N/A [16-02-1936] - [D128]

Concise description of the directive:

The discussion on poetry and literature at the Plenum of Soviet Writers draws to a close. These are the conclusions:
Our critics are wrong to praise Khlebnikov’s poetry (e.g. Aseyev’s praise of him), which is incomprehensible, or that of Pasternak (Comrade Mirsky praises him too much). This is not the poetry that Soviet art needs:
These speeches did nothing to clarify the basic creative slogan of our poetry and literature as a whole, a slogan that stems from the entire course of development of our culture and guided Mayakovsky’s work. The demand for simplicity and the spirit of the people (narodnost) in poetry is the fundamental demand we make of our poets. That complex simplicity that characterises Mayakovsky’s best poems. That “nationality” that stems from the poet’s organic connection with reality, from his knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of the people, from the poet’s constant enrichment with the treasures of popular language and folklore.
The call for simplicity and “narodnost” is directed with all its force against formalism and ugliness in art: in music as in poetry, in painting as in literature.
As has already been pointed out, many poets regard their own “incomprehensibility” as a virtue and are inclined to justify their readers’ ignorance and indifference for not understanding their works; they believe that the reader does not want to follow them through the confusing maze of random and unjustified associations written in ‘high style’ according to the infamous Joyce method. It is time for the poetic community to say it out loud to many poets, which unfortunately the Plenum speakers did not do. Did we not have critics and poets who not so long ago admired the fruits of formalism and crude naturalism in the poem The Triumph of Agriculture by the Leningrad poet Zabolotskiy? In light of the Party’s latest instructions, should we not draw the attention of Dm. Petrovsky to the fact that his poems are increasingly becoming a model of aesthetic wordplay, a formalist trick?

A true poet of our time draws his themes, ideas and images from the life of the people and creates each line of his work by directing it at the millions of wonderful readers of our country, fighters and builders of socialist culture. This concretely expresses the method and style of socialist realism, which is fundamentally hostile to such poetic techniques, when for the poet the sound of the verse is more valuable than its meaning.
The demand for simplicity and narodnost in poetry means a struggle with eloquence, with the deliberate difficulty of poetic discourse, through which the reader must view the meaning of the work. Our critics should have spoken about it at the Plenum, instead of singing unnecessary praises to certain authors, including Comrade Pasternak.