Reč' tov. M. Rozentalja [05-03-1937] - [D064]

Concise description of the directive:

The two main objectives of Soviet criticism are: 1) to fight for the heritage of classical literature and the right approach to the critical appropriation of classical literature; 2) to fight for Soviet socialist literature and the education of the artistic taste of the masses of readers. Bogdanov’s followers asserted that proletarian literature was created in a vacuum; that the great classical tradition of the past belonged to the bourgeois, the nobility and the exploiters; that Shakespeare was alive to us as long as the imprints of capitalism were alive in the human consciousness, and that erasing these imprints would also erase Shakespeare. Critics have defended the realist line of the classical heritage against the decadent formalist trend in the development of literature of the past.