Left Front of Art. LEF (Left Front of Art)
Literary and artistic association. Created in Moscow at the end of 1922. LEF members were poets (N.N. Aseev, V.V. Kamensky, S.I. Kirsanov, P.V. Neznamov, etc.; until 1927 - B.L. Pasternak ), artists (A.M. Rodchenko, B.F. Stepanova, V.E. Tatlin, etc.), critics and theorists, teachers of VKHUTEMAS-VHUTEIN (B.I. Arvatov, O.M. Brik, N.F. Chuzhak, V.B. Shklovsky, B.A. Kushner, A.M. The association was headed by V.V. Mayakovsky. Cinema figures were close to LEF (S.M. Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, L.V. Kuleshov, E.M. Shub). Close to LEF was V. Shklovsky, then a theorist of OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language).
LEF theorists put forward the theory of art as a “life-building”, the theory of “social order” (the artist is only a “master” who carries out the tasks of his class), as well as the “revolution of form” (hence the denial of the artistic and cognitive functions of art, the underestimation of the classical heritage, formalistic search). LEF considered its main task to be the propaganda of communism among artists, the unification of the revolutionary political program with ideas artistic avant-garde. LEF focused on literary and artistic youth, believing in their devotion to the ideas of the revolution and the avant-garde. The futuristic demands of the revolution of artistic form were not conceived as a change of one literary system the other, but as part of the social struggle of the futurists. The most ardent adherents of futurism directly correlated it with Marxism.
If the artist is only a master executor of the “social order” of a certain class of a certain era, then, naturally, the art of past eras is the property of the past. In addition, according to Lef’s theorists, all old art was engaged in “reflection of everyday life,” while revolutionary art was called upon to transform life. “The proletariat cannot and will not restore artistic forms that served as organic tools of obsolete historical social systems“, - B. Arvatov declared proudly.
LEF called for the creation of utilitarian works that have a specific function. The program of production art put forward by LEF contributed to the emergence of the Soviet artistic design. Combining futurism with innovation in the spirit of proletkult, they came up with a very fantastic idea of creating some kind of “industrial” art, which was supposed to perform in society the utilitarian function of providing a favorable atmosphere for material production.
Art was viewed as an element of technical construction, devoid of personality, fiction, psychologism, etc. Many LEF members denied traditional types artistic creativity (incl. easel painting V fine arts, artistic fiction in literature, which practically came into conflict with the work of the LEF poets, and above all Mayakovsky), contrasting them with the document, the so-called. "literature of fact". The association published the magazines "LEF" (1923-1925) and "New "LEF" (1927-1928) under the editorship of Mayakovsky.
During the period of the “New LEF”, the Left Front of Art advocated the theory of “literature of fact,” putting forward the need to “develop methods for accurately recording facts.” LEF places “non-fictional literature of fact” “above fictional fiction.” O. Brik believes, for example, that “people prefer weakly connected real facts in all their reality than to deal with a well-built plot construction" True, in other statements the LEFs are forced to admit some need for selecting facts, but the problem of the selection criterion is the problem of the writer’s worldview, the criteria of revolutionary practice completely fall out of their attention. While advocating for “factography”, LEF opposed fiction, against artistic“fiction”, “pardoning” only topical newspaper essays, memoirs, diaries and similar “documentary” literature.
The “workers” of the “left front” (just like the “workers” of Proletkult and other “fronts” with whom they constantly polemicized) believed that it was possible to force art to abandon historically established genres using almost the same methods that forced capitalists to give up private property. If there is a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in society, then in art, the LEFists argued, there must be a “dictatorship of taste.”
Italian futurists once spoke about art based on dictatorship. They dreamed of a new art, but created an ideology that served fascism. “We took advantage of certain slogans of Italian futurism and remained faithful to them to this day,” admitted Brik in 1927. As a slogan that was convenient to use, he cited the statement of T.F. Marinetti, futurist theorist: “... we want to praise the offensive movement, feverish insomnia, a gymnastic step, a dangerous jump, a slap and a fist.”
“A slap in the face and a fist blow” have become firmly established in LEF’s “inventory”. Zealously guarding the purity of the ranks of proletarian literature, they considered it their honorable duty to give a timely “slap in the face” to those “who are trying to lead... through poorly guarded 'artistic' doors... of every kind artistic opportunism." Thus, the LEFs met “Envy” by Y. Olesha, the stories of M. Zoshchenko, the novels of A. Tolstoy and many other works that did not correspond to the LEF theories with “a slap in the face and a blow of the fist.”
The prose of LEF, as a rule, is “made” in accordance with the theories of the “left front”, and therefore is of little artistic value, little interesting, and is now firmly and rightly forgotten. (For example, “Unfellow Traveler” by Brik, “Undamped Oscillations” by Kushner, etc.). The same can be said about dramaturgy. Tretyakov's plays, an illustration of LEF's theories, sound (or rather, would sound if someone came up with the idea to re-release or stage them) like funny gobbledygook.
In mid-1928, Mayakovsky, realizing the mistakes of LEF, left the association, which existed until 1929, when, on Mayakovsky’s initiative, it was transformed into REF (Revolutionary Arts Front). The theories of the Left Front of art influenced the activities of VKHUTEMAS and INKHUK.
ABSTRACT
On the topic “literary groups and magazines”
Completed:
1st year student
By industry information system
Deniskin Nikolay Valerievich
Checked:
Vavilina.S.V
S. Ilek 2015
I. Introduction
II. Main part
1. Literary groups of the 20s.
2. LEF (Left Front of Art)
3. "PASS"
4. CONSTRUCTIVISM, OR LCC
III. Conclusion
IV. List of used literature
Introduction
I decided to choose this topic because I was interested in learning a lot about literary groups of the 20th century. Because This topic affects the literature material I covered. I was also interested to know what they were called, organized and who were members of them.
Literary groups of the 20s.
Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) “On the party policy in the field of fiction” (June 1925). Literary process in the 20s, especially after the death of V.I. Lenin in 1924, the curtailment of the NEP, the weakening of ties between the writers of the metropolis and the emigrant subsystem of Russian literature - the same “Russian Berlin”, Paris, Prague, Harbin - was characterized by the preservation of class divisions writers, often imposed from above, dividing them into “proletarian”, “peasant”, “Komsomol”, “fellow travelers”, “internal emigrants”, etc.
It is known that in the sphere of church politics at that time there continued to be an onslaught on the institution of the patriarchate, the ferocious atheism of the “Union of Atheists” led by E.M. Yaroslavsky. After the death of Patriarch Tikhon in April 1925, the election of a new patriarch did not take place, and many priests were exiled to Solovki. The position of peasants in the village, another source of politicization of life, was unstable: it seemed that the NEP and the market allowed the peasant to get rich and develop the economy, but it was worth hiring at least one seasonal worker, own two horses, own something more complex than an ordinary plow, and the owner found himself in the “class of kulaks.”
Similar uncertainty and uncertainty persisted in the sphere of cultural policy. On the one hand, there remained hostility towards “bourgeois art”, towards emigration, and on the other hand, there was an atmosphere of favorable, albeit vague, attitude towards various kinds of artistic groups that rejected party patronage. Quite a variety of writers' associations were preserved and re-formed. Among them, the following groups can be distinguished, constantly mentioned either in connection with V. Mayakovsky, or in connection with A. Platonov or N. Zabolotsky:
LEF (Left Front of Art)
LEF (Left Front of Art), consisting mainly of; and poets and theorists of pre-revolutionary FUTURISM led by V. Mayakovsky, O. Brik, V. Arbatov, N. Chuzhak, V. Kamensky, A. Kruchenykh and others. It arose in 1922 and existed in disputes, struggles with proletarian, peasant writers and others - until 1928. For a short time, B. L. Pasternak was a member of Lef. The theorists of this movement argued for a union of arts;! with production, the functions of “life-building” in art, promoted faith in technical progress, and in art “literature of fact”, reportage, editing of documents instead of fiction, abolished as a relic of the past. For the Lefontans, proletkults are the epigones of old realism, “putting patches on Pushkin’s faded tailcoat,” repeating the “classic generals.” In his “Orders for the Army of Arts”, Mayakovsky sometimes, for the sake of the program, the doctrine of the flow, called for either “bullets on the walls of museums”, or “shovel reinforced concrete” into the heavens, or generally rejected any personal, intimate principle in creativity: “The streets are ours.” brushes, squares are our palettes.”
"PASS"
"PASS" - a Marxist literary group that arose in Moscow in 1923-1924, quickly grew in 1926-1927, had a publishing base in the form of the magazine "Krasnaya Nov" and collections "Pereval" (published until 1929) . The informal leader of “Pereval” was the critic A.K. Voronsky (1884-1943), the group included (or were close to it) A. Vesely, M. Golodny, M. Svetlov, E. Bagritsky, A. Platonov, I. Kataev , A. Malyshkin, M. Prishvin and others. “Pass” defended the freedom of writers from the despotic imposed “social order”, defended the author’s right to choose a theme, a genre that corresponds to the individuality of the creator, fought against the normative “controlled art”, which was asserted by the adherents of the proletarian literature. The poems of the poets of Proletkult for A.K. Voronsky are “red psalms”, not new literature at all, but a remake of I. Severyanin, K. Balmont. All this attracted the intelligentsia to “The Pass”. For the Perevalians, an artistic image is much higher, more complex, multi-valued than any bare idea, scheme, even loudly declared. The favorite image of the theorist-“passenger” D. Gorbov in his book “The Search for Galatea” (1929) is the ancient nymph Galatea, who is born as a sculpture in union with the material by “liberating” her from a block of marble, cutting off from the block everything unnecessary and accidental. The artist, as it were, foresees a project, an imaginary sculpture, his ideal of beauty in a shapeless, rough, dumb block of marble; he ardently believes in his image and then, after the work of illumination, he “meets” the image. He does not create, but searches for a magical figure. After the defeat of Trotskyism, the exclusion of A.K. Voronsky from the party, “Pereval”, accused of a non-class, over-historical approach to art, of the cult of beauty, of disbelief in the possibility of the birth of a new class art, was dissolved as a “reactionary organization.”
Why was leftist art given such a short time in the country of the victorious revolution? "Theater." I decided to answer this question by turning to the history of LEF and its fleeting romance with the Soviet regime.
Apology of the document: LEF and Teatr.doc
The group "LEF" (Left Front of the Arts) arose in 1923 and briefly brought together Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Brik, Nikolai Aseev, Boris Arvatov, Viktor Shklovsky, Sergei Tretyakov under one roof. These are the main ones characters, entirely futurists and proletkultists. And also Alexander Rodchenko, who together with Mayakovsky worked on “Windows of GROWTH” and covers of “LEF” magazines, architect Anton Lavinsky, philologist Nikolai Chuzhak. All of them, having joined LEF as a party, fought fiercely for a new art.
LEF was invented by Mayakovsky. Having asked the People's Commissariat of Education for permission to organize a publishing house in 1921, he eventually decided to publish a magazine, which was called “LEF” and which became a platform for discussing new aesthetics. The Lef organ (it was published from 1923 to 1925, then from 1927 to 1928; the second time under the name “New LeF”) immediately published the program. In the theater this is constructivism, not “ easel painting", a script, not a play, overalls, not historical costumes, Meyerhold, not Stanislavsky. Mayakovsky formulated a new communication between the spectacle and the public in “Mystery Bouffe,” the first and main revolutionary play:
Please sit still,
straight or oblique
and see a piece of someone else's life.
You look and see -
lounging on the couch
Aunt Mani
yes Uncle Vanya.
And we are not interested
neither uncle nor aunt -
You will find aunts and uncles at home.
We will also show real life,
but she
in a most extraordinary spectacle
converted into a theater.
In short, the ideology of the Lefites is a denial fiction and contempt for “creative individuality.” Ideally, everything should be useful, including art. It is proposed to take a fact and, without processing, or rather, without sucking out “free” rhymes and “generalizing” images, put it on paper. Let's say, describe the history of a specific plant, not an abstract one. Osip Brik writes this in his articles of the late 1920s. Another famous Lefovite - Sergei Tretyakov, playwright, Meyerhold's comrade-in-arms, the first translator of Brecht into Russian - clarifies: the new art of fact should merge with scientific biology, and not follow the comfortable regime of the old “psychological novel.”
Crossing the desert in the pages of a novel is easier than getting the house committee to put trash cans on the back stairs.
We need to learn to see people and things with “production” eyes, Tretyakov decides and uses documentary material to write the scandalous play “I Want a Child” about sexual freedom in the Soviet Republic. Finally, Viktor Shklovsky, the founder of formal analysis in literature, declares the need for every writer to have a real profession in reserve.
“To engage in only one literature is not even a three-field, but simply exhaustion of the earth,” -
he declares and explains: every aspiring artist must have own attitude to things, and this does not mean “the author’s vision,” but the ability to see things “as indescribable.” It is not at all necessary, Shklovsky adds, for the author to be a naive, understanding-nothing eccentric who has arrived in a foreign city. On the contrary: it would be good to know how a knot is tied on a rope and be able to describe this process. LEF is a call to study life, to be a “cine-eye,” as did Sergei Tretyakov, who developed the biointerview technique long before the advent of “verbatim.”
Lefov’s love for fact was inherited by the documentary theater of the 1990s–2000s, which in its Russian version combines sociality with the denial of the entertainment function of theater. For the current “dokovsky” practice, that part of LEF’s ideology is important, which appealed to the activity of the viewer. If there was one thing LEF hated about old art, it was the role of a passive observer imposed on the public. Both LEF and the most consistent of the authors of Theatre.doc profess faith in detail, in photographic adherence to a fact or the speech matrix of a particular person.
But there are also differences.
LEF, represented by Mayakovsky, was against mimesis in any form. Theatre.doc, and the new drama in general, are not averse to watching “Aunt Manya and Uncle Vanya” - the “verbatim” technique is very suitable for this. Lefovites preferred to capture things, phenomena and “knots on a rope.” Dokovtsy go among the people.
Doc theater in its Russian version is the legacy of the British ancestors who invented “verbatim” during the years of Margaret Thatcher’s Prime Minister. In fact, Doc is the face of the new Russian humanism: he is a priori for the offended, unjustly convicted, persecuted by the law, and innocently killed. And to be on the side of the offended in today's Russia means to be against the authorities. LEF was with those who overthrew the previous government and built a new one.
Formalism, as was said
Pure aesthetics, soon renamed into the abusive “formalism,” became an important feature of LEF: in the magazine, Gorky is criticized for his old-fashioned form, Pilnyak is criticized for his ignorance of reality, Vsevolod Ivanov is accused of plagiarism, and Alexei Tolstoy and Alexander Fadeev are simply bullied. Realizing that without perspective there is no new photo, but without poetics (just not “pink Whites”, as they say in their manifesto) no new literature, LEF is committed to establishing avant-garde principles in art. But behind them there is always political and class pragmatics.
From the "how to film a demo" guide:
If viewed from the wrong angle, this photograph will do anti-revolutionary work.
If a demonstration is being filmed, there may be several tasks.
To show its abundance - then it is better to shoot from above, vertically.
Show her social composition- then you need to shoot it point-blank, choosing those places where people’s clothes speak about their profession, and shoot the people in the foreground in close-up.
To show the demands of the demonstration - it is necessary to remove the posters so that there are as many of them as possible and the inscriptions come out as clearly as possible.
To show how the human mass crystallizes around the leading rod - a double exposure is possible here: in addition to the demonstration taken from above, the same photo shows a photograph of a similar structure (anthill, bees on a honeycomb, growth rings of a trunk, sawdust around a magnet).
There is a discussion between the poet Kushner and the photographer Rodchenko about what is more important for a left-wing artist - the object (the leaders of the revolution) or the perspective (how to photograph the leader of the revolution). The dispute is accompanied by a commentary from the editors, which says: the main thing is not what or how, but why. With one hand, constructivist Stepanova makes a machine for Meyerhold’s performance, and with the other, prints for the Ivanovo garment factory. Lavinsky and Rodchenko are mastering design; engaged in advertising of Soviet goods - from matches to salt - Mayakovsky, Brik and the same Rodchenko. At the end of LEF, Mayakovsky announces a fight against apolitism and a focus on the agitprop of socialist construction. From here it’s a stone’s throw to the social order of the 1930s, the true heyday of which, however, the poet did not live to see.
LEF gave birth to and nurtured the aesthetics that is still associated with leftist art. But the usual connection between the left and the political with struggle, with protest (art as a debater, art as an opponent) in the case of LEF, as we have seen, is invalid: LEF was loyal to the state. At first, the Lefovites liked everything: they liked the Bolshevik intolerance towards outdated “bourgeois art”, the belief in the possibility of building a just state, and finally, they were related to the authorities by extremist rhetoric and militaristic style. The futurist Mayakovsky no longer wore a yellow jacket, and the head of the Theater Department of the People's Commissariat of Education, Meyerhold, wore a leather jacket and a cap. But the main thing that brought the Lefists and the Bolsheviks who came to power together was the belief that if the state can be transformed, the intellectual sphere can also be transformed. LEF, and he was not the only one, rolled up his sleeves. This is what is stated in Lef’s manifesto, signed by Aseev, Arvatov, Brik, Kushner, Mayakovsky, Tretyakov and Chuzhak.
October taught by work.
It is clear - at the sight of the heels of the fleeing intelligentsia, we were not very much asked about our aesthetic beliefs.
We created, then revolutionary, “Izo”, “Teo”, “Muzo”; we led the students to storm the academy.
Next to organizational work, we gave the first works of art of the October era (Tatlin - a monument to the Third International, “Mystery Bouffe” staged by Meyerhold, “Stenka Razin” by Kamensky).
We did not aestheticize, making things for narcissism. The acquired skills were used for propaganda and artistic work required by the revolution (ROSTA posters, newspaper feuilleton, etc.).< …>
And finally, violating the decorous perspective, in different angles singles are leftists. People and organizations (Inkhuk, Vkhutemas, Gitis Meyerhold, Opoyaz, etc.). Some are heroically trying to lift the prohibitively heavy new thing alone, while others are still cutting the shackles of the old with files of lines.
LEF must bring together the left forces. LEF must examine its ranks, discarding the stuck past. LEF must unite the front to explode junk, to fight for coverage new culture.
We will resolve issues of art not with a mythical majority of voices, hitherto only in the idea of the existing left front, but with deeds, with the energy of our initiative group, which year after year leads the work of the left and has always led it ideologically.
The revolution taught us a lot.
The Lefovites, in a sense, dug their own graves. Not because they collaborated with the authorities, but because the first began to translate aesthetic preferences into the language of politics. If you chose the wrong angle, you are a counter-revolutionary; you used the wrong formal technique - you are an enemy of the working people. Then they began to beat them with their own weapons. Only everything has changed exactly the opposite.
Utopia and revolution
It is important to remember that the source of faith in the new man was not so much the revolution as utopian (primarily symbolist) ideas Silver Age, who proposed to create art that does not reflect life, but transforms and organizes it. This largely explains the presence in the post-revolutionary TRAMs, LEF, and Proletkult, finally, of excellently educated aesthetes and idealists who, without hesitation, stood under the banner of 1917. It was they, who were familiar first-hand with the heritage of the Symbolists, who were now expounding it on new way- for the benefit of the revolutionary cause. Professional revolutionary and opponent of Lenin Bogdanov, who created Proletkult, Adrian Piotrovsky with his theory of the unified art club, Shklovsky, who joined LEF. The goal of the new art was proclaimed to be in this case one is “the re-creation of humanity.”
It was hardly worth looking for an idea that was more beneficial in a revolutionary sense - its totality and scope could only be envied. With such tasks of art, the specific activity of the artist inevitably takes on an almost religious, or theurgic character, according to Vladimir Solovyov. And then, as Vyacheslav Ivanov dreamed, in the “Dionysian” circle of supermen who have forgotten about their egos, a true “cathedral theater” will be born, and the crowd of spectators will turn into “one many-sided body” of like-minded people. Something like a “white ring” in Moscow in the winter of 2012. Only, unlike the “ring,” the mass actions of Nikolai Evreinov in revolutionary Petrograd were carefully orchestrated and demonstrated the power of the Bolsheviks in alliance with the proletariat and sailors. In other words, there was no protest energy in them, there was delight in the scale of the coup carried out by the “hegemon”.
It was symbolist, “conciliar” ideas that were useful to the revolution with its pathos of building a social utopia. It was these that the leftist artists of the 1920s used in their newest theories. It is important to take into account one more condition that the theorists of proletarian art insisted on: in the “many-faced body” there is no division into professionals and amateurs. Anyone can create as needed, a professional artist is immoral, Leo Tolstoy said, and after him Alexander Blok, who opposed “specialists” in art. This idea was corrected by the same Vyacheslav Ivanov, who directly stated that it is not the theater created by the intelligentsia that should descend to the people, but the people should awaken in themselves artistic beginning and create your own theater. The Proletkultists, TRAM and partly LEF make an amendment: the proletarian must create. In reality, the proletarian, as we know, could not and did not combine work at the factory and the theater. Instead of him and for him they created professional artists, playwrights and directors.
LEF entered into dangerous territory already when he involuntarily demonstrated his continuity in relation to symbolism. Yes, he rejected the old bourgeois art, but he grew up - including aesthetically - on the ideas and achievements of the beginning of the century.
Along party lines
The LEF catechism clearly defines the camps and indicates who belongs to which, but there is no call to test everyone for party strength. In the end, the purges will be carried out not by LEF, but by RAPP - the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. The strength of RAPP lay in the powerful desire to win a place in the sun, to become the main ones, to gain the right to decide who is with us and who is against us. Who on the arts front is a real proletarian author, and who has smeared himself. RAPP speaks about the artist’s “classism” and his “Sovietness,” but implies that the proletarian artist must always be loyal to the ever-changing party line: whoever writes and stages differently is not with the party, and therefore against the people. Both the orthodox Proletkult and the formalist LEF could not withstand such pressure.
IN literary encyclopedia In 1933, members of the LEF group were called fellow travelers of the left. Including because the Lefites could not boast of proletarian origin. But not only that.
I consider the very formulation of the question of right and left in fiction(and therefore in the theater) - writes Stalin in 1929, when LEF was practically finished. -<…>It would be most accurate to operate in fiction with concepts of class order or even with the concepts of “Soviet” - “anti-Soviet”, “revolutionary” - “anti-revolutionary”.
It was only at first that it was proposed to use the qualifications of “fellow travelers” and their friendliness towards the winning class. Next in full height The task arose to create art designed for the masses of workers and peasants, to develop forms “understandable to millions.” But LEF, with its commitment to new forms, was not simple.
Something else is also important. Since the era of the great turning point, the Soviet empire has become leftist only at the level of rhetoric, but in essence, Stalinism has nothing in common with leftist discourse or leftist ideas. It is more of a restoration project and assumes the existence of art within the framework of already tested artistic forms.
The LEF was guided by politics in its utilitarian application in the fight against “academics”, “youthful rot”, the right and “democratic charm”.
At that time, everyone without exception was involved in politics in the applied sense - they drowned each other, they fought - some for an idea, some for power. LEF was no exception: he was ideological and knew how to cast ideas into words and “things.” But the real authorities very soon became more comfortable dealing with RAPP, an eclectic group of zealous fighters for loyalty to the party. Left art the ruling party did not need it - just as the left Trotskyist opposition, which tried to fight the vertical back in 1923, was not needed. Loyalty and the ability to mimic were needed.
It is not surprising that the Lefovites - not all, but many - ended badly. Arvatov went crazy during civil war and committed suicide; Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930; Alien, Kushner and Tretyakov were shot. On the death of his friend and teacher, Brecht wrote:
His books were destroyed. Talk about him
Considered suspicious. They are cut off.
What if you're innocent?
Tretyakov himself, one of Lef’s main ideologists, “adjutant of the revolution”, turned out to be even more insightful:
Heart crushed
In the anger of the quarries
Red sore
Which everything is possible.
Comrades! You will beat
Don't get your hands dirty
Remember
Carefully
Painted.
It sounds like a reminder for today's riot police.
LEF (Left Front of the Arts) is a literary and artistic association and a magazine of the same name, which arose in Moscow at the beginning of 1923 under the leadership of V.V. Mayakovsky. The creation of LEF was preceded by repeated attempts in post-revolutionary conditions to “gather together the left forces... to unite the front for the explosion of old things, for the fight to embrace a new culture” (What is LEF fighting for?). Among such organizations were ASIS (Association of Socialist Art, 1918), Flying Federation of Futurists (1918), IMO (Art of the Young, 1919), Comfut (Communist Futurists, 1919-21), IAF (Moscow, future International Futurist Association, 1922 ). Based on five years of experience, Mayakovsky applied to the Agitation Department of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) for permission to publish a magazine, the purpose of which is “to contribute to finding a communist path for all types of art; reconsider the ideology and practice of the so-called leftist art, discarding its individualistic antics and developing its valuable communist sides... to serve as the avant-garde for Russian and world art" (Mayakovsky V. Political meeting essays). In practice, LEF united futurists, constructivist artists, representatives of the formal school (OPOLZ) and members of the Far Eastern group “Creativity” who moved to Moscow. Declaration “What is Lef fighting for?” signed together with Mayakovsky by members of the journal's editorial board N. Aseev, B. Arvatov, O. Brik, B. Kushner, S. Tretyakov and N. Chuzhak. V. Kamensky, A. Kruchenykh, B. Pasternak, artists A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova, L. Popova, film directors S. Eisenstein, D. Vertov, architects L.A., V.A. took part in the work of LEF. and A.A. Vesnin, Y. Chernikhov, philologists V. Shklovsky, G. Vinokur and others. The program provisions of LEF were, along with a negative attitude towards the art of the past inherited from futurism, a predominant attention to the creation of form - social order, utilitarianism, the concepts of “literature fact", propaganda and production art. Tretyakov demanded that “representation of everyday life be counteracted with agitation; lyrics - energetic word processing; to the psychologism of fiction - an adventurous and inventive novella; pure art- newspaper feuilleton, propaganda; declarations - oratorical platform; bourgeois drama-tragedy and farce; experiences - production movements" (LEF. 1923. No. 1). The Stranger with the theory of life structure stood somewhat apart, advocating the transformation of LEF from literary group into a “single cultural communist party.”
An important aspect of LEF was its appeal to the “young people”- working poets, students of VKHUTEMAS, whose works appeared on the pages of the magazine. Groups related to LEF were formed in Odessa (YugoLEF), in Kharkov (UkrLEF), it was reported about the activities of LEF in Yugoslavia, about the need to create an International of Arts on the basis of the international section of the magazine. LEF concluded agreements on “rallying forces to combat the corrupting influence of bourgeois-noble and pseudo-traveling literature” (Literary Manifestos), participated in the FOSP (Federation of Associations Soviet writers, 1927). Despite critical disputes, the magazine “On Post” called LEF - together with “October” and “Forge” - the closest to the party line (Averbakh L. On this side of the literary trenches On Post. 1923. No. 1). Later, the Rappovites considered Mayakovsky and Aseev to be fellow travelers. L. Trotsky wrote that Mayakovsky’s expression of the communist worldview is less organic than that of the party member A. Bezymensky (Trotsky L. Literature and Revolution). In turn, A. Voronsky noted that Mayakovsky is “broader and larger than both futurism and LEFA” (Krasnaya Nov. 1925. No. 2). The discrepancy between the rationalistic, strictly regulated program of LEF and the diversity of creative individuals included in it led to a crisis (Pasternak’s exit from LEF, the closure of the magazine after No. 7, 1925). Most interesting works, published in LEF, largely contradicted his platform (Mayakovsky's poems "About This", 1923, "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin", 1924; Pasternak's "Nine Hundred and Fifth", 1925-26, "Lieutenant Schmidt", 1926-27; Aseeva " Semyon Proskakov", 1928, texts by V. Khlebnikov). Despite the “fragmentation of LEF workers, the absence of a common voice compressed by the magazine,” noted in the preface, the magazine “New LEF” began publishing in January 1927.
Emphasizing continuity, the LEF members stated: “LEF has won and is winning in many sectors of the cultural front... The new LEF is a continuation of our always-on struggle for communist culture.” Initially, under the leadership of Mayakovsky, and from January 1928 - Tretyakov, the magazine spoke out against the RAPP slogans “back to the classics”, to “psychology” and “living man”. Speaking about the group’s program, Aseev again stated that “the center of gravity literary work transferred to a diary, report, interview, feuilleton” (Reader and Writer. 1928. No. 45). At the same time, Mayakovsky understood that Lef’s principles were turning into a dogma serving a narrow group, as Vyacheslav Polonsky also pointed out in the article “Lef or Bluff?” (Izvestia. 1927. February 25 and 27). Speaking with the report “Levey Lefa” in September 1928, Mayakovsky announced his withdrawal from LEF, thereby ending its existence. A year later, he tried to revive it, first as the editorial office of the almanac “REF” (Revolutionary Arts Front), then as an organization: “Of all leftism, we take only that which is revolutionary.” However, REF's activities were short-lived. To implement the slogan of consolidation of forces in literature, Mayakovsky and Aseev joined RAPP in February 1930, which led to the final disintegration of the group.
