TRETYAKOV AND HIS «NON-CANONICAL» BRECHT AS A REPRESSIONED PAGE OF THE LITERARY HISTORY

Abstract

The paper analyzes, in terms of «cultural exclusion zones» (Sergey Troitsky), Sergey Tretyakov's essay on Bertolt Brecht, as well as contacts between those two outstanding representatives of the literary «Left Front». Tretyakov’s essay is viewed here against the backdrop of both writers’ problematic relationship with Stalin’s censorship that refused to admit the «politically unreliable» Brecht to Soviet cultural space and likewise exerted influence on Sergey Tretyakov – first through supervisory measures and then through arrest and prohibition of his books. Tretyakov’s collection of essays «People of the One Fire» which, besides sketches on other leftist artists of the Weimar Republic, contained the above-mentioned Brecht-essay also fell victim to this prohibition and was banned for some decades to come. In this paper, Tretyakov’s interpretation of Brecht’s texts is analyzed in its relations with the overall concept of the book which bears the stamp of transition from the crackdown on revolutionary avant-garde to the establishing of communist party dictatorship in literature typical of the period between 1920s and 1930s. The study focuses on Tretyakov’s strategic maneuvering between censorship restrictions and his own literary proficiencies as one of the protagonists of Russian avant-garde and the founder of the new Soviet journalism. For this purpose, special attention is paid to the gaps, omissions and arcane debate with the dogmas of the prevailing discourse.