The Thinking Reed

First, this doctrine assumes that ‘the Party’ — in the form of the bureaucratic leading circles, of course — has the right to give an artist guiding instructions, to supervise his work, to ‘direct’ him. Such instructions are published periodically either as special decisions (on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, or, comparatively recently, on literary and art criticism, and so on) or as advice given to artists by the Party leaders (in every report he made to every congress, Brezhnev gave the creative intelligentsia their due share of advice and, as has been observed even in official circles, the advice handed out on different occasions is inconsistent). All these instructions are given, of course, in the name of ‘the people’, ‘the Party’, and so forth which, however, alters nothing. Such instructions can be comically detailed. Thus in the summer of 1954 writers were told to write books that would depict

the splendid image of Soviet people — advanced workers in production, masters of agriculture, people who have brought the virgin lands under cultivation and by their inspired shock-work have created plenty in foodstuffs and other material benefits.123

In Stalin’s time ‘partisanship’ was understood above all as meaning eulogy of ‘the great teacher’. And they did eulogize him. In A. Surov’s play Dawn over Moscow, the hero said of him: ‘It seems to me that, every morning, he switches on the dawn over Moscow with his own hand.’124 It would seem that one could not go further than that…

While freedom to create has been recognized by the official ideologists, very strict limits have been laid down for this freedom (fortunately, as time goes by, these limits are widening). The essence of ‘socialist realism’ as a whole is the subordination of artistic creativity to the tastes and purposes of the ruling statocratic class. These tastes and aims, however, have changed. The degree of subordination has also changed. For this reason ‘socialist realism’ can not simply be treated as a whole, as a consistent ‘artistic’ phenomenon. Analysis of concrete works also tells us little here. It has to be said that ‘socialist realism’ in the strict sense existed for a very short time, in the Stalin era alone. Where those years were concerned, one can speak of a more or less harmonious system of principles laid down by the ruling statocracy as the basis for any artistic creation. As the prominent Soviet historian A. Ya. Gurevich has said, every social phenomenon has to be studied ‘in the phase when the potentialities contained within it are revealed most fully’.123

The first distinctive feature of Stalinist aesthetics is that it is centred on literature. This characteristic of socialist-realist theory can be explained from the historico-cultural and also from the sociopolitical standpoint. In the first place nineteenth-century Russian culture, on which theoreticians of Soviet art have based (and have continued to base) themselves really was, to a large extent, ‘literature-centred’. This tradition has its roots in the depths of history. Secular literature took shape in Russia much earlier than secular art or music, even before Peter’s time. Here it may be objected that eighteenth-century Russian painting was better than the literature of the same period. But we must remember that at the level of world classics it was Russian literature, the works of Pushkin and Griboedov, that came to the fore, while the turn of Russian painting and music arrived only later. Continuity and national originality were most strongly marked in literature, and that made it the reference point for Russian art as a whole. Symphonic music and secular painting came to Russia from the West, and in their search for identity the national schools of painters and composers (the ‘Itinerants’, the ‘Mighty Handful’, and so on) based themselves above all upon the successes of literature.