The Thinking Reed

It is interesting that the viewer judged the fresco in accordance with the socialist-realist stereotype and his ideas were expressed in the language of the newspapers, of officialdom! The same interrogatees were convinced ‘that the purpose of painting is, basically, practical… This thinking in terms of utility,’ the sociologists comment, ‘this assignment to a painting of a practical, functional purpose eliminates any possibility of perceiving its uniqueness as a work of art.’127 Finally, their thinking was also marked by normativeness: ‘In their judgements they often used such expressions as “the artist ought to be”, “he should have shown”, “it was necessary to depict”, “it oughtn’t to be done like that”, and so on.’128

It is important to remember that this research was carried out at the end of the 1970s. Students are, as a rule, very well informed about matters related to the popular and narrative arts — the stage, literature, the cinema, television. Generally speaking, it must be said, an old ideology does not collapse all at once but ‘departs bit by bit’, losing its foothold in one sphere while still keeping it in another. The socialist-realist way of seeing things was shown here, first and foremost, in an obvious inability to understand contemporary painting, and that is very significant. Of course, by no means all the students who were questioned answered like those quoted above. Moreover, the socialist-realist perception of images was already by the 1970s not completely orthodox, having been partly depoliticized. The stereotypes of the 1930s and 1940s were much stricter. Interesting also was the presence of a large number of inside-out socialist-realists, who said that ‘real’ art is when everything is ‘unlike life’, when everything is the other way round.

Perhaps this concrete sociological investigation reveals the essence of ‘socialist realism’ better than any theoretical criticism. Every system of art has its ‘model viewer’, and this model tells us more about the given system than any statements made by its supporters and opponents. Social changes bring about the death of old aesthetic dogmas, because the actually existing ‘model viewer’ begins to change, and then no declarations, threats or bans can save what has outlived itself. Here, however, we are anticipating somewhat.

In concluding our discussion of the Stalinist conception of artistic creativity we must describe one more of its characteristic features. According to this theory, art must be free from conflict (this was said openly), or else the conflicts or real life must be replaced by invented, illusory or secondary ones. Typical of the classical ‘socialist realism’ of the 1940s was a conscious utopianism, the creation of a ‘second reality’, of what André Malraux called ‘a fictitious world’.129 Art’s task here was not the cognition of reality by artistic means but the fashioning of an anti-reality while trying in every way to present this fictitious world as the only real one. For this reason ‘socialist realism’ was frequently and correctly described as ‘utopia in lifelike forms’.

What is true is not what actually exists but what ought to exist, what is ‘correct’ from the standpoint of official ideology. Lunacharsky spoke frankly on this point: