This is said to Soviet writers and playwrights by the Bolshevik Party, guiding the building of Communism. Socialism realism is just as inseparable from living, ardent loving interest in the life and activities of the people, from deep and noble patriotic feeling, as bourgeois braggart-cosmopolitanism is connected to indifferent and nonchalant treatment of the people and their creativity, to a neutral, emasculated and cold aestheticism and formalism.

The entire history of leading Russian literature teaches this. The passionate struggle of Belinsky for realism was permeated with lofty patriotic feelings, because artistic truth, which he demanded from writers, playwrights, and actors, is rooted in passionate love for their own people, and love of the fatherland, which gave birth to the struggle for its freedom from tyrants. Belinsky called aestheticism “art for art’s sake,” a game of art, which is why aestheticism of every kind is not only false but antipopular, reactionary in its essence, antipatriotic and treasonous.

The precepts of Belinsky, supported and developed by Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, penetrated all leading Russian literature and developed its noblest traditions. These Coryphaeuses of Russian criticism, great enlighteners, showed in their very appearance what it must be to a critic of realist literature and theater. It is impossible even to this day to reread Belinsky’s articles on theater without emotion. He saw in artistic creations, expressed on stage, the strongest means for the realization of his revolutionary-democratic ideas. Belinsky ardently loved his people, he knew them -- and he demanded that the Russian people portrayed by the theatre be the same as their history actually made them.

Things have changed since then, when Belinsky wrote about the theater. The Soviet people have cast off the bearers of social reaction, liquidated completely the class of exploiter-parasites; The creativity of the people has unfolded wonderfully in every branch of life. Socialist construction, the inspired patriotic uplift during the Great Patriotic War, the immense all-union achievement of creative work which followed the war, the development of new features in the character of the Soviet people, unending innovation in production and in science -- these are all most worthy subjects for art, literature and poetry. And the best writers of the Soviet people, caught up by the same creative enthusiasm by which all the people live, strive to make their own contribution to the common cause, remembering that as highly our Party values any honest ideological work for the benefit of the people, so too does the Party highly value the work of writers, calling them “engineers of the human soul.”

The Party has many times pointed out what miserable and destructive consequences result from a writer being out of touch with the life and struggle of the Soviet people, as well as how the great ideas of Soviet patriotism can enrich and inspire the creativity of a writer. Unbridled cosmopolitanism is not only antipopular, but also infertile. It is harmful, like those parasites in the vegetable world which gnaw the sprouts of healthy crops. It serves as a path for reactionary bourgeois influences hostile to us.

The Party in its decisions regarding the struggle on the ideological front has paid special attention to Soviet criticism. The critic is the first propagandist for new, significant, and positive developments in literature and art. Especially important is the role of the theatre critic. He must transmit widely, through the printed word, the action of artistic theatrical forms. The authentic Soviet critic, loving his work, is devoted to socialist art. He can only be an ardent patriot, he can only be proud, when a new work appears on stage, even if it is still insufficiently perfected but boldly advances a new idea, producing a new image of Soviet man. The theater critic is the theater’s first helper in the search for what is the best, truest and most gifted embodiment in artistic forms of how the nation lives.

Unfortunately, criticism, and especially theatrical criticism has been the most backward area in our literature. Moreover, it is precisely theatrical criticism that up to recently retained nests of bourgeois aestheticism, sheltering an antipatriotic, cosmopolitan, and putrid treatment of Soviet art.

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