Lenin i nekotorye voprosy literaturnoj kritiki (di P. Judin) [1933] - [D134]

Concise description of the directive:

The first long essay published in the inaugural issue of “Literaturniy kritik” is written by Pavel Yudin, who at the time served as editor-in-chief of the journal. Programmatic in nature, the text develops and expands on the principles outlined in the editorial Nashi zadachi, defining the theoretical foundations of Marxist-Leninist literary criticism.
Yudin regards literature as a reflection of the economic and social relations determined by the material mode of production, asserting that it is impossible to separate literary creation from the author’s worldview (mirovozzreniye). During the rise of the bourgeoisie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, literature expressed a revolutionary outlook; once the bourgeoisie became the dominant class economically and politically, however, it gradually assumed a reactionary role on the ideological level as well.
According to Yudin, Communist criticism must therefore devote particular attention to a broad and in-depth analysis of the worldview reflected in literary works, since bourgeois culture has not yet been fully overcome in contemporary production. Lenin’s writings provide paradigmatic examples of the use of literature as a weapon of political struggle: literature, Judin argues, serves as an instrument of mass education, a vehicle for the formation of collective consciousness, and a means of influencing economic relations.
The ideas and ideological content conveyed by a work do not depend on the author’s subjective intention but on the objective conditions and class relations in which it originates. The task of Communist criticism is thus to expose the remnants of the bourgeois worldview and to orient literary production toward a genuinely socialist literature, rooted in the new Soviet reality.

Ilaria Aletto, Maria Zavyalova