Academia (di L. Kamenev) [23-12-1933] - [D001]

Concise description of the directive:

A year ago, Stalin outlined the Soviet Union’s new goal with the slogan “appropriating technology”. This also concerns the work of the Academia publishing house. The masterpieces of world literature are a treasure we must appropriate in order to build a new consciousness of man in a classless society. No publishing house in the old world could ever have approached world literature with similar aims. Our goal is to appropriate the world’s culture of the artistic word and, through its critical reception, put it at the service of the building of socialism. To achieve this, we must provide Soviet readers with the canonical texts of world literature accompanied by illustrations and commentaries that are worthy of these works and, at the same time, show their place in the dramatic history of human culture. The work of the publishing house will follow a more structured plan. First, we will publish the classics in the new Soviet translations, so that they can contribute to the construction of the new socialist culture, which would not be possible using re-publications of the old translations or commentaries. Unfortunately, we do not have all the translations ready yet, so the publishing house is working with translators to prepare new editions. Also crucial is the drafting of new critical commentaries on the works of the classics, commentaries that explain their value in the history of human thought and social struggle and that are based on the doctrine of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin; this work is completely innovative and is still in its early stages. Such commentary can only be created through the joint efforts of old literary experts and young Marxist scholars. That is why publishing classics like Dante, Balzac or Shakespeare in our country is such a complex proposition. However, we will not give up. We are working on such a commentary that will not only make the classics more accessible to our readers, but also help them navigate the class struggle that generated these classic works and find a connection between the current struggle for socialist society and the masterpieces of past centuries. Secondly, we will introduce readers to the translated works of secondary authors who have described critical and/or revolutionary phases of human history, in order to restore to memory the democratic and revolutionary literature that is ignored by bourgeois literary critics and is not published in the West. The Academia library must represent an unbroken chain from the early Middle Ages to the proletarian poetry of the early 20th century within two genres: lyric and novel. We must not renounce the eroticism of the bourgeois novel and novella because it was born in opposition to the ‘virtue’ and ‘asceticism’ of the genres of chivalric literature. In other social conditions it would be pornography, but in this case it is realism. For ideological reasons, we also devote ample space to the dramas of past centuries. We must fight against the works of the past with our dialectical-materialist methods and, while overcoming that which is hostile to us, absorb and rework that which we need.