Socialist Realism without Shores
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Socialist Realism without Shores
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Overview
The contributors here argue that socialist realism has never been a monolithic art form. Essays demonstrate, among other things, that its literature could accommodate psychoanalytic criticism; that its art and architecture could affect the aesthetic dictates of Moscow that made "Soviet" art paradoxically heterogeneous; and that its aesthetics could accommodate both high art and crafted kitsch. Socialist Realism without Shores also addresses the critical discourse provoked by socialist realism—Stalinist aesthetics, "anthropological" readings; ideology critique and censorship; and the sublimely ironic approaches adapted from sots art, the Soviet version of postmodernism.
Contributors. Antoine Baudin, Svetlana Boym, Greg Castillo, Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Boris Groys, Hans Günther, Julia Hell, Leonid Heller, Mikhail Iampolski, Thomas Lahusen, Régine Robin, Yuri Slezkine, Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, Xudong Zhang, Sergei Zimovets
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822398097 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/1997 |
| Series: | Post-contemporary interventions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Thomas Lahusen is Associate Professor of Russian and Literature at Duke University and the editor of Late Soviet Culture, also published by Duke University Press. Evgeny Dobrenko is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at Duke University.
Read an Excerpt
Socialist Realism Without Shores
By Thomas Lahusen, Evgeny Dobrenko
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1997 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9809-7
CHAPTER 1
SOCIALIST REALISM IN SEARCH OF ITS SHORES
Some Historical Remarks on the "Historically Open Aesthetic System of the Truthful Representation of Life"
We proceed from the logic of the real forward movement of history.
—Dmitry Markov
In a paradoxical way, socialist realism has reached the level of one of its latest definitions, namely, a "historically open aesthetic system of the truthful representation of life": with the disappearance of the Soviet State, the socialist realist heritage truthfully represents the Soviet past. Beyond an ironic reading of Soviet official art, however, it is worth reassessing (if possible) the problem of the "openness" versus the "closure" of a literary practice that produced the overwhelming majority of Soviet literature, minus, of course, the well-known "dissident" exceptions and the "returned" masterpieces.
One of the last theoretical debates, exemplified by Dmitry Markov's 1978 definition of the "historically open system," occurred at a time when socialist realist theory was responding to Western revisionism, above all to Roger Garaudy's D'un réalisme sans rivages (1966), and when socialist realist literary practice was already fighting a rearguard battle, challenged by increasing cultural pluralism, "rural (nationalist) prose," "magic realism," samizdat, tamizdat, and so on.
The internal debate regarding the "openness" or "closure" of the socialist realist method was followed by a series of appraisals from "outside": some Western readings (by Jochen-Ulrich Peters, Katerina Clark, Hans Günther, and others) and an "already-outside-but-still-inside" exchange of points of view during the late 1980s (by Evgeny Dobrenko, Galina Belaya, and Yury Andreev, among others). Some of these readings reproduced the internal debate, albeit with inversions and deviations. The "method," for its supporters and opponents alike, was often part of the "logic of the real forward movement of history," a logic which suddenly crumbled in 1991.
Various meanings can be attributed to "openness" and "closure" in the context of socialist realist writing of the "mature" period. In reexamining some structural and institutional aspects of Soviet writing from the 1920s through the late 1940s — in other words, from the "protocanon" to the phase of its "full functioning" (in Günther's terms)—and in evaluating the theoretical presuppositions posed by such a reexamination, we can challenge the idea of Soviet literature as "monolithic" during the Stalin era. On both the structural and the institutional level the method disintegrated much earlier than is commonly assumed, and the very moment of the canon's crystallization coincided with its opening to dislocation and decay, well before socialist realism was denned as a "historically open system."
From the very outset of his Problemy teorii sotsialistkheskogo realizma (Problems of the Theory of Socialist Realism), Dmitry Markov dissociates himself from "left" and "right": from attempts to identify the method with proletarian-revolutionary currents, on the one hand, and from the idea of bourgeois aesthetic theory (according to which modernist currents represent the highest stage of artistic development), on the other. This double dissociation, by which Markov attempts to stand aloof from both the "dogmatic" heritage and foreign contamination, organizes the book's whole argument, developed under the overarching principle of the "logic of the real forward movement of history." Markov's famous formulation of the "historically open aesthetic system of the truthful representation of life," which became the last official definition of socialist realism in Soviet history, is motivated by a series of legitimizing genealogies, considered "critically": the nineteenth-century proletarian-revolutionary tradition, for example, should not be confused, as Lenin correctly showed, with later postrevolutionary developments, such as the "vulgarizing" theories of the Proletkult. This heritage should also be viewed with some balance, that is, with a reasonable degree of openness: if the limitations that the socialist realist method placed on the modernist tendencies of the 1920s should remain an "organizing principle," this does not imply that all modernist writing has to be dismissed. Symbolism was in some cases, after all, "the expression of social rebellion and protest." Maxim Gorky—"for whom any narrow treatment of artistic consciousness was alien" — knew how to distinguish the "good" (Bryusov, Blok) from the "bad" (Sologub, Merezhkovsky).
Concerning "revolutionary romanticism," Markov believes that its role during the period of formation of socialist realism has to be reevaluated. His argument is based on the "late" opinions of Leonid Timofeev, as expressed in Osnovy teorii literatury (Principles of the Theory of Literature), according to which romanticism and realism are "functional concepts, relative to art in its entirety." Again, criticism and openness are two aspects of the same dialectical "logic" as Markov distinguishes two tendencies of "romanticism" in the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the reactionary and the progressive, that is, (reactionary) symbolism and Gorky's (progressive) "revolutionary romanticism." The "diversity" of forms that characterized the development of the new literature has still not been satisfactorily explained, argues Markov. On one hand, the vulgarizing interpretation of Marx's letter to Ferdinand Lassalle by "RAPPian nihilism" (to "Shakespearize" more and "Schillerize" less) must, of course, be dismissed; on the other hand, at the dawn of the proletarian movement the socialist ideal had not yet unfolded within realist forms and could therefore only be expressed by revolutionary romanticism.
Markov's chapter on "The Socialist Literatures of the 1920s and 1930s in the Context of the Worldwide Process of Literary Development" shows that the "diversity of forms and styles" was affirmed not only over time, but also in other places: that is, the overall process was not limited to the Russian/Soviet experience. The fact that the development of socialist literature had its "limits" becomes clear, however, with Markov's use in a subsequent chapter of "humanism" as a cornerstone of the "method": "The humanist concept of man [ chelovekd], in which the spiritual appearance and the attitude of the artist find their reflection, is undoubtedly linked to the global question of the relation between art and reality." But this cornerstone also marks a boundary insofar as the humanist conception of man determines the limits of the artistic cognition of the world, that is, its "relation with the progressive ideals of the time." Socialist realism— continues Markov—"inherited the humanist traditions of the past in elevating them to a new quality," namely " socialist humanism," and thereby "expressing the social and spiritual-ethical freedom of mankind." It goes without saying that this development had nothing to do with bourgeois artistic ideologies, such as existentialism, structuralism, or the "literature of the absurd." Socialist realism, understood as a "historically open system of aesthetic possibilities," is consequently perceived as having an increasing and massive power of attraction in world literature. If its "internationalist character" is mainly related to the literature of socialist countries (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and, to a certain extent, the gdr and Poland), many writers in the capitalist countries who represent modernist tendencies also practice critical realism and have been creatively influenced by the art of socialist realism, with its concept of the new man. Concerning the socialist countries, Markov admits that they are not free of modernist tendencies and regrets that part of the creative intelligentsia in some of these countries, still identifying socialist realism with narrowness, schematism, normativity, has no faith in it, or even rejects it. Some remnants of dogmatism inside the Soviet Union (Gennady Pospelov, for example) can be held responsible for this attitude. The category of "truthfulness" (pravdivost) finally sets limits to the "openness" of the system. Therefore, revisionist views — Garaudy's concept of a "realism without shores," for example — are unacceptable because they "open the door to alien ideological phenomena."
Among the polemics against the theory of the "open system" one can cite Yury Andreev's Dvizhenie realizma (The Movement of Realism). For Andreev, Markov's views (with which he associates the formula of "realism without shores") show a fundamental lack of faith in the realist method. Realism has not been exhausted by nineteenth-century critical realism: its development, including its socialist realist one, is a dynamic concept in continual evolution. How could it have reached the point of critical realism and then dried up, reaching the stage of socialist realism only on the crutches of symbolism, avant-gardism, and romanticism? Realism distinguishes itself from other creative methods in avoiding the single labels applied by other literary schools, and this is its specificity. Stylistic diversity is defined by two antonymous processes: nonrealistic literature included a multitude of canons, each focusing on one or another obligatory, self-sufficient aspect, such as the image (imagism), the impression (impressionism), the renewal of device and form (avant-gardism), the individual's subjective opinions and dreams (romanticism), and so on. The liberation from any given canon, on the contrary, is achieved by realistic literature because, in tending only toward the cognition of objective reality, it changes with every change of focus.
A second point of contention for Andreev is the fact that many theoreticians and critics refuse to distinguish between socialist art and socialist realism. Ideological unity (ideinoe edinstvo) does not imply ideological-artistic unity (ideino-kbudozhestvennoe edinstvo), even if socialist realism represents the vanguard of the latter. One should beware of misapplying the label of socialist realism because doing so will only compromise the "method." Andreev cites the example of "those Polish colleagues on the literary front" who justly criticize such "headlong politics of overzealous activists," which gave only bad results. He invites the "talented and leading masters of culture who think in socialist terms [sotsialisticheski mysliashchie] to create according to their national artistic traditions instead of dealing with the destruction of art.... Time will then show that their artistic method, imprisoned in one or the other narrow canon, will give people much less than realism, with its manifold possibilities and its diversity of individual manifestations."
The foreign observer who has probably given the best account of the Soviet response to Western revisionism is Jochen-Ulrich Peters. His 1974 article "Réalisme sans rivages?" does not address Markov's subsequently published concept of the "open system," but it has the double value of contextualizing the discussion in the post-Twentieth Congress period and relating it to the crucial Brecht-Lukacs debate, which is scarcely mentioned, if at all, in Soviet criticism relative to the "open system." Peters exposes the various stages of the discussion held within the Soviet Union since the criticism of the rigid literary politics of Stalin's time was launched in 1952 with Pomerantsev's famous article "Ob iskrennosti v literature" (On Sincerity in Literature). This development is considered on the institutional level, as well as the "theoretical," through the evidence of official documents, articles, books, and conferences.
Here are some highlights: The explicitly "educational" formulation of socialist realism ("the ideological remolding and education of the workers in the spirit of socialism") was abandoned in 1956. Theory as such was the product of liberalization, beginning in December 1956 with Alexei Metchenko's Novyi mir article on "Historicism and Dogma." Metchenko's article was followed in April 1957 by the discussion on realism at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, published in Voprosy literatury during 1957 and 1958, and by the publication of Problemy realizma v mirovoi literature (Problems of Realism in World Literature) in 1959. Viktor Vinogradov's views, according to which the literary development of realism could not be considered independently from the relevant literary language, did not get a positive response. The majority of theoreticians and literary historians continued to understand realism as a determined "artistic form of thought" (khudozhestvennoe myshlenie). Although the principal task of the "science of literature" was to consider "the artistic development in the light of Lenin's theory of reflection, as a continually developing truthful perception of reality," a consensus was reached to abandon the nondifferentiated opposition between realism and antirealism and to consider the former as only one, very fruitful artistic method that was not necessarily identifiable with a determined Weltanschauung. At the same time, explicit and openly "polemic" positions against "revisionist" literature and literary criticism in Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union (against Lukács's Wider den mifiverstandenen Realismus, for example) were voiced in the 1959 volume V bor'be za sotsialisticheskii realizm (The Struggle for Socialist Realism). Elsewhere, one can see attempts to integrate "non-realistic" works in the canon. In Realizm i ego sootnosheniia s drugimi tvorche-skimi metodami (Realism and Its Relations with Other Creative Methods), for instance, N. S. Pavlova blames Lukács for having abandoned "left expressionism" too hastily in the "expressionism debate" and maintains that the abstract character of left expressionism and its immediacy had allowed Brecht to translate the task of theater into direct artistic practice. This did not prevent Mikhail Kuznetsov from expelling, in the same volume, modernism, naturalism, and the neorealism of the new Italian cinema from the socialist realist canon.
A special place was reserved for romanticism, the reevaluation of which became, according to Peters, the most important element of the antidogmatic movement in Soviet criticism after the Twenty-Second Party Congress. The discussion took a new turn with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in 1962 and Vladimir Lakshin's controversial 1964 and 1965 Novyi mir articles in response to the story. While not abandoning such traditional concepts as "popular spirit" (narodnost), "truthfulness" (pravdivost), and "Party-mindedness" (partiinost), Lakshin attempted to relate these directly to narrative: literature could succeed in fulfilling its educational mission by depicting truly what is. As the discussion developed over time, according to Peters, the constraints on form were somewhat relaxed, whereas the ideological "shores" remained stable. Only the realist author could mediate between abstraction and naturalism, socialist realism being the only method capable of rendering at once a subjective and an objective appreciation of social evolution. Specific problems arose in regard to poetry within socialist realism, while such concepts as Brecht's "epic theater" or that of the experimental novel (Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus or Maxim Gorky's Klim Samgin, for example) produced works that were understood as "exceptional," as the expression of a revolutionary era. The disruption of causal relations in individual scenes or other such devices often encountered in this literature were counterbalanced by the "fundamental theme," that is, the relation between the people, the hero, and history. This theoretical operation allowed Gorky, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky to be seen in continuity, with all of them representing a "closed period" of Russian history within the overall literary development. What remained was the other forbidden shore: Joyce, Beckett, and the nouveau roman. The well-known formula of "unity of method, diversity of styles" allowed different "methods" to compete within Soviet literature. As for Garaudy's notion of a "universal humanism" which corresponded to the given sociohistorical situation but could not be derived from it, his concept of a socialist-committed art and literature, his desire to replace "Party-mindedness" with subjective (although socialist-oriented) partisanship, and, above all, his departure from the Leninist theory of reflection, all of this remained unacceptable to Soviet critics.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Socialist Realism Without Shores by Thomas Lahusen, Evgeny Dobrenko. Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction / Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko 1Socialist Realism in Search of Its Shores: Some Historical Remarks on the "Historically Open Aesthetic System of the Truthful Representation of Life / Thomas Lahusen 5
Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero / Katerina Clark 27
A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic Categories / Leonid Heller 51
A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism / Boris Groys 76
Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question / Greg Castillo 91
Paradoxes of Unified Culture: From Stalin's Fairy Tale to Molotov's Lacquer Box / Svetlana Boym 120
The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, or, Who "Invented" Socialist Realism? / Evgeny Dobrenko 135
Censorship as the Triumph of Life / Mikhail Iampolski 165
Wise Father Stalin and His Family in Soviet Cinema / Hans Günther 178
Son of the Regiment: Deus ex Machina / Sergei Zimovets 191
Soft-Porn, Kitsch, and Post-Fascist Bodies: The East German Novel of Arrival / Julia Hell 203
"Why is the Soviet Painting Hidden From Us?" Zhdanov Art and Its International Relations and Fallout, 1947–53 / Antoine Baudin 227
W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism: The Black Flame as Socialist Realism / Lily Wiatrowski Phillips 257
The Power of Rewriting: Postrevolutionary Discourse on Chinese Socialist Realism / Xudong Zhang 282
Primitive Communism and the Other Way Around / Yuri Slezkine 310
The Past as a Dustbin, or, The Phantoms of Socialist Realism / Régine Robin 337
Index 357
Notes on Contributors 367