Buržuaznye restavratory [15-06-1937] - [D041]

Concise description of the directive:

Harsh criticism directed against the Litfront. On the one hand, the Litfront members followed Trotsky, who stated that Marxist methods were not artistic ones, promoting an autonomous art, independent of politics; on the other hand, they rejected the aesthetic element in art. They fought against epic art, against the realist novel, denying their actual meaning and claiming that service to their people was the opposite of service to art. Yet the socialist country creates all the conditions to create great art. Litfront members deny the creative character of the Great Revolution. The members of Litfront were ready to eliminate art in the name of a propaganda slogan. Great art was pitted against the great Revolution. Socialism is the first system in history to create all the favourable conditions for the harmonious development of the individual. Litfront instead promoted reactionary theories about the dissolution of the individual into the collective. Hence the negation of the psychological novel. Litfront also denied the ability of socialism to transform human nature. The members of Litfront and Averbach’s circle cultivated scholastic and pseudoscientific literary criticism. The party fights relentlessly against enemy influences in literature. How could it happen, then, that even after the 1932 decree on the closure of RAPP, Averbach’s Trotskyist circle persisted in our literary criticism? It is due to a lack of vigilance.