On the History of the Unpublished VAPP Reference Book “10 Years of Proletarian Literature” (1927–1928)

The article examines the history of the creation of the unpublished reference publication of the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP) “10 Years of Proletarian Literature”, which was conceived as a reporting work for the decade of the Revolution. The work on the handbook was initiated as a publishing project that accompanied the solution of priority tasks to strengthen the positions of the VAPP, which strives to become a control center that unites all regional and republican proletarian literary organizations around itself. Also related to the work on the handbook are the failed attempts to introduce the VAPP into the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN), which was initially entrusted with most of the work on the book. Approved by Glavlit in August 1928, the reference book was never published. The reasons for the cancellation of the publication are obviously related to the failure of the national policy of the VAPP — the unification under his leadership of all the proletarian literatures of the republics of the USSR did not happen by mid-1928; creation in May 1928 the RAPP, which actually replaced the VAPP, the reference book was not needed; in addition, the untimeliness of the book and the outdated material even before publication would have made it an easy target for criticism, which at the same time took up arms, at the suggestion of Gorky, against another similar publication of the State Academic Academy of Arts — the dictionary “Writers of the Modern Era”.