socialist realism

Term used to describe the idealization of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the arts, apparently first used in the Soviet journal Literaturnaya Gazeta on 25 May 1932. After the cultural pluralism of the 1920s in the Soviet Union, and in line with the objectives of the Five-year plans, art was subordinated to the needs and dictates of the Communist Party. In 1932, following four years of ideological struggle and polemic among different artistic groups, the Central Committee of the party disbanded all existing artistic organizations and set up in their place party-led unions for individual art forms. In the summer of 1934, at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, Socialist Realism was proclaimed the approved method for Soviet artists in all media. Andrey Zhdanov, who gave the keynote address at the Congress, was Stalin's mouthpiece on cultural policy until his death in 1948. In the words of his leader, the artist was to be 'an engineer of the human soul'. The aim of the new creative method was 'to depict reality in its revolutionary development'; no further guidelines concerning style or subject-matter were laid down. Accordingly, the idea of what constituted Socialist Realism evolved negatively out of a series of cultural purges orchestrated by Zhdanov in the pages of Pravda, the party newspaper, and enforced at local level by the union branches. Such words as 'formalism' and 'intuitivism' were used as terms of abuse in the search for cultural enemies.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

socialist realism, a slogan adopted by the Soviet cultural authorities in 1934 to summarize the requirements of Stalinist dogma in literature: the established techniques of 19th‐century realism were to be used to represent the struggle for socialism in a positive, optimistic light, while the allegedly ‘decadent’ techniques of modernism were to be avoided as bourgeois deviations. The approved model was Maxim Gorky's novel The Mother (1907). A few outstanding novels have conformed to this official prescription, including Mikhail Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned (1932) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Grey Granite (1934), but the doctrine acted chiefly to stifle imaginative experiment, and has been rejected as such by many leading socialist writers, notably Bertolt Brecht. See also proletcult, propagandism.

For more information on Socialist Realism, visit Britannica.com.

Offically approved styles of art, architecture, literature, etc., in the former Soviet Union and some other Communist countries. In architecture it usually involved a type of coarse stripped Classicism.

Bibliography

• CoE (1995)
• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Aesthetic doctrine enunciated at the 1934 first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers by Maxim Gorky and Communist Party Secretary Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's son-in- law. Following the early completion of Russia's first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), it reflected Stalin's growing power and determination to subordinate cultural production to his ideological aims. (In 1932 all existing cultural associations had been dissolved, and the individual arts reorganized in centrally controlled unions.)

Socialist Realism in the visual arts harked back to late 19th-century realist painting, but with new improved optimism and political correctness: reality would be recognizable, but selected and idealized; Soviet achievements and heroes would be presented positively and in a form accessible to the masses. The anti-naturalistic avant-gardes that had flourished in the 1920s would be suppressed.

In photography, the principal targets were both the remnants of pictorialism and New Vision-influenced cosmopolitan photographers and photographer-designers such as Alexander Rodchenko, Gustav Klucis, and Abram Shterenberg (1894-1979). Since the late 1920s they had been criticized for ‘formalism’ and ‘decadence’ by journals such as Proletarskoe Foto and Sovetskoe Foto and members of the Russian Society of Proletarian Photographers (ROPF). Typical was an attack on Rodchenko's famous low-angle Pioneer Trumpeter (1930): ‘Surely the issue of class lies like a thick, harmful shadow over [it] … in the crude bestial knot of muscle and clumsy shape of the face, surely one cannot recognise the lively, happy face of the younger generation of Communists.’

Although Socialist Realism officially put paid to avant- gardism in photography as in the other arts, it was notable that even ROPF stalwarts like Arkadi Shaikhet, and younger photojournalists such as Georgi Petrussov and Yakov Khalip (1908-80), continued to use ‘New Vision’ dynamic perspectives and tilting verticals when it suited them: usually in depicting inherently modernistic subjects like dams or steelworks. Nevertheless, the new orthodoxy persisted for decades, hindering experimentation and the treatment of ‘difficult’ (non-uplifting) topics. With local variations, it also spread to the USSR's East European satellites.

— Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930-1945 (1996)

In the Soviet Union during Stalin's regime, dance was expected to conform to Party doctrine. Ideally, choreographers were meant to portray contemporary life in a realistic style while at the same time glorifying the workers' revolution and denouncing the bourgeoisie. Not all artists toed the official line, some finding subtle ways of introducing irony into their work, but the plots of many ballets created between the late 1920s and 1950s show remarkable political correctness. One of the earliest examples was Lashchilin and Tikhomirov's The Red Poppy; another notable instance was Belsky's Coast of Hope (mus. A. Petrov, Kirov, Leningrad, 1959). This ballet is set in two contrasting fishing villages, one on the Soviet side of the sea, whose citizens are happy and loyal, and one on the other side where life is unhappy and repressive. A Soviet fisherman is shipwrecked on the other shore and its people take him prisoner in order to convert him to their ways. He remains faithful to his own comrades, though, and one day the walls of his prison magically burst open and he finds himself back home. Some of the most apparently correct librettos, such as Lopukhov's The Bright Stream, did not always find approval, though. While this ballet showed Socialist morals triumphing over regressive behaviour, its use of classical dance to portray the lives of ordinary people was considered unacceptable as was Lopukhov's use of Shostakovich's score and he was dismissed from his post as ballet chief of the Maly Theatre.

On April 23, 1932, the Party Central Committee of the USSR adopted socialist realism (SR) as the official artistic mandate for Soviet literature (de facto for art, music, film, and architecture as well), a practice that, theoretically, governed the production of any work of art until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. While most frequently associated with literature (especially since the adoption of SR occurred practically simultaneously with the dissolution of all literary groups and their subjugation into one Union of Writers), socialist realism provided the guidelines according to which any artist should craft his work.

Yet the very concept of socialist realism problematizes the process of definition. Over the course of its implementation socialist realism's practitioners and critics have referred to it as a method, doctrine, framework, or style. Precisely the inability to definitively label it points to its inherent contradictions. Indeed, the best label for socialist realism could well be critic Yevgeny Dobrenko's term - an aesthetic system. This moniker implies that socialist realism dictated far more than the form of an artistic work; in addition, socialist realism strove to control how an artist worked and how an audience received and perceived any work of art. Just as events in the Soviet Union unfolded, so, too, did socialist realism adjust to the new demands of changing times. Consequently, socialist realism was realized as a totalizing system that would inculcate Soviet citizens into the new ideological system, the result of the Bolshevik revolution, and the emergence of Stalinism.

Andrei Zhdanov, then Leningrad Party boss and frequent spokesman for Party policy, delineated the program of SR at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Increasingly critics identify the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky as the true instigator behind the movement given his active role in establishing journals (such as Nashi Dostizheniya [Our Achievements]) and literary series (such as The History of Factories and Plants), as well as his editorship of volumes such as The History of the Construction of the Stalin White Sea - Baltic Canal. Indeed many of Gorky's polemical and didactic articles of the time delineate how writers were called to document, applaud, and encourage the building of the new Soviet state, especially vis-à-vis the first two Five-Year Plans, even though Gorky himself produced no original works of literature during this final period of his career. In addition, as had been proposed most vociferously by RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) in the 1920s, common workers should emerge as the chief arbiters of artistic production. It was believed that if properly trained, any worker could become a Soviet writer or artist, especially because, ideologically speaking, only workers had the appropriate class pedigree.

Not surprisingly, although attempts were made to reforge (a common metaphor of the early 1930s) workers into masterful artists, much of this activity was in vain. As readers in the early 1930s were quick to point out, badly written or executed SR art was neither appealing nor inspiring. Indeed, recently some critics have noted that the reading and viewing public of the early 1930s played a much larger role in determining what kind of art would be produced, thanks to their active response to any artistic production that did not meet with their aesthetic sensibilities or did not conform to their conception of a typical work of Soviet art. This did not imply, however, that subsequent works of socialist realist art had uniformly high quality and were superior works of art; most were not.

Hence, mounting pressure was applied to members of the various artistic establishments to embrace the new aesthetic model of socialist realism. In the literary arena some writers, most notably Mikhail Bulgakov, Osip Mandelshtam, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Anna Akhmatova to name but a few, consistently resisted the pressure to produce Party-mandated art; consequently they found it essentially impossible to have their work published. Others such as Mikhail Zoshchenko, Viktor Shklovsky, and Valentin Katayev attempted to find a compromise position that enabled them to continue to be published while maintaining a modicum of personal artistic style and integrity. Yet others, among them Alexander Fadeyev, Alexei Tolstoy and Vera Inber, subscribed completely to the Party mandate by producing literary works that strove to comply as closely as possible with socialist realism. Here, too, the issue of artistic quality emerged as a concern.

Yet the outline above should not suggest that the divisions among artists were black and white categories that did not allow for subversions of the socialist realist canon or deviations from the "Party line" within an artist's oeuvre. Consequently, it is not uncommon to find musical comedies in the 1930s, which, while celebrating the heightened class consciousness and loyalty of Soviet citizens, also featured musical production numbers, slapstick comedy, and lighthearted romance (e.g., Volga, Volga, The Jolly Fellows, Circus). In addition, in literature the early "canonical" works of socialist realism, which were posited as models for future works, predated the adoption of the socialist realist aesthetic. These include Gorky's novel Mat (Mother, 1906), Fyodor Gladkov's post-Civil war story Tsement (Cement, 1925), Dmitry Furmanov's Civil War epic Chapayev (1923), and Alexander Fadeyev's Bolshevik drama Razgrom (The Rout, 1927) all of which presented the struggle for socialism from authors who understood how to present Soviet reality in its revolutionary development. As these examples illustrate, in literature the socialist realist genre of choice was the novel. Similarly, in music the symphony reigned supreme, while in tactile art, sculpture, and architecture massive, grandiloquent, and neoclassical exemplars managed to concretize the physical manifestations of socialist realism.

Indeed, in one respect socialist realism's lineage harkened back to the nineteenth century since its foundation rested on the aesthetic principles of realism and its purported ability to truthfully depict life as it was happening. Moreover, the populist movements of the second half of the nineteenth century, which greatly appealed to Bolshevik ideologists, including Vladimir Lenin, provided the prototypes not only for the appropriate psychological makeup of a character. In addition, these populist models served to situate socialist realist aesthetics in a revolutionary context that applauded the development of socialism.

In addition, some critics have traced socialist realism's genealogy through early twentieth-century Russian symbolism, a development that thereby enabled the Russian artistic and political avantgarde movements to share the notion of a perfect future life. The artistic avant-garde drew on the work of the Russian symbolist philosopher Vladimir Soloviev as the basis of its doctrine, while the political avant-garde followed Marxist ideology on its path to create a new Soviet society. Both avantgarde projects shared many of the same ideas, metaphors, and terminology in describing the "new world" they hoped to create. For example, while Soloviev espoused the idea that art was an instrument for creating the future, Marxists maintained that art was an instrument for transforming life, a process that, by its very nature, would create new men and women. Indeed, the Left Front Futurist theorist Nikolai Chuzhak links Solovievian symbolist principles with Marxist ideology, thereby creating a Marxist aesthetic that blended the theurgic impulse of Solovievian thinking with Marxist dialectics. Chuzhak labels this end product "ultrarealism," a construct that "would express the dialectical collision between 'what is' and 'what will be'" (Gutkin, 1999, p. 46). According to this interpretation, the artistic and political avant-garde movements already had sown the seeds of socialist realism long before its actual adoption.

Similarly, the critic Boris Groys has argued, among other notions, that socialist realism was more avant-garde than the avant-garde itself. Whereas the avant-garde provided numerous theoretical models, mandates, and pronouncements for how the future world should be, they were neither willing nor able to completely replace or even destroy the traditions that preceded and produced them. In fact this futuristic vision could never fully be realized, precisely because the avant-garde sought to construct it on the existing cultural structure. Conversely, socialist realism was, according to Groys, able to achieve that which the avant-garde never could - to reject traditional cultural structures and in their place to construct a new system of artistic production that reflected the new society that was supposedly being created in the Soviet Union.

Critics such as Herman Ermolaev and C. Vaughan James have argued that the basis for socialist realism rests firmly on Communist Party ideology and its desire to control cultural production to serve its ideological and propagandistic needs. Finally, the writer and literary critic Andrei Sinyavsky has proposed that the aesthetic system after which socialist realism was modeled harkened back not to nineteenth-century realism, but rather to the neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century. As Sinyavsky notes, the necessity to produce state-mandated art; the directive to applaud the glory, power, and vision of the State, especially vis-à-vis its own citizens and other cultures; the proclivity to build, write, paint, or compose works of art that were massive in structure, grandiose in their praise, and fraught with visions of how life should be, not as it actually was - these elements paralleled the demands put to socialist realism.

Clearly the development and historical precedents in Russian cultural history for socialist realism are richer and more complicated than originally thought. In fact, even the proposed elements that had to be included in an artistic production to make it truly socialist realist were reconfigured and reemphasized as this aesthetic system continued through successive eras in the development of the Soviet Union.

Initially a number of characteristics were required of a work of socialist realism. First, it had to depict Soviet life not as it was, but as it should be. Hence, any work of socialist realist art would exemplify for its reader or viewer a behavior, event, or image that captured an "ideal" rather than reality. As stated in Literaturnaya gazeta (September 3, 1934), "Socialist realism, being the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism, demands from the artist the truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating the working people in the spirit of socialism." While this statement specifically refers to literature, the parameters it sets forth were applicable to any artistic production.

In essence, any work of socialist realism should depict the bright future that Soviet public rhetoric continually promised its citizens, provided that they followed the socialist realist model. The epitome of this model was the "new Soviet man/woman" who through his or her Party-mindedness, intensive labor, class identity, and singlemindedness achieved great feats that resulted in a happy ending and that glorified the Soviet Union, thereby demonstrating the correctness of its ideology. In literature these new Soviet men and women were created by Soviet writers, the "engineers of human souls," as Josef Stalin called them. Hence, almost from its inception Socialist realism was redolent with industrial metaphors and images. Writers, indeed all artists, were engineers charged with "reforging" or reconstructing characters, images, words, and deeds into manifestations of Party policy and Soviet power.

Originally a work of socialist realism should contain four key elements. The first was ideinost - the work must be anchored in and resonate with Soviet ideology, i.e. Marxism-Leninism. Second, the work must convey klassovost - class-consciousness. The socialist realist heroes and heroines must personify their class heritage. Preferably they were to be members of the working class or, more rarely, enlightened peasants or intellectuals, who embraced the new ideology and demonstrated through their lives and work their allegiance to their class, and, ultimately, to the Soviet Union. Third, a socialist realist work must contain partynost - Party-mindedness. This meant that the firm, guiding hand of the Communist Party of the USSR constantly exerted its presence in a work of socialist realism, either in the character of an ideal Party member in a work of literature, or through the visual or aural presentation of a theme or motif that exuded strength, decisiveness, and grandiosity. Finally, works of socialist realism should have narodnost - the content of a work of art should represent the interests and viewpoint of the people (narod) rendered in an intelligible, approachable manner.

Throughout the 1930s the aforementioned guidelines were strictly applied to artistic production. Whereas in the early 1930s collective heroism and collective labor (consonant with the goals of the first two five-year plans) were glorified and promoted, in the latter half of the 1930s up to the advent of World War II, individual heroes, from Stalin to polar explorers, from collective farm workers to Stakhanovites, were extolled. As the war years unfolded, the official enforcement of socialist realist imperatives lessened but definitely did not disappear. The slight flexibility, afforded writers in particular, to depict the brutality of battle during World War II (but not any mistakes of Stalin or his military commanders) was counterbalanced by the heroic music, art work, and films that understandably lauded the honest heroism displayed by common Soviet citizens in the face of the war.

Nonetheless, when the war concluded, a redoubling of efforts to enforce strict principles of socialist realism emerged. Primary responsibility for this enforcement fell, once again, to Andrei Zhdanov, then chair of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Zhdanov's most virulent wrath fell on poet Anna Akhmatova and writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose work Zhdanov aggressively attacked in the press. Consequently, the canonical elements of socialist realism reemerged and prevailed until the so-called Thaw in the late 1950s.

This period (1953 - 1963) witnessed another lessening of the paradigmatic strictures that defined socialist realism. During this period relatively greater flexibility marked artistic endeavors. In particular, literary works were permitted to explore previously untouchable topics - the Soviet concentration camps, the difficulties of life in the countryside, the trauma of the post-war years - in a more humanely artistic, less formulaic way. This did not mean that Party supervision of artistic production diminished completely, nor were all works of literature written at this time permitted to be published (e.g., Lidia Chukovskaya's Sofia Petrovna, Solzhenitsyn's First Circle). Rather, a slight lessening of the controls enabled some artists to produce works that stretched the boundaries of socialist realism.

This short-lived easing of control over artistic production ended with a further tightening of the parameters that defined socialist realism. While these parameters never approached the strictness of the early years of Soviet power, they persisted nonetheless. Ironically during this ensuing period - called Stagnation (1964 - 1985) - a number of interesting, original films, works of literature, art, and music appeared either through official channels or through the burgeoning artistic underground. This underground phenomenon permitted a host of officially censored or unacceptable works to be circulated among appreciative audiences through samizdat (self-publication) or tamizdat (publication abroad). Consequently, with each passing year, the hold that the socialist realist aesthetic exerted on Soviet culture gradually lessened until it dissolved into the period of glasnost in the mid-1980s. Nonetheless, the village and urban prose movements of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that socialist realism's elasticity was greater than one might have imagined. Indeed, the traditional view that the artistic value of any work of socialist realism was compromised by virtue of the fact that it was Party-mandated, has lost some of its urgency. While not all works of socialist realism deserve attention and appreciation, many do. When coupled with the non - socialist realist works of this period, most notably Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, we are left with a rich, variegated artistic legacy.

Moreover, the fundamental fact that socialist realism changed with the ideological and political demands of a particular time period argues for an inherent organicity that infused the system since its inception. Our understanding and, perhaps, even appreciation of socialist realism has grown thanks not only to the post-glasnost flood of archival texts and documents, but also thanks to the broader vision that hindsight provides.

Bibliography

Brooks, Jeffrey. (1994). "Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All About It." Slavic Review 53 (4):973 - 991.

Carleton, Greg. (1994). "Genre in Socialist Realism." Slavic Review 53 (4):992 - 1009.

Clark, Katerina. (1978). "Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Literature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan." In Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928 - 1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Clark, Katerina. (1985). The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dobrenko, Evgeny. (1997). The Making of the Soviet Reader. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Dobrenko, Evgeny. (2001). The Making of the Soviet Writer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Ermolaev, Herman. (1963). Soviet Literary Theories, 1917 - 1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism. University of California Publications in Modern Philology, no. 69. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Golomshtock, Igor. (1990). Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People's Republic of China, tr. Robert Chandler. London: Collins Harvill.

Groys, Boris. (1992). The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles Rougle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gunther, Hans, ed. (1990). The Culture of the Stalin Period. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Gutkin, Irina. (1999). The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890 - 1934. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

James, C. Vaughan. (1973). Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Lahusen, Thomas. (1997). How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lahusen, Thomas, and Dobrenko, Evgeny, eds. (1997). Socialist Realism without Shores. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Reid, Susan E. (2001). "Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935 - 1941." Russian Review 60:153 - 184.

Robin, Regine. (1992). Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, tr. Catherine Porter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Tertz, Abram [Andrei Sinyavsky]. (1982). The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism, tr. Max Hayward and George Dennis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

—CYNTHIA A. RUDER

Not to be confused with Social realism or Real socialism.

Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style of realistic art which has as its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism. Although related, it should not be confused with social realism, a type of art that realistically depicts subjects of social concern.

Contents 1 In the Soviet Union 2 In other states 3 Roots 4 Characteristics 5 Notable works and artists 6 Consequences 7 Gallery 7.1 Architecture 7.2 Sculpture 8 See also 9 Notes 10 References and further reading 11 External links

In the Soviet Union

Socialist realism was the officially approved type of art in the Soviet Union for nearly sixty years. Communist doctrine decreed that all material goods and means of production belonged to the community as a whole. This included means of producing art, which were also seen as powerful propaganda tools. During the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks established an institution called Proletkult (the Proletarian Cultural and Enlightenment Organizations) which sought to put all arts into the service of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Moscow State University

In the early years of the Soviet Union, Russian and Soviet artists embraced a wide variety of art forms under the auspices of Proletkult. Revolutionary politics and radical non-traditional art forms were seen as complementary. In art, constructivism flourished. In poetry, the nontraditional and the avant-garde were often praised.

This, however, was rejected by some members of the Communist party, who did not appreciate modern styles such as impressionism and cubism, since these movements existed before the revolution and hence were associated with "decadent bourgeois art." Socialist realism was thus to some extent a reaction against the adoption of these "decadent" styles. Also, it was thought that the non-representative forms of art were not understood by the proletariat and thus could not be used by the state for propaganda.

Socialist realism became state policy in 1932 when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin promulgated the decree "On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations". The Union of Soviet Writers was founded to control the output of authors, and the new policy was rubber-stamped at the Congress of Socialist Writers in 1934. It was enforced ruthlessly in all spheres of artistic endeavour. Artists who strayed from the official line were severely punished. Form and content were often limited, with erotic, religious, abstract, surrealist and expressionist art being forbidden. Form, including internal dialogue, stream of consciousness, nonsense, free-form association and cut-up were also disallowed. This was either because they were "decadent", unintelligible to the proletariat or counter-revolutionary.

The restrictions were loosened somewhat after Stalin's death in 1953 but the state still kept a tight rein on personal artistic expression. This caused many artists to choose to go into exile, for example the Odessa Group from the city of that name. Independent-minded artists that remained continued to feel the hostility of the state. In 1974, for instance, a show of unofficial art in a field near Moscow was broken up, and the artworks destroyed with a water cannon and bulldozers (see Bulldozer Exhibition). Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and perestroika facilitated an explosion of interest in alternative art styles in the late 1980s, but socialist realism remained in limited force as the official state art style until as late as 1991. It was not until after the fall of the Soviet Union that artists were finally freed from state censorship^{[citation needed]}.

In other states

The people of Wuhan fighting the flood of 1954, as depicted on a monument erected in 1969

After the Russian Revolution, socialist realism became an international literary movement. Socialist trends in literature were established in the 1920s in Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Writers who helped develop socialist realism in the West included Louis Aragon, Johannes Becher, Jaroslav Hasek, and Pablo Neruda. ^[1]

The doctrine of socialist realism in other Soviet-controlled new People's Republics, was legally enforced from 1949 to 1956. It involved all domains of visual and literary arts, though its most spectacular achievements were made in the field of architecture, considered a key weapon in the creation of a new social order, intended to help spread the communist doctrine by influencing citizens' consciousness as well as their outlook on life. During this massive undertaking, a crucial role fell to architects perceived not as merely engineers creating streets and edifices, but rather as "Engineers of the human soul". The general theme, extending beyond simple aesthetics into an urban design, was meant to express grandiose ideas and arouse feelings of stability, persistence and political power.

Today, arguably the only countries still focused on these aesthetic principles are North Korea, Laos, and to some extent Vietnam. The People's Republic of China occasionally reverts to socialist realism for specific purposes, such as idealised propaganda posters to promote the Chinese space program. Socialist realism had little mainstream impact in the non-Communist world, where it was widely seen as a totalitarian means of imposing state control on artists.

The former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was an important exception among the communist countries, because after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, it abandoned socialist realism along with other elements previously imported from the Soviet system and allowed greater artistic freedom.^[2] Miroslav Krleža, one of the leading Yugoslav intellectuals, held a speech at the Third Congress of the Writers Alliance of Yugoslavia in Ljubljana in 1952, which is considered a turning point in the Yugoslav dennouncement of dogmatic socialist realism.

Due to its controversial nature, socialist realism can be quite taboo in Western nations. For example, in 2007, the Chinese sculptor, Lei Yixin was selected as the lead sculptor for the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial. But because Mr. Lei has worked on various socialist realism pieces back in China (such as carving statues celebrating Mao Zedong), his selection was heavily criticized by many in the US, such as by the Chinese dissident Harry Wu. Furthermore, in 2008, the U.S. Commission of Fine Art rejected Lei's design for the King Memorial Sculpture. In a letter dated 28 April, the commission wrote that Yixin's presentation was an inappropriate expression of Dr. King and that Yixin's model recalled the genre of political sculpture that has recently been destroyed in other countries, hinting at the removal of many socialist realism statues during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Roots

The initial tendencies toward socialist realism date from the mid-19th century. They include revolutionary literature in Great Britain (the poetry of the Chartist movement), Germany (Herwegh, Freiligrath, and G. Weerth), and France (the literature of the Paris Commune and Pottier's "Internationale.") Socialist realism emerged as a literary method in the early 20th century in Russia, especially in the works of Gorky. It was also apparent in the works of writers like Kotsiubinsky, Rainis, Akopian, and Edvoshvili. Following Gorky, writers in several countries combined the realistic depiction of life with the expression of a socialist world view. They included Barbusse, Andersen Nexø, and John Reed. ^[3]

The political aspect of socialist realism was, in some respects, a continuation of pre-Soviet state policy. Censorship and attempts to control the content of art did not begin with the Soviets, but were a long-running feature of Russian life. The Tsarist government also appreciated the potentially disruptive effect of art and required all books to be cleared by the censor. Writers and artists in 19th century Imperial Russia became quite skilled at evading censorship by making their points without spelling it out in so many words. However, Soviet censors were not easily evaded.

Socialist realism had its roots in neoclassicism and the traditions of realism in Russian literature of the 19th century that described the life of simple people. It was exemplified by the aesthetic philosophy of Maxim Gorky. The work of the Peredvizhniki ("Wanderers," a Russian realist movement of the late 19th / early 20th centuries), Jacques-Louis David and Ilya Yefimovich Repin were notable influences.

Socialist Realism was a product of the Soviet system. Whereas in market societies professional artists earned their living selling to, or being commissioned by rich individuals or the Church, in Soviet society not only was the market suppressed, there were few if any individuals able to patronise the arts and only one institution - the State itself. Hence artists became state employees. As such the State set the parameters for what it employed them to do. What was expected of the artist was that s/he be formally qualified and to reach a standard of competence. However, whilst this rewarded basic competency, it did not provide an incentive to excel, resulting in a stultification similar to that in other spheres of Soviet society. The State, after the Congress of 1934, laid down four rules for what became known as "Socialist Realism"-

That the work be;

13 May 1967.Cinemacenter Avrora. Architect E.A. Serdjukov.1300 Seats.

1. Proletarian- art relevant to the workers and understandable to them.

2. Typical- scenes of every day life of the people.

3. Realistic - in the representational sense.

4. Partisan - supportive of the aims of the State and the Party.

Even so, many of the art works glorifying Joseph Stalin and other leaders are hardly in keeping with these ideals and the charge that art be understandable to the whole people negated the Western notion of the avant garde (despite the Bolsheviks casting themselves as a political "vanguard") and discouraged experimental approaches. The realism achieved was often technically very good and similar to many Western works intended as magazine illustration or bookjackets, rather than High Art. The partisan quality tends to attract the most criticism, in that it often predominated to the exclusion of the other tenets, so that paintings of peasants feasting after bumper harvests was neither real nor typical of the lot of many of those depicted, especially in the Ukrainian Famine.^{[citation needed]}

Characteristics

Socialist-Realist allegories surrounding the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw

Socialist realism held that successful art depicts and glorifies the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress. The Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934 stated that socialist realism

is the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.

Its purpose was to elevate the common worker, whether factory or agricultural, by presenting his life, work, and recreation as admirable. In other words, its goal was to educate the people in the goals and meaning of Communism. The ultimate aim was to create what Lenin called "an entirely new type of human being": New Soviet Man. Stalin described the practitioners of socialist realism as "engineers of souls".

The "realism" part is important. Soviet art at this time aimed to depict the worker as he truly was, carrying his tools. In a sense, the movement mirrors the course of American and Western art, where the everyday human being became the subject of the novel, the play, poetry, and art. The proletariat was at the center of communist ideals; hence, his life was a worthy subject for study. This was an important shift away from the aristocratic art produced under the Russian tsars of previous centuries, but had much in common with the late-19th century fashion for depicting the social life of the common people.

Compared to the eclectic variety of 20th century Western art, socialist realism often resulted in a fairly bland and predictable range of artistic products (indeed, Western critics wryly described the principles of socialist realism as "girl meets tractor").^[4] Painters would depict happy, muscular peasants and workers in factories and collective farms; during the Stalin period, they also produced numerous heroic portraits of the dictator to serve his cult of personality. Industrial and agricultural landscapes were popular subjects, glorifying the achievements of the Soviet economy. Novelists were expected to produce uplifting stories in a manner consistent with the Marxist doctrine of dialectical materialism. Composers were to produce rousing, vivid music that reflected the life and struggles of the proletariat.

Socialist realism thus demanded close adherence to party doctrine, and has often been criticized as detrimental to the creation of true, unfettered art – or as being little more than a means to censor artistic expression. Czesław Miłosz, writing in the introduction to Sinyavsky's On Socialist Realism, describes the products of socialist realism as "inferior", ascribing this as necessarily proceeding from the limited view of reality permitted to creative artists.

Not all Marxists accepted the necessity of socialist realism (Marx, Engels and Trotsky's views on art and culture were very liberal and may have baulked at the propagandism of Socialist realism themselves). Its establishment as state doctrine in the 1930s had rather more to do with internal Communist Party politics than classic Marxist imperatives. The Hungarian Marxist essayist Georg Lukács criticized the rigidity of socialist realism, proposing his own "critical realism" as an alternative. However, such critical voices were a rarity until the 1980s.

Notable works and artists

Maxim Gorky's novel Mother is usually considered to have been the first work of socialist realism. Gorky was also a major factor in the school's rapid rise, and his pamphlet, On Socialist Realism, essentially lays out the needs of Soviet art. Other important works of literature include Fyodor Gladkov's Cement (1925) and Mikhail Sholokhov's two volume epic, And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) and The Don Flows Home to the Sea (1940).

Martin Andersen Nexø developed socialist realism in his own way. His creative method was characterized by a combination of publicistic passion, a critical view of capitalist society, and a steadfast striving to bring reality into accord with socialist ideals. The novel "Pelle, the Conqueror" is considered to be a classic of socialist realism. The novel "Ditte, Daughter of Man" had a working-class woman as its heroine. He battled against the enemies of socialism in the books "Two Worlds", and "Hands Off!".

The novels of Louis Aragon such as "The Real World" depicts the working class as a rising force of the nation. He published two books of documentary prose, "The Communist Man." In the collection of poems "A Knife in the Heart Again", Aragon criticizes the penetration of American imperialism into Europe. The novel "The Holy Week" depicts the artist's path toward the people against a broad social and historical background.

Hanns Eisler composed many workers' songs, marches, and ballads on current political topics such as "Song of Solidarity", "Song of the United Front", and "The Cominten." He was a founder of a new style of revolutionary song for the masses. He also composed works in larger forms such as "Requiem for Lenin". Eisler's most important works include the cantatas "German Symphony", "Serenade of the Age" and "Song of Peace." Eisler combines features of revolutionary songs with varied expression. His symphonic music is known for its complex and subtle orchestration.

Closely associated with the rise of the labor movement was the development of the revolutionary song, which was performed at demonstrations and meetings. Among the most famous of the revolutionary songs are "The Internationale" and "Warszawianka". Notable songs from Russia include "Boldly, Comrades, in Step", "Workers' Marseillaise", and "Rage, Tyrants". Folk and revolutionary songs influenced the Soviet mass songs. The mass song was a leading genre in Soviet music, especially during the 1930s and the war. The mass song influenced other genres, including the art song, opera, and film music. The most popular mass songs include Dunaevsky's "Song of the Homeland", Blanter's "Katiusha", Novikov's "Hymn of Democratic Youth of the World", and Aleksandrov's "Sacred War".

In the early 1930s, Soviet filmmakers applied socialist realism in their work. Notable films include "Chapaev", which shows the role of the people in the history-making process. The theme of revolutionary history was developed in films like "The Youth of Maxim", by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, "Shchors" by Dovzhenko, and "We are from Kronstadt" by E. Dzigan. The shaping of the new man under socialism was a theme of films like "A Start Life" by N. Ekk, "Ivan" by Dovzhenko, and "Valerii Chkalov" by M. Kalatozov. Some films depicted the part of peoples of the Soviet Union against foreign invaders: "Alexander Nevsky" by Eisenstein, "Minin and Pozharsky" by Pudvokin, and "Bogdan Khmelnitsky" by Savchenko. Soviet politicians were the subjects in films such as Yutkevich's trilogy of movies about Lenin.

Socialist realism was also applied to Hindi films of the 1940s and 1950s. These include Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar (1946), which won the Grand Prize at the 1st Cannes Film Festival, and Bimal Roy's Two Acres of Land (1953), which won the International Prize at the 7th Cannes Film Festival.

The painter Aleksandr Deineka provides a notable example for his expressionist and patriotic scenes of the Second World War, collective farms, and sports. Yuri Pimenov, Boris Ioganson and Geli Korzev have also been described as "unappreciated masters of twentieth-century realism".^[5] Another well-known practitioner was Fyodor Pavlovich Reshetnikov.

Consequences

A relief from the Soviet military cemetery in Warsaw showing workers greeting victorious soldiers.

Socialist realism's rigid precepts and enforcement greatly hindered the freedom of Soviet artists. Many artists and authors found their works censored, ignored, or rejected. Mikhail Bulgakov, for instance, was forced to write his masterwork, The Master and Margarita, in secret, despite earlier successes such as White Guard. Sergei Prokofiev found his musical language increasingly restricted in the years after his permanent return to the Soviet Union in 1935 (especially in the wake of the 1948 Zhdanov Decree), although he continued to compose until the end of his life five years later.

The political doctrine behind socialist realism also underlay the pervasive censorship of Communist societies. Apart from obvious political considerations that saw works such as those of George Orwell being banned, access to foreign art and literature was also restricted on aesthetic grounds. Bourgeois art and all forms of experimentalism and formalism were denounced as decadent, degenerate and pessimistic, and therefore anti-Communist in principle. The works of James Joyce were particularly harshly condemned. The net effect was that it was not until the 1980s that the general public in the Communist countries were able to freely access many works of Western art and literature. Many then joined Western observers in denouncing socialist realism as mere propaganda.^{[citation needed]}

The Sots Art paintings of Komar and Melamid can be viewed as a parody of socialist realism.^{[citation needed]}

Gallery

Click on each image for more details. An asterisk indicates that more information is available.

Lenin			Stalin
by Alexei Nesterenko	by Stepan Karpov	by Isaac Brodskiy	Monument in Prague-Letná (1955-1962)

Ordinary life
"Miner" by Boris Vladimirski	"Female Worker" by Vladimirski	"In a Girls' School" by Ivan Vladimirov	"Lenin's Room in Simbirsk 1878 to 1887" by Vladimir Krikhatzkij	""Wedding on a Tomorrow Street" by Yury Pimenov

Revolution and War	Technology
"Meeting of a Village Party Cell" by Efim Cheptsov	The First Tractor by Vladimir Krikhatsky	"In the Stalin Factory" by Mikhail Kostin

Architecture

Main article: Stalinist architecture

Unrealized project of Zaryadye skyscraper (Eight Sister) in Moscow	Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw	All-Soviet Exhibition Centre in Moscow	Railway station, Petrozavodsk
Palace of cultures, Rostov on Don	Centre of Nowa Huta	Centre of new part of Ostrov town in the west of Czech Republic	House in the centre of Krasnoyarsk

Sculpture

Kiev's monumental statue of the Mother Motherland. (See Museum of the Great Patriotic War, Kiev)	Soc-Realist allegories surrounding the Palace of Culture and Science	A relief from the Soviet military cemetery in Warsaw showing workers greeting victorious soldiers.	A figure of a worker over the main entrance to the skyscraper on Rebellions Square in Moscow
Mutter Heimat.jpg The 85-meter-tall statue of Mother Motherland crowns the Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd	Worker and Kolkhoz Woman sculpture in Moscow (1935-37)	The construction and industry statue on the Green Bridge, Vilnius; it is one of the few remaining in its original place in Lithuania.

See also

• Engineers of the human soul
• The First Tractor
• Formalism
• Heroic realism, a term which embraces both Socialist realism and Nazi heroic realism, the very similar art style associated with Fascism.
• List of statues of Lenin
• Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw
• Seven Sisters (Moscow)
• Social realism
• Socialist realism in China
• Socialist realism in Poland
• Socialist realism in Romania
• Stalin Monument in Budapest
• Stalin's Monument (Prague)
• Andrei Zhdanov
• Post-socialist art

Notes

1. ^ D.F. Markov and L.I. Timofeev, "Socialist Realism"
2. ^ Library of Congress Country Studies - Yugoslavia: Introduction of Socialist Self-Management
3. ^ Markov and L.I. Timofeev, "Socialist Realism"
4. ^ Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia, Published 1992 by Cornell University Press, ISBN 0801495164.
5. ^ Marek Bartelik, Concerning Socialist Realism: Recent Publications on Russian Art, book review. Art Journal, Winter, 1999.

References and further reading

• Bek, Mikuláš, Geoffrey Chew, and Petr Macek (eds.). Socialist Realism and Music. Musicological Colloquium at the Brno International Music Festival 36. Prague: KLP; Brno: Institute of Musicology, Masaryk University, 2004. ISBN 8086791181
• Golomstock, Igor. Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China, Harper Collins, 1990.
• James, C. Vaughan. Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973.
• Prokhorov, Gleb. Art under Socialist Realism: Soviet Painting, 1930-1950. East Roseville, NSW, Australia: Craftsman House; G + B Arts International, 1995. ISBN 9768097833
• Sinyavsky, Andrei [writing as Abram Tertz]. "The Trial Begins", and "On Socialist Realism", translated by Max Hayward and George Dennis, with an introduction by Czesław Miłosz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960–1982. ISBN 0-520-04677-3

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Socialist realism

• Marxists.org Socialist Realism page
• Socialist Realism art gallery
• Virtual Museum of Political Art - Socialist Realism

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