The Thinking Reed

Consequently, there is nothing bad about ‘literaturocentrism’ in itself. It is bad only if it is made into an obligatory norm for all the arts. The literary mode of thought was proclaimed the model for all artistic thinking. The entire terminology and all the categories of ‘socialist realism’ were drawn not from the arts as a whole, but from literature alone. The aesthetics of the Renaissance, Classicism, Romanticism, the great epochs in the history of art, expressed something vital which united all the genres. The term ‘critical realism’, applied to nineteenth-century Russian and Western art but invented later, was used only in relation to literature — in its pure form, indeed, only to prose. The theory of ‘critical realism’ in Soviet art criticism was developed under the influence of the ‘literaturocentrist’ dogma and transformed into the ‘historical element’ in the socialist-realist construct. Attempts to discover ‘critical realism’ in art amounted to mere speculation. Instead of looking for common features in Courbet and Balzac, or in the Itinerants and Tolstoy, Courbet and the Itinerants were simply reduced to Balzac and Tolstoy, forced into the framework of literary aesthetics. (The question arises: What is realism in music or, for heaven’s sake, in architecture?)

The concepts of ‘critical’ and ‘socialist’ realism were ideological twins, created in bureaucratic offices. Although they belong to different epochs, their coincidence revealed very well an approach which identified the history of art with the development of literature. This principle survived Stalin’s death. It is interesting that between the 1950s and 1970s there were very few artistic disputes between the state and writers, even though there were plenty of political disputes. On the other hand, however, the constantly recurring disputes with composers and painters were exclusively artistic in character, although sometimes they were treated later as having been political. The reason was that the aesthetics of ‘socialist realism’ is in general potentially hostile to painting and music as art forms. Every new phenomenon in these fields, if it is original at all, is quite impossible to fit into the categories of ‘literaturocentrist’ aesthetics. The revolt against ‘socialist realism’ was, for painters, mainly a revolt against ‘literaturocentrist’ norms. The painters’ refusal to let themselves be guided by literature aroused the indignation of the ‘socialist realists’, who accused their opponents of modernism, formalism and other sins. But the real issue was different: not between ‘realism’ and ‘formalism’, an antithesis thought up by the socialist-realists themselves, but between ‘socialist realism’ and painting.

With ‘literaturocentrism’ went an extremely suspicious attitude to the producer in the theatre. For the classical socialist-realist, a theatrical performance is a play which is read from the stage ‘in character’. Everything else is from the Evil One. Campaigns were waged against ‘distortion of classical plays’ periodically throughout the sixties and seventies. The theoretician of ‘socialist realism’ cannot understand that what is being shown on the stage is not a play but a performance — that is, a totally new work, even a work of a different art. Naturally, an attempt to subject one art to the laws of another can have no good outcome. It is therefore not surprising that when, immediately after Stalin’s death, the restrictions of the normative aesthetic were slightly loosened, Soviet literature achieved great successes, but painting developed with great difficulty.

But the orientation upon literature has social causes as well. Words are easiest to control. The strokes of a paintbrush, gestures, harmonies — these are less submissive to censorship. All existing methods of censorship are applicable chiefly to written texts. They can be cut — as also, though less successfully, can cinema film. Any narrative can be shortened, but it is difficult to ‘cut’ a picture without destroying it completely. Considerations of the censor’s convenience played no small part in the establishment of ‘socialist realism’.

Another important feature of ‘socialist realism’, as in any normative aesthetic, is orientation upon past examples. Again, there is nothing dangerous in this, provided that such orientation is not made binding on everyone and is not ensured (literally) by a repressive police apparatus. Here we also see the artistic conservatism of the ruling class, its inability to turn itself towards the future or even the present, as is the way with every anti-democratic ideology.