The journal regularly featured critical reviews, correspondence and discussion on avant-garde cultural activities in the Soviet Union and abroad.
Edited by theatre critic Lev Kolpakchi,[2][4] the journal was associated with the work of V. Ardov, B. Bebutov, O. Brik, P. Markov, V. Meyerhold, S. Yutkevich, A. Fevralsky, B. Arvatov, S, Tretyakov, and others.
The journal served as a platform for discussions of the role of Left Front of the Arts (Russian:"Левый фронт искусств") in Soviet culture and society.
Topics discussed in the journal included the role of stylization versus naturalism in actors' physical movement, role of spectacle, the grotesque aesthetic, intellectualism, Formalism, audience affect, proletarian content, divisions between art and life, children's theatre, populist forms, comparisons with European and American trends in culture.
In a preface to the 24th edition, the writer V. Mass discussed the determining relationship between revolutionary theatre and NEP policy, the state financier and official promoter of cultural reforms in the USSR.
"[6] The editors univocally condemned any "fetish of beauty" in art and were critical of bourgeois tendencies, unsubstantiated aesthetic, and spiritual escapism.
", an article published in the 18th edition, reviewed the discussion in the forum of the same name held at the Central Proletarian Club by members of the Left front (with the participation of Arvatov, Pletnev, Gomza, O. Brik, Tretyakov and Chuzhak) and the so-called Marxist opposition, the followers of Plekhanov on 20 December 1922.
Arvatov, in an article titled "What is it about worker's theatre" argued for the need to develop an "agit-theatre," which would discourage from passive viewing and escapist illusion and which would activate real people.
The writer Vladimir Mass wrote a defense of the Left front against such accusations by stating that the form/content debate itself was regressive and that "goal-oriented expediency is the main question of new art."
Among the discussion on the means of integration of the proletariat into revolutionary culture, was the conversation on the general discrimination against uneducated viewers from theatre, which had previously been reserved for the bourgeois audience.
The writers of the journal praised Meyerhold's constant commitment to dialectic method and his intuitive awareness of revolutionary theatre that predated the 1917 Revolution.
"[11] Other articles, such as those by O. Brik and Mikhail Levidov reveal the general lack of support for Meyerhold in Moscow circles by praising him despite his failure.
The State Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS, Russian:Государственный Институт Театральночо Искусства, ГИТИС ), was opened on September 17, 1922 with Meyerhold serving as creative director.
Meyerhold envisioned GITIS as a place for the scientific development of the human through physical exercise and the construction of new culture where science, art and work would be united.
When the Left Russian theatre that will have the material opportunity to perform in front of the working masses of the West, we will be deserving of real, moral success.
"[13] The timing of the article was concurrent to the exceptional success of state-sponsored First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin in October 1922, which featured the work of both representative painting and the Left front.
According to Mayakovsky, there were no interesting theaters in Germany and the general poor state of the arts was due to the expiration of formalist aesthetics without a social basis.