It was a creative method used in art and literature. This method was considered an aesthetic expression of a certain concept. This concept was associated with the period of struggle for the construction of a socialist society.
This creative method was considered the main artistic direction in the USSR. Realism in Russia proclaimed a truthful reflection of reality against the background of its revolutionary development.
M. Gorky is considered the founder of the method in the literature. It was he who, in 1934, at the First Congress of Writers of the USSR, defined socialist realism as a form that affirms being as an act and creativity, the purpose of which is the continuous development of the most valuable abilities of the individual to ensure his victory over natural forces for the sake of human longevity and health.
Realism, whose philosophy is reflected in Soviet literature, was built in accordance with certain ideological principles. According to the concept, the cultural figure had to follow a peremptory program. Socialist realism was based on the glorification of the Soviet system, labor enthusiasm, as well as the revolutionary opposition of the people and leaders.
This creative method was prescribed to all cultural figures in every field of art. This put creativity in a fairly rigid framework.
However, some artists of the USSR created unique and striking works of universal human significance. Only recently has the dignity of a number of socialist realist artists been recognized (Plastov, for example, who painted scenes from village life).
Literature in that period was an instrument of party ideology. The writer himself was considered as an "engineer of human souls." With the help of his talent, he had to influence the reader, to be a propagandist of ideas. The main task of the writer was to educate the reader in the spirit of the Party and to support with him the struggle for the construction of communism. Socialist realism brought the subjective aspirations and actions of the personalities of the heroes of all works into line with objective historical events.
In the center of any work, only a positive hero must necessarily stand. He was an ideal communist, an example for everything. In addition, the hero was a progressive person, human doubts were alien to him.
Speaking about the fact that art should be owned by the people, that it is precisely on the feelings, demands and thoughts of the masses that artistic work should be based, Lenin specified that literature should be party literature. Lenin believed that this direction of art is an element of the common proletarian cause, a detail of one great mechanism.
Gorky argued that the main task of socialist realism is to educate a revolutionary view of what is happening, an appropriate perception of the world.
To ensure a strict adherence to the method, the creation of pictures, the composition of prose and poetry, etc., had to be subordinated to the exposure of capitalist crimes. At the same time, each work was supposed to praise socialism, inspiring viewers and readers to the revolutionary struggle.
The method of socialist realism covered absolutely all spheres of art: architecture and music, sculpture and painting, cinema and literature, dramaturgy. This method asserted a number of principles.
The first principle - nationality - was manifested in the fact that the heroes in the works had to necessarily come from the people. First of all, these are workers and peasants.
The works were supposed to contain a description of heroic deeds, revolutionary struggle, building a brighter future.
Another principle was specificity. It was expressed in the fact that reality was a process of historical development that corresponded to the doctrine of materialism.
1. Prerequisites. If in the field of natural science the cultural revolution was reduced mainly to a "revision" of the scientific picture of the world "in the light of the ideas of dialectical materialism", then in the field of humanities, the program of party leadership in artistic creativity, the creation of a new communist art, came to the fore.
The aesthetic equivalent of this art was the theory of socialist realism.
Its premises were formulated by the classics of Marxism. For example, Engels, discussing the purpose of the "tendentious" or "socialist" novel, noted that the proletarian writer achieves his goal when, "when, truthfully depicting real relations, he breaks the prevailing conditional illusions about the nature of these relations, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world , casts doubts about the immutability of the foundations of the existing ..." At the same time, it was not at all necessary "to present the reader in finished form with the future historical resolution of the social conflicts he depicts" . Such attempts seemed to Engels a utopian deviation, which was resolutely rejected by the "scientific theory" of Marxism.
Lenin singled out the organizational moment more: "Literature must be party." This meant that it "cannot be in general an individual matter, independent of the general proletarian cause." “Down with non-Party writers! - categorically declared Lenin. - Down with the superhuman writers! Literary work must become a part of the common proletarian cause, "wheel and cog" of one single, great social-democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the entire working class. Literary work must become an integral part of organized, planned, united Social-Democratic Party work. Literature was assigned the role of "propagandist and agitator", embodying in artistic images the tasks and ideals of the class struggle of the proletariat.
2. The theory of social realism. The aesthetic platform of socialist realism was developed by A. M. Gorky (1868-1936), the main "petrel" of the revolution.
According to this platform, the outlook of the proletarian writer must be permeated with the pathos of militant anti-philistinism. Philistinism has many faces, but its essence lies in the thirst for "satiety", material well-being, on which all bourgeois culture is based. The petty-bourgeois passion for the "meaningless accumulation of things" and personal property has been instilled in the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Hence the duality of his consciousness: emotionally the proletariat gravitates toward the past, intellectually toward the future.
And consequently, the proletarian writer needs, on the one hand, with all perseverance to pursue "the line of a critical attitude to the past", and on the other hand, "to develop the ability to look at it from the height of the achievements of the present, from the height of the great goals of the future." According to Gorky, this will give socialist literature a new tone, help it develop new forms, "a new direction - socialist realism, which - it goes without saying - can only be created on the facts of socialist experience."
Thus, the method of socialist realism consisted in decomposing everyday reality into "old" and "new", that is, in fact, bourgeois and communist, and in showing the bearers of this new in real life. It is they who should become the positive heroes of Soviet literature. At the same time, Gorky admitted the possibility of "speculation", an exaggeration of the elements of the new in reality, considering this as an anticipatory reflection of the communist ideal.
Accordingly, the writer categorically spoke out against criticism of the socialist system. The critics, in his opinion, only “litter the bright working day with rubbish of critical words. They suppress the will and creative energy of the people. After reading the manuscript of A.P. work, I do not think that it will be printed, published.This will be prevented by your anarchist frame of mind, apparently inherent in the nature of your "spirit".
Whether you wanted it or not, you gave the coverage of reality a lyrical-satirical character, which, of course, is unacceptable to our censorship. With all the tenderness of your attitude towards people, they are colored ironically in you, they appear to the reader not so much as revolutionaries as "eccentrics" and "crazy" ... I will add: among modern editors, I do not see anyone who could evaluate your novel by its virtues ... That's all I can tell you, and I'm very sorry that I can not say anything else. And these are the words of a man whose influence was worth the influence of all Soviet editors combined!
For the sake of glorifying "socialist achievements" Gorky allowed the creation of a legend about Lenin, exalted the personality of Stalin.
3. The novel "Mother". Articles and speeches by Gorky in the 20-30s. summed up his own artistic experience, the pinnacle of which was the novel "Mother" (1906). Lenin called it "a great work of art" that helps to strengthen the labor movement in Russia. Such an assessment was the reason for the party canonization of Gorky's novel.
The plot core of the novel is the awakening of revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat, suppressed by want and lack of rights.
Here is the usual and bleak picture of suburban life. Every morning, with a lingering factory whistle, "from the little gray houses ran out into the street like frightened cockroaches, gloomy people who had not had time to refresh their muscles with sleep." They were workers from a nearby factory. The non-stop "hard labor" diversified in the evenings with drunken, bloody fights, often ending in serious injuries, even murders.
There was no kindness or responsiveness in people. The bourgeois world has drained out of them a sense of human dignity and self-respect. “In the relations of people,” Gorky darkened the situation even more, “there was most of all a feeling of lurking malice, it was as old as incurable muscle fatigue. People were born with this disease of the soul, inheriting it from their fathers, and it accompanied them with a black shadow to the grave, prompting in the course of life to a series of deeds, disgusting with their aimless cruelty.
And people are so accustomed to this constant pressure of life that they did not expect any changes for the better, moreover, they "considered all changes capable of only increasing oppression."
Such was the "poisonous, convict abomination" of the capitalist world pictured in Gorky's imagination. He did not care at all how the picture he depicted corresponded to real life. He drew his understanding of the latter from Marxist literature, from Lenin's assessments of Russian reality. And this meant only one thing: the position of the working masses under capitalism is hopeless, and it cannot be changed without a revolution. Gorky also wanted to show one of the possible ways of awakening the social "bottom", gaining revolutionary consciousness.
The solution of the task was served by the images he created of the young worker Pavel Vlasov and his mother Pelageya Nilovna.
Pavel Vlasov could completely repeat the path of his father, in which, as it were, the tragedy of the position of the Russian proletariat was personified. But the meeting with the "forbidden people" (Gorky remembered Lenin's words that socialism was introduced into the masses "from the outside"!) opened up a life perspective for him, led him onto the path of the "liberation" struggle. He creates an underground revolutionary circle in the suburb, rallies the most energetic workers around him, and they develop political enlightenment.
Taking advantage of the story of the "bog penny", Pavel Vlasov openly delivered a pathetic speech, urging the workers to unite, to feel like "comrades, a family of friends, firmly connected by one desire - the desire to fight for our rights."
From that moment on, Pelageya Nilovna accepts the work of her son with all her heart. After the arrest of Pavel and his comrades at the May Day demonstration, she picks up a red flag dropped by someone and addresses the frightened crowd with fiery words: “Listen, for the sake of Christ! All of you are relatives ... all of you are of the heart ... look without fear "What happened? Children, our blood, go in the world, they follow the truth... for everyone! For all of you, for your babies, they doomed themselves to the way of the cross... they are looking for bright days. They want another life in truth, in justice.. They want good for everyone!"
Nilovna's speech reflects her former way of life - a downtrodden, religious woman. She believes in Christ and the need for suffering for the sake of "Christ's Resurrection" - a bright future: "Our Lord Jesus Christ would not exist if people did not die for his glory..." Nilovna is not yet a Bolshevik, but she is already a Christian socialist. By the time Gorky wrote Mother, the Christian socialist movement in Russia was in full force and supported by the Bolsheviks.
But Pavel Vlasov is an undisputed Bolshevik. From beginning to end, his consciousness is permeated with the slogans and appeals of the Leninist party. This is fully revealed at the trial, where two irreconcilable camps come face to face. The image of the court is based on the principle of multifaceted contrast. Everything related to the old world is given in depressingly gloomy tones. It's a sick world in every way.
"All the judges seemed to their mothers to be unhealthy people. Painful fatigue was reflected in their postures and voices, it lay on their faces - painful fatigue and annoying, gray boredom." In some ways, they are similar to the workers of the settlement before their awakening to a new life, and it is not surprising, because both are the product of the same "dead" and "indifferent" bourgeois society.
The depiction of revolutionary workers is of a completely different character. Their mere presence at the court makes the hall more spacious and brighter; one feels that they are not criminals here, but prisoners, and the truth is on their side. This is what Paul demonstrates when the judge gives him the floor. "A man of the party," he declares, "I only recognize the judgment of my party and I will not speak in my defense, but - at the request of my comrades, who also refused to defend myself, I will try to explain to you what you did not understand."
But the judges did not understand that they were not just "rebels against the king", but "enemies of private property", enemies of a society that "considers a person only as an instrument of its own enrichment." “We want,” Pavel declares in phrases from socialist leaflets, “now to have so much freedom that it will give us the opportunity to win all power over time. Our slogans are simple - down with private property, all means of production - to the people, all power - to the people, labor - obligatory for all. You see, we are not rebels!" Paul's words "slender rows" cut into the memory of those present, filling them with strength and faith in a brighter future.
The Gorky novel is inherently hagiographic; for the writer, partisanship is the same category of holiness that was the property of hagiographic literature. Party membership was assessed by him as a kind of involvement in the highest ideological sacraments, ideological shrines: the image of a person without party membership is the image of an enemy. It can be said that for Gorky party membership is a kind of symbolic distinction between polar cultural categories: "one's own" and "alien". It ensures the unity of ideology, endowing it with the features of a new religion, a new Bolshevik revelation.
Thus, a kind of hagiographization of Soviet literature was carried out, which Gorky himself saw as a fusion of romanticism and realism. It is no coincidence that he called for learning the art of writing from his medieval countryman from Nizhny Novgorod, Avvakum Petrov.
4. Literature of socialist realism. The novel "Mother" caused an endless stream of "party books" dedicated to the sacralization of "Soviet everyday life." Of particular note are the works of D. A. Furmanov (“Chapaev”, 1923), A. S. Serafimovich (“Iron Stream”, 1924), M. A. Sholokhov (“Quiet Don”, 1928-1940; “Virgin Soil Upturned” , 1932-1960), N. A. Ostrovsky ("How the steel was tempered", 1932-1934), F. I. Panferov ("Bars", 1928-1937), A. N. Tolstoy ("Walking through the torments", 1922-1941), etc.
Perhaps the largest, perhaps even larger than Gorky himself, apologist for the Soviet era was V. V. Mayakovsky (1893-1930).
In every possible way glorifying Lenin, the party, he himself frankly admitted:
I wouldn't be a poet if
this is not what he sang
in the stars of the five-pointed sky of the immense vault of the RCP.
The literature of socialist realism was tightly protected from reality by the wall of party myth-making. She could exist only under "high patronage": she had little of her own strength. Like hagiography with the church, it has grown together with the party, sharing the ups and downs of communist ideology.
5. Cinema. Along with literature, the Party considered cinema to be the "most important of the arts". The importance of cinema increased especially after it became sound in 1931. One after another, film adaptations of Gorky's works appear: "Mother" (1934), "Gorky's Childhood" (1938), "In People" (1939), "My Universities" (1940), created by director M. S. Donskoy. He also owned films dedicated to Lenin's mother - Mother's Heart (1966) and Mother's Fidelity (1967), which reflected the influence of the Gorky stencil.
Pictures on historical and revolutionary themes come out in a wide stream: a trilogy about Maxim directed by G. M. Kozintsev and L. Z. Trauberg - “The Youth of Maxim” (1935), “The Return of Maxim” (1937), “The Vyborg Side” (1939); “We are from Kronstadt” (directed by E. L. Dzigan, 1936), “Deputy of the Baltic” (directed by A. G. Zarkhi and I. E. Kheifits, 1937), “Shchors” (directed by A. P. Dovzhenko, 1939) , "Yakov Sverdlov" (director S. I. Yutkevich, 1940), etc.
The exemplary film of this series was Chapaev (1934), filmed by directors G. N. and S. D. Vasiliev based on Furmanov’s novel.
Films that embodied the image of the "leader of the proletariat" did not leave the screens either: "Lenin in October" (1937) and "Lenin in 1918" (1939) directed by M. I. Romm, "The Man with a Gun" (1938) directed by S. I. Yutkevich.
6. Secretary General and artist. Soviet cinema has always been the product of an official order. This was considered the norm and was strongly supported by both the “tops” and the “bottoms”.
Even such an outstanding master of cinematography as S. M. Eisenstein (1898-1948), recognized as "the most successful" in his work films that he made on the "order of the government", namely "Battleship Potemkin" (1925), "October "(1927) and" Alexander Nevsky "(1938).
By government order, he also shot the film "Ivan the Terrible". The first series of the picture was released in 1945 and was awarded the Stalin Prize. Soon the director finished editing the second series, and it was immediately shown in the Kremlin. The film disappointed Stalin: he did not like that Ivan the Terrible was shown as some kind of "neurasthenic", repentant and worried about his atrocities.
For Eisenstein, such a reaction from the Secretary General was quite expected: he knew that Stalin took an example from Ivan the Terrible in everything. Yes, and Eisenstein himself saturated his previous paintings with scenes of cruelty, causing them to "select the subject, methodology and credo" of his directorial work. It seemed to him quite normal that in his films “crowds of people are shot, children are crushed on the Odessa stairs and thrown off the roof (“Strike”), they are allowed to be killed by their own parents (“Bezhin meadow”), they are thrown into blazing fires (“Alexander Nevsky ") etc.". When he began work on Ivan the Terrible, he first of all wanted to recreate the "cruel age" of the Moscow Tsar, who, according to the director, for a long time remained the "ruler" of his soul and "beloved hero".
So the sympathies of the general secretary and the artist completely coincided, and Stalin had the right to count on a corresponding end to the film. But it turned out differently, and this could only be taken as an expression of doubt about the expediency of the "bloody" policy. Probably, the ideologized director, tired of the eternal pleasing of the authorities, really experienced something similar. Stalin never forgave such things: Eisenstein was saved only by an untimely death.
The second series of "Ivan the Terrible" was banned and saw the light only after the death of Stalin, in 1958, when the political climate in the country was inclined towards a "thaw" and intellectual dissent began to ferment.
7. "Red wheel" of socialist realism. However, nothing changed the essence of socialist realism. He was and remained a method of art, designed to capture the "cruelty of the oppressors" and "the madness of the brave." Its slogans were communist ideology and party spirit. Any deviation from them was considered capable of "damaging the creativity of even gifted people."
One of the last resolutions of the Central Committee of the CPSU on questions of literature and art (1981) strictly warned: "Our critics, literary journals, creative unions, and, above all, their party organizations, must be able to correct those who are pushed in one direction or another. And, of course, actively, on principle to act in those cases when works appear that discredit our Soviet reality. Here we must be irreconcilable. The Party has not been and cannot be indifferent to the ideological orientation of art ".
And how many of them, genuine talents, innovators of literary affairs, fell under the "red wheel" of Bolshevism - B. L. Pasternak, V. P. Nekrasov, I. A. Brodsky, A. I. Solzhenitsyn, D. L. Andreev, V T. Shalamov and many others. others
XX centuries The method covered all areas of artistic activity (literature, drama, cinema, painting, sculpture, music and architecture). It affirmed the following principles:
- describe reality "accurately, in accordance with the specific historical revolutionary development."
- coordinate their artistic expression with the themes of ideological reforms and the education of workers in the socialist spirit.
History of origin and development
The term "socialist realism" was first proposed by I. Gronsky, chairman of the Organizing Committee of the USSR Writers' Union, in Literaturnaya Gazeta on May 23, 1932. It arose in connection with the need to direct the RAPP and the avant-garde to the artistic development of Soviet culture. Decisive in this was the recognition of the role of classical traditions and understanding of the new qualities of realism. In 1932-1933 Gronsky and head. the sector of fiction of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks V. Kirpotin intensively promoted this term.
At the 1st All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Maxim Gorky stated:
“Socialist realism affirms being as an act, as creativity, the purpose of which is the continuous development of the most valuable individual abilities of a person for the sake of his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his health and longevity, for the sake of great happiness to live on the earth, which he, in accordance with the continuous growth of his needs, wants to process everything, as a beautiful dwelling of mankind, united in one family.
The state needed to approve this method as the main one for better control over creative individuals and better propaganda of its policy. In the previous period, the twenties, there were Soviet writers who sometimes took aggressive positions in relation to many outstanding writers. For example, the RAPP, an organization of proletarian writers, was actively engaged in criticism of non-proletarian writers. The RAPP consisted mainly of aspiring writers. During the period of the creation of modern industry (the years of industrialization), the Soviet government needed art that lifts the people to "labor feats." The fine arts of the 1920s also presented a rather motley picture. It has several groups. The most significant was the Association of Artists of the Revolution group. They depicted today: the life of the Red Army, workers, peasantry, leaders of the revolution and labor. They considered themselves the heirs of the Wanderers. They went to factories, plants, to the Red Army barracks in order to directly observe the life of their characters, to “draw” it. It was they who became the main backbone of the artists of "socialist realism". Less traditional masters had a much harder time, in particular, members of the OST (Society of Easel Painters), which united young people who graduated from the first Soviet art university.
Gorky solemnly returned from exile and headed the specially created Union of Writers of the USSR, which included mainly writers and poets of a pro-Soviet orientation.
Characteristic
Definition in terms of official ideology
For the first time, an official definition of socialist realism was given in the Charter of the Writers' Union of the USSR, adopted at the First Congress of the Writers' Union:
Socialist realism, being the main method of Soviet fiction and literary criticism, requires from the artist a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideological reworking and education in the spirit of socialism.
This definition became the starting point for all further interpretations up to the 80s.
« socialist realism is a deeply vital, scientific and most advanced artistic method, developed as a result of the successes of socialist construction and the education of Soviet people in the spirit of communism. The principles of socialist realism ... were a further development of Lenin's teaching on the partisanship of literature. (Great Soviet Encyclopedia , )
Lenin expressed the idea that art should stand on the side of the proletariat in the following way:
“Art belongs to the people. The deepest springs of art can be found among a wide class of working people... Art must be based on their feelings, thoughts and demands and must grow with them.
Principles of social realism
- Ideology. Show the peaceful life of the people, the search for ways to a new, better life, heroic deeds in order to achieve a happy life for all people.
- concreteness. In the image of reality, show the process of historical development, which, in turn, must correspond to the materialistic understanding of history (in the process of changing the conditions of their existence, people change their consciousness and attitude towards the surrounding reality).
As the definition from the Soviet textbook stated, the method implied the use of the heritage of world realistic art, but not as a simple imitation of great examples, but with a creative approach. “The method of socialist realism predetermines the deep connection of works of art with contemporary reality, the active participation of art in socialist construction. The tasks of the method of socialist realism require from each artist a true understanding of the meaning of the events taking place in the country, the ability to evaluate the phenomena of social life in their development, in complex dialectical interaction.
The method included the unity of realism and Soviet romance, combining the heroic and romantic with "a realistic statement of the true truth of the surrounding reality." It was argued that in this way the humanism of "critical realism" was supplemented by "socialist humanism".
The state gave orders, sent on creative business trips, organized exhibitions - thus stimulating the development of the layer of art that it needed.
In literature
The writer, in the famous expression of Stalin, is "an engineer of human souls." With his talent, he must influence the reader as a propagandist. He educates the reader in the spirit of devotion to the party and supports it in the struggle for the victory of communism. The subjective actions and aspirations of the individual had to correspond to the objective course of history. Lenin wrote: “Literature must become party literature… Down with the non-party writers. Down with the superhuman writers! Literary work must become a part of the common proletarian cause, "cogs and wheels" of one single great social-democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the entire working class.
A literary work in the genre of socialist realism should be built "on the idea of the inhumanity of any form of exploitation of man by man, expose the crimes of capitalism, inflame the minds of readers and viewers with just anger, and inspire them to the revolutionary struggle for socialism."
Maxim Gorky wrote the following about socialist realism:
It is vital and creative for our writers to take a point of view from the height of which - and only from its height - all the dirty crimes of capitalism, all the meanness of its bloody intentions are clearly visible, and all the greatness of the heroic work of the proletariat-dictator is visible.
He also claimed:
"... the writer must have a good knowledge of the history of the past and knowledge of the social phenomena of the present, in which he is called upon to play two roles at the same time: the role of a midwife and a gravedigger."
Gorky believed that the main task of socialist realism is the education of a socialist, revolutionary view of the world, a corresponding sense of the world.
Criticism
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Socialist realism: the individual is socially active and involved in the creation of history by violent means.
The philosophical foundation of socialist realism was Marxism, which asserts: 1) the proletariat is a messiah class, historically called upon to make a revolution and by force, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, to transform society from an unjust to a just one; 2) at the head of the proletariat is a party of a new type, consisting of professionals called after the revolution to lead the construction of a new classless society in which people are deprived of private property (as it turned out, in this way people become absolutely dependent on the state, and the state itself becomes de facto property of the party bureaucracy heading it).
These socio-utopian (and, as it turned out historically, inevitably leading to totalitarianism), philosophical and political postulates found their continuation in Marxist aesthetics, which directly underlies socialist realism. The main ideas of Marxism in aesthetics are as follows.
- 1. Art, having some relative independence from the economy, is conditioned by the economy and artistic and mental traditions.
- 2. Art is able to influence the masses and mobilize them.
- 3. Party leadership of art directs it in the right direction.
- 4. Art must be imbued with historical optimism and serve the cause of the movement of society towards communism. It must affirm the order established by the revolution. However, at the level of the house manager and even the chairman of the collective farm, criticism is permissible; in exceptional circumstances 1941-1942. with the personal permission of Stalin, in A. Korneichuk's play The Front, even the front commander was allowed to criticize. 5. Marxist epistemology, which puts practice at the forefront, has become the basis for the interpretation of the figurative nature of art. 6. The Leninist principle of partisanship continued the ideas of Marx and Engels about the class nature and tendentiousness of art and introduced the idea of serving the party into the very creative consciousness of the artist.
On this philosophical and aesthetic basis, socialist realism arose - art engaged by the party bureaucracy, serving the needs of a totalitarian society in the formation of a "new man". According to official aesthetics, this art reflected the interests of the proletariat, and later of the entire socialist society. Socialist realism is an art direction that affirms an artistic concept: the individual is socially active and is included in the creation of history by violent means.
Western theorists and critics give their own definitions of socialist realism. According to the English critic J. A. Gooddon, “Socialist realism is an artistic creed developed in Russia to introduce the Marxist doctrine and spread in other communist countries. This art affirms the goals of a socialist society and views the artist as a servant of the state, or, according to Stalin's definition, as an "engineer of human souls." Gooddon noted that socialist realism encroached on the freedom of creativity, against which Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn rebelled, and "they were shamelessly used for propaganda purposes by the Western press."
Critics Carl Benson and Arthur Gatz write: “Socialist realism is traditional for the 19th century. a method of prose narration and dramaturgy, associated with topics that favorably interpret the socialist idea. In the Soviet Union, especially during the Stalin era, as well as in other communist countries, it was artificially imposed on artists by the literary establishment.
Inside the biased, semi-official art, like heresy, semi-official, politically neutral, but deeply humanistic (B. Okudzhava, V. Vysotsky, A. Galich) and Fronder (A. Voznesensky) art developed, tolerated by the authorities. The latter is mentioned in the epigram:
Poet with his poetry
Creates worldwide intrigue.
He, with the permission of the authorities
The authorities show a fig.
socialist realism totalitarian proletariat marxist
During periods of mitigation of the totalitarian regime (for example, during the “thaw”), works that were uncompromisingly truthful (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Solzhenitsyn) also burst onto the pages of the press. However, even in tougher times, there was a “back door” next to the ceremonial art: the poets used the Aesopian language, went into children's literature, into literary translation. Outcast artists (underground) formed groups, associations (for example, "SMOG", the Lianozovsky school of painting and poetry), unofficial exhibitions were created (for example, the "bulldozer" in Izmailovo) - all this helped to more easily endure the social boycott of publishers, exhibition committees, bureaucratic authorities and "Police Culture Stations".
The theory of socialist realism was filled with dogmas and vulgar sociological propositions, and in this form was used as a means of bureaucratic pressure on art. This manifested itself in authoritarian and subjective judgments and assessments, in interference in creative activity, in violation of creative freedom, and in harsh command methods of managing art. Such leadership cost the multinational Soviet culture dearly, and affected the spiritual and moral state of society, and the human and creative destiny of many artists.
Many artists, including the largest, became victims of arbitrariness during the years of Stalinism: E. Charents, T. Tabidze, B. Pilnyak, I. Babel, M. Koltsov, O. Mandelstam, P. Markish, V. Meyerhold, S. Mikhoels . Yu. Olesha, M. Bulgakov, A. Platonov, V. Grossman, B. Pasternak were pushed aside from the artistic process and were silent for years or worked at a quarter of their strength, unable to show the results of their work. R. Falk, A. Tairov, A. Koonen.
The incompetence of art management was also reflected in the awarding of high prizes for opportunistic and weak works, which, despite the propaganda hype around them, not only did not enter the golden fund of artistic culture, but were generally quickly forgotten (S. Babaevsky, M. Bubennov, A. Surov, A. Sofronov).
Incompetence and authoritarianism, rudeness were not only the personal characteristics of the character of the party leaders, but (absolute power corrupts the leaders absolutely!) Became the style of the party leadership of artistic culture. The very principle of party leadership in art is a false and anti-cultural idea.
Post-perestroika criticism saw a number of important features of socialist realism. "Social realism. He is not at all so odious, he has enough analogues. If you look at it without social pain and through the prism of cinema, it turns out that the famous American film of the thirties "Gone with the Wind" is equivalent in its artistic merits to the Soviet film of the same years "Circus". And if we return to literature, then Feuchtwanger's novels in their aesthetics are not at all polar to A. Tolstoy's epic "Peter the Great". No wonder Feuchtwanger loved Stalin so much. Socialist realism is still the same "big style", but only in the Soviet way. (Yarkevich. 1999) Socialist realism is not only an artistic direction (a stable concept of the world and personality) and a type of "great style", but also a method.
The method of socialist realism as a way of figurative thinking, a way of creating a politically tendentious work that fulfills a certain social order, was used far beyond the sphere of domination of communist ideology, used for purposes alien to the conceptual orientation of socialist realism as an artistic direction. So, in 1972, at the Metropolitan Opera, I saw a musical performance that struck me with its tendentiousness. A young student came to Puerto Rico for a vacation, where he met a beautiful girl. They dance and sing merrily at the carnival. Then they decide to get married and fulfill their desire, in connection with which the dances become especially temperamental. The only thing that upsets the young is that he is just a student, and she is a poor peysan. However, this does not prevent them from singing and dancing. In the midst of a wedding spree from New York City, a blessing and a million-dollar check for the newlyweds arrive from the student's parents. Here the fun becomes unstoppable, all the dancers are arranged in a pyramid - below the Puerto Rican people, above the bride's distant relatives, even above her parents, and at the very top a rich American student-groom and a poor Puerto Rican peysan bride. Above them is the striped flag of the United States, on which many stars are lit. Everyone sings, and the bride and groom kiss, and at the moment their lips join, a new star lights up on the American flag, which means the emergence of a new American state - Pueru Rico is part of the United States. Among the most vulgar plays of Soviet drama, it is difficult to find a work that, in its vulgarity and straightforward political tendentiousness, reaches the level of this American performance. Why not the method of social realism?
According to the proclaimed theoretical postulates, socialist realism presupposes the inclusion of romance in figurative thinking - a figurative form of historical anticipation, a dream based on real trends in the development of reality and overtaking the natural course of events.
Socialist realism affirms the need for historicism in art: historically concrete artistic reality must acquire “three-dimensionality” in it (the writer seeks to capture, in Gorky’s words, “three realities” - past, present and future). Here socialist realism is invaded by
the postulates of the utopian ideology of communism, which firmly knows the path to the "bright future of mankind." However, for poetry, this striving for the future (even if it is utopian) had a lot of attraction, and the poet Leonid Martynov wrote:
Don't read
yourself worthwhile
Only here, in existence,
Present,
Imagine yourself walking
On the border of the past with the future
Mayakovsky also introduces the future into the reality he depicts in the 1920s in the plays Bedbug and Bathhouse. This image of the future appears in Mayakovsky's dramaturgy both in the form of the Phosphoric Woman and in the form of a time machine that takes people worthy of communism to a distant and beautiful tomorrow, and spitting out bureaucrats and other "unworthy of communism." I note that society will “spit out” many “unworthy” into the Gulag throughout its history, and some twenty-five years will pass after Mayakovsky wrote these plays and the concept of “unworthy of communism” will be spread by the (“philosopher” D. Chesnokov, with Stalin's approval) to entire nations (already evicted from places of historical residence or subject to expulsion). This is how the artistic ideas of even the really “best and most talented poet of the Soviet era” (I. Stalin), who created works of art that were vividly embodied on stage by both V. Meyerhold and V. Pluchek, turn around. However, nothing surprising: the reliance on utopian ideas, which include the principle of the historical improvement of the world through violence, could not but turn into some kind of "sniffing" the Gulag's "immediate tasks".
Domestic art in the twentieth century. passed a number of stages, some of which enriched world culture with masterpieces, while others had a decisive (not always beneficial) impact on the artistic process in Eastern Europe and Asia (China, Vietnam, North Korea).
The first stage (1900-1917) is the Silver Age. Symbolism, acmeism, futurism are born and develop. In the novel "Mother" by Gorky, the principles of socialist realism are formed. Socialist realism arose in the early twentieth century. in Russia. Its ancestor was Maxim Gorky, whose artistic endeavors were continued and developed by Soviet art.
The second stage (1917-1932) is characterized by aesthetic polyphony and pluralism of artistic trends.
The Soviet government introduces cruel censorship, Trotsky believes that it is directed against the "alliance of capital with prejudice." Gorky tries to oppose this violence against culture, for which Trotsky disrespectfully calls him "the most amiable psalmist." Trotsky laid the foundation for the Soviet tradition of evaluating artistic phenomena not from an aesthetic, but from a purely political point of view. He gives political, and not aesthetic, characteristics of the phenomena of art: "Kadetism", "joined", "fellow travelers". In this respect, Stalin will become a true Trotskyist and social utilitarianism, political pragmatics will become for him the dominant principles in his approach to art.
During these years, the formation of socialist realism and the discovery of an active personality, participating in the creation of history through violence, according to the utopian model of the classics of Marxism, took place. In art, the problem of a new artistic conception of personality and the world arose.
There was a sharp controversy around this concept in the 1920s. As the highest virtues of a person, the art of socialist realism sings of socially important and significant qualities - heroism, selflessness, self-sacrifice (“Death of the Commissar” by Petrov-Vodkin), self-giving (“to give the heart to times to break” - Mayakovsky).
The inclusion of the individual in the life of society becomes an important task of art and this is a valuable feature of socialist realism. However, the individual's own interests are not taken into account. Art claims that a person’s personal happiness lies in self-giving and service to the “happy future of mankind”, and the source of historical optimism and the fulfillment of a person’s life with social meaning is in his involvement in the creation of a new “just society”. The novels “Iron Stream” by Serafimovich are imbued with this pathos , “Chapaev” by Furmanov, the poem “Good” by Mayakovsky. In Sergei Eisenstein's films The Strike and The Battleship Potemkin, the fate of the individual is relegated to the background by the fate of the masses. The plot becomes what in humanistic art, preoccupied with the fate of the individual, was only a secondary element, the "social background", the "social landscape", the "mass scene", the "epic retreat".
However, some artists departed from the dogmas of socialist realism. So, S. Eisenstein still did not completely eliminate the individual hero, did not sacrifice him to history. The mother evokes the strongest compassion in the episode on the Odessa stairs (“Battleship Potemkin”). At the same time, the director remains in line with socialist realism and does not close the viewer's sympathy to the personal fate of the character, but focuses the audience on experiencing the drama of history itself and affirms the historical necessity and legitimacy of the revolutionary action of the Black Sea sailors.
An invariant of the artistic concept of socialist realism at the first stage of its development: a person in the "iron stream" of history "is a drop pouring with the masses." In other words, the meaning of a person's life is seen in self-denial (the heroic ability of a person to get involved in the creation of a new reality is affirmed, even at the cost of his direct daily interests, and sometimes at the cost of life itself), in joining the creation of history (“and there are no other worries!”). Pragmatic-political tasks are placed above moral postulates and humanistic orientations. So, E. Bagritsky calls:
And if the era orders: kill! - Kill it.
And if the era commands: lie! - Lie.
At this stage, along with socialist realism, other artistic trends develop, asserting their invariants of the artistic concept of the world and personality (constructivism - I. Selvinsky, K. Zelinsky, I. Ehrenburg; neo-romanticism - A. Green; acmeism - N. Gumilyov , A. Akhmatova, Imagism - S. Yesenin, Mariengof, symbolism - A. Blok, literary schools and associations arise and develop - LEF, Napostovtsy, "Pass", RAPP).
The very concept of "socialist realism", which expressed the artistic and conceptual qualities of the new art, arose in the course of heated discussions and theoretical searches. These searches were a collective matter, in which many cultural figures took part in the late 1920s and early 1930s, who defined the new method of literature in different ways: “proletarian realism” (F. Gladkov, Yu. Lebedinsky), “tendentious realism" (V. Mayakovsky), "monumental realism" (A. Tolstoy), "realism with a socialist content" (V. Stavsky). In the 1930s, cultural figures increasingly agreed on the definition of the creative method of Soviet art as the method of socialist realism. "Literaturnaya Gazeta" May 29, 1932 in the editorial "For work!" wrote: "The masses demand sincerity from artists, revolutionary socialist realism in the depiction of the proletarian revolution." The head of the Ukrainian writers' organization I. Kulik (Kharkov, 1932) said: “... conditionally, the method that you and I could orient ourselves to should be called “revolutionary socialist realism”. At a meeting of writers in Gorky's apartment on October 25, 1932, socialist realism was named the artistic method of literature during the discussion. Later, the collective efforts to develop the concept of the artistic method of Soviet literature were "forgotten" and everything was attributed to Stalin.
Third stage (1932-1956). During the formation of the Writers' Union in the first half of the 1930s, socialist realism was defined as an artistic method that required the writer to present a truthful and historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development; the task of educating the working people in the spirit of communism was emphasized. There was nothing specifically aesthetic in this definition, nothing pertaining to art proper. The definition focused art on political engagement and was equally applicable to history as a science, to journalism, and to propaganda and agitation. At the same time, this definition of socialist realism was difficult to apply to such types of art as architecture, applied and decorative art, music, to such genres as landscape, still life. Lyricism and satire, in essence, turned out to be beyond the limits of this understanding of the artistic method. It expelled or called into question major artistic values from our culture.
In the first half of the 30s. aesthetic pluralism is administratively suppressed, the idea of an active personality is deepened, but this personality is not always oriented towards truly humanistic values. The leader, the party and its goals become the highest values in life.
In 1941, war invaded the life of the Soviet people. Literature and art are included in the spiritual support of the fight against the fascist invaders and victory. During this period, the art of socialist realism, where it does not fall into the primitiveness of agitation, most fully corresponds to the vital interests of the people.
In 1946, when our country lived with the joy of victory and the pain of huge losses, the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad” was adopted. A. Zhdanov spoke with an explanation of the decision at a meeting of party activists and writers of Leningrad.
The work and personality of M. Zoshchenko were characterized by Zhdanov in such "literary-critical" terms: "philistine and vulgar", "non-Soviet writer", "dirty and indecency", "turns his vulgar and low soul inside out", "unscrupulous and unscrupulous literary hooligan".
It was said about A. Akhmatova that the range of her poetry is “limited to the point of squalor”, her work “cannot be tolerated on the pages of our magazines”, that, “except for harm”, the works of this either a “nun” or a “harlot” can give nothing to our youth.
Zhdanov's extreme literary-critical vocabulary is the only argument and tool of "analysis". The rough tone of literary teachings, elaborations, persecutions, prohibitions, martinet interference in the work of artists were justified by the dictates of historical circumstances, the extreme nature of the situations experienced, and the constant exacerbation of the class struggle.
Socialist realism was bureaucratically used as a separator separating "permitted" ("our") art from "unlawful" ("not ours"). Because of this, the diversity of domestic art was rejected, neo-romanticism was pushed to the periphery of artistic life or even beyond the boundaries of the artistic process (A. Green's story "Scarlet Sails", A. Rylov's painting "In the Blue Space"), neo-realist existential-event, humanistic art ( M. Bulgakov "The White Guard", B. Pasternak "Doctor Zhivago", A. Platonov "The Pit", sculpture by S. Konenkov, painting by P. Korin), realism of memory (painting by R. Falk and graphics by V. Favorsky), poetry of fortune the spirit of personality (M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam, A. Akhmatova, later I. Brodsky). History has put everything in its place, and today it is clear that it is these works, rejected by semi-official culture, that constitute the essence of the artistic process of the era and are its main artistic achievements and aesthetic values.
The artistic method as a historically determined type of figurative thinking is determined by three factors: 1) reality, 2) the worldview of artists, 3) the artistic and mental material from which they come. The imaginative thinking of the artists of socialist realism was based on the vital basis of the accelerated development of the reality of the 20th century, on the worldview basis of the principles of historicism and the dialectical understanding of being, relying on the realistic traditions of Russian and world art. Therefore, for all its tendentiousness, socialist realism, in accordance with the realistic tradition, aimed the artist at creating a voluminous, aesthetically multicolored character. Such, for example, is the character of Grigory Melekhov in the novel Quiet Flows the Don by M. Sholokhov.
The fourth stage (1956-1984) - the art of socialist realism, asserting a historically active personality, began to think about its inherent value. If the artists did not directly offend the power of the party or the principles of socialist realism, the bureaucracy tolerated them; if they served, they rewarded them. “And if not, then no”: the persecution of B. Pasternak, the “bulldozer” dispersal of the exhibition in Izmailovo, the study of artists “at the highest level” (Khrushchev) in the Manezh, the arrest of I. Brodsky, the expulsion of A. Solzhenitsyn ... - "stages of the long journey" of the party leadership of art.
During this period, the statutory definition of socialist realism finally lost its authority. Pre-sunset phenomena began to grow. All this affected the artistic process: it lost its orientation, a “vibration” arose in it, on the one hand, the proportion of works of art and literary criticism of anti-humanist and nationalist orientation increased, on the other hand, works of apocryphal-dissident and neo-official democratic content appeared .
Instead of the lost definition, we can give the following, reflecting the features of the new stage of literary development: socialist realism is a method (method, tool) for constructing artistic reality and the corresponding artistic direction, absorbing the socio-aesthetic experience of the twentieth century, carrying an artistic concept: the world is not perfect, “you must first remake the world, having remade you can sing”; the individual must be socially active in the matter of forcibly changing the world.
Self-consciousness awakens in this person - a sense of self-worth and a protest against violence (P. Nilin "Cruelty").
Despite the ongoing bureaucratic interference in the artistic process, despite the continued reliance on the idea of a violent transformation of the world, the vital impulses of reality, the powerful artistic traditions of the past contributed to the emergence of a number of valuable works (Sholokhov's story "The Fate of a Man", M. Romm's films "Ordinary Fascism" and " Nine Days of One Year”, M. Kalatozova “The Cranes Are Flying”, G. Chukhrai “Forty-First” and “The Ballad of a Soldier”, S. Smirnov “Belorussky Station”). I note that especially many bright and remaining in history works were devoted to the Patriotic War against the Nazis, which is explained both by the real heroism of the era, and by the high civil-patriotic pathos that swept the whole society during this period, and by the fact that the main conceptual setting of socialist realism (the creation of history through violence) during the war years coincided both with the vector of historical development and with the people's consciousness, and in this case did not contradict the principles of humanism.
Since the 60s. the art of socialist realism affirms the connection of man with the broad tradition of the national existence of the people (works by V. Shukshin and Ch. Aitmatov). In the first decades of its development, Soviet art (Vs. Ivanov and A. Fadeev in the images of the Far Eastern partisans, D. Furmanov in the image of Chapaev, M. Sholokhov in the image of Davydov) captures images of people breaking out of the traditions and life of the old world. It would seem that there was a decisive and irreversible breakage of the invisible threads connecting the personality with the past. However, the art of 1964-1984. pays more and more attention to how, by what features a person is connected with centuries-old psychological, cultural, ethnographic, everyday, ethical traditions, for it turned out that a person who breaks with the national tradition in a revolutionary impulse is deprived of the soil for a socially expedient, humane life (Ch Aitmatov "White steamboat"). Without connection with the national culture, the personality turns out to be empty and destructively cruel.
A. Platonov put forward an artistic formula “ahead of time”: “Without me, the people are not complete.” This is a wonderful formula - one of the highest achievements of socialist realism at its new stage (despite the fact that this position was put forward and artistically proved by the outcast of social realism - Platonov, it could only grow in places fertile, in places dead, and on the whole contradictory soil this artistic direction). The same idea about the merging of a person's life with the life of the people sounds in Mayakovsky's artistic formula: a person "is a drop pouring with the masses." However, the new historical period is felt in Platonov's emphasis on the inherent value of the individual.
The history of socialist realism has instructively demonstrated that what matters in art is not opportunism, but artistic truth, no matter how bitter and "inconvenient" it may be. The party leadership, the criticism that served it, and some of the postulates of socialist realism demanded from the works of "artistic truth", which coincided with the momentary situation, corresponding to the tasks set by the party. Otherwise, the work could be banned and thrown out of the artistic process, and the author was subjected to persecution or even ostracism.
History shows that the "prohibitors" remained overboard, and the forbidden work returned to it (for example, A. Tvardovsky's poems "By the Right of Memory", "Terkin in the Other World").
Pushkin said: "Heavy mlat, crushing glass, forges damask steel." In our country, a terrible totalitarian force "crushed" the intelligentsia, turning some into scammers, others into drunkards, and still others into conformists. However, in some she forged a deep artistic consciousness, combined with vast life experience. This part of the intelligentsia (F. Iskander, V. Grossman, Yu. Dombrovsky, A. Solzhenitsyn) created deep and uncompromising works under the most difficult circumstances.
Even more resolutely affirming the historically active personality, the art of socialist realism for the first time begins to realize the reciprocity of the process: not only the personality for history, but also history for the personality. Through the crackling slogans of serving a “happy future”, the idea of human self-worth begins to break through.
The art of socialist realism in the spirit of belated classicism continues to affirm the priority of the "general", the state over the "private", the personal. The inclusion of the individual in the historical creativity of the masses continues to be preached. At the same time, in the novels of V. Bykov, Ch. Aitmatov, in the films of T. Abuladze, E. Klimov, the performances of A. Vasiliev, O. Efremov, G. Tovstonogov, not only the theme of the responsibility of the individual to society, familiar to socialist realism, sounds, but also a theme arises that prepares the idea of "perestroika", the theme of society's responsibility for the fate and happiness of man.
Thus, socialist realism comes to self-negation. In it (and not only outside it, in disgraced and underground art) the idea begins to sound: man is not the fuel for history, giving energy for abstract progress. The future is created by people for people. A person must give himself to people, egoistic isolation deprives life of meaning, turns it into an absurdity (the promotion and approval of this idea is a merit of the art of socialist realism). If the spiritual growth of a person outside of society is fraught with degradation of the personality, then the development of society outside and apart from the person, contrary to his interests, is detrimental to both the individual and society. These ideas after 1984 will become the spiritual foundation for perestroika and glasnost, and after 1991 for the democratization of society. However, the hopes for perestroika and democratization were far from being fully realized. The relatively soft, stable and socially preoccupied Brezhnev-type regime (totalitarianism with an almost human face) has been replaced by a corrupt, unstable terry democracy (an oligarchy with an almost criminal face), preoccupied with the division and redistribution of public property, and not with the fate of the people and the state.
Just as the slogan of freedom put forward by the Renaissance, “do what you want!” led to the crisis of the Renaissance (because not everyone wanted to do good), and the artistic ideas that prepared perestroika (everything for a person) turned into a crisis of both perestroika and the whole society, because bureaucrats and democrats considered only themselves and some of their kind to be people; according to party, national and other group characteristics, people were divided into “ours” and “not ours”.
The fifth period (mid-80s - 90s) - the end of socialist realism (it did not survive socialism and Soviet power) and the beginning of the pluralistic development of domestic art: new trends in realism developed (V. Makanin), social art appeared (Melamid, Komar), conceptualism (D. Prigov) and other postmodern trends in literature and painting.
Today, democratically and humanistically oriented art finds two opponents, undermining and destroying the highest humanistic values of mankind. The first opponent of the new art and new forms of life is social indifference, the egocentrism of the individual celebrating the historical liberation from the control of the state and relinquishing all duties to society; the greed of the neophytes of the "market economy". The other enemy is the leftist-lumpen extremism of the dispossessed by self-serving, corrupt and stupid democracy, forcing people to look back at the communist values of the past with their herd collectivism that destroys the individual.
The development of society, its improvement must go through the person, in the name of the individual, and the self-valuable person, having unlocked social and personal egoism, must join the life of society and develop in accordance with it. This is a reliable guide for art. Without affirming the need for social progress, literature degenerates, but it is important that progress proceed not in spite of and not at the expense of man, but in his name. A happy society is that society in which history moves along the channel of the individual. Unfortunately, this truth turned out to be unknown or uninteresting neither to the communist builders of the distant "bright future", nor to shock therapists and other builders of the market and democracy. This truth is not very close to the Western defenders of individual rights who dropped bombs on Yugoslavia. For them, these rights are a tool for fighting opponents and rivals, and not a real program of action.
The democratization of our society and the disappearance of party tutelage contributed to the publication of works whose authors strive to artistically comprehend the history of our society in all its drama and tragedy (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's work The Gulag Archipelago is especially significant in this respect).
The idea of the aesthetics of socialist realism about the active influence of literature on reality turned out to be correct, but greatly exaggerated, in any case, artistic ideas do not become a "material force". Igor Yarkevich in an article published on the Internet “Literature, aesthetics, freedom and other interesting things” writes: “Long before 1985, in all liberally oriented parties it sounded like a motto: “If the Bible and Solzhenitsyn are published tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow we will wake up in another country” . Dominance over the world through literature - this idea warmed the hearts of not only the secretaries of the SP.
It was thanks to the new atmosphere that after 1985 the Tale of the Unextinguished Moon by Boris Pilnyak, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, The Pit by Andrei Platonov, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman and other works that remained outside the circle of reading for many years were published. Soviet man. There were new films “My friend Ivan Lapshin”, “Plumbum, or a dangerous game”, “Is it easy to be young”, “Taxi blues”, “Should we send a messenger”. Films of the last one and a half decades of the twentieth century. they talk with pain about the tragedies of the past (“Repentance”), express concern for the fate of the younger generation (“Courier”, “Luna Park”), and talk about hopes for the future. Some of these works will remain in the history of artistic culture, and all of them pave the way for a new art and a new understanding of the fate of man and the world.
Perestroika created a special cultural situation in Russia.
Culture is dialogical. Changes in the reader and his life experience lead to a change in literature, and not only emerging, but also existing. Its content is changing. "With fresh and current eyes" the reader reads literary texts and finds in them previously unknown meaning and value. This law of aesthetics is especially clearly manifested in critical eras, when people's life experience changes dramatically.
The turning point of perestroika affected not only the social status and rating of literary works, but also the state of the literary process.
What is this state? All the main directions and currents of Russian literature have undergone a crisis, because the ideals, positive programs, options, artistic concepts of the world that they offer turned out to be untenable. (The latter does not exclude the artistic significance of individual works, most often created at the cost of the writer's departure from the concept of direction. An example of this is V. Astafiev's relationship with rural prose.)
Literature of the bright present and future (socialist realism in its "pure form") has left culture in the last two decades. The crisis of the very idea of building communism deprived this direction of its ideological foundation and goals. One "Gulag Archipelago" is enough for all the works that show life in a rosy light to reveal their falsity.
The latest modification of socialist realism, the product of its crisis, was the National Bolshevik trend in literature. In a state-patriotic form, this direction is represented by the work of Prokhanov, who glorified the export of violence in the form of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The nationalist form of this trend can be found in the works published by the magazines Young Guard and Our Contemporary. The collapse of this direction is clearly visible against the historical background of the flames that burned twice (in 1934 and in 1945) the Reichstag. And no matter how this direction develops, historically it has already been refuted and alien to world culture.
I have already noted above that in the course of the construction of the “new man” ties with the deep layers of national culture were weakened, and sometimes even lost. This resulted in many disasters for the peoples on whom this experiment was carried out. And the trouble of troubles was the willingness of the new person to interethnic conflicts (Sumgait, Karabakh, Osh, Ferghana, South Ossetia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Transnistria) and civil wars (Georgia, Tajikistan, Chechnya). Anti-Semitism was supplemented by the rejection of "persons of Caucasian nationality." The Polish intellectual Michnik is right: the highest and last stage of socialism is nationalism. Another sad confirmation of this is a non-peaceful divorce in Yugoslav and peaceful divorce in Czechoslovak or Bialowieza.
The crisis of socialist realism gave rise in the 70s to the literary trend of socialist liberalism. The idea of socialism with a human face became the mainstay of this trend. The artist performed a hairdressing operation: a Stalinist mustache was shaved off the face of socialism and a Leninist beard was glued. According to this scheme, M. Shatrov's plays were created. This trend had to solve political problems by artistic means when other means were closed. The writers did make-up on the face of barracks socialism. Shatrov gave a liberal interpretation of our history for those times, an interpretation capable of both satisfying and enlightening the top authorities. Many viewers admired the fact that Trotsky was given a hint, and this was already perceived as a discovery, or it was said that Stalin was not very good. This was perceived with enthusiasm by our half-crushed intelligentsia.
The plays of V. Rozov were also written in the vein of socialist liberalism and socialism with a human face. His young hero destroys furniture in the house of a former Chekist with his father's Budyonnovsky saber taken off the wall, which was once used to cut down the White Guard counter. Today, such temporarily progressive writings have gone from being half-true and moderately attractive to being false. The age of their triumph was short.
Another trend in Russian literature is lumpen-intelligentsia literature. A lumpen intellectual is an educated person who knows something about something, does not have a philosophical view of the world, does not feel personal responsibility for it and is accustomed to thinking "freely" within the framework of cautious frondism. The lumpen writer owns a borrowed art form created by the masters of the past, which gives his work some attractiveness. However, he is not given the opportunity to apply this form to the real problems of being: his consciousness is empty, he does not know what to say to people. The lumpen intellectuals use the exquisite form to convey highly artistic thoughts about nothing. This often happens with modern poets who own poetic technique, but lack the ability to comprehend modernity. The lumpen writer puts forward his own alter ego as a literary hero, an empty, weak-willed, petty mischief-maker, able to “grab what lies badly”, but not capable of love, who can neither give a woman happiness nor become happy himself. Such, for example, is the prose of M. Roshchin. A lumpen intellectual cannot be either a hero or a creator of high literature.
One of the products of the collapse of socialist realism was the neo-critical naturalism of Kaledin and other debunkers of the "lead abominations" of our army, cemetery and city life. This is everyday writing of the Pomyalovsky type, only with less culture and lesser literary abilities.
Another manifestation of the crisis of socialist realism was the "camp" current of literature. Unfortunately, many
The writings of the "camp" literature turned out to be at the level of the everyday writing mentioned above and lacked philosophical and artistic grandeur. However, since these works dealt with life unfamiliar to the general reader, its “exotic” details aroused great interest, and the works that conveyed these details turned out to be socially significant, and sometimes artistically valuable.
The literature of the Gulag brought into the people's consciousness the enormous tragic life experience of camp life. This literature will remain in the history of culture, especially in such higher manifestations as the works of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov.
Neo-emigrant literature (V. Voinovich, S. Dovlatov, V. Aksenov, Yu. Aleshkovsky, N. Korzhavin), living the life of Russia, did a lot for the artistic understanding of our existence. “You can't see a face face to face,” even at an emigre distance, writers really manage to see a lot of important things in a particularly bright light. In addition, neo-immigrant literature has its own powerful Russian émigré tradition, which includes Bunin, Kuprin, Nabokov, Zaitsev, Gazdanov. Today, all emigre literature has become part of our Russian literary process, part of our spiritual life.
At the same time, bad tendencies have emerged in the neo-emigre wing of Russian literature: 1) the division of Russian writers according to the basis: left (= decent and talented) - did not leave (= dishonorable and mediocre); 2) a fashion has arisen: living in a cozy and well-fed far away, to give categorical advice and assessments of events on which emigrant life almost does not depend, but which threaten the very life of citizens in Russia. There is something immodest and even immoral in such “advice from an outsider” (especially when they are categorical and contain an intention in the undercurrent: you idiots in Russia don’t understand the simplest things).
Everything good in Russian literature was born as something critical, opposing the existing order of things. This is fine. Only in this way in a totalitarian society is the birth of cultural values possible. However, simple denial, simple criticism of what exists does not yet give access to the highest literary achievements. The highest values appear along with the philosophical vision of the world and intelligible ideals. If Leo Tolstoy had simply spoken about the abominations of life, he would have been Gleb Uspensky. But this is not world class. Tolstoy also developed an artistic concept of non-resistance to evil by violence, internal self-improvement of the individual; he argued that one can only destroy by violence, but one can build with love, and one should first of all transform oneself.
This conception of Tolstoy foresaw the 20th century, and, if heeded, it would have prevented the disasters of this century. Today it helps to understand and overcome them. We lack a concept of this magnitude, covering our era and going into the future. And when it appears, we will have great literature again. She is on her way, and the guarantee of this is the traditions of Russian literature and the tragic life experience of our intelligentsia, acquired in the camps, in lines, at work and in the kitchen.
The peaks of Russian and world literature "War and Peace", "Crime and Punishment", "Master and Margarita" are behind us and ahead. The fact that we had Ilf and Petrov, Platonov, Bulgakov, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova gives confidence in the great future of our literature. The unique tragic life experience that our intelligentsia acquired in suffering, and the great traditions of our artistic culture, cannot but lead to the creative act of creating a new artistic world, to the creation of true masterpieces. No matter how the historical process goes and no matter what setbacks happen, a country with huge potential will historically come out of the crisis. Artistic and philosophical achievements await us in the near future. They will come before economic and political achievements.
socialist realism is a creative method of literature and art of the 20th century, the cognitive sphere of which was limited and regulated by the task of reflecting the processes of reorganization of the world in the light of the communist ideal and Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Goals of socialist realism
Socialist realism is the main officially (at the state level) recognized method of Soviet literature and art, the purpose of which is to capture the stages in the construction of Soviet socialist society and its "movement towards communism". For half a century of existence in all developed literatures of the world, socialist realism strove to occupy a leading position in the artistic life of the era, opposing its (supposedly the only true) aesthetic principles (the principle of party spirit, nationality, historical optimism, socialist humanism, internationalism) to all other ideological and artistic principles.
History of occurrence
The domestic theory of socialist realism originates from the "Fundamentals of Positive Aesthetics" (1904) by A.V. Lunacharsky, where art is oriented not to what is, but to what is due, and creativity is equated with ideology. In 1909, Lunacharsky was one of the first to call the story "Mother" (1906-07) and the play "Enemies" (1906) by M. Gorky "serious works of a social type", "significant works, the significance of which in the development of proletarian art will someday be taken into account" (Literary decay , 1909. Book 2). The critic was the first to draw attention to the Leninist principle of party membership as determining in the construction of socialist culture (article "Lenin" Literary Encyclopedia, 1932. Volume 6).
The term "Socialist Realism" first appeared in the editorial of Literaturnaya Gazeta on May 23, 1932 (author I.M. Gronsky). I.V. Stalin repeated it at a meeting with writers at Gorky's on October 26 of the same year, and from that moment the concept became widespread. In February 1933, Lunacharsky, in a report on the tasks of Soviet dramaturgy, emphasized that socialist realism “is completely given over to the struggle, it is all through and through a builder, it is confident in the communist future of mankind, believes in the strength of the proletariat, its party and leaders” (Lunacharsky A.V. Articles about Soviet literature, 1958).
The difference between socialist realism and bourgeois realism
At the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), the originality of the method of socialist realism was substantiated by A.A. Zhdanov, N.I. Bukharin, Gorky and A.A. Fadeev. The political component of Soviet literature was emphasized by Bukharin, who pointed out that socialist realism “differs from proto-realism in that it inevitably puts in the center of attention the image of the construction of socialism, the struggle of the proletariat, the new man, and all the complex “connections and mediations” of the great historical process of modernity ... Style features that distinguish socialist realism from bourgeois ... are closely related to the content of the material and the aspirations of the strong-willed order dictated by the class position of the proletariat ”(First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. Verbatim report, 1934).
Fadeev supported the idea expressed earlier by Gorky that, in contrast to “the old realism - critical ... ours, socialist, realism is affirmative. Zhdanov's speech, his formulations: "depict reality in its revolutionary development"; “At the same time, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic image must be combined with the task of ideologically reshaping and educating working people in the spirit of socialism,” formed the basis for the definition given in the Charter of the Union of Soviet Writers.
His assertion that “revolutionary romanticism should enter into literary creativity as an integral part” of socialist realism was also programmatic (ibid.). On the eve of the congress that legitimized the term, the search for its defining principles was qualified as "The Struggle for the Method" - under this title one of the collections of the Rappovites was published in 1931. In 1934 the book In Disputes over Method was published (with the subtitle Collection of Articles on Socialist Realism). In the 1920s there were discussions about the artistic method of proletarian literature between the theorists of Proletkult, RAPP, LEF, OPOYAZ. The pathos of the struggle was “through and through” the put forward theories of “living man” and “production” art, “learning from the classics”, “social order”.
Expansion of the concept of socialist realism
Sharp disputes continued in the 1930s (about language, about formalism), in the 1940s and 50s (mainly in connection with the "theory" of non-conflict, the problem of a typical, "good hero"). It is characteristic that discussions on certain issues of the "artistic platform" often touched on politics, were associated with the problems of aestheticization of ideology, with the justification of authoritarianism, totalitarianism in culture. For decades, the debate has lasted about how romanticism and realism correlate in socialist art. On the one hand, it was about romance as a “scientifically substantiated dream of the future” (in this capacity, “historical optimism” began to replace romance at a certain stage), on the other hand, attempts were made to single out a special method or stylistic trend of “socialist romanticism” with its cognitive opportunities. This trend (denoted by Gorky and Lunacharsky) led to the overcoming of stylistic monotony and to a more voluminous interpretation of the essence of socialist realism in the 1960s.
The desire to expand the concept of socialist realism (and at the same time to “loose” the theory of method) was indicated in domestic literary criticism (under the influence of similar processes in foreign literature and criticism) at the All-Union Conference on Socialist Realism (1959): I.I. Anisimov emphasized the “great flexibility” and “breadth” inherent in the aesthetic concept of the method, which was dictated by the desire to overcome dogmatic postulates. In 1966, a conference "Actual Problems of Socialist Realism" was held at the Institute of Literature (see the collection of the same name, 1969). The active apology of socialist realism by some speakers, the critical-realist "type of creativity" by others, the romantic - by third, intellectual - by fourth - testified to a clear desire to push the boundaries of ideas about the literature of the socialist era.
Domestic theoretical thought was in search of a "broad formulation of the creative method" as a "historically open system" (D.F. Markov). The final discussion unfolded in the late 1980s. By this time, the authority of the statutory definition had finally been lost (it became associated with dogmatism, incompetent leadership in the field of art, Stalinism's dictates in literature - "custom", state, "barracks" realism). Based on the real trends in the development of Russian literature, modern critics consider it quite legitimate to speak of socialist realism as a concrete historical stage, an artistic direction in the literature and art of the 1920-50s. V.V. Mayakovsky, Gorky, L. Leonov, Fadeev, M.A. Sholokhov, F.V. Gladkov, V.P. Kataev, M.S. Shaginyan, N.A. Ostrovsky, V. V. Vishnevsky, N.F. Pogodin and others.
A new situation arose in the literature of the second half of the 1950s in the wake of the 20th Party Congress, which noticeably undermined the foundations of totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Russian “village prose” was “breaking out” from the socialist canons, depicting peasant life not in its “revolutionary development”, but, on the contrary, in conditions of social violence and deformation; literature also told the terrible truth about the war, destroying the myth of bureaucratic heroics and optimism; the civil war and many episodes of national history appeared differently in literature. The "industrial prose" clung to the tenets of socialist realism the longest. 
An important role in the attack on the Stalinist legacy belongs in the 1980s to the so-called "detained" or "rehabilitated" literature - the works of A.P. Platonov, M.A. Bulgakov, A.L. Akhmatova, B.L. .Lasternak, V.S. Grossman, A.T. Tvardovsky, A.A. Beck, B. L. Mozhaev, V. I. Belov, M. F. Shatrov, Yu. O. Dombrovsky, V. T. Shalamov, A. I. Pristavkin and others. Domestic conceptualism (Sotsart) contributed to the exposure of socialist realism.
Although socialist realism “disappeared as an official doctrine with the collapse of the State, of which it was part of the ideological system,” this phenomenon remains at the center of studies that consider it “as an integral element of Soviet civilization,” says the Parisian magazine Revue des etudes slaves. A popular train of thought in the West is an attempt to connect the origins of socialist realism with the avant-garde, as well as the desire to justify the coexistence of two trends in the history of Soviet literature: "totalitarian" and "revisionist".
