SURREALISM AT THE SERVICE OF REVOLUTION – ? REVOLUTION AS A SCANDAL OF EXPOSURE

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Article Mic. Lifshits “Why am I not a modernist?” was published in 1963 in Estetika Prague and three years later reprinted in Russian in the Literary Gazette. The matter is long-standing, but the questions posed by the article or that rise after reading of the article are not yet resolved. First of all, what are these questions? – The question can be formulated historically, how did it happen that such an educated and even honest aestheticist as Mikhail Lifshits took a position against the avant-garde? Rather, along these lines, the spring exhibition of last year, devoted to M. Lifshits and held by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art Garage, poses the question. It is responsible for this question, because the position of Mic. Lifshits is Marxist position itself. The organizers of the exhibition, in essence, agree with Lifshits that Marxism is hostile to the avant-garde, and if this conclusion does not sound like a verdict to the avant-garde, it is only because they are not Marxists, i.e. because the question of the relation of Marxism to the avant-garde (and vice versa) they are no longer interested, or rather, interested in terms of what was passed. It is precisely this lack of interest that allows them to say ordinary enough: while the majority of the Soviet intelligentsia turned away from Marxism, this very majority condemned Lifshitz’s article as apostasy (apostasy from what?), Lifshits remained his firm supporter 1 . But why should we assume that the majority is already alienated and one Lifshits remained firm? This explanation hides from us the fact that the vanguard did not perceive itself as something anti-Marxist, rather, on the contrary. – Of course, not all avant-garde declared its Marxist sympathies, but, for example, Andre Breton stated and even was friends with Leon Trotsky, of course, even in the 60s the fact of such friendship could be regarded as evidence of the opposite of what I intend to prove. In other words the proof of the fascist