K Plenumu pravlenija SSP. Politika i éstetika (di D. Mirskij) [28-12-1934] - [D014]

Concise description of the directive:

Before the turning point of 23 April 1932, the main task of literary criticism was the struggle for the transformation of the Soviet writer. The critic did not so much judge the work as the political position of the writer. The decree of 23 April marked a change of direction: all Soviet literati took the party’s positions. As a result, criticism has lost its political authority and failed to gain authority of another kind. Given the fight against the enemies of the party (Comrade Kirov was killed on 1 December), criticism must not become less political. At the same time, criticism must also become scientific and aesthetic. Yet it must not be purely aesthetic; it must not seek to replace political problems with moral ones under the guise of building socialist ethics, nor with attempts to impose the criteria of bourgeois aestheticism, nor with discourses on Soviet “classics”. It is now fashionable to speak of the “technology” of literary works as meaning those aspects that have nothing to do with its political content. However, this does not seem appropriate because: a) technology makes one think of industrial technologies that have nothing to do with literature; b) it refers to the formal rules of the past such as those of rhyme or metre that no longer interest us. The relationship between the author and language is an ideological rather than a “technological” problem. Form is not technology, but the motion of content that is inseparable from it. Understanding the logic of this movement is the task of true aesthetic criticism. The art of an alien and decadent author can only be valuable to us as a model of a professional attitude, as an artifact of a certain work culture. We cannot learn artistic procedures from such authors because their use is directly linked to the writer’s ideological goals. Art cannot be the only criterion for evaluation. Aesthetic evaluation must have a political character. The main goals of socialist realism are those formulated by Stalin: 1) socialist realism envisages artistic generalisations that contribute to the understanding of reality in its revolutionary development; 2) writers are “engineers of human souls” who participate in the construction of a new socialist type of human consciousness. Even in the past, the value of literary works was determined by the cognitive value of its realism and its role in liberating human consciousness from the shackles of ignorance, religion, etc. Therefore, we detect 3 major phases in the history of literature: 1) the first awakening of free human consciousness in Greece; 2) the epoch of the second liberation from the dark night of Christian feudalism (the Renaissance); 3) the epoch of the great bourgeois realists (from the 18th century up to Balzac and Tolstoy). Only socialist culture can fully understand the value of all these great artistic phenomena. Only socialist culture can continue the work of these great epochs. The soul that our writers must build must not be the soul of a gentleman, but that of a soldier, Chekist and soldier of the Red Army. Socialist realism and the engineering of human souls for a socialist society are the two principles of our normative aesthetics. Leninist Marxist normative aesthetics are not a system of prescriptive and prohibitive rules.