The film "Circus" directed by Grigory Aleksandrov ends as follows: a demonstration, people in white clothes with shining faces march to the song "Wide is my native land". This shot a year after the film's release, in 1937, will literally be repeated in Alexander Deyneka's monumental panel "The Stakhanovites" - except that instead of a black child sitting on the shoulder of one of the demonstrators, a white one will be put on the shoulder of the Stakhanovite. And then the same composition will be used in the giant canvas "Noble People of the Land of the Soviets", painted by a team of artists under the leadership of Vasily Efanov: this is a collective portrait, where heroes of labor, polar explorers, pilots, akyns and artists are presented together. Such a genre is the apotheosis - and it most of all gives a visual idea of \u200b\u200bthe style, which almost monopolistically dominated Soviet art for more than two decades. Socialist realism, or, as the critic Boris Groys called it, "the Stalin style."

A still from the film "Circus" by Grigory Alexandrov. 1936 year Film studio "Mosfilm"

Socialist realism became an official term in 1934, after Gorky used this phrase at the First Congress of Soviet Writers (before that, there were casual uses). Then it got into the charter of the Writers' Union, but it was explained completely indistinctly and very loudly: about the ideological education of a person in the spirit of socialism, about the depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. This vector - striving for the future, revolutionary development - could somehow be applied to literature, because literature is a temporary art, it has a plot sequence and the evolution of heroes is possible. And how to apply this to the visual arts is not clear. Nevertheless, the term spread to the entire spectrum of culture and became mandatory for everything.

The main customer, addressee and consumer of socialist realism art was the state. It viewed culture as a means of agitation and propaganda. Accordingly, the canon of socialist realism made it a duty for the Soviet artist and writer to depict exactly what the state wants to see. This concerned not only the subject matter, but also the form, the way of the image. Of course, there might not have been a direct order, the artists worked, as it were, at the call of their hearts, but there was a certain receiving authority over them, and it was deciding whether, for example, a painting should be in the exhibition and whether the author deserved encouragement, or quite the opposite. Such a vertical power structure on the issue of purchases, orders and other ways to encourage creative activity. Critics have often played the role of this host. Despite the fact that there were no normative poetics and sets of rules in socialist realist art, criticism was good at catching and broadcasting the supreme ideological vibes. In tone, this criticism could be mocking, destructive, repressive. She administered the judgment and confirmed the verdict.

The system of state orders took shape back in the twenties, and then the main hired artists were members of the AHRR - the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. The need to fulfill the social order was recorded in their declaration, and the customers were state bodies: the Revolutionary Military Council, the Red Army, and so on. But then this custom art existed in a diverse field, among many completely different initiatives. There were communities of a completely different kind - avant-garde and not entirely avant-garde: they all competed for the right to be the main art of our time. AHRR won this fight because its aesthetics matched both the tastes of power and the mass taste. Painting, which simply illustrates and records the scenes of reality, is understandable to everyone. And it is natural that after the forced dissolution of all art groups in 1932, it was this aesthetics that became the basis of socialist realism - mandatory for execution.

Socialist realism has a rigidly built hierarchy of painting genres. On its top, not - the so-called thematic painting. It is a pictorial story with the right emphasis. The plot has to do with modernity - and if not with modernity, then with those situations of the past that promise us this wonderful modernity. As it was said in the definition of socialist realism: reality in its revolutionary development.

In such a picture, there is often a conflict of forces - but which of the forces is right is demonstrated unambiguously. For example, in Boris Ioganson's painting At the Old Ural Factory, the figure of the worker is in the light, and the figure of the exploiter-manufacturer is submerged in the shadow; besides, the artist rewarded him with a repulsive appearance. In his painting Interrogation of Communists, we see only the back of the head of the white officer conducting the interrogation - the back of the head is fat and folded.

Boris Ioganson. At the old Ural plant. 1937 year

Boris Ioganson. Interrogation of the communists. 1933 yearPhoto by RIA Novosti,

Thematic paintings with a historical-revolutionary content merged with battle paintings and historical ones proper. Historical ones went mainly after the war, and in terms of genre they are close to the already described apotheosis paintings - such an opera aesthetics. For example, in the painting by Aleksandra Bubnov "Morning on the Kulikovo Field", where the Russian army is waiting for the beginning of the battle with the Tatar-Mongols. Apotheosis was also created on conventionally modern material - such are the two "Kolkhoz Holidays" of 1937, by Sergei Gerasimov and Arkady Plastov: a triumphant abundance in the spirit of the later film "Kuban Cossacks". In general, the art of socialist realism loves abundance - there should be a lot of everything, because abundance is joy, fullness and fulfillment of aspirations.

Alexander Bubnov. Morning at the Kulikovo field. 1943-1947 yearsState Tretyakov Gallery

Sergey Gerasimov. Collective farm holiday. 1937 yearPhoto by E. Kogan / RIA Novosti; State Tretyakov Gallery

In socialist realist landscapes, scale is also important. Very often this is a panorama of the "Russian expanse" - as if an image of the whole country in a specific landscape. Fyodor Shurpin's painting "The Morning of Our Motherland" is a vivid example of such a pey-zazh. True, the landscape here is only a background for the figure of Stalin, but in other similar panoramas, Stalin seems to be invisibly present. And it is important that the music compositions are horizontally oriented - not an aspiring vertical, not a dynamically active diagonal, but horizontal statics. This world is unchanging, already accomplished.

Fyodor Shurpin. Morning of our homeland. 1946-1948 years State Tretyakov Gallery

On the other hand, hyperbolized industrial landscapes are very popular - giant construction sites, for example. Motherland is building Magnitka, Dneproges, factories, factories, power plants and so on. Gigantism, the pathos of quantity - this is also a very important feature of socialist realism. It is not formulated directly, but it manifests itself not only at the level of the theme, but also in the way everything is drawn: the expressive fabric becomes noticeably heavier and denser.

Incidentally, former Jacks of Diamonds, such as Lentulov, are very successful in portraying industrial giants. The materiality inherent in their painting turned out to be very useful in the new situation.

And in portraits this material pressure is very noticeable, especially in women. Already not only at the level of the picturesque texture, but even in the entourage. Such a weaving-nevy weight - velvet, plush, furs, and everything feels a little wasted, with an antique touch. Such is, for example, Johanson's portrait of the actress Zer-kalova; Ilya Mashkov has such portraits - quite salon ones.

Boris Ioganson. Portrait of Darya Zerkalova, Honored Artist of the RSFSR. 1947 year Photo by Abram Shterenberg / RIA Novosti; State Tretyakov Gallery

And in general, portraits in an almost enlightening spirit are viewed as a way to glorify outstanding people who, through their labor, have earned the right to portrait. Sometimes these works are presented right in the text of the portrait: here is Academician Pavlov intensely pondering in his laboratory against the background of biological stations, here is the surgeon Yudin doing the operation, here the sculptor Vera Mukhina sculpts a statuette of Borey. These are all portraits created by Mikhail Nesterov. In the 80s and 90s of the XIX century, he was the creator of his own genre of monastic idylls, then he fell silent for a long time, and in the 1930s he suddenly turned out to be the main Soviet portrait painter. And the teacher of Pavel Korin, whose portraits of Gorky, actor Leonidov or Marshal Zhukov, in terms of their monumental structure, already resemble monuments.

Mikhail Nesterov. Portrait of the sculptor Vera Mukhina. 1940 yearPhoto by Alexey Bushkin / RIA Novosti; State Tretyakov Gallery

Mikhail Nesterov. Portrait of the surgeon Sergei Yudin. 1935 yearPhoto by Oleg Ignatovich / RIA Novosti; State Tretyakov Gallery

Monumentality extends even to still lifes. And they are called, for example, by the same Mashkov, epically - "Moscow food" or "Soviet breads" ... The former "jacks of diamonds" are generally the first in terms of subject wealth. For example, in 1941, Pyotr Konchalovsky painted the painting "Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy visiting the artist" - and in front of the writer a ham, slices of red fish, baked poultry, cucumbers, tomatoes, lemon, glasses for various drinks ... But the trend towards monumentalization is common ... Anything heavy and solid is welcome. Deineka's athletic bodies of his characters are heavy, gaining weight. Alexander Samokhvalov in the series "Metrostroyevki" and other masters from the former association"Circle of Artists" the motive of the "big figure" appears - such female deities, personifying the earthly power and the power of creation. And the painting itself becomes heavy, thick. But go-stop - in moderation.

Pyotr Konchalovsky. Alexey Tolstoy visiting the artist. 1941 year Photo by RIA Novosti, State Tretyakov Gallery

Because moderation is also an important sign of style. On the one hand, a brush stroke should be noticeable - a sign that the artist has worked. If the texture is smoothed, then the work of the author is not visible - but it should be visible. And, say, for the same Deineka, who used to operate with solid color planes, now the surface of the picture is made more prominent. On the other hand, superfluous maestria is also not encouraged - it is immodest, it is protruding oneself. The word "protruding" sounds very ominous in the 1930s, when a campaign was being waged against formalism - in painting, in a children's book, in music, and everywhere else. It is, as it were, a struggle against wrong influences, but in fact it is a struggle in general with any manner, with any methods. After all, the reception casts doubt on the sincerity of the artist, and sincerity is an absolute fusion with the subject of the image. Sincerity does not imply any mediation, and reception, influence is mediation.

However, there are different methods for different tasks. For example, a certain colorless, "rainy" impressionism is quite suitable for lyrical subjects. It manifested itself not only in the genres of Yuri Pimenov - in his painting "New Moscow", where a girl drives in an open car through the center of the capital, enchanted by new construction projects, or in the later "New Quarters" - a series about the construction of suburban neighborhoods. But, for example, in the huge canvas by Alexander Gerasimov "Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov in the Kremlin" (popular name - "Two leaders after the rain"). The atmosphere of rain denotes human warmth, openness to each other. Of course, such an impressionistic language cannot be in the depiction of parades and celebrations - everything is still extremely strict, academic.

Yuri Pimenov. New Moscow. 1937 yearPhoto by A. Saykov / RIA Novosti; State Tretyakov Gallery

Alexander Gerasimov. Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov in the Kremlin. 1938 yearPhoto by Viktor Velikzhanin / TASS photo chronicle; State Tretyakov Gallery

It has already been said that socialist realism has a futuristic vector - striving towards the future, towards the result of revolutionary development. And since the victory of socialism is inevitable, the signs of the accomplished future are also present in the present. It turns out that time collapses in socialist realism. The present is already the future, and such, beyond which there will be no next future. The story reached its highest peak and stopped. Deinek's Stakhanovites in white robes are no longer people - they are celestials. And they are not even looking at us, but somewhere into eternity - which is already here, already with us.

Somewhere around 1936-1938, this gets its final look. Here the highest point of socialist realism - and Stalin becomes the obligatory hero. His appearance in the paintings of Efanov, or Svarog, or anyone else looks like a miracle - and this is the biblical motive of a miraculous phenomenon, traditionally associated, of course, with completely different characters. But this is how genre memory works. At this moment, socialist realism really becomes a great style, a style of totalitarian utopia - only this is a utopia that has come true. And since this utopia has come true, then there is a solidification of style - monumental academization.

And any other art, which was based on a different understanding of plastic values, turns out to be art forgotten, "under the closet", invisible. Of course, the artists had some kind of sinuses in which they could exist, where cultural skills were preserved and reproduced. For example, in 1935, at the Academy of Architecture, a Workshop of Monumental Painting was founded, led by artists of the old school - Vla-Dimir Favorsky, Lev Bruni, Konstantin Istomin, Sergei Romanovich, Niko-lai Chernyshev. But all such oases do not exist for long.

There is a paradox here. Totalitarian art in its verbal declarations is addressed specifically to man - the words "man", "humanity" are present in all the manifestos of socialist realism of this time. But in fact, socialist realism partly continues this messianic pathos of the avant-garde with its myth-making pathos, with its apology for the result, with the desire to remake the whole world - and among such pathos there is no room for an individual person. And the "quiet" painters who do not write declarations, but in reality just stand on the defense of the individual, petty, human, they are doomed to an invisible existence. And it is in this "closet" art that humanity continues to live.

Late 1950s Socialist Realism will try to appropriate it. Stalin, the cementing figure of the style, is no longer alive; his former subordinates are at a loss - in a word, the era is over. And in the 1950s and 60s, socialist realism wants to be socialist realism with a human face. There were some predictions a little earlier - for example, the paintings of Arkady Plastov on rural themes, and especially his painting "The Fascist Flew Away" about the senselessly killed boy shepherd.

Arkady Plastov. The fascist flew by. 1942 year Photo by RIA Novosti, State Tretyakov Gallery

But the most revealing are the paintings of Fyodor Reshetnikov "Arrived at the holidays", where a young Suvorovite salutes his grandfather at the New Year tree, and "Again a deuce" - about a careless schoolboy (by the way, on the wall of the room in the painting "Again a deuce" hangs a reproduction of the painting “Arrived on vacation” is a very touching detail). This is still socialist realism, this is a clear and detailed story - but the state thought, which was the basis of all the stories earlier, is transformed into a family thought, and the intonation changes. Socialist realism is becoming more intimate, now it is about the life of ordinary people. This also includes the late genres of Pimenov, as well as the work of Aleksan-dra Laktionov. His most famous painting "A Letter from the Front", which was sold in many postcards, is one of the main Soviet paintings. Here edification, didacticity, and sentimentality are such a socialist realist philistine style.

Socialist realism: the person is socially active and is included in the creation of history by violent means.

The philosophical foundation of socialist realism was Marxism, which asserts: 1) the proletariat is the messiah class, historically called upon to make a revolution and by violent means, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, to transform society from unjust to just; 2) at the head of the proletariat is a party of a new type, consisting of professionals who, after the revolution, are called upon to lead the construction of a new classless society in which people are deprived of private property (as it turned out, thereby people fall into absolute dependence on the state, and the state itself becomes de facto the property of the party bureaucracy that heads it).

These socio-utopian (and, as it turned out historically, inevitably leading to totalitarianism), philosophical and political postulates found their continuation in Marxist aesthetics, which directly underlies socialist realism. The main ideas of Marxism in aesthetics are as follows.

• 1. Art, possessing some relative independence from the economy, is due to the economy and artistic and thought traditions.
• 2. Art is capable of influencing the masses and mobilizing them.
• 3. Party leadership of art directs it in the right direction.
• 4. Art must be imbued with historical optimism and serve the cause of the movement of society towards communism. It must affirm the system established by the revolution. However, criticism is permissible at the level of the house manager and even the collective farm chairman; in exceptional circumstances 1941-1942 with Stalin's personal permission, criticism even of the front commander was allowed in A. Korneichuk's play "Front". 5. Marxist epistemology, which puts practice at the forefront, became the basis for interpreting the figurative nature of art. 6. The Leninist principle of partisanship continued the ideas of Marx and Engels about the class and tendentiousness of art and introduced the idea of \u200b\u200bserving the party into the very creative consciousness of the artist.

On this philosophical and aesthetic basis, socialist realism arose - an art engaged by the party bureaucracy that served the needs of a totalitarian society in the formation of a "new man". According to official aesthetics, this art reflected the interests of the proletariat, and later of the entire socialist society. Socialist realism is an artistic direction that affirms an artistic concept: a person is socially active and is included in the creation of history by violent means.

Western theorists and critics give their own definitions of socialist realism. According to the British critic J. A. Gooddon, “Socialist realism is an artistic credo developed in Russia to implement the Marxist doctrine and spread in other communist countries. This art affirms the goals of socialist society and views the artist as a servant of the state or, according to Stalin's definition, as an "engineer of human souls." Gooddon noted that socialist realism encroached on freedom of creativity, against which Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn rebelled, and "they were shamelessly used for propaganda purposes by the Western press."

Critics Karl Benson and Arthur Gatz write: “Socialist realism is traditional for the 19th century. the method of prose narration and drama, associated with themes that favorably interpret the socialist idea. In the Soviet Union, especially in the Stalinist era, as well as in other communist countries, it was artificially imposed on artists by the literary establishment. "

Inside the biased, semi-official art, like heresy, semi-official tolerant, politically neutral, but deeply humanistic (B. Okudzhava, V. Vysotsky, A. Galich) and fronder (A. Voznesensky) art developed. The latter is described in the epigram:

The poet with his poetry

Creates an all-world intrigue.

He is with the permission of the authorities

Shows the authorities fig.

socialist realism totalitarian proletariat marxist

During periods of softening of the totalitarian regime (for example, during the "thaw"), uncompromisingly truthful works also broke through the pages of the press ("One Day in Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn). However, even in harsher times, there was a "back door" next to ceremonial art: poets used the Aesopian language, went into children's literature, into literary translation. Outcast artists (underground) formed groups, associations (for example, "SMOG", the Lianozovo school of painting and poetry), unofficial exhibitions were created (for example, the "bulldozer" in Izmailovo) - all this helped to more easily endure the social boycott of publishing houses, exhibition committees, bureaucratic authorities and "cultural police stations".

The theory of socialist realism was filled with dogmas and vulgar sociological provisions and in this form was used as a means of bureaucratic pressure on art. This manifested itself in the authoritarianism and subjectivity of judgments and assessments, in interference in creative activity, violation of creative freedom, and tough commanding methods of art leadership. Such leadership cost the multinational Soviet culture dearly, affected the spiritual and moral state of society, the human and creative destiny of many artists.

Many artists, including the largest, during the years of Stalinism became victims of arbitrariness: E. Charents, T. Tabidze, B. Pilnyak, I. Babel, M. Koltsov, O. Mandelstam, P. Markish, V. Meyerhold, S. Mikhoels ... They were pushed aside from the artistic process and for years were silent or worked at a quarter of their strength, unable to show the results of their work, Yu. Olesha, M. Bulgakov, A. Platonov, V. Grossman, B. Pasternak. R. Falk, A. Tairov, A. Koonen.

The incompetence of art management was also reflected in the awarding of high prizes for opportunistic and weak works, which, despite the propaganda hype around them, not only did not enter the golden fund of artistic culture, but were generally quickly forgotten (S. Babaevsky, M. Bubennov, A. Surov, A. Sofronov).

Incompetence and authoritarianism, rudeness were not only personal characteristics of the character of party leaders, but (absolute power corrupts the leaders absolutely!) Became the style of party leadership in artistic culture. The very principle of party leadership in art is a false and anti-cultural idea.

Post-perestroika criticism has seen a number of important features of socialist realism. “Socialist Realism. He is not at all so odious, he has quite enough analogues. If you look at it without social pain and through the prism of cinema, it turns out that the famous American film of the thirties "Gone with the Wind" in its artistic merit is equivalent to the Soviet film of the same years "Circus". And if we return to literature, then Feuchtwanger's novels in their aesthetics are in no way polarizing to A. Tolstoy's epic "Peter the First" It was not for nothing that Feuchtwanger loved Stalin so much. Socialist realism is still the same "big style", but only in the Soviet way. " (Yarkevich. 1999) Socialist realism is not only an artistic direction (a stable concept of the world and personality) and a type of "grand style", but also a method.

The method of socialist realism as a way of figurative thinking, a way of creating a politically tendentious work fulfilling a certain social order, was applied far beyond the sphere of the domination of communist ideology, was used for purposes alien to the conceptual orientation of socialist realism as an artistic direction. For example, in 1972 at the Metropolitan Opera I saw a musical performance that struck me with its tendentiousness. A young student came on vacation to Puerto Rico, where he met a beautiful girl. They dance and sing merrily at the carnival. Then they decide to get married and fulfill their desire, and therefore the dances become especially temperamental. The only thing that upsets the young is that he is just a student, and she is a poor peyzan. However, this does not prevent them from singing and dancing. In the midst of the wedding fun, a blessing and a check for a million dollars for the newlyweds come from the student's parents from New York. Here the fun becomes unstoppable, all the dancers are arranged in a pyramidal shape - below are the Puerto Rican people, the distant relatives of the bride are higher, her parents are even higher, and at the very top is a rich American student groom and a poor Puerto Rican peyzan bride. Above them is the striped US flag with many stars on it. Everyone sings, and the bride and groom kiss, and at the moment their lips join, a new star lights up on the American flag, which means the emergence of a new American state - Puerto Rico is part of the United States. Among the most vulgar plays of Soviet drama, it is difficult to find a work that, in its vulgarity and straightforward political tendentiousness, reaches the level of this American performance. Isn't it the method of socialist realism?

According to the proclaimed theoretical postulates, socialist realism presupposes the inclusion of romance in figurative thinking - a figurative form of historical anticipation, a dream based on real trends in the development of reality and overtaking the natural course of events.

Socialist realism asserts the need for historicism in art: a historically concrete artistic reality must acquire "three-dimensionality" in it (the writer seeks to capture, in Gorky's words, "three realities" - past, present and future). Here socialist realism is invaded by

chairmen of the utopian ideology of communism, which firmly knows the path to the "bright future of mankind." However, for poetry, this striving for the future (even if it is utopian) was much attractive, and the poet Leonid Martynov wrote:

Do not honor

Myself standing

Only here, in existence,

Present,

And imagine yourself walking

On the border of the past with the future

Mayakovsky also introduces the future into the reality he portrays in the 1920s in the plays "Bedbug" and "Bathhouse". This image of the future appears in Mayakovsky's drama both in the form of the Phosphoric woman and in the form of a time machine that takes people worthy of communism into a distant and wonderful tomorrow and spits out bureaucrats and other "unworthy of communism." I would like to note that society will "spit out" many "unworthy" into the GULAG throughout its history, and some twenty-five years will pass after Mayakovsky wrote these plays and the concept of "unworthy of communism" will be widespread (by the "philosopher" D. Chesnokov, p. Stalin's approval) on entire peoples (already evicted from places of historical residence or subject to expulsion). This is how the artistic ideas of even the really "best and most talented poet of the Soviet era" (I. Stalin), who created works of art that were vividly embodied on the stage by V. Meyerhold and V. Pluchek, turned out. However, there is nothing surprising: reliance on utopian ideas, which include the principle of the historical improvement of the world through violence, could not but turn into a certain "podsuyukivanie" Gulag "next tasks".

Domestic art in the twentieth century. passed a number of stages, some of which enriched world culture with masterpieces, while others had a decisive (not always beneficial) impact on the artistic process in Eastern Europe and Asia (China, Vietnam, North Korea).

The first stage (1900-1917) - the Silver Age. Symbolism, acmeism, futurism are emerging and developing. In the novel "Mother" by Gorky, the principles of socialist realism are formed. Socialist realism emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. in Russia. Its founder was Maxim Gorky, whose artistic endeavors were continued and developed by Soviet art.

The second stage (1917-1932) is characterized by aesthetic polyphony and pluralism of artistic trends.

The Soviet government introduces severe censorship, Trotsky believes that it is directed against the "union of capital with prejudice." Gorky tries to resist this violence against culture, for which Trotsky disrespectfully calls him "a worthy psalm reader." Trotsky laid the foundation for the Soviet tradition of evaluating artistic phenomena not from an aesthetic, but from a purely political point of view. He gives political, not aesthetic characteristics of the phenomena of art: "cadetism", "joined", "fellow travelers". In this respect, Stalin will become a true Trotskyist and social utilitarianism, political pragmatics will become for him the dominant principles in his approach to art.

During these years, the formation of socialist realism and the discovery by it of an active personality participating in the creation of history through violence took place, according to the utopian model of the classics of Marxism. In art, the problem of a new artistic concept of personality and the world arose.

There was a sharp controversy around this concept in the 1920s. As the highest human dignity, the art of socialist realism glorifies socially important and significant qualities - heroism, dedication, self-sacrifice ("The Death of the Commissar" by Petrov-Vodkin), dedication ("give your heart to break times" - Mayakovsky).

The inclusion of the individual in the life of society becomes an important task of art and this is a valuable feature of socialist realism. However, the individual's own interests are not taken into account. Art claims that a person's personal happiness lies in dedication and service to the “happy future of mankind”, and the source of historical optimism and the fullness of a person’s life with social meaning lies in her involvement in the creation of a new “just society”. This pathos is imbued with the novels “Iron Stream” , "Chapaev" by Furmanov, the poem "Good" by Mayakovsky. In Sergei Eisenstein's films Strike, Battleship Potemkin, the fate of the individual is relegated to the background by the fate of the masses. The plot is what in humanistic art, concerned with the fate of the individual, was only a secondary element, a "public background", "social landscape", "mass scene", "epic retreat."

However, some artists deviated from the dogmas of socialist realism. Thus, S. Eisenstein did not completely eliminate the individual hero, did not sacrifice him to history. The mother evokes the strongest compassion in the episode on the Odessa stairs ("Battleship Potemkin"). At the same time, the director remains in the mainstream of socialist realism and does not close the viewer's sympathy on the personal fate of the character, but concentrates the audience on experiencing the drama of the story itself and asserts the historical necessity and legitimacy of the revolutionary performance of the Black Sea sailors.

An invariant of the artistic concept of socialist realism at the first stage of its development: a person in the "iron stream" of history "pours like a drop with the masses." In other words, the meaning of a person's life is seen in self-sacrifice (the heroic ability of a person to join in the creation of a new reality is affirmed even at the cost of his direct daily interests, and sometimes at the cost of life itself), in involvement in the creation of history ("and there are no other worries!"). Pragmatic-political tasks are placed above moral postulates and humanistic orientations. So, E. Bagritsky calls:

And if the era commands: kill! - Kill.

And if the era orders: lie! - Lie.

At this stage, alongside socialist realism, other artistic trends develop, asserting their invariants of the artistic concept of the world and personality (constructivism - I. Selvinsky, K. Zelinsky, I. Ehrenburg; neo-romanticism - A. Green; acmeism - N. Gumilev , A. Akhmatova, imagism - S. Yesenin, Mariengof, symbolism - A. Blok; literary schools and associations arise and develop - LEF, napostovtsy, "Pass", RAPP).

The very concept of "socialist realism", which expressed the artistic and conceptual qualities of the new art, arose in the course of heated discussions and theoretical searches. These searches were a collective affair, in which many cultural figures took part in the late 1920s and early 1930s, defining the new method of literature in different ways: “proletarian realism” (F. Gladkov, Yu. Lebedinsky), “tendentious realism "(V. Mayakovsky)," monumental realism "(A. Tolstoy)," realism with a socialist content "(V. Stavsky). In the 30s, cultural figures are increasingly agreeing on the definition of the creative method of Soviet art as a method of socialist realism. "Literaturnaya Gazeta" on May 29, 1932, in the editorial "To Work!" wrote: "The masses demand from the artists sincerity, revolutionary socialist realism in the depiction of the proletarian revolution." The head of the Ukrainian writers' organization I. Kulik (Kharkov, 1932) said: “... conventionally, the method by which you and I could be guided should be called“ revolutionary socialist realism ”. At a meeting of writers at Gorky's apartment on October 25, 1932, socialist realism was called the artistic method of literature during the discussion. Later, collective efforts to develop a concept of the artistic method of Soviet literature were "forgotten" and everything was attributed to Stalin.

The third stage (1932-1956). During the formation of the Writers' Union in the first half of the 30s, socialist realism was defined as an artistic method that requires a writer to present truthfully and historically concretely reality in its revolutionary development; the task of educating the working people in the spirit of communism was emphasized. In this definition, there was nothing specifically aesthetic, nothing related to art itself. The definition oriented art towards political engagement and was equally applicable to history as a science, and to journalism, and to propaganda and agitation. At the same time, this definition of socialist realism was difficult to apply to such types of art as architecture, applied and decorative arts, music, to genres such as landscape, still life. Lyrics and satire essentially turned out to be beyond the specified understanding of the artistic method. It expelled from our culture or questioned major artistic values.

In the first half of the 30s. aesthetic pluralism is administratively suppressed, the idea of \u200b\u200ban active personality is deepening, but this personality does not always have an orientation towards truly humanistic values. The leader, the party and its goals are becoming the highest life values.

In 1941, war invades the life of the Soviet people. Literature and art are included in the spiritual support of the struggle against the fascist occupiers and victory. During this period, the art of socialist realism, where it does not fall into the primitiveness of agitation, most fully corresponds to the vital interests of the people.

In 1946, when our country was living with the joy of victory and the pain of huge losses, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution "On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad." A. Zhdanov made an explanation of the resolution at a meeting of party activists and writers of Leningrad.

Creativity and personality of M. Zoshchenko were characterized by Zhdanov in such "literary-critical" expressions: "bourgeois and vulgar", "non-Soviet writer", "dirty tricks and indecency", "turns his vulgar and low soul inside out", "unscrupulous and shameless literary bully".

It was said about A. Akhmatova that the range of her poetry was "limited to poverty", her work "cannot be tolerated on the pages of our magazines", that, "apart from harm," the works of this "nun" or "harlot" can give nothing to our youth.

Zhdanov's extreme literary-critical vocabulary is the only argument and instrument of "analysis." The harsh tone of literary teachings, elaboration, persecution, prohibitions, and soldier's interference in the work of artists were justified by the dictates of historical circumstances, the extremeness of the situations experienced, the constant exacerbation of the class struggle.

Socialist realism was bureaucratically used as a separator separating "permitted" ("our") art from "unlawful" ("not our"). Because of this, the diversity of domestic art was rejected, neo-romanticism was pushed aside to the periphery of artistic life or even beyond the boundaries of the artistic process (A. Green's story "Scarlet Sails", A. Rylov's painting "In the Blue Space"), new-realist existential event, humanistic art ( M. Bulgakov "White Guard", B. Pasternak "Doctor Zhivago", A. Platonov "Pit", sculpture by S. Konenkov, painting by P. Korin), realism of memory (painting by R. Falk and graphics by V. Favorsky), poetry of the state spirit of personality (M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam, A. Akhmatova, later I. Brodsky). History has put everything in its place and today it is clear that it is these works, rejected by semi-official culture, that constitute the essence of the artistic process of the era and are its main artistic achievements and aesthetic values.

The artistic method as a historically conditioned type of figurative thinking is determined by three factors: 1) reality, 2) the worldview of artists, 3) the artistic and mental material from which they proceed. The figurative thinking of the artists of socialist realism was based on the vital basis of the reality of the 20th century, which accelerated in its development, on the ideological basis of the principles of historicism and the dialectical understanding of life, based on the realistic traditions of Russian and world art. Therefore, for all its tendentiousness, socialist realism, in accordance with the realistic tradition, aimed the artist at creating a voluminous, aesthetically multicolored character. Such, for example, is the character of Grigory Melekhov in the novel "Quiet Don" by M. Sholokhov.

The fourth stage (1956-1984) - the art of socialist realism, affirming a historically active personality, began to think about its intrinsic value. If the artists did not directly touch the power of the party or the principles of socialist realism, the bureaucracy tolerated them; if they served, they rewarded them. “And if not, then no”: the persecution of B. Pasternak, the “bulldozer” dispersal of the exhibition in Izmailovo, the elaboration of artists “at the highest level” (Khrushchev) in the Manezh, the arrest of I. Brodsky, the expulsion of A. Solzhenitsyn ... - "Stages of the long journey" of party art leadership.

During this period, the statutory definition of socialist realism finally lost its credibility. The pre-sunset phenomena began to grow. All this affected the artistic process: it lost its bearings, “vibration” arose in it, on the one hand, the proportion of works of art and literary-critical articles of anti-humanist and nationalist orientation increased, on the other hand, works of apocryphal-dissident and unofficial democratic content appeared ...

Instead of the lost definition, the following can be given, reflecting the features of a new stage of literary development: socialist realism is a method (method, tool) of constructing artistic reality and the artistic direction corresponding to it, absorbing the socio-aesthetic experience of the 20th century, carrying an artistic concept: the world is not perfect, “the world must first be altered, altering can be sung”; the person must be socially active in the cause of violent change of the world.

Self-awareness awakens in this personality - a feeling of self-worth and protest against violence (P. Nilin "Cruelty").

Despite the continuing bureaucratic interference in the artistic process, despite the continuing reliance on the idea of \u200b\u200ba violent transformation of the world, vital impulses of reality, powerful artistic traditions of the past contributed to the emergence of a number of valuable works (Sholokhov's story "The Fate of a Man", M. Romm's films "Ordinary Fascism" and " Nine days of one year ”, M. Kalatozova“ The Cranes Are Flying ”, G. Chukhrai“ Forty-first ”and“ Ballad of a Soldier ”, S. Smirnova“ Belorussky Station ”). I note that especially a lot of bright and remaining in history works were devoted to the Patriotic War against the Nazis, which is explained by the real heroism of the era, and by the high civil-patriotic pathos that swept the entire society during this period, and by the fact that the main conceptual setting of socialist realism (the creation of history through violence) in the war years coincided with the vector of historical development and with the popular consciousness, and in this case did not contradict the principles of humanism.

Since the 60s. the art of socialist realism affirms the connection between man and the broad tradition of the national existence of the people (works by V. Shukshin and Ch. Aitmatov). In the first decades of its development, Soviet art (Vs. Ivanov and A. Fadeev in the images of Far Eastern partisans, D. Furmanov in the image of Chapaev, M. Sholokhov in the image of Davydov) captures the images of people breaking out of the traditions and life of the old world. It would seem that there has been a decisive and irrevocable break of the invisible threads connecting the personality with the past. However, the art of 1964-1984. pays more and more attention to how, by what traits a personality is connected with centuries-old psychological, cultural, ethnographic, everyday, ethical traditions, because it turned out that a person who broke with a national tradition in a revolutionary outburst is deprived of the soil for a socially expedient, humane life (Ch Aitmatov "White Steamer"). Without connection with the national culture, the personality turns out to be empty and destructively cruel.

A. Platonov put forward an artistic formula “ahead of time”: “The people are not complete without me”. This is a wonderful formula - one of the highest achievements of socialist realism at its new stage (despite the fact that this position was put forward and artistically proved by the outcast of socialist realism - Platonov, it could only grow on fertile, sometimes dead, and generally contradictory soil of this artistic direction). The same idea about the merging of the life of a person with the life of the people sounds in Mayakovsky's artistic formula: a person “pours like a drop with the masses”. However, the new historical period is felt in Platonov's emphasis on the intrinsic value of personality.

The history of socialist realism has instructively demonstrated that in art it is not opportunism that matters, but artistic truth, no matter how bitter and “inconvenient” it may be. The party leadership, the criticism that served him, and some of the postulates of socialist realism demanded from the works "artistic truth", which coincided with the momentary conjuncture that corresponded to the tasks set by the party. Otherwise, the work could be banned and thrown out of the artistic process, and the author was persecuted or even ostracized.

History shows that the "prohibitors" remained outside of it, and the forbidden work returned to it (for example, the poem by A. Tvardovsky "By the Right of Memory", "Terkin in the Next World").

Pushkin used to say: "A heavy mill, crushing glass, forges damask steel." In our country, a terrible totalitarian force “crushed” the intelligentsia, turning some into informers, others into drunkards, and still others into conformists. However, in some, she forged a deep artistic consciousness, combined with a huge life experience. This part of the intelligentsia (F. Iskander, V. Grossman, Y. Dombrovsky, A. Solzhenitsyn) created deep and uncompromising works under the most difficult circumstances.

While affirming the historically active personality even more decisively, the art of socialist realism for the first time begins to realize the reciprocity of the process: not only personality for history, but history for personality. The idea of \u200b\u200ba person's self-worth is beginning to break through the noisy slogans of serving the “happy future”.

The art of socialist realism in the spirit of belated classicism continues to assert the priority of the "general", the state over the "private", the personal. He continues to preach the involvement of the individual in the historical creativity of the masses. At the same time, in the novels of V. Bykov, Ch. Aitmatov, in the films of T. Abuladze, E. Klimov, performances by A. Vasiliev, O. Efremov, G. Tovstonogov, not only the theme of the responsibility of the individual to society, which is familiar to socialist realism, but also a theme arises that prepares the idea of \u200b\u200b"perestroika", the theme of society's responsibility for the fate and happiness of man.

Thus, socialist realism comes to self-denial. In him (and not only outside him, in disgraced and underground art), the idea begins to sound: man is not a fuel for history, giving energy for abstract progress. The future is being built by people for people. A person must give himself to people, egoistic isolation deprives life of meaning, turns it into absurdity (the advancement and approval of this idea is the merit of the art of socialist realism). If the spiritual growth of a person outside of society is fraught with degradation of the individual, then the development of society outside and outside of a person, contrary to his interests, is detrimental to both the individual and society. After 1984, these ideas will become the spiritual foundation of perestroika and glasnost, and after 1991 - the democratization of society. However, hopes for perestroika and democratization were far from fully realized. The relatively soft, stable and socially preoccupied regime of the Brezhnev type (totalitarianism with an almost human face) was replaced by a corrupt, unstable double democracy (an oligarchy with an almost criminal face), concerned about the division and redistribution of public property, and not the fate of the people and the state.

Just like the slogan of freedom put forward by the Renaissance "do what you want!" led to the crisis of the Renaissance (because not everyone wanted to do good), and the artistic ideas that prepared perestroika (everything for a person) turned into a crisis and perestroika, and of the whole society, because bureaucrats and democrats considered only themselves and some of their own kind as people; according to party, national and other group characteristics, people were divided into "ours" and "not ours."

The fifth period (mid-80s - 90s) - the end of socialist realism (it did not survive socialism and Soviet power) and the beginning of the pluralistic development of Russian art: new trends in realism developed (V. Makanin), socialist art appeared (Melamid, Komar), conceptualism (D. Prigov) and other postmodernist trends in literature and painting.

Today, democratically and humanistically oriented art acquires two opponents, undermining and destroying the highest humanistic values \u200b\u200bof mankind. The first opponent of the new art and new forms of life is social indifference, the egocentrism of a person who celebrates the historical liberation from state control and who has surrendered all responsibilities to society; the greed of the neophytes of the "market economy". Another adversary is the leftist-lumpen extremism of the dispossessed by self-serving, corrupt and stupid democracy, forcing people to look back at the communist values \u200b\u200bof the past with their herd collectivism, which destroys personality.

The development of society, its improvement must go through the person, in the name of the individual, and the self-valuable person, having unlocked social and personal egoism, must join the life of society and develop in harmony with it. It is a reliable reference point for art. Without an assertion of the need for social progress, literature degenerates, but it is important that progress should go not in spite of and not at the expense of man, but in his name. A happy society is that society in which history moves through the channel of the individual. Unfortunately, this truth turned out to be unknown or uninteresting either to the communist builders of the distant "bright future", or to shock therapists and other builders of the market and democracy. This truth is not very close to Western defenders of individual rights, who dropped bombs on Yugoslavia. For them, these rights are a tool to fight opponents and rivals, and not a real program of action.

The democratization of our society and the disappearance of party tutelage contributed to the publication of works whose authors seek to artistically comprehend the history of our society in all its drama and tragedy (the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, is especially significant in this respect).

The idea of \u200b\u200bsocialist realism aesthetics about the active influence of literature on reality turned out to be correct, but greatly exaggerated, in any case, artistic ideas do not become a “material force”. Igor Yarkevich writes in his article “Literature, aesthetics, freedom and other interesting things” published on the Internet: “Long before 1985, in all liberal-oriented gatherings, the slogan sounded like:“ If we publish the Bible and Solzhenitsyn tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow we will wake up in another country ” ... Domination over the world through literature - this idea warmed the hearts of not only the secretaries of the joint venture. "

It was thanks to the new atmosphere after 1985 that Boris Pilnyak's Tale of the Unquenched Moon, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Andrei Platonov's Foundation Pit, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, and other works that remained outside the reading circle for many years were published. Soviet man. There were new films “My friend Ivan Lapshin”, “Plumbum, or a dangerous game”, “Is it easy to be young”, “Taxi blues”, “Shouldn't we send a messenger”. Films of the last one and a half decades of the twentieth century. with pain they talk about the tragedies of the past ("Repentance"), express concern for the fate of the younger generation ("Courier", "Luna Park"), talk about hopes for the future. Some of these works will remain in the history of artistic culture, and all of them pave the way for new art and a new understanding of the fate of man and the world.

Perestroika has created a special cultural situation in Russia.

Culture is dialogical. Changes in the reader and his life experience lead to a change in literature, and not only born, but also existing. Its content changes. With "fresh and present eyes" the reader reads literary texts and finds in them previously unknown meaning and value. This law of aesthetics is especially clearly manifested in critical epochs, when the life experience of people changes dramatically.

The turning point of perestroika affected not only the social status and rating of literary works, but also the state of the literary process.

What is this state? All the main directions and trends of Russian literature have undergone a crisis, because the ideals, positive programs, variants, and artistic concepts of the world they proposed proved to be untenable. (The latter does not exclude the artistic significance of individual works, created most often at the cost of the writer's departure from the concept of direction. An example of this is V. Astafiev's relationship with village prose.)

The literature of a bright present and future (socialist realism in its "pure form") has left culture in the last two decades. The crisis of the very idea of \u200b\u200bbuilding communism deprived this trend of its ideological foundation and goals. One "Gulag Archipelago" is enough for all works showing life in a pink light to reveal their falsity.

The newest modification of socialist realism, the product of its crisis, was the National Bolshevik trend in literature. In a state-patriotic form, this direction is represented by the work of Prokhanov, who glorified the export of violence in the form of the invasion of Soviet troops into Afghanistan. The nationalist form of this trend can be found in the works published by the magazines "Young Guard" and "Our Contemporary". The collapse of this trend is clearly visible against the historical background of the flame, which burned twice (in 1934 and in 1945) the Reichstag. And no matter how this trend develops, historically it has already been refuted and is alien to world culture.

I have already noted above that in the course of the construction of the “new man”, connections with the deep layers of the national culture were weakened, and sometimes lost. This resulted in many disasters for the peoples over whom this experiment was conducted. And the disaster from the troubles was the new person's readiness for interethnic conflicts (Sumgait, Karabakh, Osh, Fergana, South Ossetia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Transnistria) and civil wars (Georgia, Tajikistan, Chechnya). Anti-Semitism was supplemented by rejection of “persons of Caucasian nationality”. The Polish intellectual Michnik is right: the highest and last stage of socialism is nationalism. Another sad confirmation of this is the non-peaceful divorce in Yugoslavian and peaceful in Czechoslovakian or Belovezhsky.

The crisis of socialist realism gave birth to the literary trend of socialist liberalism in the 70s. The idea of \u200b\u200bsocialism with a human face became the mainstay of this trend. The artist performed a hairdressing operation: the Stalinist mustache was shaved off the face of socialism and Lenin's beard was glued. The plays of M. Shatrov were created according to this scheme. This movement was forced to solve political problems with artistic means, when other means were closed. Writers put makeup on the face of barracks socialism. Shatrov gave a liberal interpretation of our history for those times, an interpretation capable of both satisfying and enlightening the higher authorities. Many viewers were delighted that Trotsky was given a hint, and this was already perceived as a discovery, or it was hinted that Stalin was not entirely good. This was received with delight by our half-crushed intelligentsia.

V. Rozov's plays were also written in the spirit of socialist liberalism and socialism with a human face. His young hero smashes furniture in the house of a former Chekist with his father's Budennovist saber removed from the wall, which was once used to chop off the White Guard counter. Today, such temporarily progressive works have turned from half-truthful and moderately attractive to false. The century of their triumph was short.

Another trend in Russian literature is the lumpen-intelligentsia literature. Lumpen intellectual is an educated person who knows something about something, does not have a philosophical view of the world, does not feel personal responsibility for it and is used to thinking “freely” within the framework of cautious frontierism. Lumpen-writer owns a borrowed, created by masters of the past, art form, which gives his work some attractiveness. However, he is not given to apply this form to real problems of being: his consciousness is empty, he does not know what to say to people. The lumpen intellectuals use the refined form to convey highly artistic thoughts about nothing. This is often the case with modern poets who own poetic technique, but lack the ability to comprehend modernity. The lumpen-writer puts forward his own alter ego as a literary hero, a man of an empty, weak-willed, petty shkodnik, capable of “grasping what lies badly,” but incapable of love, unable to give a woman happiness or become happy himself. Such is, for example, the prose of M. Roshchin. An intellectual lumpen cannot be either a hero or a creator of high literature.

One of the products of the disintegration of socialist realism was the neo-critical naturalism of Kaledin and other denouncers of the "leaden abominations" of our army, cemetery and city life. This is a description of everyday life like Pomyalovsky, only with less culture and less literary ability.

Another manifestation of the crisis of socialist realism was the "camp" trend in literature. Unfortunately, many products

the conduct of "camp" literature turned out to be at the level of the above-mentioned description of everyday life and lacked philosophical and artistic greatness. However, since these works were about everyday life unfamiliar to the general reader, his "exotic" details aroused great interest and the works that convey these details turned out to be socially significant and sometimes artistically valuable.

The literature of the GULAG brought into the people's consciousness a huge tragic life experience of camp life. This literature will remain in the history of culture, especially in such its highest manifestations as the works of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov.

Neo-emigre literature (V. Voinovich, S. Dovlatov, V. Aksenov, Yu. Aleshkovsky, N. Korzhavin), living the life of Russia, has done a lot for the artistic understanding of our existence. “You can't see a face face to face” and at an emigrant distance, writers really manage to see a lot of important things in a particularly bright light. In addition, neo-emigrant literature has its own powerful Russian emigre tradition, which includes Bunin, Kuprin, Nabokov, Zaitsev, Gazdanov. Today all emigre literature has become a part of our Russian literary process, a part of our spiritual life.

At the same time, bad tendencies were outlined in the neo-emigrant wing of Russian literature: 1) the division of Russian writers on the basis of: left (\u003d decent and talented) - did not leave (\u003d dishonorable and incompetent); 2) a fashion has arisen: living in a cozy and well-fed far away, to give categorical advice and assessments of events on which emigre life is almost independent, but which threaten the very life of citizens in Russia. There is something immodest and even immoral in such "advice of an outsider" (especially when they are categorical and in the underwater current contain an intention: you idiots in Russia do not understand the simplest things).

Everything good in Russian literature was born as something critical, opposed to the existing order of things. This is normal. This is the only way in a totalitarian society the birth of cultural values \u200b\u200bis possible. However, a simple denial, a simple criticism of the existing one does not yet give way to the highest literary achievements. Higher values \u200b\u200bappear along with a philosophical vision of the world and intelligible ideals. If Leo Tolstoy was just talking about the abominations of life, he would be Gleb Uspensky. But this is not a global level. Tolstoy, on the other hand, developed an artistic concept of non-resistance to evil by violence, of the inner self-improvement of the individual; he argued that violence can only destroy, but you can build with love, and you should transform yourself first of all.

This concept of Tolstoy foresaw the twentieth century, and, if heeded, it would have prevented the calamities of this century. Today she helps to understand and overcome them. We lack a concept of this magnitude, covering our era and going into the future. And when it appears, we will have great literature again. She is on her way, and this is guaranteed by the traditions of Russian literature and the tragic life experience of our intelligentsia, gained in the camps, in queues, at work and in the kitchen.

The peaks of Russian and world literature "War and Peace", "Crime and Punishment", "The Master and Margarita" are behind and ahead of us. The fact that we had Ilf and Petrov, Platonov, Bulgakov, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova gives confidence in the great future of our literature. The unique tragic life experience that our intelligentsia gained in suffering, and the great traditions of our artistic culture cannot but lead to the creative act of creating a new artistic world, to the creation of true masterpieces. No matter how the historical process goes and no matter what setbacks happen, a country with huge potential will historically come out of the crisis. Artistic and philosophical achievements await us in the near future. They will come before economic and political achievements.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Socialist realism - the artistic method of literature and art, built on the socialist concept of the world and man. According to this concept, the artist was supposed to serve the construction of a socialist society with his works. Consequently, socialist realism was supposed to reflect life in the light of the ideals of socialism. The concept of "realism" is literary, and the concept of "socialist" is ideological. By themselves, they contradict each other, but in this theory of art they merge. As a result, the norms and criteria dictated by the Communist Party were formed, and the artist, be he a writer, sculptor or painter, had to create in accordance with them.

The literature of socialist realism was an instrument of party ideology. The writer was interpreted as an "engineer of human souls." With his talent, he was supposed to influence the reader as a propagandist. He brought up the reader in the spirit of the Party and at the same time supported her in the struggle for the victory of communism. The subjective actions and aspirations of the personalities of the heroes of the works of socialist realism had to be brought into line with the objective course of history.

In the center of the work, there must have been a positive hero:

• He is an ideal communist and an example for a socialist society.
• He is a progressive person who is alien to the doubts of the soul.

Lenin expressed the following idea that art should be on the side of the proletariat: “Art belongs to the people. The deepest springs of art can be found among a wide class of working people ... Art must be based on their feelings, thoughts and demands and must grow with them. " In addition, he clarified: “Literature must become party literature ... Down with non-party writers. Down with the writers of supermen! Literary work must become a part of the general proletarian cause, cogs and wheels of one single great Social Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the entire working class. "

The founder of socialist realism in literature, Maksim Gorky (1868-1936), wrote the following about socialist realism: the meanness of his bloody intentions and all the greatness of the heroic work of the proletariat-dictator is visible. " He also argued: "... a writer must have a good knowledge of the history of the past and knowledge of social phenomena of our time, in which he is called upon to play simultaneously two roles: the role of a midwife and a gravedigger."

A.M. Gorky believed that the main task of socialist realism is to educate a socialist, revolutionary view of the world, corresponding to a sense of the world.

To follow the method of socialist realism, composing poetry and novels, creating paintings, etc. it is necessary to subordinate the goals of exposing the crimes of capitalism and the praise of socialism in order to inspire readers and viewers to revolution, igniting their minds with just anger. The method of socialist realism was formulated by Soviet cultural figures under the leadership of Stalin in 1932. It covered all spheres of artistic activity (literature, drama, cinema, painting, sculpture, music and architecture). The method of socialist realism asserted the following principles:

1) describe reality accurately, in accordance with a specific historical revolutionary development; 2) coordinate their artistic expression with the themes of ideological reforms and the education of workers in a socialist spirit.

The principles of socialist realism

1. Nationality. The heroes of the works must come from the people, and the people are, first of all, workers and peasants.
2. Party membership. Show heroic deeds, building a new life, revolutionary struggle for a brighter future.
3. Concreteness. In depicting reality, show the process of historical development, which in turn must correspond to the doctrine of historical materialism (matter is primary, consciousness is secondary).

The Soviet era is usually called the period of national history of the XX century, covering 1917-1991. At this time, the Soviet artistic culture took shape and experienced the peak of its development. An important milestone on the path of the formation of the main artistic direction of art of the Soviet era, which later came to be called "socialist realism", were works that assert the understanding of history as a relentless class struggle in the name of the ultimate goal - the elimination of private property and the establishment of the power of the people (M. Gorky's story "Mother ", His play" Enemies "). In the development of art in the 1920s, two tendencies are clearly visible, which can be traced to the example of literature. On the one hand, a number of prominent writers did not accept the proletarian revolution and emigrated from Russia. On the other hand, some creators poeticized reality, believed in the heights of the goals that the communists set for Russia. Hero of the literature of the 20s. - a Bolshevik with a superhuman iron will. In this vein, the works of V. V. Mayakovsky ("Left March"), A. A. Blok ("Twelve") were created. A rather variegated picture was presented by the fine arts of the 1920s. Several groups emerged in it. The most significant was the group "Association of Artists of the Revolution". They depicted the present day: the life of the Red Army, the life of the workers, peasants, revolutionaries and labor. " They considered themselves the heirs of the Itinerants. They went to factories, factories, to the Red Army barracks to directly observe the life of their characters, to "sketch" it. In another creative community - OST (Society of Easel Painters), young people who graduated from the first Soviet art university were united. The OST motto is the development in easel painting of themes that reflect the signs of the 20th century: an industrial city, industrial production, sports, etc. In contrast to the masters of the Academy of Arts, the "Ostovites" saw their aesthetic ideal not in the works of their predecessors, the "Itinerant" artists, but in the newest European trends.

Some works of socialist realism

• Maxim Gorky, the novel "Mother"
• group of authors, the painting "Speech by V. I. Lenin at the 3rd Congress of the Komsomol"
• Arkady Plastov, painting "The Fascist flew by" (Tretyakov Gallery)
• A. Gladkov, novel "Cement"
• film "Pig and Shepherd"
• the film "Tractor Drivers"
• Boris Ioganson, painting "Interrogation of the Communists" (TG)
• Sergei Gerasimov, painting "Partisan" (State Tretyakov Gallery)
• Fyodor Reshetnikov, painting "Two Again" (Tretyakov Gallery)
• Yuri Neprintsev, painting "After the battle" (Vasily Terkin)
• Vera Mukhina, sculpture "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" (at VDNKh)
• Mikhail Sholokhov, "Quiet Don" novel
• Alexander Laktionov, "Letter from the Front" (Tretyakov Gallery)

To understand how and why socialist realism arose, it is necessary to briefly describe the socio-historical and political situation of the first three decades of the beginning of the 20th century, because this method, like no other, was politicized. The dilapidation of the monarchical regime, its numerous miscalculations and failures (the Russo-Japanese war, corruption at all levels of government, brutality in suppressing demonstrations and riots, "Rasputinism", etc.) gave rise to massive discontent in Russia. In intellectual circles, it has become a rule of good form to be in opposition to the government. A significant part of the intelligentsia falls under the spell of the teachings of Karl Marx, who promised to arrange the society of the future on new, just conditions. The Bolsheviks declared themselves true Marxists, distinguished from other parties by the scale of their ideas and the "scientific" forecasts. And although few people really studied Marx, it became fashionable to be a Marxist, and therefore a supporter of the Bolsheviks.

This epidemic also affected M. Gorky, who began as an admirer of Nietzsche and by the beginning of the 20th century had gained widespread popularity in Russia as a herald of the coming political "storm." In the writer's work, images of proud and strong people appear, rebelling against a gray and gloomy life. Later, Gorky recalled: “When I first wrote a Man with a Capital Letter, I still did not know what kind of a great man he was. His image was not clear to me. In 1903, I realized that the Man with a Capital Letter was embodied in the Bolsheviks headed by Lenin. ".

Gorky, who had almost outlived his fascination with Nietzscheism, expressed his new knowledge in the novel Mother (1907). There are two central lines in the novel. In Soviet literary criticism, especially in school and university courses in the history of literature, the figure of Pavel Vlasov was brought to the fore, growing from an ordinary artisan to the leader of the working masses. In the image of Paul, the central Gorky concept is embodied, according to which the true master of life is a person endowed with reason and rich in spirit, at the same time a practical figure and a romantic, confident in the possibility of practical realization of the eternal dream of mankind - to build on Earth a kingdom of reason and goodness. Gorky himself believed that his main merit as a writer was that he was "the first in Russian literature and, perhaps, the first in life like this, personally, to understand the greatest significance of labor - labor that forms everything that is most valuable, everything beautiful, everything great in this world. "

In "Mother" the labor process and its role in the transformation of the personality is only declared, and yet it is the man of labor who is made in the novel the mouthpiece of the author's thought. Subsequently, Soviet writers will take this oversight of Gorky into account, and the production process in all its subtleties will be described in works about the working class.

Having in the person of Chernyshevsky predecessor, who created the image of a positive hero fighting for universal happiness, Gorky first also painted heroes towering over everyday life (Chelkash, Danko, Petrel). In "Mother" Gorky said a new word. Pavel Vlasov is not like Rakhmetov, who everywhere feels free and at ease, knows everything and can do everything, and is endowed with heroic strength and character. Paul is a crowd man. He is "like everyone else," only his faith in justice and the necessity of the cause he serves is stronger and stronger than that of others. And here he rises to such heights that Rakhmetov was unknown. Rybin says about Pavel: “The man knew that they could hit him with a bayonet, and they would slaughter him with hard labor, but he went. His mother would lie to him on the way - would have stepped over. Would I, Nilovna, go over you?” “Would I go!” Said the mother ... "And Andrey Nakhodka, one of the characters most dear to the author, is in solidarity with Pavel (" For my comrades, for the cause - I can do anything! And I will kill. At least my son ... ").

Even in the 1920s, Soviet literature, reflecting the cruel intensity of passions in the Civil War, narrated how a girl kills her beloved - an ideological enemy ("Forty-first" by B. Lavrenev), how brothers, scattered by a whirlwind of revolution in different countries, destroy each other, how sons put to death their fathers, and they execute children ("Don stories" by M. Sholokhov, "Cavalry" by I. Babel, etc.), but the writers still avoided touching on the problem of ideological antagonism between mother and son.

The image of Paul in the novel is recreated with sharp poster strokes. Here in the house of Pavel, artisans and intellectuals gather and conduct political disputes, here he leads a crowd indignant at the arbitrariness of the management (the story of the "swamp penny"), here Vlasov walks on the demonstration in front of the column with a red banner in his hands, here he says in court accusatory speech. The thoughts and feelings of the hero are revealed mainly in his speeches, the inner world of Paul is hidden from the reader. And this is not Gorky's miscalculation, but his credo. "I," he once emphasized, "begin with a person, and a person begins for me with his thought." That is why the protagonists of the novel so willingly and often come up with declarative justifications for their activities.

However, it is not for nothing that the novel is called "Mother" and not "Pavel Vlasov". Paul's rationalism sets off the mother's emotionality. She is motivated not by reason, but by love for her son and his comrades, since she feels in her heart that they want good for everyone. Nilovna does not really understand what Pavel is talking about with his friends, but she believes that they are right. And this faith in her is akin to religious.

Nilovna, and “before meeting new people and ideas, she was a deeply religious woman. But here's the paradox: this religiosity almost does not interfere with the mother, and more often helps to penetrate the light of the new creed carried by her son, the socialist and atheist Pavel.<...> And even later, her new revolutionary enthusiasm takes on the character of some kind of religious exaltation, when, for example, going to a village with illegal literature, she feels like a young praying mantis who goes to a distant monastery to worship a miraculous icon. Or - when the words of a revolutionary song at a demonstration are mixed in the mind of the mother with Easter singing for the glory of the risen Christ. "

And young atheist revolutionaries themselves often resort to religious phraseology and parallels. The same Nakhodka addresses the demonstrators and the crowd: "We now went on a procession in the name of the new god, the god of light and truth, the god of reason and goodness! Our goal is far from us, the crown of thorns is close!" Another of the characters in the novel declares that the proletarians of all countries have one common religion - the religion of socialism. Paul hangs in his room a reproduction depicting Christ and the apostles on the way to Emmaus (Nilovna then compares her son and his companions with this picture). Already engaged in distributing leaflets and becoming her own in the circle of revolutionaries, Nilovna "began to pray less, but more and more thought about Christ and about people who, without mentioning his name, as if not even knowing about him, lived - it seemed to her - according to his behests and, like him, considering the land the kingdom of the poor, they wished to divide equally among the people all the riches of the earth. " Some researchers generally see in Gorky's novel a modification of the "Christian myth of the Savior (Pavel Vlasov) sacrificing himself in the name of all mankind and his mother (that is, the Mother of God)."

All these traits and motives, if they appeared in some work of a Soviet writer of the thirties and forties, would immediately be regarded by critics as "slander" against the proletariat. However, in Gorky's novel, these aspects of him were hushed up, since "Mother" was declared the source of socialist realism, and it was impossible to explain these episodes from the standpoint of the "main method".

The situation was further complicated by the fact that such motives in the novel were not accidental. In the early nine hundredths V. Bazarov, A. Bogdanov, N. Valentinov, A. Lunacharsky, M. Gorky and a number of other lesser-known Social Democrats in their search for philosophical truth departed from orthodox Marxism and became supporters of Machism. The aesthetic side of Russian Machism was substantiated by Lunacharsky, from whose point of view already obsolete Marxism became "the fifth great religion." Both Lunacharsky himself and his associates also attempted to create a new religion that professed the cult of strength, the cult of the superman, free from lies and oppression. In this doctrine, elements of Marxism, Machism and Nietzscheanism are intricately intertwined. Gorky shared and in his work popularized this system of views, known in the history of Russian social thought under the name of "god-building."

First G. Plekhanov, and then even more sharply and Lenin, criticized the views of the breakaway allies. However, Lenin did not mention Gorky's name in his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909): the head of the Bolsheviks was aware of the power of Gorky's influence on the revolutionary-minded intelligentsia and youth and did not want to wean the "petrel of revolution" from Bolshevism.

In a conversation with Gorky, Lenin spoke of his novel as follows: "The book is necessary, many workers took part in the revolutionary movement unconsciously, spontaneously, and now they will read Mother with great benefit for themselves"; "A very timely book." This judgment is indicative of a pragmatic approach to a work of fiction, which follows from the main provisions of Lenin's article "Party Organization and Party Literature" (1905). In it, Lenin advocated "literary work," which "cannot be an individual matter, independent of the general proletarian cause," and demanded that "literary work" become "the wheel and cog of a single great social democratic mechanism." Lenin himself had in mind party journalism, but already from the beginning of the 30s his words in the USSR began to be interpreted broadly and applied to all branches of art. This article, according to the authoritative publication, contains "a detailed demand for communist partisanship in fiction ...<.. > It is precisely the mastery of the communist partisanship, according to Lenin's thought, that leads to liberation from delusions, beliefs, prejudices, since only Marxism is a true and true doctrine. "And just at the time of Gorky's enthusiasm for" god-building ", leading an epistolary dispute with the writer, Lenin" at the same time he tried to involve him in practical work in the party press ... ".

Lenin succeeded quite well. Until 1917, Gorky was an active supporter of Bolshevism, helping the Leninist party in word and deed. However, Gorky was in no hurry to part with his "delusions": in the journal Letopis (1915), founded by him, the leading role belonged to the "arch-suspicious bloc of Machists" (V. Lenin).

Almost two decades passed before the ideologists of the Soviet state discovered the initial principles of socialist realism in Gorky's novel. The situation is very strange. After all, if a writer grasped and managed to embody the postulates of the new advanced method into artistic images, then he would immediately have followers and successors. This is exactly what happened with romanticism and sentimentalism. Gogol's themes, ideas and techniques were also picked up and replicated by representatives of the Russian "natural school". This did not happen with socialist realism. On the contrary, in the first decade and a half of the 20th century, the aestheticization of individualism, a burning interest in the problems of non-existence and death, a rejection not only of partisanship, but also of civicism in general are indicative of Russian literature. An eyewitness and participant in the revolutionary events of 1905 M. Osorgin testifies: "... Young people in Russia, moving away from the revolution, rushed to burn their lives in a drunken drug stupor, in sexual experiments, in suicide circles; this life was reflected in literature" ("Times ", 1955).

That is why, even in the social democratic environment, "Mother" at first did not receive wide recognition. G. Plekhanov, the most authoritative judge in the field of aesthetics and philosophy in revolutionary circles, spoke of Gorky's novel as an unsuccessful work, stressing that "people are rendering him a very disservice by encouraging him to act in the roles of a thinker and preacher; he was not created for such roles." ...

And Gorky himself in 1917, when the Bolsheviks were just asserting themselves in power, although its terrorist nature had already manifested itself quite clearly, reconsidered his attitude to the revolution, having published a series of articles "Untimely Thoughts." The Bolshevik government immediately closed the newspaper in which Untimely Thoughts were published, accusing the writer of slandering the revolution and failing to see the main thing in it.

However, Gorky's position was shared by quite a few artists of the word, who had previously sympathized with the revolutionary movement. A. Remizov creates "The Word about the Death of the Russian Land", I. Bunin, A. Kuprin, K. Balmont, I. Severyanin, I. Shmelev and many others emigrate and oppose Soviet power abroad. The Serapion Brothers demonstratively refuse any participation in the ideological struggle, striving to escape into a world of conflict-free existence, and E. Zamyatin predicts a totalitarian future in the novel We (published in 1924 abroad). At the initial stage of its development, the assets of Soviet literature include proletkult abstract "universal" symbols and images of the masses, in which the role of the creator is assigned to the Machine. A little later, a schematic image of a leader was created, inspiring the same people with his example and not requiring any indulgences for himself ("Chocolate" by A. Tarasov-Rodionov, "Week" by Y. Libedinsky, "The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov" by I. Ehrenburg). The predestination of these characters was so obvious that in the criticism this type of hero was immediately designated as a "leather jacket" (a kind of uniform for commissars and other middle managers in the early years of the revolution).

Lenin and the party he led were well aware of the importance of influencing the population of literature and the press in general, which were then the only means of information and propaganda. That is why one of the first acts of the Bolshevik government was the closure of all "bourgeois" and "White Guard" newspapers, that is, the press that allows itself to dissent.

The next stage in the introduction of the new ideology into the masses was the exercise of control over the press. In tsarist Russia, there was censorship, guided by a censorship charter, the content of which was known to publishers and authors, and non-compliance with it was punishable by fines, the closure of a printed organ and imprisonment. In Russia, the Soviet censorship was declared abolished, but freedom of the press practically disappeared along with it. Local officials who were in charge of ideology were now guided not by the censorship charter, but by "class instinct", the limits of which were limited either by the secret instructions of the center, or by their own intelligence and diligence.

The Soviet government could not act otherwise. Things did not go at all as planned by Marx. Not to mention the bloody Civil War and intervention, both workers and peasants themselves repeatedly rose up against the Bolshevik regime, in whose name tsarism was destroyed (the Astrakhan riot of 1918, the Kronstadt revolt, the Izhevsk workers' formation that fought on the side of the whites, the "Antonovism", etc.) .d.). And all this provoked retaliatory repressive measures, the purpose of which was to curb the people and teach them unquestioning obedience to the will of the leaders.

For the same purpose, at the end of the war, the party begins to tighten ideological control. In 1922, the organizing bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), having discussed the issue of the struggle against petty-bourgeois ideology in the literary and publishing field, decided to recognize the support of the Serapionov Brothers publishing house as necessary. The resolution contained one at first glance, insignificant reservation: support for the "Serapions" will be provided as long as they do not take part in reactionary publications. This clause guaranteed the absolute inactivity of the party organs, which could always refer to a violation of the agreed condition, since any publication, if desired, could be qualified as reactionary.

As the economic and political situation in the country has been somewhat streamlined, the party begins to pay more and more attention to ideology. Numerous unions and associations still continued to exist in literature; individual notes of disagreement with the new regime still sounded on the pages of books and magazines. Groups of writers were formed, among which were those who did not accept the displacement of Russia by "kondovoy" industrial Russia (peasant writers), and those who did not propagandize the Soviet regime, but did not argue with it anymore and were ready to cooperate ("fellow travelers") ... Writers "proletarian" were still in the minority, and they could not boast of such popularity as, say, S. Yesenin's.

As a result, proletarian writers, who did not possess special literary authority, but who realized the power of the influence of the party organization, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe need for all party supporters to unite in a close creative union that could determine the literary policy in the country. A. Serafimovich, in one of his letters from 1921, shared with the addressee his thoughts on this matter: “... All life is organized in a new way; how can writers remain as artisans, handicraft individualists. And the writers felt the need for a new system of life, communication, creativity, the need for a collective beginning. "

The party took over the leadership of this process. In the resolution of the XIII Congress of the RCP (b) "On the press" (1924) and in a special resolution of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) "On the party's policy in the field of fiction" (1925), the government directly expressed its attitude towards ideological trends in literature. The Central Committee resolution declared the need for all-round assistance to "proletarian" writers, attention to "peasant" writers and a tactful and careful attitude towards "fellow travelers." The "bourgeois" ideology was to be waged "decisively". Purely aesthetic issues have not yet been addressed.

But even this state of affairs did not suit the party for long. "The impact of socialist reality, meeting the objective needs of artistic creativity, the party's policy led in the second half of the 20s - early 30s to the elimination of" intermediate ideological forms ", to the formation of the ideological and creative unity of Soviet literature," which should have resulted in this " general unanimity ".

The first attempt in this direction was unsuccessful. The RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) vigorously promoted the need for a clear class position in art, moreover, the political and creative platform of the working class led by the Bolshevik party was proposed as an exemplary platform. The leaders of the RAPP transferred the methods and style of party work to the writers' organization. Those who disagreed were subjected to "elaboration", the result of which were "organizational conclusions" (excommunication from the press, defamation in everyday life, etc.).

It would seem that such a writers' organization should have suited the party, which held on to the iron discipline of execution. It turned out differently. The Rappers, "fierce adherents" of the new ideology, imagined themselves to be its high priests and on this basis dared to propose the ideological guidelines of the supreme power itself. A small handful of writers (far from the most outstanding) were supported by the Rapp leadership as truly proletarian, while the sincerity of the "fellow travelers" (for example, A. Tolstoy) was questioned. Sometimes even such writers as M. Sholokhov were classified by the RAPP as "exponents of the White Guard ideology." The party, which focused on restoring the country's economy destroyed by the war and revolution, at a new historical stage was interested in attracting as many "specialists" as possible in all fields of science, technology and art to its side. Rapp's leadership did not catch the new trends.

And then the party takes a number of measures to organize a writers' union of a new type. The involvement of writers in the "common cause" was carried out gradually. "Shock brigades" of writers are organized, which are sent to industrial new buildings, collective farms, etc., and works that reflect the labor enthusiasm of the proletariat are promoted and encouraged in every possible way. A new type of writer, “an active figure in Soviet democracy” (A. Fadeev, Vs. Vishnevsky, A. Makarenko, and others) is becoming a prominent figure. Writers are involved in writing collective works like "History of Factories and Plants" or "History of the Civil War", initiated by Gorky. To improve the artistic skills of young proletarian writers, the Literaturnaya Ucheba magazine was created, headed by the same Gorky.

Finally, considering that the soil is sufficiently prepared, the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) adopted a resolution "On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations" (1932). Until now, this has not been observed in world history: the authorities have never directly intervened in the literary process and have not decreed the methods of work of its participants. Previously, governments banned and burned books, imprisoned authors or bought them, but they did not regulate the conditions for the existence of literary unions and groupings, much less dictate methodological principles.

The decree of the Central Committee spoke of the need to liquidate the RAPP and unite all writers who support the party's policy and strive to participate in socialist construction into a single Union of Soviet Writers. Immediately, similar resolutions were adopted by most of the Union republics.

Soon, preparations began for the First All-Union Congress of Writers, which was led by the organizing committee headed by Gorky. The writer's activity in carrying out the party line was clearly encouraged. In the same 1932, the "Soviet public" widely celebrated the "40th anniversary of the literary and revolutionary activities" of Gorky, and then the main street of Moscow, the plane and the city where he spent his childhood were named after him.

Gorky is also attracted to the formation of a new aesthetics. In mid-1933, he published an article "On Socialist Realism". It repeats the theses repeatedly varied by the writer in the 1930s: all world literature is based on the struggle of classes, "our young literature is called upon by history to finish off and bury everything hostile to people," that is, "philistinism" widely interpreted by Gorky. The essence of the affirming pathos of the new literature and its methodology is said briefly and in the most general terms. According to Gorky, the main task of young Soviet literature is "... to excite that proud, joyful pathos, which gives our literature a new tone that will help create new forms, create the new direction we need - socialist realism, which - of course - can be created only on the facts of socialist experience. " It is important to emphasize one circumstance here: Gorky speaks of socialist realism as a matter of the future, and the principles of the new method are not very clear to him. In the present, according to Gorky, socialist realism is still being formed. Meanwhile, the term itself already appears here. Where did it come from and what did it mean?

Let us turn to the memoirs of I. Gronsky, one of the party leaders, assigned to literature to guide it. In the spring of 1932, Gronsky says, a commission of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was created to specifically address the problems of restructuring literary and artistic organizations. The commission consisted of five people who had not shown themselves in any way in literature: Stalin, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Stetsky and Gronsky.

On the eve of the meeting of the commission, Stalin summoned Gronsky and said that the question of dispersing the RAPP had been resolved, but "creative questions remain unresolved, and the main one is the question of the Rappian dialectical-creative method. Tomorrow, at the commission, the RAPP members will undoubtedly raise this issue. We therefore need in advance, before the meeting, determine our attitude towards it: do we accept it or, conversely, reject it. Do you have any suggestions on this? " ...

Stalin's attitude to the problem of the artistic method is very indicative here: if it is unprofitable to use the Rappian method, it is necessary to immediately, in opposition to it, put forward a new one. Stalin himself, busy with state affairs, had no considerations on this score, but he did not doubt that in a single artistic union it was necessary to introduce a single method that would allow managing the writers' organization, ensuring its clear and well-coordinated functioning and, therefore, the imposition of a single state ideology.

Only one thing was clear: the new method must be realistic, because all kinds of "formal tricks" by the ruling elite, brought up on the creativity of revolutionary democrats (Lenin resolutely rejected all "isms"), were considered inaccessible to the broad masses, and it was the latter that the art of the proletariat should be guided by ... Since the late 1920s, writers and critics have been feeling the essence of the new art. According to Rapp's theory of the "dialectical-materialist method", one should have been equal to the "psychological realists" (mainly L. Tolstoy), putting at the forefront a revolutionary worldview, helping to "tear off all and every masks." Approximately the same was said by Lunacharsky ("social realism"), and Mayakovsky ("tendentious realism"), and A. Tolstoy ("monumental realism"), among other definitions of realism, such as "romantic", "heroic" and simply "proletarian". Note that the Rappians considered romanticism in contemporary art unacceptable.

Gronsky, who had never thought about the theoretical problems of art before, began with the simplest - he proposed the name of the new method (he did not sympathize with the Rapopists, therefore he did not accept the method), rightly judging that later theorists would fill the term with suitable content. He proposed such a definition: "proletarian socialist, or even better communist realism." Stalin chose the second out of three adjectives, substantiating his choice as follows: “The merit of such a definition is, firstly, brevity (only two words), secondly, comprehensibility and, thirdly, an indication of continuity in the development of literature (literature of critical realism, which arose at the stage of the bourgeois-democratic social movement, passes, develops at the stage of the proletarian socialist movement into the literature of socialist realism) ".

The definition is clearly unfortunate, since the artistic category is preceded by a political term. Subsequently, the theorists of socialist realism tried to justify this conjugation, but they were not very successful in that. In particular, Academician D. Markov wrote: “... tearing off the word“ socialist ”from the general name of the method, they interpret it nakedly sociologically: it is believed that this part of the formula reflects only the artist's worldview, his socio-political convictions. it is clearly understood that we are talking about a certain (but also extremely free, not limited, in fact, in its theoretical rights) type of aesthetic knowledge and transformation of the world. " This was said more than half a century after Stalin, but it hardly clarifies anything, since the identity of the political and aesthetic categories has not yet been eliminated.

Gorky at the First All-Union Writers' Congress in 1934 defined only the general tendency of the new method, also emphasizing its social orientation: "Socialist realism affirms being as an act, as creativity, the purpose of which is the continuous development of the most valuable individual abilities of man for the sake of his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his health and longevity, for the sake of great happiness to live on earth. " Obviously, this pathetic declaration did not add anything to the interpretation of the essence of the new method.

So, the method has not yet been formulated, but has already been put into use, the writers have not yet recognized themselves as representatives of the new method, and its genealogy is already being created, and its historical roots are being discovered. Gronsky recalled that in 1932, "at the meeting, all the members of the commission who spoke and presided over by N. P. Postyshev stated that socialist realism as a creative method of fiction and art actually arose long ago, long before the October Revolution, mainly in the work of M. Gorky. and we just gave it a name (formulated) ".

Socialist realism found a clearer formulation in the Charter of the Soviet Union, in which the style of party documents can be felt. So, “socialist realism, being the main method of Soviet fiction and literary criticism, requires from the artist a truthful, historically specific depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality should be combined with the task of ideological alteration and education. working people in the spirit of socialism. " It is curious that the definition of socialist realism as the main The method of literature and criticism, according to Gronsky, arose as a result of tactical considerations and in the future should have been removed, but it remained forever, since Gronsky simply forgot to do this.

The Charter of the SSP noted that socialist realism does not canonize genres and methods of creativity and provides ample opportunities for creative initiative, but how this initiative can manifest itself in a totalitarian society was not explained in the Charter.

In subsequent years, in the works of theorists, the new method gradually acquired visible features. Socialist realism was characterized by the following features: a new theme (first of all, the revolution and its achievements) and a new type of hero (a man of labor), endowed with a sense of historical optimism; disclosure of conflicts in the light of the prospects for the revolutionary (progressive) development of reality. In their most general form, these signs can be reduced to ideology, partisanship and nationality (the latter implied, along with topics and problems close to the interests of the "masses", simplicity and accessibility of the image, "necessary" for the wide reader).

Since it was announced that socialist realism had arisen even before the revolution, it was necessary to draw a line of its continuity with pre-October literature. The founder of socialist realism, as we know, was declared Gorky and, first of all, his novel "Mother". However, one piece was, of course, not enough, and there were no others of this kind. Therefore, it was necessary to raise on the shield the creativity of the revolutionary democrats, which, unfortunately, by far from all ideological parameters could not be put alongside Gorky.

Then they begin to look for signs of a new method in modern times. Better than others fit the definition of socialist realist works "The Defeat" by A. Fadeev, "Iron Stream" by A. Serafimovich, "Chapaev" by D. Furmanov, "Cement" by F. Gladkov.

Especially great success fell to the lot of K. Trenev's heroic-revolutionary drama Lyubov Yarovaya (1926), which, according to the author, expressed his complete and unconditional recognition of the truth of Bolshevism. The play contains the entire set of characters who later became a "common place" in Soviet literature: the "iron" party leader; who accepted the revolution "with his heart" and had not yet fully realized the need for the strictest revolutionary discipline "brother" (as the sailors were called then); an intellectual who slowly comprehends the justice of the new order, burdened by the "burden of the past"; "philistine" and "enemy" adapting to the harsh necessity, actively fighting against the new world. At the center of events is the heroine, in pain comprehending the inevitability of the "truth of Bolshevism."

Lyubov Yarovaya faces a difficult choice: in order to prove his devotion to the cause of the revolution, it is necessary to betray her husband, beloved, but who has become an implacable ideological enemy. The heroine makes a decision only after making sure that a person who was once so close and dear to her understands the good of the people and the country in a completely different way. And only after revealing the "betrayal" of her husband, abandoning everything personal, Yarovaya realizes herself as a true participant in the common cause and convinces herself that she is only "from now on a faithful comrade."

A little later, the theme of the spiritual "restructuring" of man will become one of the main topics in Soviet literature. The professor ("Kremlin chimes" by N. Pogodin), a criminal who experienced the joy of creative work ("Aristocrats" by N. Pogodin, "Pedagogical Poem" by A. Makarenko), men who realized the advantages of collective economy ( "Bars" by F. Panferov and many other works on the same topic). The writers preferred not to talk about the dramatic nature of such a “reforging”, except perhaps in connection with the death of a hero going into a new life at the hands of a “class enemy”.

But the intrigues of enemies, their treachery and malice towards all manifestations of a new bright life are reflected in almost every second novel, story, poem, etc. "Enemy" is a necessary background to highlight the merits of a positive hero.

The new type of hero, created in the thirties, showed itself in action, and in the most extreme situations ("Chapaev" by D. Furmanov, "Hatred" by I. Shukhov, "How the steel was tempered" by N. Ostrovsky, "Time, forward!" Kataeva and others). “The positive hero is the holy of holies of socialist realism, its cornerstone and main achievement. The positive hero is not just a good person, he is a person illuminated by the light of the most ideal ideal, a model worthy of any imitation.<...> And the advantages of a positive hero are difficult to enumerate: ideology, courage, intelligence, willpower, patriotism, respect for women, readiness for self-sacrifice ... The most important of them, perhaps, are clarity and directness with which he sees the goal and strives towards it. ... For him there are no inner doubts and hesitations, unsolvable questions and unsolved secrets, and in the most confusing matter he easily finds a way out - along the shortest path to the goal, in a straight line. "The positive hero never regrets what he has done and if he is dissatisfied with himself it is only because he could have done more.

The quintessence of such a hero is Pavel Korchagin from the novel "How the Steel Was Tempered" by N. Ostrovsky. In this character, the personal principle is reduced to the minimum that ensures his earthly existence, everything else is brought by the hero to the altar of the revolution. But this is not an atoning sacrifice, but an ecstatic gift of heart and soul. Here is what is said about Korchagin in a university textbook: "To act, to be needed by the revolution - this is the aspiration carried through by Pavel throughout his life - stubborn, passionate, the only one. It is from this aspiration that Pavel's exploits are born. A person driven by a high goal, as it were, forgets about himself, neglects what is most dear to him - life - in the name of what is really dearer to him than life ... Pavel is always there, where it is most difficult: the novel focuses on key, critical situations, and in them the irresistible power of his free aspirations ...<...> He literally rushes towards difficulties (the fight against banditry, pacification of the boundary riot, etc.). In his soul there is not even a shadow of discord between "want" and "must". Awareness of revolutionary necessity is his personal, even intimate. "

World literature did not know such a hero. From Shakespeare and Byron to L. Tolstoy and Chekhov, writers have portrayed people seeking the truth, doubting and mistaken. There was no place for such characters in Soviet literature. The only exception, perhaps, is Grigory Melekhov in The Quiet Don, who was counted among socialist realism retroactively, and at first was regarded as a work, of course, "White Guard".

The literature of the 1930s – 1940s, armed with the methodology of socialist realism, demonstrated the inextricable link between the positive hero and the collective, which constantly exerted a beneficial influence on the personality, helped the hero to form will and character. The problem of leveling the personality by the environment, which was so significant for Russian literature before, practically disappears, and if it is planned, it is only to prove the triumph of collectivism over individualism ("The Defeat" by A. Fadeev, "Day Two" by I. Ehrenburg).

The main sphere of application of the forces of a positive hero is creative work, in the process of which not only material values \u200b\u200bare created and the state of workers and peasants grows stronger, but Real People, creators and patriots are forged ("Cement" by F. Gladkov, "Pedagogical Poem" by A. Makarenko, "Time, forward!" V. Kataev, films "The Light Way" and "Big Life", etc.).

The cult of the Hero, the Real Man, is inseparable in Soviet art from the cult of the Leader. The images of Lenin and Stalin, and with them the leaders of a lower rank (Dzerzhinsky, Kirov, Parkhomenko, Chapaev, etc.) were reproduced in millions of copies in prose, poetry, in drama, in music, in cinema, in the visual arts ... Almost all prominent Soviet writers, even S. Yesenin and B. Pasternak, were involved in the creation of Leniniana to one degree or another; “folk” storytellers and singers told about Lenin and Stalin, and sang songs. "... Canonization and mythologization of leaders, their heroization are included in genetic code Soviet literature. Without the image of a leader (leaders), our literature did not exist for seven decades, and this circumstance is, of course, not accidental. "

Naturally, with the ideological acuteness of literature, the lyrical principle almost disappears from it. Poetry, following Mayakovsky, becomes the herald of political ideas (E. Bagritsky, A. Bezymensky, V. Lebedev-Kumach, etc.).

Of course, not all writers have managed to imbue with the principles of socialist realism and turn into singers of the working class. It was in the 1930s that there was a massive "departure" to the historical theme, which to a certain extent saved from accusations of "apoliticality". However, for the most part, historical novels and films of the 1930s – 1950s were works closely related to modernity, clearly demonstrating examples of "rewriting" history in the spirit of socialist realism.

Critical notes still heard in the literature of the 20s, by the end of the 30s, were completely drowned out by the sound of victorious fanfare. Everything else was rejected. In this sense, the example of the idol of the 1920s, M. Zoshchenko, is indicative, who tries to change his former satirical manner and also turns to history (the story Kerensky, 1937; Taras Shevchenko, 1939).

Zoshchenko can be understood. Many writers then strive to master the state "recipes" so as not to literally lose their "place in the sun." In V. Grossman's novel "Life and Fate" (1960, published in 1988), which takes place during the Great Patriotic War, the essence of Soviet art in the eyes of contemporaries looks like this: "They argued what socialist realism was. This is a mirror, which is asked by the party and the government “Who in the world is lovelier, more beautiful and whiter than all?” answers: “You, you, the party, the government, the state, all blush and lovelier!” Those who answered differently are forced out of literature (A. Platonov, M. Bulgakov, A. Akhmatova, etc.), and many are simply destroyed.

The Patriotic War brought the people the most severe suffering, but at the same time somewhat weakened the ideological pressure, for in the fire of battles, Soviet people gained some independence. The victory over fascism, which he received at a very heavy price, also strengthened his spirit. In the 40s, books appeared in which a real life full of drama was reflected ("Pulkovo Meridian" by V. Inber, "Leningrad Poem" by O. Bergholts, "Vasily Terkin" by A. Tvardovsky, "Dragon" by E. Schwartz, " In the trenches of Stalingrad "V. Nekrasov). Of course, their authors could not completely abandon ideological stereotypes, because in addition to political pressure, which had already become customary, there was also auto-censorship. And yet their works, in comparison with the pre-war ones, are more truthful.

Stalin, who had long since turned into an autocratic dictator, could not indifferently watch how the shoots of freedom were sprouting through the cracks in the monolith of like-mindedness, on the construction of which so much effort and money had been spent. The leader considered it necessary to remind that he would not tolerate any deviations from the "common line" - and in the second half of the 40s a new wave of repression began on the ideological front.

The notorious decree on the magazines "Zvezda" and "Leningrad" (1948) was issued, in which the work of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko was cruelly condemned. This was followed by the persecution of "rootless cosmopolitans" - theater critics accused of every conceivable and inconceivable sins.

In parallel with this, there is a generous distribution of prizes, orders and titles to those artists who diligently followed all the rules of the game. But sometimes sincere service was not a guarantee of safety.

This was clearly manifested in the example of the first person in Soviet literature, General Secretary of the USSR Writers' Union A. Fadeev, who published the novel "Young Guard" in 1945. Fadeev portrayed the patriotic impulse of very young guys and girls who, not voluntarily remaining in the occupation, rose to fight the invaders. The book's romantic coloring further emphasized the heroism of the youth.

It would seem that the party could only welcome the appearance of such a work. After all, Fadeev drew a gallery of images of representatives of the young generation, brought up in the spirit of communism and in fact proved their loyalty to the precepts of their fathers. But Stalin began a new campaign of "screwing the nuts" and remembered Fadeev, who had made a mistake in some way. In Pravda, the organ of the Central Committee, an editorial appeared on the Young Guard, in which it was noted that Fadeev did not sufficiently cover the role of the party leadership of the youth underground, thereby “distorting” the real state of affairs.

Fadeev reacted as he should. By 1951, he created a new version of the novel, in which, despite the vital reliability, the leading role of the party was emphasized. The writer was well aware of what he was doing. In one of his private letters, he sadly joked: "I am converting the young guard into the old one."

As a result, Soviet writers carefully check every stroke of their work with the canons of socialist realism (more precisely, with the latest directives of the Central Committee). In literature ("Happiness" by P. Pavlenko, "Cavalier of the Golden Star" by S. Babaevsky, etc.) and in other types of art (films "Kuban Cossacks", "The Legend of the Siberian Land", etc.), a happy life is glorified free and generous land; and at the same time, the owner of this happiness manifests himself not as a full-fledged versatile person, but as "a function of some transpersonal process, a person who has found himself in the" cell of the existing world order, at work, in production ... ".

Unsurprisingly, the "production" novel, whose genealogy dates back to the 1920s, became one of the most widespread genres in the 1950s. A modern researcher builds a long series of works, the very titles of which characterize their content and focus: "Steel and Slag" by V. Popov (about metallurgists), "Living Water" by V. Kozhevnikov (about meliorators), "Height" by E. Vorobyov (about builders domain), "Students" by Y. Trifonov, "Engineers" by M. Slonimsky, "Sailors" by A. Perventsev, "Drivers" by A. Rybakov, "Miners" by V. Igishev, etc., etc.

Against the background of the construction of a bridge, the smelting of metal or the "battle for the harvest", human feelings look like something secondary. The protagonists of the "production" novel exist only within the confines of a factory shop, coal mine or collective farm field, outside these limits they have nothing to do, nothing to talk about. Sometimes even accustomed contemporaries could not stand it. So, G. Nikolaeva, who tried to "humanize" the canons of the "production" novel in her "Battle on the Road" (1957), four years earlier, in a review of modern fiction, mentioned V. Zakrutkin's "Floating Village", noting that the author " I concentrated all my attention on the fish problem ... He showed the peculiarities of people only insofar as it was necessary to "illustrate" the fish problem ... the fish in the novel overshadowed the people. "

Depicting life in its "revolutionary development", which, according to party guidelines, was improving every day, writers generally cease to touch on any shadow sides of reality. Everything conceived by the heroes is immediately successfully translated into action, and any difficulties are no less successfully overcome. These signs of Soviet literature of the fifties found their most vivid expression in the novels of S. Babaevsky "Cavalier of the Golden Star" and "Light Above the Earth", which were immediately awarded the Stalin Prize.

Theorists of socialist realism immediately substantiated the need for just such an optimistic art. "We need festive literature," wrote one of them, "not literature about" holidays, "but festive literature that lifts a person above trifles and accidents."

The writers were sensitive to the "demands of the moment." Everyday life, the depiction of which was given so much attention in the literature of the 19th century, was practically not covered in Soviet literature, for the Soviet person had to be above "the little things of life". If the paucity of everyday existence was touched upon, it was only in order to demonstrate how a Real Man overcomes "temporary difficulties" and achieves universal well-being by selfless labor.

With this understanding of the tasks of art, the birth of the "theory of conflict-freeness" is quite natural, which, for all the short duration of its existence, perfectly expressed the essence of Soviet literature of the 50s. This theory boiled down to the following: class contradictions have been eliminated in the USSR, and, therefore, there are no reasons for the emergence of dramatic conflicts. Only a struggle between the "good" and the "best" is possible. And since in the country of the Soviets the public should be in the foreground, the authors had nothing to do but describe the "production process." In the early 60s, the "theory of conflict-freeness" was gradually consigned to oblivion, for it was already clear to the most undemanding reader that "festive" literature had completely detached itself from reality. However, the rejection of the "theory of conflict-free" did not mean rejection of the principles of socialist realism. As an authoritative official source explained, "the interpretation of life contradictions, shortcomings, difficulties of growth as" trifles "and" accidents ", opposing them to" festive "literature - all this does not at all express an optimistic perception of life by the literature of socialist realism, but weakens the educational role of art, tears his from the life of the people. "

The renunciation of one too odious dogma led to the fact that all the others (partisanship, ideology, etc.) began to be guarded even more vigilantly. It was worth several writers during the short-term "thaw" that came after the XX Congress of the CPSU, where the "personality cult" was criticized, to come out with a bold condemnation of bureaucracy and conformism in the lower echelons of the party at that time (V. Dudintsev's novel "Not by bread alone", A. Yashin's story "Levers", both 1956), how a massive attack began on the authors in the press, and they themselves were excommunicated for a long time from literature.

The principles of socialist realism remained unshakable, because otherwise the principles of state structure would have to be changed, as happened in the early nineties. In the meantime, literature "should bring to consciousness what is in the language of regulations "brought to notice"... Moreover, she had to make out and lead to some system disparate ideological actions, introducing them into consciousness, translating them into the language of situations, dialogues, speeches. The time of artists has passed: literature has become what it should have become in the system of a totalitarian state - a "wheel" and "cog", a powerful tool for "brainwashing". The writer and the functionary merged in an act of "socialist creation".

And yet, since the 60s, a gradual disintegration of that clear ideological mechanism that took shape under the name of socialist realism began. As soon as the political course inside the country softened a little, a new generation of writers, which did not go through the harsh Stalinist school, responded with "lyrical" and "country" prose and fiction that did not fit into the Procrustean bed of socialist realism. A previously impossible phenomenon also arises - Soviet authors who publish their "impassable" works abroad. In criticism, the concept of social realism imperceptibly fades into the shadows, and then almost completely goes out of use. It turned out that any phenomenon of modern literature can be described without using the category of socialist realism.

Only the orthodox theorists remain in their former positions, but they, too, when telling about the possibilities and achievements of socialist realism, have to manipulate the same lists of examples, the chronological framework of which is limited to the mid-50s. Attempts to push these limits and classify V. Belov, V. Rasputin, V. Astafiev, Yu. Trifonov, F. Abramov, V. Shukshin, F. Iskander and some other writers as socialist realists looked unconvincing. The detachment of orthodox adherents of socialist realism, although thinned, nevertheless did not disintegrate. Representatives of the so-called "secretarial literature" (writers occupying prominent positions in the joint venture) G. Markov, A. Chakovsky, V. Kozhevnikov, S. Dangulov, E. Isaev, I. Stadnyuk and others continued to portray reality "in its revolutionary development ", they still painted exemplary heroes, however, already endowing them with small weaknesses, designed to humanize ideal characters.

And as before, Bunin and Nabokov, Pasternak and Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, Babel and Bulgakov, Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn were not honored to be ranked among the heights of Russian literature. And even at the beginning of perestroika, one could still come across a proud statement that socialist realism is "essentially a qualitative leap in the artistic history of mankind ...".

In connection with this and similar statements, a reasonable question arises: since socialist realism is the most progressive and effective method of all that existed before and now, then why did those who created before its appearance (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov) create masterpieces on which they studied adherents of socialist realism? Why did the "irresponsible" foreign writers, whose worldview flaws were so eagerly discussed by the theorists of socialist realism, did not rush to take advantage of the opportunities that the most advanced method opened for them? The achievements of the USSR in the field of space exploration prompted America to intensively develop science and technology, while the achievements in the field of art by artists of the Western world for some reason left indifferent. "... Faulkner will give a hundred points ahead to any of those whom we in the same America and in the West generally refer to as socialist realists. Can we then talk about the most advanced method?"

Socialist realism arose by order of the totalitarian system and faithfully served it. As soon as the party loosened its grip, socialist realism, like shagreen skin, began to shrink, and with the collapse of the system, it completely disappeared into oblivion. Currently, socialist realism can and should be the subject of an impartial literary and cultural study - it has long been unable to claim the role of the main method in art. Otherwise, socialist realism would have survived both the collapse of the USSR and the collapse of the joint venture.

• As A. Sinyavsky accurately noted back in 1956: “... most of the action takes place here near the plant, where the characters leave in the morning and from where they return in the evening, tired but cheerful. But what are they doing there, what kind of work and what kind of products the plant produces, remains unknown " (Sinyavsky A. Literary encyclopedic dictionary. P. 291.
• Literary newspaper. 1989.17 May. P. 3.

Socialist realism is the creative method of literature and art of the 20th century, the cognitive sphere of which was limited and regulated by the task of reflecting the processes of restructuring the world in the light of the communist ideal and Marxist-Leninist ideology.

The goals of socialist realism

Socialist realism is the main officially (at the state level) recognized method of Soviet literature and art, the purpose of which is to capture the stages of the construction of Soviet socialist society and its "movement towards communism." During half a century of existence in all developed literatures of the world, socialist realism strove to take a leading position in the artistic life of the era, opposing its (supposedly the only true) aesthetic principles (the principle of partisanship, nationality, historical optimism, socialist humanism, internationalism) to all other ideological and artistic principles.

History of origin

The domestic theory of socialist realism originates from the "Foundations of Positive Aesthetics" (1904) by A.V. Lunacharsky, where art is guided not by the existing, but by what is due, and creativity is equated with ideology. In 1909, Lunacharsky was one of the first to call the story "Mother" (1906-07) and the play "Enemies" (1906) by M. Gorky "serious works of a social type", "significant works, the significance of which in the development of proletarian art will someday be taken into account" (Literary decay , 1909. Book 2). The critic was the first to draw attention to the Leninist principle of partisanship as determining in the construction of socialist culture (article "Lenin" Literary Encyclopedia, 1932. Volume 6).

The term "Socialist Realism" first appeared in the editorial of the Literaturnaya Gazeta dated May 23, 1932 (by IM Gronsky). J.V. Stalin repeated it at a meeting with writers at Gorky's on October 26 of the same year, and from that moment the concept became widespread. In February 1933, Lunacharsky, in a report on the tasks of Soviet drama, emphasized that socialist realism "is devoted to the struggle through and through, he is a builder through and through, he is confident in the communist future of mankind, believes in the strength of the proletariat, its party and leaders" (Lunacharsky A.V. Articles on Soviet Literature, 1958).

The difference between socialist realism and bourgeois

At the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), A.A. Zhdanov, N.I.Bukharin, Gorky and A.A. Fadeev substantiated the originality of the method of socialist realism. The political component of Soviet literature was emphasized by Bukharin, who pointed out that socialist realism “differs from common realism in that it inevitably puts in the center of attention the image of the construction of socialism, the struggle of the proletariat, the new man and all the polysyllabic“ connections and mediations ”of the great historical process of our time ... that distinguish socialist realism from bourgeois realism ... are closely related to the content of the material and purposefulness of the volitional order dictated by the class position of the proletariat "(First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. Stenographic Report, 1934).

Fadeev supported the idea expressed earlier by Gorky that, in contrast to “the old realism — critical… ours, socialist, realism — is affirmative. Zhdanov's speech, his formulations: "to portray reality in its revolutionary development"; “At the same time, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic image must be combined with the task of ideological alteration and education of working people in the spirit of socialism,” formed the basis of the definition given in the Charter of the Union of Soviet Writers.

His assertion that “revolutionary romanticism should be included in literary creation as an integral part” of socialist realism (ibid.) Was also programmatic. On the eve of the congress, which legitimized the term, the search for its defining principles was qualified as "The Struggle for Method" - under this name in 1931 one of the collections of the Rapopists was published. In 1934, the book In Disputes About Method (with the subtitle Collection of Articles on Socialist Realism) was published. In the 1920s, there were discussions about the artistic method of proletarian literature between the theorists of Proletkult, RAPP, LEF, OPOYAZ. The pathos of the struggle "through and through" permeated the theories of "living man" and "industrial" art, "learning from the classics", "social order".

Expansion of the concept of socialist realism

Sharp debates continued in the 1930s (about language, about formalism), in the 1940s and 1950s (mainly in connection with the “theory” of conflict-freeness, the problem of a typical, “positive hero”). It is characteristic that discussions on various issues of the "artistic platform" often concerned politics, were associated with the problems of aestheticization of ideology, with the justification of authoritarianism and totalitarianism in culture. For decades, there has been a debate about the relationship between romanticism and realism in socialist art. On the one hand, it was about romance as a “scientifically grounded dream of the future” (in this capacity, romance at a certain stage began to be replaced by “historical optimism”), on the other hand, attempts were made to highlight a special method or stylistic trend of “socialist romanticism” with its cognitive opportunities. This tendency (already outlined by Gorky and Lunacharsky) led to overcoming stylistic monotony and to a more voluminous interpretation of the essence of socialist realism in the 1960s.

The desire to expand the concept of socialist realism (and at the same time to "shake" the theory of method) was indicated in Russian literary criticism (under the influence of similar processes in foreign literature and criticism) at the All-Union Conference on Socialist Realism (1959): I.I. Anisimov emphasized the "great flexibility" and "breadth" inherent in the aesthetic concept of the method, which was dictated by the desire to overcome dogmatic postulates. In 1966 the IM LI hosted a conference "Actual problems of socialist realism" (see the collection of the same name, 1969). The active apologetics of socialist realism by some speakers, the critical-realistic “type of creativity” by others, romantic by others, and intellectual by the fourth, testified to a clear desire to expand the framework of ideas about the literature of the socialist era.

Domestic theoretical thought was in search of a "broad formulation of the creative method" as a "historically open system" (DF Markov). The final discussion took place in the late 1980s. By this time, the authority of the statutory definition was completely lost (it began to be associated with dogmatism, incompetent leadership in the field of art, the dictate of Stalinism in literature - "custom", state, "barracks" realism). Based on the real trends in the development of Russian literature, contemporary critics consider it quite legitimate to speak of socialist realism as a concrete historical stage, an artistic direction in literature and art of the 1920s and 1950s. Socialist realism included V.V. Mayakovsky, Gorky, L. Leonov, Fadeev, M. A. Sholokhov, F. V. Gladkov, V. P. Kataev, M. S. Shaginyan, N. A. Ostrovsky, V. Vishnevsky, N.F. Pogodin and others.

A new situation arose in the literature of the second half of the 1950s in the wake of the 20th Party Congress, which noticeably undermined the foundations of totalitarianism and authoritarianism. From the socialist canons the Russian “village prose” was “broken”, depicting peasant life not in its “revolutionary development”, but on the contrary, in conditions of social violence and deformation; literature also told the terrible truth about the war, destroying the myth of government heroism and optimism; the civil war and many episodes of Russian history appeared in a different way in literature. Longest clinging to the dogmas of socialist realism "production prose".

An important role in the attack on the Stalinist legacy belongs to the so-called “detained” or “rehabilitated” literature in the 1980s - the works of A.P. Platonov, M.A.Bulgakov, A.L. Akhmatova, B.L. Lasternak, V. S. Grossman, A. T. Tvardovsky, A. A. Beck, B. L. Mozhaev, V. I. Belova, M. F. Shatrov, Yu. V. Trifonova, V. F. Tendryakov, Yu. .O.Dombrovsky, VT Shalamov, AI Pristavkin and others. Domestic conceptualism (Sotsart) contributed to the exposure of socialist realism.

Although socialist realism “disappeared as an official doctrine with the collapse of the State of which it was part of the ideological system,” this phenomenon remains at the center of studies that regard it “as a constituent element of Soviet civilization,” says the Parisian magazine Revue des etudes slaves. The train of thought popular in the West is an attempt to connect the origins of socialist realism with the avant-garde, as well as the desire to substantiate the coexistence of two trends in the history of Soviet literature: "totalitarian" and "revisionist".