The Thinking Reed

Formerly, acting on the thesis that the distinctive method of socialist realism is the ability ‘to see what is new’, people were inclined to consider that what was typical of a Soviet landscape painting was the depiction of nature ‘transformed by man’s hand’. However, even the most hopeless dogmatists of the forties did not assert that any depiction of nature which failed to include high-voltage transmission lines or something of that sort was thereby outside the limits of socialist realism.172

Nedoshivin also rejected the official-traditional interpretation of ‘partisanship’, showing that it had nothing in common with Lenin’s views. Here the Soviet aestheticist was essentially repeating what E. Fischer and F. Marek had said in their book What Lenin Really Said. That book had been condemned in the USSR, yet Nedoshivin’s article was published. Truly, the ways of the censor are inscrutable!

Nedoshivin wrote quite correctly, about Lenin’s article, that

‘Party Organization and Party Literature’ never had or could have any restricting, let alone ‘prohibiting’, significance. Lenin was less concerned than anyone else to lay down what an artist ‘must not do’, and did not in the least seek to set any barriers before creative freedom. Moreover, the sense of Vladimir Ilyich’s article is consistently for freedom in art, real freedom, which includes the freedom of the artist to be a partisan.173

Comparing some ‘socialist-realist’ works with works by Western artists who were far from being Communists, Nedoshivin showed that there were no artistic, stylistic differences between them. He came to the conclusion ‘that the futility of an attempt to draw up a precise list of distinctive features of socialist realism is rooted in its very nature.’174 Thereby he recognized the aesthetic emptiness of the expression ‘socialist realism’. In its place a new conception of socialist art was set up. These two terms were at first used in the article as synonyms, but the former was later ousted by the latter. Of the old aesthetics only meaningless words remained. Subsequently, in the seventies, the problem of ‘socialist realism’ simply vanished. The expression ‘socialist realism’ is recalled two or three times a year in editorials on the eve of national holidays, but for the rest of the time it is happily forgotten. ‘We find ourselves’, wrote Nedoshivin, ‘at some kind of serious turning point, and perhaps, both for theory and for art itself, “the spirit of inquiry’’ is what we need today more than — please forgive the jeu de mots — irresponsible responses.’175

The expression ‘spirit of inquiry’ was a good one. The collapse of the old aesthetic theory meant that a search for a new conception of art had begun. At first, however, this did not develop around aesthetic problems as such. What was studied was the question of art and society, of art and ‘us’. Culture was becoming more and more a field of social and political conflict. The new theory was, naturally, elaborated most properly (from all points of view) on the basis of new forms of art. No heap of theoretical dogmas had yet been accumulated in this field and it was possible, skipping a phase of ‘exposure’, to proceed to examine the laws of the genre. For this reason one of the best theoretical works on art in the sixties was devoted to television. This was V. Sappak’s book Television and Us.