The Thinking Reed

There were models of the first order — the masterpieces of Russian realist art of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov. In painting, the Itinerants. In music, the Mighty Handful. In drama, the Moscow Art Theatre and Stanislavsky. But along with these genuine peaks of artistic achievement there were also models of the second order, in ‘socialist realism’ itself. These were, so to say, models of the correct imitation of models. Consequently, the ordinary painter was supposed to base himself not directly upon the models offered by Russian classical art, but upon them in the form in which they served as reference points for the creation of models of the second order. Then there were models of the third order — models of correct imitation of the imitators, and so on. If the chain were not broken, the degradation of art would continue. Plastov bases himself upon the Itinerants, and the next generation of artists base themselves on Plastov, for he himself has been canonized already. In each generation we see new canonized models. It is the same in the theatre. After Stanislavky, Kedrov becomes the classical model for everyone.

The actual development of art, however, took a different path after 1956. The contradiction between obligatory schemas and the real processes going on in culture gave rise to conflict after conflict over many years.

Finally, we must look at the bureaucratic concept of realism. Essentially, as I have already explained, for the conservative thinking of the bureaucrat, ‘realism’ means what resembles the work of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky, and so on, so that what does not resemble it is not realism. This is a sort of artistic criterion which, again, is not without foundation. At the basis of such thinking, however, lies a deliberate rejection of any new form of realism. Along with the artistic criterion there is also an extra-artistic one which is no less important. This is the judging of a work of art according to the principle: is it like my idea of life (more correctly, is it ‘lifelike’ or ‘not lifelike’)? This criterion has been assiduously drummed into the heads of the mass of Soviet viewers and readers, right down to the 1970s. It continues to be an important theoretical stereotype.

In this connection it is very interesting to recall a study by a group of Soviet sociologists — G. Dadamyan, D. Dondurei and L. Nevler — who researched, with a group of students as their material, ‘the ordinary way of perceiving art’ as taught by official propaganda, the schools and the socialist-realist aesthetic. Those interrogated had to give their opinion of a super-realistic fresco in one of the rooms in their institute. Literal correspondence between the picture and its actual subject was the first and most important criterion. ‘For some sections of the students,’ the sociologists write,

the ‘correctness’, the exactness of ‘what is painted on the wall’ is the chief indicator which decides whether they accept or reject a painting, it shows a men’s hostel, but there are women in it, and that’s wrong, because we have segregated hostels,’ they say: ‘nobody wears overalls in our engineering workshops,’ and so on. One viewer, after examining a painter’s work, ‘looking at everything in it’, noted ‘several mistakes’ and declared that it’s not like that,’ for ‘everything is sort of lifeless, static dummies with stony faces, identical figures’: ‘the artist has botched it, because he didn’t study the way we live thoroughly enough: the faces and the buildings are not ours, and the teachers aren’t like that.’ The painter was said to have ‘depicted our life untypically: for instance, all the students look very serious, but they are like that only at lectures,’ and ‘the girls are, for some reason, shown as very middle-aged-looking, as though they were teachers.’126