This article examines the complex process of transformation of the cultural canon in the aesthetic theory and literary practice of the proletarian culture in the 1920s. At that time, the avant-garde impulse faded and neo-imperial sentiments grew, while the ideas of “classics” and “classical” became instruments of all kinds of ideological manipulations. The article pays special attention to the discussions between aesthetically opposing literary groups about the role of the “classics” in the formation of proletarian culture. The key moment is the polemic between the editor of Red Virgin Soil and the ideologist of “Pereval” A. K. Voronsky, in which the problem of “cultural heritage” was revealed. Voronsky insisted on the need for a critical assimilation of the classics, while his opponents saw them as a threat to revolutionary culture. The Soviet government, however, took a pragmatic position, using the “classics” to legitimize the new political and aesthetic regime. In addition, this article attempts to link the problem of the “classics” with the publishing policy of the Soviet state in the 1920s: it demonstrates how the proletarian literary project was rooted through mass circulation and serial publications. It is significant that even among critics of a Marxist orientation there was no unity in the assessments of the “literary heritage”: some saw the “classics” as models to follow, material for organizing mass “literary studies”, while others sought to reject them as a “relic of the bourgeois era”. This study is based on a wide range of sources—from journal articles and transcripts of discussions to publishing plans and reader responses—which allows us to trace how the ideological attitudes created in the course of critical polemics influenced early Soviet literary production. A detailed analysis of the discussions that took place allows concluding that by the end of the decade, the ideas of “classics” and “the classical” had become not so much an aesthetic guideline for the proletarian cultural project as an instrument for its legitimization, which made it possible to monopolize the sphere of literary production in the 1920s in the space of a few years.

DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2026.1.08

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