The journalism of "Sibirskiye ogni" ("Siberian lights") and Russian vanguard in 1920s

The paper describes the fight of the national journalism against the Russian vanguard on the pages of the «Siberian Lights» magazine. The main concepts related to vanguard included the following three points: a) the break with the ideas of humanism and anthropocentrism characteristic of Russian classical literature; b) the refusal to depict life in its own life forms and a search for exotic forms of artistic expression; c) the break with simple and unambiguous understanding of the au-thor's intention by the reader, simplicity itself becomes an object of ridicule and scorn. The attitude towards vanguard after the revolution of 1917 was ambivalent: welcoming the antibourgeois rebellion of vanguard trends, official critique sharply disapproved of the meaning of the vanguard artistic statements, alien and unintelligible to the proletariat. The position of the «Siberian Lights» magazine in this context is not at all accidental, as it showed the ubiquitous nature of this fight, not limited only to metropolitan newspapers and magazines. Since the start of its life (1922) until the end of the 1920s the magazine published about two dozen op-ed and critical pieces on the masters of Russian vanguard - E. Zamyatin, B. Pilnyak, I. Ehrenburg, the «Serapion brothers» literary group and even Gorky, whom the critic Leonid Anisimov also included into this trend. One of the main masterminds of the fight against vanguard was Valery Pravduhin, who constantly emphasized the bourgeois nature of this trend, its inherent anarchism and its alien nature to the ideas of building communism. After the departure of V. Pravdukhin to Moscow (1925), the debate was continued by such critics as D. Gorbov. A. Lezhnyov and others. As we move towards the end of the 1920s, we can observe the change in the underlying trend of opposition to vanguard. The style of criticism becomes more aggressive and pretentious. The criticism begins targeting not only the figures of vanguard, but also the older generation of writers - Andreyev, Artsybashev, Kuprin, as well as those who had become classics by that time - Chekhov and Gorky. Gradually, the focus is shifting from the issues of poetics to the problems related to the communication recipient - the Soviet reader. The year of 1929 marked a dramatic change of the literary critical context, both in the capital city and the provinces. Literary questions related to the inner-party struggle with the left and right opposition and the formation of Stalin's general line in art come to the forefront. In this situation, the fight against vanguard became less important for literary criticism and was delegated to the officials dealing with the history of literature.