The article analyzes archival, periodical and other printed material of the 1920s–1930s and demonstrates how the idea of accessibility of art (“art belongs to the people”) was realized and new “proletarian spectators”, visitors to art museums and exhibitions, were introduced to the culture. Particular attention is given to previously unexplored material (such as guest books of art museums and exhibitions, sociological studies conducted by museum employees, notes by tour guides). It gives the idea of audience reaction to “culturalization”, art in general and contemporary art in particular. As a rule, guest books escape the attention of art historians. The author thinks that these data allow developing a new approach to this significant topic. The artistic intelligentsia and museum staff were supposed to “accustom to art” workers and peasants who had been deprived of this experience before. For most visitors, their visits to the Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts were the first experience of getting acquainted with an art gallery and painting in general (“the impression is great”, the museum “is magnificent”, “made a great impression”, “I am overjoyed since everything is so unexpectedly beautiful”); the audience better understood the sculpture (“the only bad thing is that the figures are broken”), the visitors liked easel painting, but they needed explanation (“it’s extremely difficult without a guide”), classic and realistic art was preferred, the avant-garde (“a daub”) and contemporary painting were not liked (“I don’t want to look at and spend time on this”). The audience had no idea about the formal values of art and saw only the subject of the painting. The questionnaires of artists and art historians published in the weekly “Zhizn’ iskusstva” in 1929 revealed that many problems remained unresolved and art was still “alien and incomprehensible to the broad proletariat and peasant masses”.

The article discusses the little-known and long forgotten novel Tvorchestvo (Creativity, 1952) by the Soviet writer A. Barten. It is not an attempt at literary interpretation of the text, but rather the art historian’s analysis of a literary work dedicated to the fine arts and artists. The novel Tvorchestvo chronicles the art life in the era of socialist realism in the 1930s as the novel takes place in 1935, and reflects the spirit of the time when it was written - the period of ideological campaigns in 1946-1953. The artistically weak work did not attract the attention of literary critics, since it is a typical product of that time, direct and “poster-like” embodiment of the nature of totalitarian culture. The article examines collisions of art in the 1930s-1950s revealed in the novel: the fight against “formalism” and “naturalism”, against “bezydeynost” (idealessness) and “apolitichnost” (apoliticality). It analyses the characters of artists and complexity of their relationships (an “advanced” artist, an art bureaucrat, the genius of socialist realism Vedenin, “not that” realist artist Simakhin, incompetent copyist and artisan Nikodim Nikodimovich, artist “from the machine tool” Semyon, “impressionist-cosmopolitan” Rakitin and, finally, “formalist, who comes to the consciousness of his absolute creative impotence”, Veksler), problems of creativity (“delight to be in ranks” or creative freedom) and craving for producing a “masterpiece” in the conditions of “socialist building”. A. Barten displays his inability to talk about visual means of art and lards the characters’ speech with newspaper words, clichéd phrases and propaganda clichés that migrate from magazines and newspapers to fiction. The novel by A. Barten, an agitational and administrative work rather than a fictional one, in combination with a critical article by T. Golovanova and Yu. Neprintsev “Without knowledge of life” is an obvious piece of ideological demagogy, far from the real problems of literature and art; it is a typical example of manipulating readers, implanting perverted artistic tastes.