; meanwhile, behind him is capital; at the behest of a pike, millions flow into his hands, he, this unfortunate half-idiot, is one of the mighty masters of life. The degenerate bourgeois himself would not have invented decadence, but when decadence was invented, he enthusiastically gave him his patronage.35

In these semi-pictures, semi-arguments of Lunacharsky, his conviction in the creative sterility of the bourgeoisie is important. Art, even bourgeois art, is created not by the bourgeoisie, but by people from other social groups, mainly the intelligentsia, but partly the proletariat and the peasantry. They are "recruited" by the exploiting class, they are obliged to delight and entertain the "masters of life", to serve at the court of His Majesty capital as something like jesters. Lunacharsky, in many articles and speeches of both the pre-October and Soviet periods, exposed this connection between people of creative labor and money magnates, a connection that humiliates, cripples, disfigures art. The wrath of the Marxist critic is equally directed against social relations that force the artist to trade the fruits of his labor, and against artists who prostitute their talent.

At the same time, Lunacharsky is far from representing the bourgeois and the artist only in the form of an employer and employee, and reducing their relationship to a primitively understood business, profit, purchase and sale. It was not for nothing that in the Soviet years he strongly criticized Lef's theories of "social order" (O. Brik, B. Arvatov), ​​which ignored the role of the artist's ideology, beliefs, likes and dislikes. The matter, as Lunacharsky repeatedly pointed out, cannot be reduced to the whims of a rich and ignorant petty tyrant, although in Russia and partly in the West such figures were also not uncommon (for example, the well-known patron of the Symbolists and philanthropist P. Ryabushinsky) - but their personal qualities determine the nature of art . The main thing is that capitalism, with its production, which depersonalizes a person, is fundamentally hostile to art. Lunacharsky therefore claims that the struggle for the socialist transformation of society is at the same time a struggle for the liberation of the creative abilities of the artist from capitalist dependence, for the emancipation of his talent. An advanced and honest artist, in the view of Lunacharsky, by virtue of the peculiarities of his position, cannot but sympathize with the proletariat, for capitalism is their common enemy. And, on the other hand, the decadent artist, also due to the peculiarities of his position, is an enemy of social progress.

“Decadentism should be called one branch of modernism—namely, life-denying art,” wrote Lunacharsky . On the basis of the desire for originality at all costs and in an unhealthy bohemian atmosphere of dreams of fame and fame, "wild flowers of false art" grow. To decadence with its "hypertrophy of personality", ridiculous and sometimes dirty extravagances, stunted idealism and empty daydreaming, "tense originality and longing of an unsatisfied being", Lunacharsky is merciless: "Let's leave the decadents to die." 37

Concretization of these general provisions are those assessments that Lunacharsky gives to the representatives and manifestations of decadence in Russia and in the West. He subjected it to a devastating rout in the long article "Essays on Modern Russian Literature" (1908). 38The reason for Lunacharsky's speech was Z. Gippius's advertising-cheeky statement that there was no literature in Russia and that it appeared only since the founding in 1899 of the magazine "World of Art". Z. Gippius, D. Merezhkovsky, F. Filosofov and their other associates found shelter in the literary department of this journal. Gippius does not favor Russian classics of the 19th century because they were too connected with "social and political life." Nationality, passionate service to the ideas of social liberation, the struggle against slavery, ignorance and poverty - these qualities of Russian literature, which the decadent poetess tried to discredit, are in the eyes of Lunacharsky the greatest virtues of art. “Our literature did not indulge in fruitless daydreams,” Lunacharsky writes excitedly, “our writers did not flee to comfortable ‘hermitages’, to populate them with graceful inventions—these were the martyrs of thought, before whom the greatest questions tragically stood, questions about good and evil in this real human world of ours. Painfully sensitive sympathy connected our artists with their people and humanity, and they tried to be not entertainers, not brilliant conjurers, but prophets, Moses, leading the people from Egyptian captivity to the Promised Land by a difficult road, a long, deserted road.39

In regard to Gippius and her like-minded people, Plekhanov and Lunacharsky have no differences. True, Plekhanov, true to his method, “did not prescribe anything to her (i.e., Z. Gippius. - I.K.), but referred to her own lyrical outpourings, confining himself to defining their meaning,” 40 but these outpourings themselves were so eloquent, and their critical definitions so deadly, that there was simply no need for direct journalistic conclusions. Lunacharsky directly expresses his indignation and contempt for the miserable "caliphs for an hour." It is clear, however, that these differences relate to the individual characteristics of the critics, to their temperaments, and not to the aesthetic principles they affirm.

Vivid documents of the organized and united struggle against decadence were two critical collections, Literary Decay (the first came out in 1908, the second in 1909). Among the authors were A. M. Gorky, A. Lunacharsky, L. Voitolovsky, M. Morozov, Yu. Steklov, P. Orlovsky (pseudonym of V. Vorovsky), V. Friche, P. Yushkevich, V. Bazarov, V. Shulyatikov etc. In the preface to the first collection it was said that its participants "stand on the basis of the proletarian worldview in its only scientific form - Marxism." 41Recognizing the inevitability of differences in the assessment of individual phenomena of modern literature, the participants declared their solidarity in the main thing - in asserting a complete gap between the creativity of modern decadents and the creativity of the future. For the majority of the participants in the collections, modern literature is from beginning to end infected with the corrupting spirit of bourgeois decay and decline and deserves complete denial and merciless exposure. Representatives of the “new art” for them are “modernists, scalp hunters or, in their language, behind the“ new brain line ”, all sorts of demonists, decadents, symbolists, impressionists, mystics, idealists and decadents in general.” 42

It is indicative that for many authors - Yu. Steklov, L. Voitolovsky, M. Morozov - as well as for Plekhanov, decadence and modernism are synonymous concepts. Such a simplistic approach distorted the real picture of literary life: writers who did not deserve it were imprisoned in the camp of decadents, decadent literature grew to incredible proportions, obscuring other writers, and decadence itself was perceived only in an ideological plane, excluding artistic analysis. The most unacceptable figure for Yu. Steklov, L. Voitolovsky, M. Morozov turned out to be F. Sologub. And his worldview, and the manner of writing, and his "created legends" - everything came under critical fire, everything was exposed and ridiculed. Moreover, critics considered the heroes of Sologub - Peredonov and Trirodov - various modifications of their creator, autobiographical reflections of his own thoughts, feelings and almost actions, which, of course, was a polemical excess. The views of D. Merezhkovsky, V. Rozanov, N. Berdyaev were criticized sharply and in many ways convincingly. The participants in the collections were more condescending towards V. Bryusov, A. Blok and A. Bely, some of the latter’s negative reviews about their St. Petersburg counterparts and all kinds of “carriage bastards” in literature were even sympathetically quoted by them.

The authors of the collections correctly wrote about naturalism and pessimism, religious mysticism and the preaching of debauchery, covered up "for decency" with references to ancient eroticism and popular freedom of morals, as peculiar signs of the "new art". They resolutely protested against attempts to defame revolutionary ideals, to reduce the struggle for the social liberation of man to the "theory of artificial abortions", and the freedom of art to pornography and witchcraft. These thoughts constituted the pathos of V. Vorovsky's well-known article "Sanin and Bazarov" and Gorky's remarkable speech "On Cynicism."

Some articles of the collection are characterized by limited views and extreme conclusions. Comparison of Lunacharsky's article in the first collection with the works of other authors shows that V. Shulyatikov was the most alien to him in terms of methodology. It was he who, turning to the work of Tolstoy, Chekhov and other writers, discovered in them "aristocratism" and "proved" their absolute unsuitability for the proletariat. Shulyatikov’s vulgar sociological attacks, which anticipated the “bends” of the Proletkultists and Rappovists, very close to them in time and in methods, were so rude that the editors of the first collection, where the article “Non-aristocratic aristocracy” was published, had to specify in a footnote their disagreement with some of the judgments of her author.

Lunacharsky's article was called "Darkness". It was a literary portrait of Leonid Andreev. Lunacharsky's attitude to the popular writer was complex and ambiguous, it changed depending on changes in the social and political position of the writer himself. The creative manner of L. Andreev, the hyperbolism of his images, the tension of action, the substitution of social psyche for social mysticism caused Lunacharsky's dissatisfaction. At the same time, the critic saw that the writer was on the rise, getting closer and closer to Gorky and Knowledge, and hoped that L. Andreev would go further along the path of revolutionary and democratic art. Such works as "Red Laughter", "The Life of Vasily of Thebes", "The Governor", "To the Stars", caused him a contradictory reaction. The critic noted both the relevance of the problem, and the wrong individualistic solution of social problems. The greatest sympathy, although also with reservations, was caused by Lunacharsky's play by L. Andreev "The Life of a Man".

By the time the first collection "Literary Decay" was published, L. Andreev had published the story "Darkness" and the play "Tsar-Hunger", which marked the departure of the writer to the right. They are predominantly considered by Lunacharsky. In the conflict of the story, the critic found a lot of deliberate, unnatural and false. In the play "Tsar-Hunger" Lunacharsky was outraged by the "infinitely simplified, gloomy, almost slanderous depiction of the working class" (vol. 1 , p. 414). It is not without reason that criminals and hooligans were placed by L. Andreev on a par with revolutionary workers, during the uprising they smashed the National Gallery. “This has never been and never will be,” the critic commented on this scene. “Revolutionaries, proletarians have always guarded museums” (vol. 1 , p. 415).

However, with all the harsh characterizations, Lunacharsky avoids the one-sidedness that was characteristic of many other critics. Recognizing Andreev's talent as destructive, calling the writer an "emissary of death" and a "grave digger", Lunacharsky is in no hurry to give him to the camp of decadents and notes a lot of useful things in his work. It’s not bad that Andreev doesn’t accept everything that is obsolete, rotten, doomed to death - this is just dignity in the eyes of Lunacharsky - it’s bad that the writer does not see the creation of new human relations, and if he notices their sprouts, he still tries to approach him with old measurements. The characterization of L. Andreev's creativity and personality was quite dialectical, the critic did not make final judgments and left the opportunity to return to the discussion of the issues raised by him.

Lunacharsky's second article, "The Twenty-Third Collection of Knowledge," according to the author's intention, was to demonstrate the possibilities of advanced realistic art. Thus, Lunacharsky wanted to show that decadent tendencies do not determine the face of modern literature, that opponents of literary decay should be sought not only in the future, but also Recognizing that the current position of the proletariat as an oppressed class is not very favorable for the creation of a new culture, Lunacharsky asks the question: “So, but can’t he create, isn’t he already creating, willy-nilly, the rudiments of such a culture?” 43 And the main content of the article was to affirm this important idea.

Unfortunately, the correct assumptions did not receive concrete confirmation or, to be more precise, the evidence came into conflict with the general theoretical provisions. Lunacharsky tried to prove the principles of proletarian art using the analysis of Gorky's story "Confession" as an example. In the evaluation of Confession, Lunacharsky disagreed with Lenin and Plekhanov, who considered this work not evidence of the writer's creative growth, but an attempt at the artistic embodiment and propaganda of ideas alien to Marxism. The preaching of god-building in the articles of A. Lunacharsky, as well as V. Bazarov and P. Yushkevich, significantly weakened the criticism of the literature of decay.

So, the two critical collections "Literary Decay" demonstrated both the fundamental merits of the Marxist method in literary criticism, and the serious difficulties in the way of its approval and development at that historical moment, the well-known differences and a certain superiority of Lunacharsky in comparison with other critics, and at the same time some of its weaknesses and shortcomings in common with them.

From the beginning of 1907 to May 1917, Lunacharsky constantly lived abroad: first in Italy, and then in France and Switzerland. The position of a political emigrant somewhat weakened his ties with modern Russian literature, but it provided him with wide opportunities for observing Western art. In the newspapers Kievskaya Thought, Den, Theater and Art, Nov, in the journals Obrazovanie, Chronicle, Borba, etc. 44Lunacharsky publishes numerous articles and essays, reviews and correspondence on literature, painting, theatre, music, writers, artists and critics. Not a single significant direction in the art of the early 20th century escaped his attentive eye. His journalistic work became especially intense after moving in the spring of 1911 to Paria?, which has always been a kind of mirror reflecting any changes in the cultural life of Europe.

Lunacharsky is far from denying and ridiculing modernism: one thing is decadent modernism, another thing is the modernism of the emerging proletarian art, to which Lunacharsky treats with a certain sympathy, 45 besides them, the modernism of various intermediate groups is possible, which have not yet joined the proletariat, but have already broken with the bourgeoisie. Thus, in his understanding, modernism was a fairly broad typological category, which can be filled with various artistic content, depending on the social aspirations of the author and his public sympathies. “One can argue about the advantages and disadvantages of their direction,” wrote Lunacharsky about the modernists, “but that among them there are many first-class talents, this is a fact that can only be denied out of gross ignorance or prejudice.”46

Lunacharsky, like Plekhanov, sees in impressionism a departure from realistic principles, but he also recognizes Gauguin's "primary talent", calls Van Gogh a "genius artist", and Renoir a "painter of happiness". Lunacharsky recognizes the artist's right to diversify and refine his experience, to refract reality through the prism of his imagination, and in general to infect the viewer with the thrill of his nerves. Therefore, impressionism achieved considerable results and enriched the treasury of world art. Lunacharsky understood impressionism quite broadly, found it not only in painting, but also in literature, and wrote, already in the Soviet period, about Chekhov as “the largest Russian realist-impressionist”: “We do not know a writer equal to him in the power of impressionism” (t .1 _, with. 363). Here, impressionism, with its poeticization of fleeting moods, expressiveness and laconism of descriptions, appears not as a trend in the art of the late 19th century, but as a kind of creative manner.

Lunacharsky is a determined opponent of cubism. Attempts to depict objects simultaneously from different sides, “elements of corporality projected into a plane” seem to him theoretically fruitless, and creative results - “very anti-artistic”. "This is very suspicious and smacks of quackery," 47 he remarked. “If talent shines through, then it shines through contrary to principles,” 48 he wrote shrewdly, and that is why he singled out among the Cubists the “gifted Picasso”, 49 “talented Picasso”, 50 “highly talented Picasso”, because he is “less a prisoner of cubism”. 51

Those who have been completely enslaved by false principles evoke indignation and ridicule in Lunacharsky. These are “mischief-makers, madcaps and psychopaths”, whose creations make you dizzy at first, and then, upon mature reflection, you are convinced that “the fantasy of gentlemen hooligans turns out to be relatively miserable.” 52 About the founder of abstractionism, V. Kandinsky, Lunacharsky wrote indignantly: “This man is obviously in the last degree of mental decay. He will draw, draw stripes with the first paints that come across and sign, unfortunate, - "Moscow", "Winter", and even "Saint George".

Why, after all, are they allowed to exhibit? Well, well, - freedom; but it is too obvious a disease.” 53

While living in Paris, Lunacharsky often visited the exhibitions of various salons, where these paintings and sculptures, ephemeris, were presented in abundance. Criticism revolts at the desire of bourgeois artists to draw attention to themselves by any means. Having achieved popularity, the “master” quickly acquires a crowd of fans and imitators, he is briskly written about in fashion magazines and newspapers, and now a new “direction” has been “created”. It briefly attracts the attention of a jaded sensation-hungry public, and then it bursts like a soap bubble, and in its place other “directions” appear, just as extravagant and ridiculous. Lunacharsky quickly determined their class background, showed the theoretical inconsistency of their creators, and characterized this kind of "creativity" with pamphlet sharpness.

Ways of salvation
No matter how noisy the emergence of each new “trend” and a new “caliph for an hour” was, Lunacharsky was primarily interested in large and serious artists. He devoted a number of articles to the ideological and artistic searches of M. Maeterlinck: "Maurice Maeterlinck" (1902), "Issues of Morals and M. Maeterlinck" (1904), "Love and Death" (1913), "Maeterlinck's Thoughts on War" (1916) and etc.

The subject of Maeterlinck's dramas from the beginning of his work is the depiction of premonitions, vague anxieties, everything inexpressible and difficult to grasp in the human mind. By the content of such plays as "The Uninvited Guest" (another, now established name is "The Uninvited"), "The Blind", "The Seven Princesses", the playwright wants to convince us that life is a preparation for death. The horror of her constant expectation paralyzes the will of a person, deprives her of attachments and makes her a pitiful toy in the hands of an inexorable and unknown fate. These plays by Maeterlinck, despite all their nightmares, are not tragedies, because they lack resistance to alien forces, there is no struggle, but without it, as Lunacharsky wrote in his article “In the face of fate. Toward a Philosophy of Tragedy” (1903), a tragic collision is impossible.

The idea of ​​struggle first appears in The Death of Tentagil, and therefore its heroine Irene is "Maeterlinck's first truly tragic figure." 54 Cruel fate can steal a helpless boy from the sisters, but she cannot make the proud Irena humble herself: “Monster, monster! I spit in your face!" Maeterlinck's turn to activity, to a new, humane understanding of the tasks of life, evokes ardent sympathy from Lunacharsky. The critic approves the ideological orientation of the plays "Ariana and Bluebeard", which is "some kind of cry of liberation, she is full of light and jubilation", "Sister Beatrice", which became an event in the theatrical life of Russia thanks to the soulful play of V. F. Komissarzhevskaya, "Monna Vanna "-" the climax in the work of Maeterlinck. 55The basis of the conflict of the last play, as Lunacharsky shows, is the understanding of honor in the narrow, class-feudal sense and in the lofty, universal sense. Thus, in the understanding of Lunacharsky, Maeterlinck, without ceasing to be a symbolist in the artistic methods of his work, becomes "a defector from the camp of the decadents." 56

In subsequent articles, Lunacharsky gave a detailed, rather critical and at the same time respectful analysis of the works of the Belgian playwright. True, in his enthusiasm for Maeterlinck, Lunacharsky sometimes went to extremes, especially when he discovered in him "scientific mysticism", which caused an ironic remark by V. I. Lenin. 57 On the whole, however, Lunacharsky turned out to be right, and history has confirmed that in the person of Maeterlinck we have a major artist whose work does not fit into the framework of mysticism and decadence. The modern researcher of Belgian drama I. D. Shkunaeva highly appreciated everything written by Lunacharsky about Maeterlinck. 58

Emil Verharn turned out to be much closer spiritually to the Russian Marxist critic! On December 12, 1910, that is, a few days after the tragic death of the poet, Lunacharsky said at an evening in Geneva: “Emile Verharn was my joy and my pride. It would not matter if I alone had such feelings; but there are many of us Russian Verharnians. Often I exclaimed: what a happiness, what an honor to breathe the same air as this great man. And really, isn't Verhaarn one of the greatest poets of all mankind?" 59

Emil Verhaarn uses the poetics of symbolism, however, as Lunacharsky speaks about it and specifically shows I. D. Shkunaeva, 60the entire figurative system of his poems and dramas was primarily nourished by the juices of green Flanders, mythology, language and life of his native country. The singer of ruined “hallucinating villages” and “delirious fields”, huge capitalist “octopus cities”, rising “dawns” and “rebellious forces” of life was a great social poet of the 20th century, and it was this quality of his talent that first of all attracted Lunacharsky. Individualism, to a greater or lesser extent characteristic of all modernists, is completely absent in Verhaarn, a poet of objective theme and epic power. Verharn and Lunacharsky had a lot in common: the conviction of the high purpose of creativity as a public cause, the philosophical richness of the works, “combat meliorism”. 61 Lunacharsky calls Verhaarn a “true modernist” and a “true futurist” (vol. 5, with. 334), but not in the sense of adherence to narrow schools, but because, brought up on traditions, he was an artist both deeply modern and an innovator who widely pushed the boundaries of poetry.

Lunacharsky devoted the works of the great Belgian poet to the work of the great Belgian poet in the articles "Verhaarn's New Book" (1913), "Verhaarn's Last Books" (1914), "The Singer of the New World" (1914), 62 "Letter to E. Verhaern" (1915), "Verhaarn in Switzerland" (1916), "The Death of Verhaern" (1916), "Emile Verhaern" (1916). Like the first translator and popularizer of Verhaarn V. Ya. Bryusov, Lunacharsky did a lot to acquaint the Russian reader with Verhaarn. To confirm his judgments, he cites extensive quotations from the works of the Belgian poet in his own prose translation.

Verhaarn was often mentioned by Lunacharsky. So, next to Verhaern, the critic places another great urban poet, Walt Whitman, Verhaern's predecessor and, to a large extent, his teacher. Verhaarn, according to Lunacharsky, one of the descendants of Victor Hugo, who reflected in his poems a new, more proletarianized phase of democracy. Verharn and Taras Shevchenko remembered Lunacharsky in a heartfelt article about Frederic Mistral. Paying tribute to the Provencal poet, "the artistic embodiment of an entire nation," Lunacharsky clearly shows the limitations of his patriarchal-peasant lyre. Mistral cannot be compared with the "great Taras" - "the martyr poet, who reflected the soul of the people not only in its peace and narcissism, but also in its angry and mournful outburst, in its collective sobbing over its historical fate" (v. 5, with. 231). Mistral is also inferior to his Belgian contemporary: “No life indications, no new prophecy, with which Verhaarn, for example, is immensely rich, can be sought from Mistral” (vol. 5 , p. 319). Lunacharsky measures many Western artists by Verhaarn's yardstick: when he notes his influence on a whole galaxy of French poets (Magre, Greguet, Bougelier) and when he opposes him to the devout Catholic Paul Claudel. “These two poets,” writes Lunacharsky about Claudel and Verharne, “are the poles of modern culture” (vol. 5 , p. 305).

And in the Soviet years, Lunacharsky repeatedly turned to Emil Verharn, finding in his work a lot of instructive for Soviet poetry. Lunacharsky devoted much space to it in his lectures on the history of Western European literature, delivered in 1923-1924 at the Communist University named after I.I. Ya. M. Sverdlov. Thus, in particular, the lecturer said that "the best part of Bryusov, that which is valuable for us in Bryusov, comes directly from Verharn" (vol. 4 , p. 355). The lecturer found a similarity with Verharn (but not his influence) in Mayakovsky: “Mayakovsky claims that he never read Verharn, maybe such things are transmitted through the air ...” (vol. 4 , p. 355). “Armenian Verharn” (vol. 2 , p. 368) Lunacharsky called Akop Hakobyan, whom he knew from the Parisian emigration.

Poetic influence was understood by Lunacharsky broadly and by no means meant mechanical imitation. The critic believed that a great poetic talent grows on national soil, and therefore its origins must be sought in the conditions of the social life of one's country. However, these conditions can be similar, and they give rise to the phenomena of similarity, influence, attraction or repulsion in literature. Lunacharsky subtly captured the complexity and originality of the creative processes of various artists and painted their portraits against a broad background of world literature and world culture, revealing the connecting threads between poets of different countries and peoples.

Recalling the situation during the period of the first Russian revolution, A. M. Gorky remarked: “When “modernism” flourished, they tried to understand it, but they condemned it more, which is much easier to do. There was no time to seriously think about literature, politics was in the foreground. Blok, Bely, Bryusov seemed to be some kind of "solitary pedestrians", at best - eccentrics, at worst - something like traitors to the "great traditions of the Russian public." Gorky does not approve of such an attitude, although he recognizes it as inevitable in moments of social upheaval. “I also thought and felt so,” 63 the writer added.

As for Lunacharsky, politics, of course, played a significant role in his judgments about art, but the critic never sacrificed aesthetics to it. And the policy itself was not reduced by Lunacharsky to the narrowly understood “topics of the day” and sheer tendentiousness. Politics in Lunacharsky does not oppose art, but organically merges with it.

Even in pre-revolutionary works, Lunacharsky soberly assessed the position of the creative intelligentsia and repeatedly pointed out that not all of its representatives are allies of the proletariat, although "philistine complacency is rarely inherent in great talents." 64 A detailed and critical analysis of the views of Russian modernists is contained in the long article "The Book of the New Theatre". Lunacharsky's chapters on Vs. Meyerhold and A. Belom.

It was not enough for Andrei Bely to be a poet, the author of the beautiful Ashes. He, as Lunacharsky shows, clearly violated his talent, loading him with the burden of philosophy, religion, mysticism. His prose gives the impression of delirium and confusion, and suddenly in this dense forest - like sunny glades - accurate realistic sketches: for example, the departure of Senator Ableukhov in Petersburg. “Like a butterfly, he is drawn to the blazing fire of proletarian world renewal,” Lunacharsky wrote of Bely. “Will he turn sharply into the darkness of the night at the very fire?” Or will it flutter into it and perish in this attracting elemental element, which is alien to it? Or, finally, will there be living forces in it, so that, after burning, it will be reborn from the ashes, like a Phoenix? 65

These questions remained unanswered, because in 1908, when these lines were written, the further evolution of A. Bely was not clear, but the very nature of the questions allowed, in Lunacharsky's view, different ways out of the situation in which the writer was. "Will this man be saved?" - the critic finishes his discussion about A. Bely. Now we can say that A. Bely remained a prisoner of his idealistic worldview until the end of his life and, therefore, did not fully reveal the possibilities of his talent. But the Marxist critic Lunacharsky did everything to "save" him. 66

Help can only come from the proletariat. In his struggle, in his ideology, Lunacharsky saw the anchor of "salvation" for the creative intelligentsia, whose worldview was more or less infected with the prejudices of the bourgeois world. Of course, it is naive to think that Lunacharsky has the last word in the interpretation and evaluation of modernism. We have already noted certain contradictions of the terminological order in him, in addition, the pre-revolutionary Lunacharsky was limited by the specific material that criticized the art of his time. Summarizing what has been said about Lunacharsky's pre-revolutionary works on modernism, we come to the following conclusions. Lunacharsky saw the social nature of modernism in the general crisis of bourgeois ideology, which escalated at the beginning of the 20th century. In the work of writers, he sought, first of all, a reflection of social life, reality, and then the embodiment of the aesthetic principles of modernism. Modernism cannot be reduced to decadence, and decadence to modernism. Lunacharsky's attitude to the theoretical principles of modernist aesthetics was either completely negative or sharply critical. He was convinced that proletarian art, which he saw flourishing in the future, would never follow the path of bourgeois modernism.

In the Soviet years, the attitude of the Marxist critic to modernism became clearer, more definite, and he found a real counterbalance to it in the best works of Soviet artists. At the same time, Lunacharsky did not have to revise his fundamental pre-revolutionary judgments. The main provisions that he had made earlier were concretized and refined in relation to the changed conditions of social life and the development of art. Thus, the arrival of V. Bryusov and A. Blok in the camp of Soviet literature illuminated for Lunacharsky a new light on their search for the previous period. On the other hand, the anti-Soviet position taken by some émigré writers (for example, K. Balmont) led to harsh criticism from critics. New phenomena of artistic life in Russia and in the West fell into Lunacharsky's field of vision: for example, French surrealism, German expressionism, Russian futurism. And here, as before, Lunacharsky shows great flexibility and caution. He was not deceived by the anti-capitalist orientation of the speeches of the early surrealists (L. Aragon, P. Eluard) and rightly found in their broadcast manifestos the preaching of anarchist rebellion and intuitionism, completely alien to the proletariat. He was greatly interested in the work of the German expressionists G. Kaiser, W. Gazenklever. And he also criticized expressionism, whose sharp and grotesque art was devoid of historical perspective. Lunacharsky resolutely opposed futurism, about the "theoreticians" of which Burliuk and Brique spoke with invariable contempt, but he fought for Mayakovsky, the great innovative poet, whose work he considered in constant movement and development. He was opposed to the poeticization of the bohemian lifestyle,67 but sympathized with Yesenin: “He wanted to live like a real person or not live at all” (vol. 2 , p. 642).

The fruitfulness of Lunacharsky's methodology is confirmed by the works of modern researchers A. Dymshits, B. Suchkov, T. Motyleva and others, who applied Lunacharsky's principles that justified themselves in the new conditions. And the oblivion of these principles, which took place in the 1940s and 1950s, led to the understanding of modernism exclusively in ideological terms as a phenomenon identical to decadence. Such a narrow scheme in practice turned into a disregard for many obvious facts of Russian and world art of the 20th century, or a very tendentious interpretation of them.

Modernism, as these scientists show, cannot be reduced to any one trend - symbolism, futurism, surrealism, cubism, etc. It is a complex, a set of trends that are very colorful, contradictory both in ideological orientation and in aesthetic settings. Therefore, as Lunacharsky's experience testifies, these trends require specific consideration, and their representatives should be judged primarily by the concrete results of artistic creativity.

Soviet scientists rightly object to the widespread attempts in the West to broaden the interpretation of modernism as a concept that coincides with modern literature in general, with modern art in general. The goal of such maneuvers, not always openly expressed, is to deny the avant-garde role of realistic art, in an attempt to present it as something secondary, provincial, lagging behind the needs of the time. In the struggle against such apologists of modernism, Lunacharsky's example will always be valuable and instructive for us.

On the other hand, modern literary criticism, also following Lunacharsky, objects to the reduction of modernism to decadence. V. Shcherbina correctly points out that modernism is a complex of phenomena limited to the sphere of art, while decadence is an expression of decadent phenomena in all spheres of the spiritual life of bourgeois society: sociology, ethics, philosophy, art. Therefore, modernism and decadence may intersect, but do not coincide. 68

Modern modernism has gone far from those ideas and forms that determined the work of its founders and the most prominent representatives of the early 20th century. He abandoned not only the traditions of classical art, which has always been characteristic of all modernist schools, but also the humanistic principles in art in general.

Modernism in its current form denies the possibility of man in the reorganization of the world. This denial is becoming increasingly anti-democratic, cynical and immoral. The struggle against modern modernism, the exposure of its social nature, is the struggle for the artistic values ​​of a true culture, for the ability of art to fulfill its great functions aimed at transforming the world and man.

At the origins of modern concepts

A Marxist critic, Lunacharsky seeks to explain the emergence and change of literary trends by social causes. Sociological analysis for him is not just one of the possible ways of explaining the phenomena of spiritual life, but above all the main one, determining all the others, for example, biographical, cultural-historical, psychological, formal, etc. Without denying the latter in principle, he considered them insufficient tools of knowledge without sociological Marxist analysis.

In one of his early articles, “On the Question of Evaluation” (1905), Lunacharsky divides the history of art into classical and romantic periods and explains their change as turning points in public life. Later, in the 1928 article "Romance", he, returning to his early work, clarifies its provisions and outlines the main patterns in the change of romantic and classical art.

Each class, according to Lunacharsky, can occupy four positions: it can be dominant; he may be in a state of decline, anxiety for his existence; the class develops, revolutionary forces appear in its depths; the class is in a state of degradation, depression and hopelessness.

Each of these positions corresponds to different states of art: either romantic or classical. At the same time, classical art - the art of harmony, correspondence of content and form - develops during periods of development and flourishing of the class, while romantic art - the art of contrasts, sharp conflicts, the predominance of content over form - arises in transitional historical periods. Depending on the position of the class, romanticism can be revolutionary, progressive, and romanticism of despair, conservative.

The attractive side of this theory lies in the breadth of view, in the desire to comprehend the history of art in the development and struggle of opposites, in connection with social movements.

We will not dwell on the figures of individual representatives of romanticism, give the characteristics that Lunacharsky gives them, but turn to Lunacharsky's general views. It is clear that the “romance-classic” scheme, despite its external attractiveness, also has significant flaws. And the point here is not only in concessions to vulgar sociology, in a straightforward correlation of the phenomena of art with the phenomena of the class struggle, as I. Sats wrote about. 69The main drawback of this scheme, which claims to be universal (as Lunacharsky himself calls it), is that many trends in art actually fall out of it, and first of all, realism. Where to attribute it: to the classics or to romance? Or, perhaps, depending on the ratio of content and form, to divide between both of them? But in this case, both classics, and romance, and realism become very shaky and unclear concepts in their outlines. And if realism falls out of the range of these phenomena, then it means that the concrete material of art opposes the “romance-classics” scheme proposed by the critic.

Analysis of Lunacharsky's views on this cardinal problem presents certain difficulties: firstly, because he does not have a special theoretical work that unites his thoughts on realism, and secondly, because the very concept of "realism" at the beginning of the 20th century was in wide circulation and was used not only in our modern sense. Thus, in positivist philosophy, those systems that recognize the existence of an objective world were called realism. But since this world itself is interpreted in different ways, realism in philosophy tends either towards idealism or towards materialism. In the subjective-idealistic, Machian sense, Lunacharsky's comrades-in-arms used this concept in the collection Essays on a Realistic World View (1904). However, their opponent N. A. Berdyaev also called his worldview realism, but already mystical and religious.70 This explains why Marxist philosophy avoided using this term: taken in the philosophical sense, it really becomes indefinite.

The first difficulty has to be overcome by looking for general theoretical judgments about realism in Lunacharsky's pre-October literary critical articles, translating, when possible, specific characteristics into a broad aesthetic plane. The second difficulty can be overcome by correlating modern terminology with the meaning of Lunacharsky's speeches, while separating aesthetic realism from philosophical realism, primarily positivist.

Lunacharsky's thoughts on realism attracted the attention of many Soviet literary critics: P. A. Bugaenko, A. S. Bushmin, A. A. Lebedev, A. I. Metchenko, K. D. Muratova, A. S. Myasnikov, A. I. Ovcharenko, S. M. Petrova, B. L. Suchkova, N. A. Trifonova, M. B. Khrapchenko, and V. R. Shcherbina. 71 This is natural, because Lunacharsky and Gorky studied the problems of realistic art in all their complexity, in theoretical and historical aspects, their general provisions stemmed from artistic practice and, in turn, enriched it with new discoveries.

The latest studies of Lunacharsky's views on the nature of realistic art are the articles by N. P. Generalova. 72 N. P. Generalova correctly writes about the breadth of the concept of realism proposed by Lunacharsky and its closeness to Gorky’s views, that the realistic method in the understanding of criticism does not exclude the use of conventionality, fantasy, “negative realism”, i.e. satire and humor , about his attempts to classify the forms of realism, etc. Agreeing with the main conclusions of N. P. Generalova’s articles, we note that she builds them on the material of Lunacharsky’s literary critical speeches of the Soviet years, only occasionally drawing on his pre-revolutionary works. Our task is to study the pre-revolutionary works of Lunacharsky on realism, the fundamental provisions that are constant for his aesthetics.

Let us dwell in detail on the article devoted to the work of L. Toulouse-Lautrec, "The Master of Prostitutes" (1914). This article interests us not in terms of characterization of the French artist, which should be recognized as controversial. What is important for us in this case is not whether Lunacharsky is right or wrong when he calls the post-impressionist Toulouse-Lautrec a realist (and the realist Chekhov an impressionist, as has already been said). Here, as in many other cases, we are dealing with Lunacharsky's terminological license. The theoretical essence of this brilliant characteristic is important for us. Since the article was not republished during the Soviet years, we consider it appropriate to provide large excerpts from it.

Toulouse-Lautrec, writes Lunacharsky, “is not a realist because he is a bytovik, and not a dreamer. He is a realist because all reality is important to him. He is not interested in the color of the prostitute's dress, not in her skin, not in her shape, not in the lighting of the cafe, not in the movement of the dancers, but in the whole given living phenomenon, this piece of life in all its connections with the rest of life.

But where is this connection of things given? After all, it is not about the unity of time, place, composition or lighting. It is a matter of connection in essence, of the place of a given phenomenon in the universe and history. A person discovers this kind of connection creatively, by penetrating the penetrating mind, by assimilating a responsive feeling. This connection is a kind of product of the interpenetration of the object and the subject.

<…>

... It was not in vain that this count, with an ugly body and a tender heart, sat in the corner of night cafes and wandered through the dance halls of brothels. This heart was shed with blood and bile when, piercing his gaze into his object, the artist sketched his meaningful images with a dry and domineering hand. 73

First of all, let us note the deep thought of Lunacharsky that the artist creates images that, being products of his feelings and reason, intuitive and rational, acquire a second life - life in art. They are secondary in relation to reality, but they live in the minds of people along with genuine historical events and facts, and have a powerful influence on the spiritual life of mankind. What Lunacharsky calls "the interpenetration of the object and the subject", "the penetration of a penetrating mind" and "the inculcation of a responsive feeling" is an act of creativity, is the process of creating artistic images. The modern researcher I.F. Volkov from various terms denoting the connection of art with reality - "image", "imitation", "display", "reflection", "reproduction" - recognizes the latter as the most successful.74

“In the world of artistic images,” continues I. F. Volkov, “the real world is reproduced, that is, it is produced again in such a way that real life appears here not by itself, but in creative communication with the artist, in his power, transformed by him , which received further development and creative energy from him in order to infect it and transform real life. 75

Lunacharsky's thought, as we see, developed in the same direction. Moreover, it is characteristic that the results of this reproduction process for Lunacharsky are not works of art in general, but realistic works. In other words, the process of creating realistic works most closely matches the nature of art. Therefore, the retreat from realism, the rejection of it, Lunacharsky invariably associated with a retreat from the content of life, with the unwillingness or inability of the artist to use all the possibilities of his talent.

From what has been said, it does not follow that Lunacharsky brought realism and art closer together, considered them to be something like synonyms. Both in the characterization of Toulouse-Lautrec, and in a number of other arguments, Lunacharsky convincingly shows the differences between realism and classicism, romanticism, modernism. The hallmark of realism is its versatility. The realist strives first of all to comprehend not the external, individual details of this or that phenomenon of life, but its essence. Moreover, this phenomenon is perceived and reproduced by him in development, as part of the whole and a separate episode in the history of society. In this sense, we can talk about the limitless possibilities of realism, about its unconditional advantage over other methods.

“Realism artistically reflects reality,” wrote Lunacharsky in 1911. “This means that he gives it to us in a particularly vivid, concentrated form, so that his images and positions turn out to be characteristic or typical of reality” (vol. 5 , p. 158). It is easy to see the closeness of this statement of the critic to the well-known definition of Engels, according to which "realism implies, in addition to the veracity of details, the fidelity of the transfer of typical characters in typical circumstances." 76

Typical characters in Engels opposed the invented superheroes of romantic writers (for example, E. Xu), these are individuals endowed with individual characteristics - the embodiment of the social contradictions of the era. And Lunacharsky sees in the characteristic images, artistically and concentratedly reflecting reality, that feature of realism, which distinguishes it both from “raw undigested reportage, protocol naturalism”, and from “imagination that satisfies itself” (vol. 5 , p. 159).

Engels understood by typical circumstances the environment in which the hero operates, social relations. The character and circumstances, the hero and the environment are typical for realists, because they are interdependent, inconceivable without each other. And Lunacharsky, in an article about Toulouse-Lautrec, spoke of "the place of a given phenomenon in the universe and history", of a "piece of life" "in all its connections with the rest of life."

Apparently, Lunacharsky was referring to F. Sologub with the words about “a piece of life”, who in the novel “The Created Legend” (the first part of his “Naviya Charm” was published in 1907) defined his creative method as follows: “I take a piece life, rude and poor, and I create from it a sweet legend, for I am a poet. 77 VV Vorovsky showed well that this consistently applied principle led the decadent writer to compose an anti-realistic "pornographic-political novel", to the "Suzdal daub". 78 In social-democratic circles, the novel The Making Legend was rightly perceived as a slander on the revolutionary movement.

Like Engels, Lunacharsky considered typicality, meaningfulness, or, as he sometimes said in the Soviet years, pregnancy (vol. 2 , p. 132), 79 the most important features of realism. Realistic art is expensive for its social orientation, inextricably linked with truthfulness.

It follows from Lunacharsky's statements that a realistic vision and depiction is possible, first of all, with artists who are in the very crucible of those processes that they then reproduce for us in word or paint, marble or music. A realist artist cannot be a passive observer; he is a person of a pronounced social temperament. Even when he is distant or alien to the advanced ideas of the time, the pictures he depicts still have the merits of true life evidence and therefore are of undoubted value for the revolutionary forces.

Historical authenticity and psychological analysis are indispensable qualities of realistic literature, due to the typicality of characters and circumstances, the artistic logic of their disclosure. “Reproducing,” wrote Lunacharsky in 1928 about L. Tolstoy, “he wants to depict landscapes, phenomena, things, faces, conversations with perfect accuracy, conveying only what is most important, and at the same time capturing the vitality and fullness of what is transmitted. In this sense, Tolstoy is a great realist” (vol. 1 , p. 332).

So, for realism, "perfect accuracy", "vitality", "fullness" are necessary. And all this, taken together, should be typified, that is, not just reproduced, but reproduced “only what is most important”, characteristic. But generalization, Lunacharsky argued, is often accompanied by a certain departure from life-like plausibility, highlighting and emphasizing certain traits, character traits, language features, behavior, etc. Lunacharsky believed that the inclusion of conditional and even fantastic images in the fabric of a work of art does not contradict realistic method and expands its creative possibilities, if, of course, while remaining faithful to the principle of typing. In articles about cartoonists, Lunacharsky notes various stages of this departure, in some cases barely noticeable, in others sharply expressed. Yes, J. L. Foran has a tart, daring, tragic seriousness under a cheerful mask. The wonderful master of the pencil remains true to reality. “Like the three luminaries - Gavarni, Monnier, Daumier - he absolutely but needs to distort physiognomies, change their proportionality; he remains a realist, an impressionist. He seems to simply capture life in its most expressive moments.80 , wrote Lunacharsky.

E. Tisserand goes much further. “Almost all Tisserand’s portraits are not portraits of whole faces, but, so to speak, symbolic embodiments of often very subtle links and bundles of ideas, manias or vices. Having traced some original fiber of the human heart, he makes it gigantically swell with his artistic charms and then, as it were, cuts out of it entirely, from its only spiritual matter, his little man, his human-like dwarf, thanks to this device, ugly integral and strikingly one-sided.

Of course, such people do not exist in the world, but this technique gives us the opportunity to look into the depths of the social human soul. By this method Goethe created his Mephistopheles. 81

Lunacharsky does not call Tisserand a realist, but by comparing the heroes of his "Cabinet of Portraits" with Mephistopheles, he thereby points to the closeness of the creative method of their creators. Moreover, a sharp sharpening, a grotesque exaggeration, as can be seen from this statement, is possible not only in painting, not only among caricaturists and satirists, but also in literature. For Lunacharsky, this is the general law of art. “The artist, as a philosopher, may have a high gift for making extremely lofty and broad generalizations out of vital capital. The wider such a generalization is in terms of volume, the more subtle it is in terms of the sophistication of the analysis of reality that preceded it, the further it stands from life ”(Vol. 5, with. 159), - Lunacharsky argued in the article "The Newest Italian Drama" (1911). The main pathos of the theoretical part of this article is to expand the boundaries of the realistic method at the expense of conventional and fantastic forms. The departure from life's verisimilitude should not embarrass the artist. If he strives for broad social, philosophical and aesthetic generalizations, then the fruits of his creative efforts may not resemble everyday reality. As an example, the critic cites fantastic images created by Shakespeare in Macbeth, Goethe in Faust, Ibsen in Peer Gynt, Hauptmann in The Sunken Bell, Bracco in The Little Saint. Lunacharsky calls such art "a synthesis of symbolism and realism", or "realistic symbolism" (vol. 5 , pp. 159,160).

By symbolism, in this case, Lunacharsky, of course, did not understand the direction in modernist art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to the aesthetic principles of which he always had a negative attitude. Symbolism, as follows from the context, is a technique of convention and fantasy that does not lead away from reality, but, on the contrary, contribute to the comprehension of its essence, the laws of its development.

Lunacharsky never favored "negative realism" or "realist symbolism" over "objective realism". The main thing is the depth of comprehension of reality, the breadth and fidelity of generalizations, typification and artistic justification, and not external plausibility, which may or may not be. From these arguments of Lunacharsky, the idea follows that the realistic method provides the artist with ample opportunities to express his creative individuality, to manifest his attitude to life and its artistic embodiment. “In the interpretation of Marx and Engels, the concept of new realism was quite definite and at the same time broad,” A. N. Iezuitov rightly wrote. - She was devoid of any dogmatism and artistic and stylistic normativity.82

Defending the great possibilities of realistic art in the new conditions of the beginning of the 20th century, Lunacharsky acted as a Marxist critic, as a worthy student of Marx and Engels.

A certain drawback of all Lunacharsky's generally fair pre-revolutionary judgments about realism is that they were not always associated with the work of the truly great realists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - Tolstoy and Chekhov, Shaw and Wells, Rolland and Frans, Hauptmann and T. Mann. Lunacharsky often characterized their social and political positions, their work and individual works, but regardless of the theoretical provisions of realism. The very same provisions stemmed from his analysis of the "latest Italian drama", from the works of French humorists and satirists, and others, that is, those whose creative position was limitedly realistic, weakening the realistic. Lunacharsky eliminated this gap between theory and literary-critical practice in the Soviet years.

Lunacharsky did not create a unified and complete theory of realistic art. If we take into account the complexity of this task, and its far from being completely solved in our time, then in no case will we reproach critics for this.

However, summarizing his thoughts on the fate of realism, we see that, taken as a whole, they turned out to be very fruitful for our literary criticism. Soviet scholars seek and find profoundly modern ideas in Lunacharsky's judgments about realism. Firstly, Lunacharsky, like other Marxist critics, was convinced of the inexhaustible possibilities of realism and never believed that his time had passed and that other directions should come to replace him, more in line with the nature of our era. Realism, enriched with socialist content, is profoundly modern and promising; it most fully expresses the essence of art. Secondly, Lunacharsky, in studying the problems of realism, used a sociological analysis that justified itself. As a result of its dialectical application, realistic art received justification in social life, in the struggle of progress against the forces of reaction.

Criticism as a process
Marxist literary criticism arose as a result of the widespread dissemination of Marxist ideology in Russia. Its social basis is the class struggle of the proletariat in the conditions of the third stage of the liberation movement in Russia. Its goal is twofold: on the one hand, to comprehend and evaluate from a Marxist position the entire course of the development of literature and art, both in the past and in the present, both in Russia and abroad; on the other hand, to accustom the working masses, primarily the proletariat, to the riches of spiritual culture, to stimulate their own creativity.

Marxist literary criticism from the moment of its inception has been imbued with an offensive revolutionary spirit. It developed its methodology in a fierce struggle against liberal, decadent, Menshevik criticism. There was not a single serious aesthetic theory, not a single significant trend in Russian and Western art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that was not appreciated by Marxist critics. In the study of the social conditioning of art, the objective and subjective factors that determine its specificity, the undeniable superiority of Marxist criticism in comparison with all previous critical schools has affected.

Marxist criticism is characterized by a fundamental methodological basis, strong, stable and at the same time internally dynamic, the existence of various specific interests and artistic tastes among various critics, the predominant attention of one of them to certain aspects of literary creativity, special methodological emphasis, free and conscious expression of critical individualities.

Developing in the difficult conditions of illegal or semi-legal existence, emigration, censorship repressions, a split in the social democratic movement, Marxist criticism did not avoid individual mistakes. Paying mainly attention to the content, ideological and social side of literature and art, she was less interested in questions of artistic form. Between the Marxist critics there were quite significant differences of a philosophical and aesthetic nature. At times, the controversy was so sharp that it seemed as if there was nothing uniting them between them. But despite all the nuances and individual differences, Marxist critics remained united in their attitude to the literary heritage, in their criticism of modernism and decadence, in the affirmation of proletarian art, in their defense of realism.

Marxist criticism has gone through a difficult path of development. The first stage, the stage of formation (1883-1903), represented mainly by Plekhanov, is characterized by a genetic approach to the phenomena of literature; the second stage (1903–1917) is more characterized by a functional attitude and perception of literature.

The boundaries between criticism, literary history, and theory were not sharply defined in the work of the Marxist writers. We see the same picture in their predecessors, the revolutionary-democratic critics. And yet it is not difficult to see that Plekhanov spoke freely both as a theoretician, and as a historian, and as a critic of literature; Lunacharsky was a theoretician and critic before the revolution; Vorovsky - only a critic.

Compared with Plekhanov and Lunacharsky, the range of V.V. Vorovsky's work is narrower; he does not have special theoretical works, such as "Letters without an Address" or "Tasks of Social-Democratic Artistic Creativity". However, Vorovsky always built his critical judgments about Russian writers and critics—Turgenev and Koltsov, Belinsky and Pisarev, Chekhov and Gorky, Znanievists and bourgeois modernists—on a solid and solid foundation of theoretical knowledge. The philosophical part of this foundation, although not developed in detail, was consistently materialistic, free from empirio-criticism, god-building, and similar idealistic inclusions. This is a definite advantage of Vorovsky over Lunacharsky.

The main directions of Vorovsky's literary-critical activity coincided or were close to those developed by Plekhanov and Lunacharsky. Like Plekhanov and Lunacharsky, Vorovsky advocated a critical assimilation of the classical heritage and gave examples of such assimilation (“The split in the dark kingdom”, “Was Herzen a socialist?”, etc.). Vorovsky's favorite method of critical articles is the parallel between the works of classical literature of the 19th century and the writings of the decadents, as a result of which the process of gradual refinement of the ideals of the bourgeois intelligentsia (Bazarov and Sanin, Fathers and Sons, etc.) is revealed. Vorovsky inflicted strong blows on the literature of decay (“On the Night After the Battle”, “On the Bourgeoisness of the Modernists”). A staunch supporter of realistic art, a penetrating interpreter of the works of Chekhov, Bunin, Andreev, Vorovsky fought for literature of high revolutionary ideals and found examples of it in the work of Gorky, to whom he devoted a number of remarkable articles.

In the history of Marxist criticism, Vorovsky ranks next to Plekhanov and next to Lunacharsky. Defining the originality of his contribution, Lunacharsky characterized Vorovsky's criticism as "primarily socio-political criticism" (vol. 8, with. 380). And modern researchers I. Chernoutsan, O. Semenovsky, V. Kuleshov rightly single out two defining features in Vorovsky's literary-critical heritage: journalistic pathos and sociological analysis. “The task of art criticism,” wrote I. Chernoutsan, “Vorovsky saw it in giving not only a social class, but also an aesthetic assessment of works of art, that is, to reveal to the reader, viewer, listener and the measure of comprehending the essential processes of life, and artistic perfection, and consequently, the emotional effectiveness of those or other phenomena of art. 83

Vorovsky, like Lunacharsky, did not confine himself to assigning the writer to one social group or another, and did not consider the characterization of his class views to be the ultimate goal of analysis. “This is not a learned man, for whom, like, for example, Professor Pereverzev (despite his “Marxism”), literature is the same as flowers for a botanist, dried and distributed by him but equal rubrics” (vol. 8 , p. 379) , - Lunacharsky wrote about Vorovsky.

Vorovsky was a passionate fighter in literary criticism, journalism, and revolutionary work. He needs social analysis to establish the Marxist ideology, which, according to Vorovsky, should become the determining factor in the creativity of future artists and their future interpreters - literary critics.

We confine ourselves to a general description of Vorovsky's creative image, a definition of the originality of his talent - the reader will find a detailed presentation of his aesthetic views in the works of the literary critics named above. Note that the study of his literary-critical activity began with Lunacharsky's introductory article to the second volume of V. Vorovsky's works (1931).

M. S. Olminsky is more correct to call a literary critic, but a party publicist, who often turned to literary works. Of course, the boundary between literary criticism, on the one hand, and journalism, sociology, philosophy, on the other, is not a firm one. “That is why,” Lunacharsky wrote, “criticism cannot be singled out as something isolated: it is absolutely impossible to write, say, the history of literary criticism, separating it from the history of literary criticism, without making constant excursions into the field of philosophical and social sciences” (vol. 8 , p . 339).

Yet this limit exists. Literary criticism is a judgment about literature, literary self-awareness. “Each epoch of Russian literature had a demolition of consciousness about itself, expressed in criticism,” 84 wrote V. G. Belinsky. And having mastered the Marxist methodology, criticism becomes the science of evaluating literature, mostly modern. Publicism is a prompt response to social and political events, "the history of modernity." Literature here, of course, may be present, but it is not a goal, not a subject of analysis and evaluation, but a means.

Lunacharsky and Vorovsky often crossed the border between criticism and journalism in one direction or another. Olminsky almost never did this. The problematics of his articles could be literary-critical - exposing the "Jewish fiction" of Sologub, Artsybashev, Vinnichenko, Gorky's defense from attacks by the reactionary press, issues of freedom of the press and the role of censorship, "pure art". However, they were decided mainly in the journalistic plan. Very rarely Olminsky made attempts to include aesthetics in his discussions on literary topics, and most often these attempts are unsuccessful. So, in Leo Tolstoy, he saw only the founder of the theory of non-resistance to evil by violence and an opponent of the revolution. Olminsky's statement that "Chekhov is a symbolist" 85and a writer without a worldview, essentially wrong and unpromising from the point of view of literary criticism.

Perhaps the greatest merit of Olmnsky the writer is his work on Saltykov-Shchedrin. The characterization of the great satirist given by Olminsky turned out to be broad, versatile, and not obsolete in its main features until our time. Of all the Russian classics of the 19th century, Shchedrin, in his worldview, was the most free from the prejudices characteristic of many, even great, of his contemporaries. And since Olminsky considered Russian writers of the past and present primarily from the point of view of their ideological consistency and loyalty to advanced social ideals, it is understandable why he was imbued with deep sympathy for Shchedrin and retained them until the end of his life. In addition to detailed articles on Saltykov-Shchedrin, Olminsky created a unique guide to the work of his favorite writer - Shchedrin Dictionary (1897).

The works of Plekhanov, Lunacharsky and Vorovsky are the most valuable and, one might say, the classic part of Marxist criticism. However, considering criticism as a process, we must include in it those who took the first steps in interpreting literary works from the standpoint of Marxism: L. Voitolovsky, V. Fritsche, V. Pereverzev, P. Kogan, and others. Their names were often found on pages of the magazines "Education" and "Sovremennik", in the newspapers "Kyiv Mysl" and "The Day" next to the name of Lunacharsky. They were active both as critics and as literary historians. However, Marxism, for various reasons - primarily because of their lack of close ties with the Bolshevik Party and the proletarian movement - was superficially absorbed by them. The literary-critical works of L. Voitolovsky and P. Kogan, and especially the historical-literary works of V. Fritsche and V. Pereverzev, are characterized to a greater or lesser extent by vulgar sociological perversions.

Dissatisfaction with bourgeois literary criticism, which interpreted the history of literature from an idealist standpoint, is completely understandable and natural. However, the subjectivism of bourgeois historians and critics, for whom literature is an unsystematic and chaotic collection of names and works, is opposed by a vulgar scheme based on the writer's belonging to one class or another. Plekhanov, Lunacharsky and Vorovsky understood well the role and significance of "intermediate instances" between literature and the economic situation of society, although they made some mistakes in this area. What was their departure from the rules, historically inevitable costs, became the rule with V. Pereverzev and V. Fritsche. The vulgar sociological school uses Marxist propositions, but uses them inflexibly, straightforwardly and one-sidedly, without taking into account all the factors that make up a work of art. Sociology remained, dialectics, the most important part of Marxist knowledge, disappeared.

Considering Lunacharsky among other critics, we see that for all the originality and uniqueness of his appearance, he was closely connected with the Marxist literary environment, was a typical representative of this camp and this period. To speak of the formation of Lunacharsky's aesthetic views means to speak of the formation of Marxist literary criticism as a whole, although, of course, it is not limited to his name.

Marxist criticism of the second stage experienced the beneficial effect of Lenin's ideas. Criticism could still exist outside Lenin's influence, but it could develop in the new, changed conditions of the revolutionary struggle only under the banner of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin played an exceptionally important role in the spiritual development of Lunacharsky. His influence was all-round, that is, it covered not one particular area of Lunacharsky's interests: politics, philosophy, aesthetics, questions of education, etc., but all of them together. This influence expanded over the years, becoming the decisive factor that ultimately determined Lunacharsky's spiritual quest. If earlier it was possible to talk about this with a greater or lesser degree of probability, now, after the release of the 80th volume of the Literary Heritage (V. I. Lenin and A. V. Lunacharsky. Correspondence. Reports. Documents), this has become obvious and documented confirmed fact.

Chukovsky K.I. Sobr. soch., vol. 2. M., 1965, p. 423.
Chukovsky K.I. Sobr. cit., vol. 2, p. 424. Here Chukovsky made the following note: "Lunacharsky's article on Chekhov is one of his weakest articles."
Semenovsky O. Marxist criticism of Chekhov and Tolstoy. Chisinau, 1968, p. 62. _
Gorky A. M. Sobr. soch., vol. 28. M., 1954, p. 118. _
In this case, we are not talking about a philosophical worldview, but about the idea and method of achieving a life ideal, a moral imperative. The author himself stipulates such a usage.
"Education", 1903, No. 9, p. 88–89. Let us note that A. A. Fadeev, independently of Lunacharsky, came to the same conclusions in his “Subjective Notes” (1944). And he pays tribute to the purity, transparency of Chekhov's talent, the charm of his humor. And he notes the absence in Chekhov's work, in contrast to Tolstoy and Gorky, of a heroic and tragic beginning (see: Fadeev A. For thirty years. M., 1957, pp. 857–861).
"Education", 1903, No. 9, p. 90. _
N. A. Trifonov rightly objected to the exaggerations of O. Semenovsky (see: Trifonov N. A. V. Lunacharsky and Soviet literature, pp. 40–41).
"Northern Territory", 1902, December 3, No. 318.
"Northern Territory", 1902, December 31, No. 343.
There.
For more on this, see: Boguslavsky A. O., Diev V. A. Russian Soviet dramaturgy. 1917–1935 M., 1963, p. 36. _
See our article “At the Origins of the Soviet Drama” (in Sat: Oktyabr i Fiction, Minsk, 1968, pp. 101–122).
Gorky A. M. Literary portraits. M., 1959, p. 55. _
There.
Describing him, G. Berdnikov writes: “Chekhov was neither a revolutionary-democrat, like Saltykov-Shchedrin, nor a petrel of the revolution, like M. Gorky. For a long time he was far from politics, and even at the end of his career, he had a very vague idea of ​​the immediate real-historical prospects for the development of Russia. And yet, Chekhov's work is organically connected with the Russian revolution ” (Berdnikov G. A. P. Chekhov. Ideological creative searches, ed. 2nd L., 1970, pp. 537–538).
Chekhov A.P. Full. coll. soch., vol. 14. M., 1949, p. 177. _
Vorovsky VV Literary-critical articles. M., 1956, p. 102. _
Vorovsky BV Literary-critical articles, p. 139. _
Lunacharsky A. V. Etudes critical and polemical. M., 1905, p. 389.
Lunacharsky A. V. Essays on the history of Russian literature. M., 1976, p. 397–428.
Lebedev A. A. Aesthetic views of A. V. Lunacharsky, p. 45. _
A mistake was pointed out by A. Lebedeva in a detailed article by V. O. Kapustin “Lunacharsky. “What to teach V. G. Korolenko” (in collection: A. V. Lunacharsky - critic. Stati. Kiev, 1975, pp. 159–178).
Lunacharsky A. V. What does V. G. Korolenko teach. "Education", 1903, No. 9, section 2, p. 126.
Lunacharsky A. V. What does V. G. Korolenko teach, p. 126–127.
Ibid, p. 240–241.
A. V. Lunacharsky is a critic. Article, p. 169–170.
Lunacharsky A. V. What does V. G. Korolenko teach, p. 132.
Ibid, p. 165. _
Smolko N. S. Creativity of Gleb Uspensky in the assessment of A. V. Lunacharsky. - "Proceedings of the Przhevalsky State Pedagogical Institute", 1965, v. 12, p. 22–23. The article is accompanied by an index of Lunacharsky's works, in which the work of G. Uspensky is considered - 59 titles.
Lunacharsky A. V. The soul of Tarkovskaya and social psychology. - "Kievskaya thought", 1910, March 4, No. 63.
"Paris Bulletin", 1912, April 13, No. 15.
Plekhanov G. V. Art and literature, p. 293. _
Kuleshov V. I. History of Russian criticism. M., 1972, p. 467.
Lunacharsky A. V. Maurice Maeterlinck. - "Education". 1902, No. 10, sec. 2, p. 153. Lunacharsky repeatedly spoke about bourgeois degeneration as a source of decadence in the Soviet years as well. So, in the thirteenth lecture of the "History of Western European Literature in its Most Important Moments," he repeated these provisions of an earlier article on Maeterlinck (see: Lunacharsky A. V. Sobr. soch., vol. 4, pp. 330–335).
Lunacharsky A. V. Maurice Maeterlinck. - "Education", 1902, No. 10, sec. 2, p. 153. _
Lunacharsky A. V. Autumn salop in Paris. - Pravda, 1905, February, p. 154, 156.
This article was published in the Genevan "Foreign Gazette" (1908, March 23, No. 2; March 30, No. 3, cited in: Literary Heritage, vol. 82).
Literary heritage, vol. 82, p. 200. _
Plekhanov GV Art and Literature, p. 256. _
Literary decay, book. 1. St. Petersburg, 1908, p. 3. _
Steklov Yu. Socio-political conditions of literary decay. - In: Literary decay, book. 1, p. 11. _
Lunacharsky A. V. The twenty-third collection of "Knowledge". - In: Literary decay, book. 2. St. Petersburg, 1909, p. 85. _
A particularly large number of Lunacharsky's articles and correspondence were published in the progressive newspaper Kyiv Mysl. In addition to him, A. V. Amfiteatrov, V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, D. Bedny, L. N. Voitolovsky, V. G. Korolenko, S. I. Gusev-Orenburgsky and others collaborated in the newspaper.
“The art of the militant proletariat is still very much, but in literature it is already beginning to create its own modernism, which will be the lasting art of the near future,” Lunacharsky wrote in 1922 (see: Lunacharsky A.V. Etudes. M.-Pg., 1922, p. 196).
Lunacharsky A. V. Maurice Maeterlinck. - "Education", 1902, No. 10, section II, p. 155. _
Lunacharsky A. V. Paris Letters. Young French painting. - Sovremennik, 1913, June, p. 340.
There.
Ibid, p. 338.
Lunacharsky A. V. Exhibition of paintings by Cezanne. - Kyiv Thought. 1914, January 5, No. 5.
Lunacharsky A. V. Concerning Italian painting. - "Star", 1924, No. 5, p. 144. _
Lunacharsky A.V. Salon of Independents, - "Kievskaya Thought", 1911, June 5, No. 153.
Lunacharsky A.V. Salon of Independents, - "Kievskaya Thought", 1911, June 5, No. 153.
Lunacharsky A. V. Maurice Maeterlinck, - "Education", 1902, No. 10, sec. 2, p. 167.
Ibid., No. 11, sec. 2, p. 105, 109.
Ibid, p. 117. _
See: Lenin V.I. Poln. coll. cit., vol. 48, p. 180. N. A. Trifonov points out that Lenin had in mind Lunacharsky’s article “Love and Death”, placed in Kievskaya Thought (1913, February 24, No. 55) (see: Trifonov N. A. A. V. Lunacharsky and Soviet literature, p. 31).
See: Shkunaeva P. D. Belgian drama from Maeterlinck to the present day. M., 1973, p. 11. _
Literary heritage, vol. 82, p. 303. In 1916, Lunacharsky did not yet know how Lenin felt about the work of the great Belgian. Meanwhile, as N. K. Krupskaya testifies, Lenin knew his poetry well and in the difficult years of the Parisian emigration “he dreamed most stubbornly ... in sleepless nights reading Verharn” (see: V. I. Lenin on literature and art. M ., 1967, p. 628).
See: Shkunaeva P.D. Belgian drama from Maeterlinck to the present day, p. 165. _
Describing Verharn's worldview, Lunacharsky uses the term "meliorism" (from Latin melior - better). It does not quite coincide with the term "optimism" (optimus - the best), because it involves a struggle, overcoming obstacles, dissatisfaction with what has been achieved.
The article "The Singer of the New World" was first published in the social democratic journal Vestnik Tailors (1914, January 2, Nos. 5–6), signed by Andrey Svobodny, along with excerpts from Verhaern's poems. This publication was the basis for the arrest of the journal and bringing the editor V. E. Novikov to criminal liability. With comments by N. Zhdanovsky, the article “The Singer of the New World” was reprinted in Izvestia of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, OLYA (1963, vol. 22, issue 2, pp. 124–126).
Gorky A. M. Literary portraits, p. 195. _
Lunacharsky A. V. Philistinism and individualism. M., 1923, p. 136. _
Lunacharsky A. V. King about the new theater. - "Education", 1908, No. 4, p. 19. _
Lunacharsky and in the Soviet years continued to be interested in the work of A. Bely. Thanks to his support, a dramatization of the novel "Petersburg" (1925) was staged. The main role of Senator Ableukhov was played by M. Chekhov, whose performance Lunacharsky called "brilliant." In general, the performance turned out to be contradictory, despite the efforts of the theater to weaken the mystical tendencies of the play and strengthen the satirical beginning (see: Lunacharsky A. V. About A. Bely's "Petersburg" in the Second Art Theater. - Collected works, vol. 3, p. 279).
Lunacharsky A. V. Answer to imaginist poets. - "Print and Revolution", 1921, No. 2, p. 238. _
See: Shcherbina V. Ways of Art. M., 1970, p. 197. _
See his preface to the book: Lunacharsky A.V. In the world of music. M., 1958, p. 27. _
Berdyaev N.A. Slid specia aeternitalis. SPb., 1907, p. 2. _
See also our article "Content and variety of forms of realistic literature (On the question of the literary-critical positions of A. V. Lunacharsky)" (in the collection: Problems of Realism. Vologda, 1936, pp. 3–18).
Generalova N. P. Lunacharsky on realism. - In the book: A. V. Lunacharsky. Research and materials. L., 1978, p. 71–95; She is. Lunacharsky on the artistic forms of realism. - "Russian Literature", 1978, No. 4, p. 60–77.
Lunacharsky A.V. Master of prostitutes. - "Kievskaya thought", 1914, February 2, No. 33.
See: Volkov I. F. Creative methods and artistic systems. M., 1978, p. 31. _
There.
Literary heritage, vol. 2. M., 1932, p. 1. We cite this statement on the first Russian translation in the first publication that appeared during Lunacharsky's lifetime. In the collected works of K. Marx and F. Engels, this phrase is translated differently: not “fidelity of transmission”, but “veracity of reproduction” (vol. 28. M., 1940, p. 27; vol. 37. M., 1965, p. 35). However, the original translation more accurately expresses Engels' thought and defines the nature of realism (see: G. N. Pospelov, Theory of Literature. M., 1978, pp. 285–286).
Sologub F.K. Created legend. - "Rosehip", book. 3. St. Petersburg, 1907, p. 189.
Vorovsky VV Literary-critical articles. M., 1956, p. 169, 173.
From fr. pregnant - literally: carrying an embryo.
Lunacharsky A. V. Foren. - "The Day", 1913, January 22, No. 20.
Lunacharsky A. V. Cabinet of portraits. - "Kievskaya thought", 1914, July 9, No. 186.
Jezuitov A. N. Questions of realism in the aesthetics of Marx and Engels. L., 1903, p. 139. _
Chernoutsan I. Bequeathed by Lenin. - 13 Sat: Methodological problems of modern literary criticism. M., 1976, p. 16. _
Belinsky V. G. Full. coll. soch., vol. 9. M., 1955. p. 148. _
Olminsky M.S. On issues of literature. Articles 1900–1914. L., 1926, p. 54. _

.