Abstract:

In the context of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, the journal Literaturnyī Kritik in the 1930s emerged as a central platform for debating aesthetic and theoretical issues. In related articles and speeches, the inheritance of world literary heritage as a means to further develop literature became a formula. In examining the journal’s treatment of the issue of “critical inheritance of literary heritage”, the evolution of the notion of “heritage” from the French Revolution through the Stalinist period, the attitudes toward realism, romanticism, and modernism in the Soviet Union, the debates originating from Lukács and Bloch, and the shaping of Soviet national literature, are all important issues not to be neglected. “Critical inheritance of literary heritage” also contributed to the implementation of the cultural policy of “national in form, socialist in content”, thereby establishing an organic link between diverse national literature and a unified Soviet literature.

Key words: critical inheritance, literary heritage, Literaturnyī Kritik, Soviet literature, national literature