LEF (magazine)

In early January 1923, Mayakovsky sent to the propaganda department of the Central Committee of the RCP (B.) A proposal to publish a new journal: ^[1]

a) The purpose of the magazine is to help find a communist path for all kinds of art;

b) to revise the ideology and practice of the so-called leftist art, discarding individualistic antics from it and developing its valuable communist sides;
c) to conduct persistent agitation among art producers for accepting the communist path and ideology;
d) accepting the most revolutionary trends in the field of art, serve as the vanguard for Russian and world art;
e) to acquaint the Russian working audience with the achievements of European art, but not in the person of its canonized, official representatives, but in the person of the literary-hud of the “divine” youth, now rejected by the European bourgeoisie, but representing the sprouts of a new proletarian culture;
f) to fight in every way with the compromisers in the field of art, replacing the communist ideology in the field of art with old, shabby phrases about absolute values ​​and eternal beauties;
g) to give samples of literary and artistic works not to satisfy aesthetic tastes, but to indicate methods for creating effective propaganda works;

h) the struggle against decadence, with aesthetic mysticism, with self-sufficient formalism, with indifferent naturalism for the approval of tendentious realism, based on the use of technical methods of all revolutionary art schools.

The publication was allowed, and the first issue of the magazine was published at the end of March 1923. In addition to the executive editor Mayakovsky, the editorial board included N. Aseev , B. Arvatov , O. Brik , B. Kushner , S. Tretyakov , N. Chuzhak . They signed the declaration opening the magazine: “What is Lef fighting for?”, In which they promised to “agitate art with the ideas of the commune”.

Each issue consisted of five sections: 1) Program; 2) Practice; 3) Theory; 4) a book; 5) Facts. The theory section dominated. The main ideas of the Lef theorists were life-building, production art, socially useful action.

Initially, the magazine was published once every two months (four issues were published with such frequency in 1923), but then it was issued irregularly: in 1924, two issues were published, in 1925 - one, the last (its circulation was 1,500 copies). Despite the publication of a number of texts that have become classic, the journal was closed due to loss-making, as did not publish works for the general reader. Among the authors: V. Mayakovsky, N. Aseev, B. Pasternak, V. Kamensky, A. Kruchenykh, S. Tretyakov, V. Shklovsky, P. Neznamov and others.

In Lefa, several stories from Babel ’s Konarmia and two of the most famous Odessa Stories were published: The King and How It Was Done in Odessa.

• What is Lef fighting for?
• "LEF" // Brief Literary Encyclopedia / Ch. ed. A.A. Surkov . - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia , 1962-1978.
• The printed organs of Lef // Encyclopedia " Around the World ."