Serafim Severnyak

It is too late, or rather inappropriate - at least for me - to theorize on literary criticism. Criticism is a Greek word, I don't know its etymology, but one dictionary says that it meant "a detailed examination, especially of a literary work, pointing out its faults and merits..." The second meaning of this word, according to the dictionary, was "blasphemy, slander. As for our contemporary literary criticism, I find that it rather adheres to the second meaning of its calling, as formulated in the aforementioned dictionary. It's not that there are no manifestations of sober, honest, and inspired assessment of literary facts in our literary life. Quite the opposite - blasphemy, slander, misunderstanding, sociologization, taste, on the one hand, or unprincipledness, partiality, and unliterary considerations, on the other, are much more numerous. I know that my statement will cause many involuntary and condescending grimaces. But I, too, am tired of being a reader of works that fumble with unclean fingers. in the lifeblood of literature, and which are simultaneously unimaginably far from the realm of art.