LEF

Productivism

Although LEF was broad in its choices of writers, it mainly 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. Varvara Stepanova also designed covers.

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).

Factography

Buchloh asserts that, in response to a profound crisis in representation, audience, and social function, factography became the dominant method of the second phase of the Russian avant-garde because the avant-garde concluded that it had exhausted the possibilities of modernist self-reflection and could no longer justify an art addressed primarily to a specialised elite.

The later New LEF (Новый ЛЕФ, Novy LEF), which was edited by Mayakovsky along with the playwright, screenplay writer and photographer Sergei Tretyakov, tried to popularise the concept of factography (or the "literature of fact"): the idea that journalism, film, photography, and mass media technologies should be utilised by the working class for the production of works counter to bourgeois fictional texts, or as Fore encapsulates it, 'reality without realism'

New LEF ceased publication in 1929 after disagreement between editors Tretyakov, who increasingly promoted factography and documentary prose, and Mayakovsky, who persevered in his commitment to the Futurist literary project. The journal's demise occurred when avant-garde experimentation was attacked as "Formalism" and during the political-cultural shift that would institutionalise Socialist Realism.

Tretyakov brought factography into German left-wing intellectual culture, when he spent spent nearly six months in Germany, from October 1930 to April 1931, lecturing on Soviet literary practice and collective farm reportage. Thus factography had influence on theorists in the West, especially on German left intellectuals, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, who attended or knew of these discussions. Linked journals also appeared such as the Constructivist architectural journal SA (edited by Moisei Ginzburg and Alexander Vesnin) and Proletarskoe Foto, on photography.

Selected contributors

Boris Arvatov

Isaac Babel

Osip Brik

Nikolai Chuzhak

Sergei Eisenstein

Aleksei Gan

Aleksei Gastev

Aleksei Kruchyonykh

Boris Kušner

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Boris Pasternak

Liubov Popova

Alexander Rodchenko

Viktor Shklovsky

Sergei Tretyakov

Varvara Stepanova

Dziga Vertov

The Lenin issue

After Vladimir Lenin's death on January 21, 1924, LEF's first issue of the year dedicated its critical section to the Soviet leader (though the publication's artistic prose and poetry were not Lenin-themed). These critical articles mainly focused on an analysis of Lenin's writing and his oratory: this is because the Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky independently organized the project and presented it to LEF. Mayakovsky contributed an unsigned editorial to the issue, in which he criticized the newly forming habit of Soviet authorities to "canonize" Lenin by mass-producing commercial objects with his portrait or likeness on them. The editorial argued that this practice would undermine Lenin's significance for future generations. In Mayakovsky's words, "Don't take away his living gait and human traits, which he was able to preserve as he guided history. Lenin is still our contemporary. He is among the living. We need him alive, not dead." The other articles do not explicitly develop this point, although they do focus on certain unusual, "human" particularities of Lenin's style.

In total, six writers contributed articles to the critical section of the issue. Their names and the titles of their works follow:

Shklovsky - "Lenin as Decanonizer" (Ленин, как деканонизатор)

Boris Eikhenbaum - "Basic Stylistic Tendencies in Lenin's Speech" (Основные стилевые тенденции в речи Ленина)

Lev Yakubinsky - "On Lenin's Deflation of the High Style" (О снижении высокого стиля у Ленина)

Yuri Tynyanov - "Lenin's Lexicon as a Polemicist" (Словарь Ленина-полемиста)

Boris Kazansky - "Lenin's Speech - An Attempt at Rhetorical Analysis" (Речь Ленина: Опыт риторического анализа)

Boris Tomashevsky - "The Construction of the Theses" (Конструкция тезисов)

All of these men either belonged to one of two Formalist collectives, OPOJAZ (The Society For the Study of Poetic Language) and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, or were associated with them. Accordingly, their contributions to this issue of LEF focus on Lenin's specific rhetorical techniques, and not on his broader historical or social importance, which is only alluded to in passing in the articles. Since these authors share certain theoretical assumptions about language and rhetoric, moreover, the articles often overlap in the specific topics of their investigations, and produce a stable group of core conclusions about Lenin's style.