Magazine Вопросы литературы, No. 1, 1961

The past 4th anniversary of the magazine "Questions of Literature", an organ of the Writers' Union and the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, marked new serious successes in efforts to examine and clarify a number of major problems of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, theory and history of literature. For our reader, the magazine "Questions of Literature" is like a large and bright window into the world of literary theory, as the most authoritative organ of Soviet literary thought. The political and spiritual upsurge of the Soviet peoples after the 20th and 21st Congresses of the CPSU is reflected in the pathos of the magazine. The first booklet of "Questions of Literature" from 1961 opens with I. Vinogradov's article "Za beguštim dnem" - notes on the novel by V. Tendryakov. The author dwells on the contradictory statements about the novel made by a number of Soviet critics, rejects some of them and, after a detailed analysis, clarifies some of the author's peculiarities with his tendency to portray an "intellectual hero", in which the main thing is "the struggle of ideas, the persistent search for a living, complex and significant thought". And insofar as this material is "new to the writer, he is not able to relate to it freely enough, to clearly separate it from himself. . . " This partly explains the contradictory perception of Andrei Biryukov, the main character in "For the Running Day". In the article "Poets of the Antilles" E. Galperina traces the stages of emergence, development and the current state of poetry in the Republic of Haiti, in the West Indies (the islands of Jamaica, Trinidad, etc.) and in British Guiana. The desire for national and political freedom, interest in the past and folklore, anger and contempt for the colonizers - 110 these features characterize the poetry of the Antilles. The questions of purity, euphony and creative use of modern literary language attract the attention of writers, critics and readers. E. Khanpira focuses on them in his short remark "Let's talk about our speech". In our attitude to language, breadth, a sober understanding of the peculiarities of artistic speech are obviously necessary, since any extreme purism can lead to the impoverishment of speech. In support of these thoughts, E. Khanpira cites convincing examples from the literary work of M. Gorky, S. Sergeev-Tsensky, Vl. Mayakovsky, V. I. Lenin and others.