1. Utopian Visions: Week 8 Outline:
Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
Socialist Realism: The Basics
Socialist Realism in situ
Exporting Socialist Realism

2. Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
From here…
Kazimir
Malevich,
Suprematist
Composition –
White on White,
1918

3. Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
to here
Boris
Vladimirskii,
Roses for
Stalin,
1949

4. Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
From here…
Vladimir Tatlin,
Monument to the
Third International,
1919

5. Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
to here
Vera Mukhina,
The Worker and the
Kolkhoz Woman,
1937

6. Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
From here…
Konstantin
Melnikov’s
Rusakov
Workers’
Club, 1928

7. Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
to here
Moscow
State
University

8. Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
From here…
(at 40:00)
Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929

9. Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
to here
(at 1:08)
Mikhail Chiaureli, The Fall of Berlin,

10. Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
From here…
(at 8:00)
Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony no. 2, October (1927)

11. Socialist Realism: How did we get there?
to here
Red Army Choir

12. Socialist Realism: Rupture or continuity?

13. Socialist Realism: The Basics 1
1932: Stalin decree ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations’  vast array of literary, art etc. associations dissolved; small number of all-Soviet unions (one for each sector of the arts) established (some earlier, some later)  organisation and financing of cultural production put on a new footing
1932: writer Maxim Gorky ( ) returns to Soviet Union
1934 Writers’ Congress: writers and delegates discuss Soviet literature

14. Socialist Realism: The Basics 2
What was it? A doctrine? A style?away from abstraction, back to mimesis
Tenets of ‘accessibility’ (dostupnost'), ‘the spirit of the people’ (narodnost‘), and ‘the spirit of the party’ (partiinost')
‘National in form, socialist in content’ – Stalin, 1934
‘Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls. What does this mean? What duties does the title confer upon you? In the first place, it means knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art, not to depict it in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as “objective reality,” but to depict reality in its revolutionary development’. – Andrei Zhdanov, 1934

15. Socialist Realism: The Basics 3
- Often defined by its Other, bourgeois formalism - Find middle-ground between poles of bad naturalism (=hyper-realist) and bad formalism (=abstraction) dialectics

16. Socialist Realism: Dialectics
Naturalist ‘thesis’, Isaak Brodsky’s Stalin, 1937
Formalist ‘antithesis’, Pavel Filonov’s Stalin, 1936

17. Socialist Realism: Dialectics
Socialist realist ‘synthesis’, Alexander Gerasimov’s Stalin, 1939

18. Socialist Realism: The Basics 4
Predecessors, e.g. in visual arts: Wanderers and Realists of AKhR (Association of Artists of the Revolution, founded in 1922) Socialist Realist Isaak Brodsky, painted by Wanderer Ilya Repin, 1913

19. Socialist Realism in situ
1949 Art Soviet discussion of N. N. Yerushev’s painting V. I. Lenin’s Funeral on Red Square: POKARZHEVSKY: Don’t you have eyes? Then there is Stalin’s face. You should have shown the face and the body in the center, but you have the balustrade and snow-covered fir tree branches at front center. That is your center. And no people to be seen Lenin can hardly be made out. After all, this is a picture, you should remember that Lenin is surrounded by people, friends, you should have made them stand out. Tone down the snow, you should have made a gray day and more light on the faces.--The picture is unsuccessful. Its main flaw is that there are no people and no faces

20. Socialist Realism in situ cont’d 1
PLASTOV: Comrade Yerushev, what happened on that woeful day? The leader died, next to him stands another leader, Stalin, stand comrades, comrades-in-arms, soldiers, stands the entire Russian people And how are you solving this question? You are solving it, it seems to me, without an understanding of the moment and the faces that you are depicting. How are you composing? In the foreground, you devote one-third of the composition to the most motionless [element] in the composition--the balustrade, the branches, the smoke, etc. The main, key elements--Stalin, Kalinin, Dzerzhinsky, and other comrades-in-arms of Lenin--cannot be seen It is confusing. Then you begin searching--who is standing there? That is probably Stalin--yes, it is him And altogether you get neither the people, nor the atmosphere in which this is taking place, nor the people behind these leaders, nor the leaders in front of the people

21. Socialist Realism in situ cont’d 2
Furthermore, regarding the psychology of those present: Stalin’s face should express the sorrow of a great man about a genius who has passed away, and how have you expressed this? You have not. All we see is a man with a lowered head, and so forth. On to Dzerzhinsky. It is impossible to see his face, how he looked. Even his felt boots are better drawn than his head. The people who are coming up, the simple people, how have you painted them? Very superficially, very dryly, without any details of what they felt, with what kinds of eyes they looked at the terrible grief that had struck the country. Whichever spot you look at, you find low-quality drawing, a lack of precision, or an inability to express the emotion that you undoubtedly felt in the most authentic and sincere way. I think it would help if you worked on this theme more thoroughly Do keep in mind that you have chosen an exceptional moment in the history of the country, in the history of mankind, and all of a sudden you approach this moment somewhat mechanically. I do not think this is right.

22. Socialist Realism as USSR’s most successful export product: GDR

23. Socialist Realism as USSR’s most successful export product: China

24. Socialist Realism as USSR’s most successful export product: North Korea

25. Socialist Realism as USSR’s most successful export product: Vietnam

26. Socialist Realism as USSR’s most successful export product: Mozambique

27. Socialist Realism: Interpretations 1
Not art, but propaganda (often: Stalin’s whim)  long-term consequence: Socialist Realism = ‘rare example in today’s cultural context--in a world where otherwise “anything goes”--of a truly irreducible other’. Boris Groys, ‘The Art of Totality’, in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle, 2003), pp. 98–99.

28. Socialist Realism: Interpretations 2
'Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time.'
From: Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 5, no. 5 (1939), pp. 34–49.
Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946)
Argument also dear to leftists

29. Socialist Realism: Interpretations 3.1
Part of much wider stylistic-sociopolitical trend, encompassing Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Communist China  Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People's Republic of China (New York, 1990)

30. Socialist Realism: Interpretations 3.2
…including FDR’s USA 1942 mural, 'Security of the Family’, in main entrance of the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C. Part of Federal Art Project (FAP) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) programs.

31. Socialist Realism
But what if the avant-garde and Socialist Realism have more in common than we like to think? Groys and the continuity thesis…