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Lunacharsky Articles and speeches on international politicsAnxious question
Even to the most skeptical observer in our cultural life it is impossible to deny that our art is entering a period of undeniable flourishing. There is nothing to say about theaters. It is now recognized almost all over the world that our theater during the revolution not only retained the artistic level (very high) that was inherent in the Russian theater before the revolution, but also acquired such a variety and in some cases such sharpness that, in the presence of an undoubted the decline of theatrical art in the countries of the capitalist system, our theater took first place on a world scale. True, some doubts about this are sometimes expressed; but they are powerless to change the general favorable judgment. These doubts run along two lines. Firstly, along the line of dramaturgy, which allegedly does not produce new major works; secondly, along the line of an imaginary theatrical "reaction", which allegedly consists in the fact that at that time, just as the realistic theater assimilated certain elements of the achievements of the left theatres, these latter in their turn swayed towards theatrical realism, so that a sort of tendency towards a certain uniform type emerged. The first limitation of a favorable judgment about the state of our theaters ceases to be in any way justified. I can say with confidence that the new season, even more than the last one, will confirm that we already have a number of serious playwrights working in a new way, whether in terms of subject matter, or in terms of development - and that we can compete in terms of dramaturgy as with the playwrights of any other European country, as well as with any dramatic year of our past history, with the exception, of course, of those years when masterpieces like Woe from Wit, Thunderstorms, etc. were published. This relatively high level of quality and a rather large amount of dramatic production suggests that masterpieces are just around the corner. Our imaginary theatrical "reaction" is simply the time of a certain maturity of the theater. After the revolution, we lived through an era of violent and motley searches, a period of mutation and therefore "creative". Life has said its word about which theaters can survive and which ones are durable and needed. It is natural that by means of selection and adaptation to life forms that are always heterogeneous, the theater is reduced to stable types. Even before this stable type began to develop, I had already spoken more than once about the main tendencies of the public, which must inevitably lead the theater to the mainstream and, at least, to fairly accurately definable a priori forms. The way it is. It does not follow from all that has been written above that I should think that the theater has reached the climax of its development, that it is completely satisfactory, that it fulfills the entire social order given to it. Nothing like this. Our theater, like a revolutionary theater, is as young as our entire revolutionary society. It still has a long, difficult and joyful evolution ahead of it.
Turning to the field of literature, we must also admit that a great flowering is noticeable in it.
It is already possible to enumerate dozens of the names of the writers of the revolution who wrote good things, which undoubtedly can be placed next to the typical works of previous years by outstanding writers of high Russian literature.
Moreover, we can already point to individual names and works that will undoubtedly go down in the history of Russian literature. Outside our homeland, especially in Germany, a growing attention to our literature is already beginning.
Leonov's "Badgers" were deeply and thoughtfully analyzed and deserved great praise. I have no doubt that the same meeting will be given to Gladkov's Cement.
In addition to "Badgers" and "Cement", a number of major stories appeared in print over the years and created fame for our literary and creative youth.
A certain shift from poetry to prose is a profoundly healthy phenomenon; but at the same time, poetry does not remain barren. To the big names of Mayakovsky, Aseev, Pasternak, we now have to add our Komsomol youth - Bezymyansky, Zharov, Utkin, who arouse very strong hopes in us and to a large extent already justify them.
The great success of the last exhibition of the AHRR, along with the undoubted rise in the general level of our painting (at one time it was significantly lower), a large number of young people who are now attracted to the visual arts and are rich in talents, unexpectedly significant achievements even in the field of sculpture, which we still recently considered to be in decline - all this makes us speak with confidence about the great quantitative and qualitative growth of the creative arts.
We also have interesting symptoms in the field of music. The unceasing creativity of great masters attracts the special attention of the non-Union world. In most cases, Europe greets our virtuosos with surprise, especially when we have to state the remarkable skill of the youth, brought up already in revolutionary times, which we ourselves considered too difficult for the young flowers of the most refined forms of art to blossom in it.
We must also listen with extreme attention to those musical youth who have not yet found their own paths, but are striving to find paths corresponding to the smooth road of our entire revolutionary communist cultural construction.
Our cinematic art is beginning to put forward new directors and actors already born by the revolution, and sometimes it rises to such a height that again makes the whole world around us, not without surprise, recognize the greatest achievements in a country that until recently was half-dead from the shocks it experienced.
I have already had to express these optimistic thoughts, and I think that the latest developments in various fields of art can only strengthen this optimism of mine. And yet, I can never think about our art, I can never enjoy its already rich fruits without the painful thought of the internal contradiction that exists in it. Do not think that I am talking about the struggle of realists with the left, or about the sometimes very painful processes of developing new forms of art required by a renewed life, in conditions when the country itself is far from unanimous in its aspirations, and when the old is still intertwined with the new. No, all these difficulties are surmountable, and it is precisely this overcoming of them that represents the flourishing garland of creative achievements that joyfully unfold before our eyes.
No, the internal contradictions, which make one mournfully reflect, lie in the fact that this undoubted flourishing of art in all its fields, in essence, does not have any solid material base under it. Last year, the theater was still able to somehow breathe. With comparatively minimal wages for actors, with very great stinginess, most theaters somehow made ends meet. This did not prevent, however, some isolated crashes. Several theaters of exceptional importance are in a state of rather severe financial crisis. What will be the new season, it is impossible to say. But no matter how economical we may be, no matter how great that peculiar experience of various tricks, simplifications, etc., through which the theater has passed during these years of poverty, it would still be really unjustified optimism if we recognized the material the state of the theater is prosperous and would not take into account the fact that we may constantly be faced with questions about the very existence of one or another flowering branch of our theatrical tree.
Writers complain about their position all the time. There may be an excessive desire to connect the sensational facts of suicides of talented writers with their difficult financial situation, but there is no doubt that our writers live poorly, earn little, often do not have time to endure their work properly. The most prominent masters are placed in absolutely unbearable living conditions. Recently, Maxim Gorky, on the basis of the large number of letters he received, wrote to some of his friends in the USSR about the need to take urgent measures to help literature. And just in one of these letters, Aleksey Maksimovich correctly noted that literature is recovering, expanding, filling with new juices, that a new, necessary and beautiful post-revolutionary literature is being born, and that at the same time all this is happening in conditions so unfavorable that it becomes terrible.
The situation is even worse in the visual arts. When you look at these hundreds, almost thousands of works of art, many of which are of unconditional value, when you talk with young people who are striving in abundant numbers for the Vkhutemas and the Leningrad Academy, you involuntarily ask yourself the question: where is the buyer for all this production? Yes, the fine arts went to meet the masses. His works are now needed, as evidenced by the very interest in him on the part of the masses. The masses are sensitive to art, but they do not have the means to acquire the inventions of art. And if it is relatively easy to get a ticket to a theater, concert or exhibition, and even then at reduced prices, then it is not at all easy to buy a painting.
If performing musicians live somewhat tolerably, then composers are in most cases in incredibly difficult conditions. And among the performers, some young pianists absolutely do not know what to do, how to penetrate through the difficulties of a material nature into this very small circle of people whose concerts give them food.
All this must be looked at with open eyes. Speaking from the point of view of the cultural needs of the country, our position must be formulated as follows: art, rapidly and violently rising, more and more accurately determining its direction, is catching up with the cultural needs of the country. But if you look from the economic point of view, you would have to say that art has outgrown the economic possibilities of the country, that the country cannot pay for its artists.
But what will happen then? There will come a moment when the intense struggle for life waged by all artists will somehow undermine their strength, make them give up on art and try to find another way to earn money.
Will there not be a moment when art, which should have been even more filled with juices, developed even more, in order to find itself at the level of those aspirations and hopes that our great revolution excites, will begin to wither and sink. After all, even now individual artists are fleeing abroad simply for the sake of a piece of bread. The remarkable sculptor Erzya, a man of revolutionary feeling, our true friend, was forced, for example, the other day to leave for South America. If it was possible to endure such departures for a while - for food - in our famine years, now this phenomenon painfully scratches our consciousness. And, of course, the case with Erzey is not the only one. Let me remind you of such artists as Korovin, Annenkov (who recently left us), about remaining, like Konenkov in America, Soviet citizens who want to return to us, but those who are postponing this return because they are afraid of suffering too much materially from it, of falling into unbearable conditions in the sense of housing, workshops, orders, etc. Sometimes from the lips of people whom I do not want to name, you hear this question: abroad?.. I am not needed here.” This is said by people whose usefulness no one can doubt, at least on our Soviet platform. In a word, when you listen to the voices of the artists themselves about their life, you hear some kind of continuous groan. the necessity of which no one standing, at least on our Soviet platform, can doubt. In a word, when you listen to the voices of the artists themselves about their life, you hear some kind of continuous groan. the necessity of which no one standing, at least on our Soviet platform, can doubt. In a word, when you listen to the voices of the artists themselves about their life, you hear some kind of continuous groan.
And the youth? I have already written once that one of the rectors of our largest art institution, with a bitter half-joking, calls his young students candidates for suicide.
But is it really true that our country, in spite of the undoubted economic upsurge that we are witnessing, is still in such a distressed situation that it cannot support its developing, ever closer, ever more familiar art to all communist art? I think it's not. I think that the government, and the trade unions, and cooperation, and in general the broad masses of the public: with a certain organized approach to business, if the artists themselves had some organizing forces, they could resolve this painful issue, they could create a more solid basis for our art. We somehow supported art for pennies when it came to either preserving the old heritage, largely alien to the revolution, or about the very dubious ephemeral experiments of innovators who sometimes did not understand themselves.
Of course, art will still survive and win, because the revolution itself will win; anyway, she bears this child of hers in her mighty arms. But the point is to reduce heavy sacrifices, stops, backward movements, unnecessary labor pains of individual works of art - in a word, that exorbitant and unnecessary expenditure of energy that is now being made, it is true, due to really acute poverty.
In this article I am not proposing anything, I am only pointing out to all those who are interested, or rather, I want to loudly confirm what all those who are interested themselves see, namely, the existence of a deep contradiction between the ideological and formal flourishing of our art and the extreme fragility, extreme narrowness of that material the base on which this flourishing rests.