Farewell to Ermilov

And in terms of posthumous recognition, the literary critic is worse than the writer. Never particularly strong, and without the "brand" of authority - quite thin, the thread with the public breaks. New ideas appear, new assessments, new luminaries. And the work in which the most precious of the personality is realized will still be disputed, and the grains of truth obtained with no less work and talent will still pass through sieves and magnifying glasses. Descendants are not indulgent, history is rarely generous. And if he still has to show generosity, and if he still has to reach into the stingy reserve of mercy and benevolence, then here too the writer will be preferred as an infant child of nature, like a bird of God. The critic, the literary critic is always of age and is responsible for his actions according to the harshest paragraphs of aesthetic legislation. This is what obliges us to carefully examine the work of every talented critic with all the responsibility of his difficult profession, with all the seriousness of our immediate tasks. And when this critic is of the rank of V. V. Ermilov, lessons are also necessary. Not only because his work, interrupted by premature death, will not reach the heights to which he had aspired. Not only because the end requires a reckoning, and the scientific contribution - recognition. Rather, the sad occasion unties a knot of thoughts and experiences. Not every completed creative work is able to give rise to them. And this, it seems to me, is the best attestation for both the living and the dead. In the thirties, when the Komsomol writer stood at a combat post in the Soviet dailies, the artistic criterion was imposed as the main requirement of socialist literature. Works appeared that imposed them on society. But in theoretical thought, the inertia of sociological formulas, of leftist dogma, of edifying teachings continued.