WHY DID STALIN NOT LIKE THE PLAY “LIES” BY THE PLAYWRIGHT ALEXANDER AFINOGENOV? (THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CONTEXT)

Abstract

The play of the famous playwright Alexander Afinogenov “Lies” (1933) was liked by many Bolshevik Party leaders, staged in the theater and played several times, but I. V. Stalin, after the playwright’s unsuccessful attempts to correct the play according to his remarks, decided to finally ban it. The article is devoted not only to the practical aspects of studying the context, but also to the theoretical foundations of analysis. The modern scientific interpretation of this case sees the historical context in the fact that the playwright exposed the false Stalinist ideological machine. The “context” in this sense is part of the researcher’s own lifeworld. However, such explanation is not able to reveal the meaning of why Stalin said about the play that “the idea of the play is rich”, but “the form of the play” comes out “not rich”. The historical context is never derived from the habitual thinking of the researcher, but is a problem of studying the Other. Truth/ lie in the ideological paradigm of the Bolsheviks is considered as a phenomenon requiring reconstruction. The analysis shows that Stalin liked the “rich” idea of the play, that is to recognize the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party as a measure of moral virtues (“the idea is rich”), but he did not like that the Central Committee of the Party turned out to be a lonely beacon in the play having no real ground. The ground should be the communists, loyal to the party, and not “the freaks”, as Stalin wrote to Afinogenov about the characters of “Lies”. The reconstruction of the context of Alexander Afinogenov”s play shows that the playwright considers as “lies” everything that opposes the “general line” of the party and the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. The highest manifestation of the evolution of the once NEP Russia into the Stalinist Russia was the main motive of the play about the possibility and necessity of political denunciation as the only possible moral step on the way to Stalinist socialism.