Halina Stephan: “Lef” and the Left Front of the Arts (1981)

“This study analyzes the artistic theory and practice of the Left Front of the Arts (Levyi front iskusstv – Lef) with a special focus on the journal Lef (1923-1925). Two themes are central to this account: the organizational activities of the Lef group directed toward making Futurism a formative force within the Soviet culture and the artistic proposals published in Lef that had the same goal.”

Publisher Otto Sagner, Munich, 1981
Slavistische Beiträge series, 142
ISBN 3876901863, 9783876901862
242 pages

Review: Jullan Graffy (Slavonic and East European Review 1983).

OAPEN

PDF (8 MB, updated on 2012-7-18)
PDF (6 MB, added on 2020-11-25)
JPGs (added on 2015-8-10)

LEF, 1-7 (1923-25), & Novyi LEF, 1-24 (1927-29) [Russian, English]

LEF (“ЛЕФ”) was the journal of the Left Front of the Arts (“Левый фронт искусств” – “Levy Front Iskusstv”), a widely ranging association of avant-garde writers, photographers, critics and designers in the Soviet Union. It had two runs, one from 1923 to 1925 as LEF, and later from 1927 to 1929 as Novyi LEF (‘New LEF’). The journal’s objective, as set out in one of its first issues, was to “re-examine the ideology and practices of so-called leftist art, and to abandon individualism to increase art’s value for developing communism.”

Although LEF was catholic in its choices of writers, it broadly reflected the concerns of the Productivist left-wing of Constructivism. The editors were Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky: fittingly, one a Russian Formalist critic and one a poet and designer who helped compose the 1912 manifesto of Russian Futurists entitled, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”. The covers were designed by Alexander Rodchenko, and featured photomontages early on, being followed by photographs in New LEF. Among the writings published in LEF for the first time were Mayakovsky’s long poem About This, and Sergei Eisenstein’s The Montage of Attractions, as well as more political and journalistic works like Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. The journal had funding from the state, and was discussed critically, but not unsympathetically by Leon Trotsky in Literature and Revolution (1924).

The later New LEF (“Новый ЛЕФ” – “Novyi Lef”), which was edited by Mayakovsky along with the playwright, screenplay writer and photographer Sergei Tretyakov, tried to popularise the idea of ‘Factography’: the idea that new technologies such as photography and film should be utilised by the working class for the production of ‘factographic’ works. In this it had a great deal of influence on theorists in the West, especially Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht. Linked journals also appeared such as the Constructivist architectural journal SA (edited by Moisei Ginzburg and Alexander Vesnin) and Proletarskoe Foto, on photography. The New LEF closed in 1929 over a dispute over its direction between Mayakovsky and Tretyakov, and under pressure for its ‘Formalism’, which jarred with the incipient Socialist Realism. (from Wikipedia)

LEF at Monoskop wiki

LEF, 1-7 (ZIP; updated on 2012-7-19)
Novyi LEF, 1-24 (ZIP; updated on 2012-7-19)
All issues in PDF (added on 2015-7-21)
All issues in HTML (added on 2015-8-11)
English translations of selected essays (trans., ed. & intro. Richard Sherwood (LEF) and Ben Brewster (Novy LEF), Screen 12(4), Winter 1971-72; added on 2015-7-21)

Boris Groys: The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (1988–) [EN, IT]

“As communism collapses into ruins, Boris Groys provokes our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ demands that art should move from depicting to transforming the world. The revolutionaries of October 1917 promised to create a society that was not only more just and more economically stable but also more beautiful, and they intended that the entire life of the nation be completely subordinate to Communist party leaders commissioned to regulate, harmonize, and create a single “artistic” whole out of even the most minute details. What were the origins of this idea? And what were its artistic and literary ramifications? In addressing these issues, Groys questions the view that socialist realism was an “art for the masses.” Groys argues instead that the “total art” proposed by Stalin and his followers was formulated by well-educated elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the future-oriented logic of avant-garde thinking. After explaining the internal evolution of Stalinist art, Groys shows how socialist realism gradually disintegrated after Stalin’s death. In an undecided and insecure Soviet culture, artists focused on restoring historical continuity or practicing “sots art,” a term derived from the combined names of socialist realism (sotsrealizm) and pop art. Increasingly popular in the West, sots-artists incorporate the Stalin myth into world mythology and demonstrate its similarity to supposedly opposing myths.”

Originally published in German as Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, Carl Hanser, Munich and Vienna, 1988.

English edition
Translated by Charles Rougle
Publisher Princeton University Press, 1992
ISBN 0691055963, 9780691055961
126 pages

Reviews: Alla Efimova (Art Bulletin, 1992), Vyacheslav Ivanov (Slavic Review, 1993), Mary A. Nicholas (Slavic and East European Journal, 1993), Ross Wolfe (Situations, c2011), Giuliano Vivaldi (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2013).

Publisher (EN)

The Total Art of Stalinism (English, trans. Charles Rougle, 1992, updated on 2012-7-18)
Lo stalinismo ovvero l’opera d’arte totale (Italian, trans. Emanuela Guercetti, 1992, added on 2019-12-14)