Trozkistskaja gruppirovka "Pereval" [26-06-1937] - [D045]

Concise description of the directive:

Voronsky, Averbach and some other literary agents of Trotskyism are only now being permanently eradicated. Trotsky, leader of the fascists, denied the possibility of building socialism in a single country, the USSR. This also led to another thesis of the Trotskyists on the impossibility of creating a proletarian socialist culture. Voronsky argued that art could only be created by the bourgeois intelligentsia. The aim of Voronsky, a representative of the “Pereval” group with which the RAPP (Averbach) pretended to fight while actually promoting similar ideas, was the restoration of capitalism in art. The fascist Trotsky spoke of the irrational character of artistic creation. His accomplice Bukharin supported the same idea (“art is the organisation of feelings through images”). Voronsky and his accomplices actively developed this completely hostile thesis against Marxism-Leninism by pitting sentiment against thought. The mystery of art, according to them, consists in the reproduction of primary and immediate feelings and impressions; the artist can only deal with the sphere of feelings of the individual and not with the sphere of concepts of a social subject. This downplaying of the role of consciousness in art was a form of Trotskyism’s struggle against socialist sensibilities in literature. Even the task of appropriating the cultural values accumulated by mankind throughout its history was denied by the Voronsky Trotskyist group. The theories of Voronsky and Averbach represent a monstrous mixture of the neo-Kantian ideas of Mach, Bergson and Freud and the vulgar sociologism of Pereverzev. They inherited the more reactionary sides of the doctrines of idealist art. The unifying current of their reasoning was the thesis that art needs no connection to the current revolutionary reality. From Trotsky and Bukharin’s thesis on intuitivism and the unconscious character of the creative act and their denial of the class character of art also came the denial of the class struggle in literature. For Voronsky, who follows the theory of immediate impressions, a literary work only has value if it gives us the impression of an autonomous datum of people and the world. An artist must be disinterested, detached from social life. For his accomplice Gorbov, art lies outside the class struggle; the works of all writers, even enemies, must only be evaluated from the point of view of the fulfilment of their artistic task (that of describing their epoch through images). A critic, according to him, should not have to deal with ideology, just as a writer should not write too much about the revolution, as he thereby distances himself from the primary bourgeois impressions.