SOCIALIST REALISM.

Socialist realism was a Soviet doctrine developed in the early 1930s about literature and other branches of culture. Doctrine here means not simply an available school or method of art but rather a mandatory set of guidelines that all Soviet creative figures were required to follow. It came into being largely as way to end the ambivalences and ideological squabbling that went on in the Soviet Union all through the 1920s, but also as a means of curbing the more extreme self-described "proletarian movements" that escalated during the period of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution that accompanied it (c. 1929–1932). During the period of the New Economic Policy in the 1920s, cultural life had developed in a freewheeling bazaar of conflicting tastes and canons. In most of the arts, roughly three positions were advanced and put into practice: traditionalism, harking back to prerevolutionary Europe and Russia; proletarian culture, stressing heroic themes of revolution, civil war, and factory life; and the avant-garde, borrowing freely from Western modernism and experimenting in its own Russian context as well as those of other nationalities. In addition to these, though minus any supporting argument, ordinary urban popular culture (pulp fiction, jazz, entertainment) flourished amid caustic criticism from the cultural and ideological elites. Much overlapping and many sub-movements produced an exceptionally rich tapestry of cultural expression—seen by some as a golden age of Soviet poetry, theater, film, music, and architecture. When the Cultural Revolution began, the leaders of the proletarian movement took command and tried to shut down all competing genres and styles—even including folk culture, seen as retrograde by the machine-loving urban enthusiasts.

1930S: DEFINING "SOVIET" ART

In 1932 the proletarian organizations themselves felt the power of the Communist Party, which closed them down in a resolution titled "On the Reformation of Literary and Art Organizations." A new Union of Soviet Writers was called for and over the next two years literary circles around the country and a special commission of writers and political figures appointed by the Party Central Committee engaged in intense discussion on the future of Soviet literature. The first congress of the Union assembled in August 1934, presided over by the returned émigré Maxim Gorky. After much debate, the congress adopted the term socialist realism, vaguely defined as the representation of Soviet reality in its revolutionary development. Unions of writers and all the arts came into being with the mission of producing works in this category and condemning alternative styles. For narrative works, a master plot emerged, usually featuring a hot-headed young revolutionary or worker who encounters obstacles, either natural or the product of evildoers or slackers. The hero is tamed and mentored by an older and wiser character, and eventually the difficulties are resolved into a happy ending. Thus even stories of revolutionary victims and martyrs ended with an optimistic upswell of reverence and a promise of revolutionary immortality and the victory of socialism. Original models for this schema included Gorky's prerevolutionary novel Mother (1906) and Dmitri Furmanov's civil war epic Chapaev (1923), among others. Emphatically excluded were psychological nuances, existential angst, religion and mysticism, overt sexuality, and experimentalism in form and style. All works were required to be accessible to the toilers of the Soviet Union. The much-cited exemplar of this doctrine, Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–1934), embodies all the limits and negative qualities of such a constrictive theory.

The enforcement of socialist realism does not explain all the physical casualties among creative figures of the era: Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930 before it emerged, and the great poet Osip Mandelstam died in the camps for an insulting verse about Stalin. Yet the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold lost his life clearly because of a stubborn adherence to his art. Soviet plays followed the scenario of socialist realism with pious representations of civil war heroes, rehabilitated camp prisoners, and industrial production. They adhered to what was then conventional in staging, realist sets, and acting styles. Konstantin Stanislavsky, the main architect of these conventions before the revolution, reached the pinnacle of his career. Gone were the days of biomechanics (robotic movements of actors), flying lizards in the ballet, and the innovative stylized performances of the 1920s.

Cinema, a much more popular art, came under strict control in the early 1930s. The freedom and lyrical flights of Sergei Eisenstein and other directors of the 1920s gave way to the "iron script," censorship, and a demand for "movies for the millions" in the words of the chief movie bureaucrat, Boris Shumyatsky. Professional actors and "stars" replaced the mass scenes of nonactors from some of the 1920s films. Like fiction and drama, cinema took up themes of revolution and socialist construction. A lighter twist to the canons of socialist realism appeared in the well-received musical comedies of the 1930s, which borrowed domesticated forms of American jazz and Hollywood dance. The best examples featured the superstar of the era, Lyubov Orlova, and her director husband, Grigory Alexandrov. Their political correctness—though ever present—was submerged beneath the jolly good time had by all, complete with the mandatory happy ending. One important Eisenstein film appeared in this decade: Alexander Nevsky (1938), a lavishly produced story of the Novgorod prince's defense of Kievan Rus against the Teutonic invaders in the Middle Ages. The warning reference to the detested Adolf Hitler regime was lost on no one, though the film had to be withdrawn in 1939 with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

From the perspective of ideological inspection, music came in two forms: opera and other story-filled works whose content was more easily monitored than the music that accompanied it; and purely instrumental music that was obviously much harder to check. Dmitri Shostakovich, the greatest Soviet composer, fell victim in both categories when his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was roundly attacked in 1936. Apparently the impetus was Stalin's dislike of the "immorality" displayed on stage. (The plot, from Nikolai Leskov's nineteenth-century story, revolves around adultery and murder.) But critics, taking the cue, also assaulted the music and set an example for others to hound him again in the late 1930s and in 1948—on purely musical grounds. The still-raging debate over whether Shostakovich's vaunted Seventh ("Leningrad") Symphony (1941) was inspired by the composer's hatred for Hitler or for Stalin suggests how difficult it was and is to prove the political meanings of symphonic music. Other composers satisfied the demands of the regime by concocting song symphonies and cantatas with easily recognizable and audible paeans to Stalin, the factory, the Russian forest, or Red Cossacks, as in Ivan Dzerzhinsky's Quiet Don (1935), based on the novel Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov.

POSTWAR SOVIET ART AND "HIGH STALINISM"

The definitive moment of persecution occurred after the war when the political chieftain and self-appointed critic Andrei Zhdanov assaulted one well-known writer, Mikhail Zoshchenko, for satirizing Soviet society and another, Anna Akhmatova, for poetry that was too personal. In the field of music, Zhdanov scolded Vano Muradeli for using stylized instead of "authentic" Georgian folk dancing in his opera The Great Friendship (1947). Zhdanov blasted Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and others for failure to meet the standards of Soviet musical life. By this he meant producing accessible music with soaring melodies reflecting the greatness of the Russian people. By this time the experience of war had deepened the Russian nationalist and even chauvinist elements in socialist realism. Even so, beginning in the 1930s the regime had made a point of sponsoring and creating "national" music and dance in all the non-Russian republics, based loosely on collected folk materials and designed to pull the ethnic minorities into the larger Soviet culture. Although measuring the "socialist" content of music always remained problematic, on one matter clarity prevailed: the strict prohibition of twelve-tone, serial, and other modernist forms of composition that a few Soviet composers had supported and practiced in the early days of the revolution.

Socialist realist art—particularly painting—has often wrongly been equated with the realism of the so-called Travelers (Peredvizhniki) of the late nineteenth century. While the similarity of representational styles cannot be denied (such styles appear in many historical epochs), the realism of the Travelers was critical, not adulatory. In some of their works, they unveiled the maladies of their time and place: poverty, suicide, child labor, religious hypocrisy, alcoholism. The mandate of Soviet socialist realist painters pointed in the opposite direction: to use realist techniques to promote the values of the regime. This they did with great vigor and often with considerable skill. One may find the same themes in art as portrayed in fiction, drama, and film: the greatness of the Great Leader (particularly in the hands of the court painter, Alexander Gerasimov), comforting scenes of the new Moscow, the efficient productive factory, sinewy workers, and the fertile and joyous collective farm (reflecting Stalin's motto "Life has become happier"). As in the other arts, graphic production became both more skillful and more subservient to the doctrine in the postwar period of High Stalinism. Alexander Laktionov provides the prime example. He scored high with the nostalgic Letter from the Front (1947), a sweet and sad domestic scene of a family reading the missive from their loved one away at war. Family also dominates his famous painting Moving into a New Flat (1952), with the portrait of Stalin waiting to be hung. Even when not overtly political, official themes of the Soviet good life were embedded in his canvases, just as the idealized American dream was in the 1940s paintings by Norman Rockwell.

After World War II socialist realism migrated to the Soviet-controlled satellites of Eastern Europe and even to communist states in Asia. Local conditions often allowed for more latitude, but no real freedom of expression. In the post-Stalin USSR, certain strictures remained in force until the era of glasnost in the 1980s. But beside and within them, freer forms emerged and even flourished (the "thaw" novel, village prose, rock music), bringing to Soviet readers and listeners much more "real" realism than ever was provided by the Stalinist doctrine of the 1930s.

See alsoAkhmatova, Anna; Eisenstein, Sergei; Gorky, Maxim; New Economic Policy (NEP); Prokofiev, Sergei; Shostakovich, Dmitri; Stalin, Joseph; Zhdanov, Andrei.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bown, Matthew Cullerne. Socialist Realist Painting. New Haven, Conn., 1998.

Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. 2nd ed. Chicago, 1985.

Dunham, Vera S. In Stalin's Time. Cambridge, U.K., 1976.

Günther, Hans, ed. The Culture of the Stalin Period. New York, 1990.

Papernyi, Vladimir. Architecture in the Age of Stalin. Translated by John Hill and Roann Barris in collaboration with the author. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.

Robin, Régine. Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford, Calif., 1992.

Schwarz, Boris. Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia. Enl. ed. Bloomington, Ind., 1983.

Richard Stites