Left Front of the Arts

Formation and Composition

LEF (the Left Front of the Arts, ЛЕФ) was a creative association active between 1922 and 1929 in Moscow, Odessa and other Soviet cities [P1]. It was founded in Moscow in late 1922 [P3], and its core consisted of former Futurists: Vladimir Mayakovsky (leader of the association), Nikolai Aseev, Osip Brik, Sergei Tretyakov, Boris Kushner, Boris Arvatov and Nikolai Chuzhak [P4]. LEF considered itself the only genuine representative of revolutionary art and competed on that ground with the proletarian groups Oktyabr and VAPP [P5]; its journal drew writers such as Boris Pasternak, Aleksei Gastev, Aleksei Kruchyonykh, Viktor Shklovsky and Isaac Babel, and artists including Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Liubov Popova and Vladimir Tatlin [P6]. Filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov collaborated, as did architects including the Vesnin brothers; in 1925 LEF's architect members founded the Association of Contemporary Architects (OSA), and scholars of OPOYAZ also worked with LEF [P7].

Programme and Practice

LEF's basic principles were the literature of fact (the advocacy of abolishing invention in favour of documentary material), production art, and the social command [P8]. Some LEF theorists, among them Tretyakov, proposed replacing literature with journalism altogether [P9]. The first issue of its organ LEF (1923–1925) appeared in March 1923 under Mayakovsky as responsible editor, with Aseev, Arvatov, Brik, Kushner, Tretyakov and Chuzhak on the editorial board [P12]; in the "Theory" section it printed articles by "left" directors and artists such as Vertov and Eisenstein [P13]. Novy LEF ('New LEF') ran from 1927 to 1928 [P11], edited by Tretyakov from August to December 1928 [P74].

Literature of Fact and Dissolution

At various stages LEF came under harsh criticism in the journals Pod znamenem marksizma and Novy mir and the newspaper Izvestia, with V. Polonsky, Demyan Bedny and A. Lezhnev among its consistent opponents [P15]. After Mayakovsky and Brik left LEF in September 1928 the association broke up, weakened by internal contradictions, at the end of 1928; Mayakovsky's attempt to create a REF (Revolutionary Front) in 1929 failed, and in 1930 he and Aseev joined RAPP [P16]. Its successor Novy LEF tried to popularise factography, or the "literature of fact": the idea that journalism, film, photography and mass media technologies should be used by the working class for works countering bourgeois fictional texts. It ceased publication in 1929 after disagreements between Tretyakov, who promoted factography and documentary prose, and Mayakovsky, who held to the Futurist literary project [P35][P36].