Soviet socialist Realism

The Soviet socialist realism recuts the whole of the practices and the doctrines which, at the beginning of the 20th century, questioned the existing or possible bonds between the fields policy, ideological and literary. Place of ideological conflicts of a great violence, Soviet socialist realism can particularly take its source, in Russia, around years 10. Resulting from the avant-garde and more particularly from cubo-futurism, the debate is truly launched with a proclamation, a slap with the taste of the public (December 1912), written by young ambitious Russian poets who in addition tied many contacts with the artists of other disciplines, borrowing from the occasion certain theoretical aspects of the visual art (in particular the idea of the “transmental” (" Zaoum ") : released of its conventional significances, the language can finally become again a construction material, point of view which is not without bond with fascination for the technical object such as it was spread in Occident with the whole beginning of the XXe century. Sympathies to the revolutionary currents are done day insofar as certain formal critical young people (whose Jakobson) detect there a formidable setting with naked language - and more particularly of its poetic function - allied to a savage hatred of the middle-class purchaser.

The current avant-gardist of the Futuristic ones

A more radical turning is taken when in 1917, under the impulse of Vladimir Maïakovski, thefuturistic ones line up at the sides of the revolutionists: in March 1918, leaves the first and single number of the Journal of futuristic the titrated “Lives the revolution of the spirit” and a proclamation in which the artists autoproclament proletarian of art signed themselves the same year. The young government Bolshevik, and more particularly Lounatcharski then police chief of the people to the instruction, tests some difficulties of joining the more traditional fringe of the Russian intellectuals, which leads it to be interested in this group of young determined and enthusiastic people. Some are selected with which it founds the Section of the Visual arts (IZO) and a weekly magazine, the Art of the Commune (Iskousstvo Kommouny) what federates many adhesions among young artists who do not hesitate with “marxiser” if one needs it their theoretical point of view on art: the art of the past, because of its dealings with the middle-class, is irremediably rejected, and the object created is erased drastiquement behind the creative process in an artistic second reading of the concept of direction of the History. Art must become again a total process which transform the life, and either a factory of objects intended to distract the bourgeois.
Incontestably ambitious, a “Collective of the futuristic Communists” applies in January 1919 to accede to the Party, in the name of a Cultural revolution, and with the desire for seeing itself entrusting important tasks within the government. There the group comes up against a terrible limit with its dreams of glory. Indeed, they were the wrong to believe that all shared their enthusiasm, but it is not the case: some do not adhere at their sights on necessary disappearance of the big bosses of work. Lénine is these… Three months later, the futuro-Communist publication is stopped and this first broken alliance between artists and policies.

The constructivism: the utility dimension of art

Maïakovski reforms a group starting from 1923 in company of certain futuristic poets and the realizer Eisenstein, the LEF (the Face of left), which is organized around a principal idea: art must turn over in the street - what is not completely an novel idea. For as much, it is manifest that this new group also suffers to him from theoretical ambiguities good uncomfortable: sometimes art is declared dying man and the artist becomes a manufacturer, sometimes the human activities are declared irremediably creative. They enter in conflict with another current appeared the Twenties, the constructivists, who pushed in the new artistic institutes created. Certain painters were until giving up the rest to provide useful artistic material: design, architecture, stage sets… Their vision of art in general and the literature in particular is eminently functionalist, which is not, perhaps, without echoing new economic policy (NEP) installation by Lénine. They thus preach, in the place of an art doubling the life (even if this art is a prism as astonishing as futurism) one (Re) construction of the life. In this direction, lyric poetry and the literature purely nelles Fiction have to disappear with the profit from a new form, the fractography (assembly, documentary material assembly…). To this the concept of social order is added who places the Official art at the service of the collective.

Proletkult: the outline of a proletarian art

Nourished with the milk of the historical Materialism and conceived before even the Russian Revolution, the Proletkult can be regarded as the attempt to fully apply to creation the Marxist theories and starts from a relatively simple idea: since the culture is fatally middle-class (since related to a middle-class ideology), the advent triumphing over the proletariat in the technique fields, economic and ideological must naturally generate a specific culture - proletarian.

Holding of the revolution question themselves: will the proletarian culture appear only after the conquest of the capacity or must it prepare it? Does the working class have to pose its bases within middle-class civilization? For the Bogdanov writer the question is distinct: the urgent task of the proletariat is to build this new culture to occupy the fields artistic and cultural. With this intention, it organizes in 1909 with Lounatcharski the School of Capri , a seminar of summer financed by Maxime Gorki. The previous year had left Marxist Philosophy , a collection of articles of Bazarov, Bogdanov, Lounatcharski, Bermann, Hellfond, Iouchkévitch and Souvorov which posed the bases of this report/ratio of art and the Marxist ideology, bases specified during many publications of which that of a booklet in 1911 ( cultural Tasks of the proletariat ). As from 1917, this concept of Proletkult develops considerably and is supplemented, in 1920, of two important publications, on the one hand the review the Future dedicated to the self-educated poet-workmen, and proletarian Culture which preaches a final rejection of the culture of last and denounces supposed cultural continuity with the wire of the centuries. Especially, and contrary to thefuturistic ones which wished to make Entrisme in the wheels of the Party, holding them of the Proletkult aim at autonomy. Lénine sees all that of a very evil eye. It announces it as of its foreword with Matérialisme and empiriocriticism : “Many writers who claim Marxism undertook among us, this year, a true campaign against Marxist philosophy” quoting the authors of Marxist Philosophy . On the one hand, he wants to subordinate the Proletkult to the State, more precisely with the Police station of the people to the instruction. In addition - and that is due much to the proper artistic designs of Lénine - the advent of a proletarian State does not make necessary one autoproclamée culture “proletarian”, this movement being in addition contaminated by foreign influences considered to be declining (he thinks in particular of the Italian Futurisme which, later, will degrade himself with the Fascism). In 1922, and to defuse the larval but dangerous crisis, the general secretary of the Proletkult , Pletniov, invites Lénine to come to a conclusion about the question. Lénine benefits from it to distinguish the culture from the ideology, the first including the second; so for Bougdanov the reports/ratios of class generate a typically proletarian psychology constitutive of a specific culture, for Lénine, the ideology of the proletariat could not be the result of a particular psychology but that of an ancestral reflection on its condition. At the bottom, the concept even of proletarian culture Lénine obstructs because it does not give up the idea of the universality of a culture which has, inter alia marvellous achievements, produces the Marxism. He thus prefers with the cultural question that of the ideology.

The creation of the VAPP, Association panrusse of the proletarian writers

In 1921, the working poets of the Proletkult decide, afterwards many jolts, to create VAPP and to equip it with a publication, the Forging mill . The problem of this association that it is if not is cored at least invaded considerably by a new wave of writers: a fringe of working poets influenced by the Symbolists (a literary current important in the Russia of the beginning of the century and necessarily not acquired to the revolutionary ideas) and the poets-komsomots, a group of high-school pupils resulting from the lower middle class, certainly acquired with the Bolchevism but irremediably marked seal of their social origins and, in addition sensitive to the Futurism .

The businesses are spoiled rather quickly: in 1922 the Pravda attacks the Forging mill , reproaching him overall its apolitical attitude and its intellectual elitism. Gradually, the publication is thus politicized but, in 1923, a new publication is born, In sentinel (made up of a group which one will name Napostaviens) which, as their name indicates it, exempt from the interior of the Party the goods and the bad points with holding of the Proletkult . Its general secretary, already attacked by Lénine, is also by Trotski which calls into question purely and simply the concept even of proletarian culture: this one is a lure, in dangerous and useless parallel with the middle-class culture. The situation present does not arrange anything: if the proletariat could not create dominant culture under the middle-class domination, it of it is not more able now, the necessary phase of proletarian dictatorship being unsuitable to creation. The idea is, for Trotski to put all these questions between brackets the time which the classless society arrives: at this time, there will be a culture, neither middle-class woman, nor proletarian but - - the two groups antagonistic having disappeared - - a simply human culture. Until there, one can hardly speak but about one culture révolutionnaire.
So during some time, the VAPP, anxious to work out an esthetics specific to the proletarians, denounces on the occasion a realism which suffers of its middle-class origin, it succeeds, in 1926 and afterwards many voltes-faces, to pose the stakes of this esthetics: it starts a return to the character component of a kind than encouraged more - the novel, and affirms its filiation with the large realistic ones like Tolstoï and Balzac. Consecutively, the fractography and the constructivism of LEF are condemned to the point. One of the principal works greeted by the VAPP is the Defeat of Fadeïev (1927). It is about an extremely realistic narration of the Russian civil war.

1929: The “great Turning”

Bernard Lafite notes that about 1929-1930, the literature is pledged no longer with the ideology but with reality even. Indeed, XIVe Congrès of the PCR estimates that the moment now had just accelerated the industrialization of the country. XVe Congrès as for him recommends drastic measures with regard to a campaign which must imperatively leave its backwardness: collectivization is decided. With this intention, it is necessary on the one hand to make sure of the support of the peasants for the average revenues and to assemble the poor peasants against the rich peasants (Kulaks). Via Pravda, the writers are invited to turn to the field reality.

All starts with an attack in rule, in an article of 1929, against the attacks of writers reactionaries on the “face of the literature”. The proletarian writers who had formed a core around whose revolved of the less radical fellow travellers were particularly aimed. The article evokes the threat of a constitution of a literature néo-middle-class woman. To fight against its harmful influence, it is now necessary that the proletarian literature is seen reinforced and the fellow travellers must be determined. The latter could keep their independence in theory, but it was considered to be necessary that they support the country in these times of rebuilding. The language is almost warlike: to fight in the countryside, to fight in the literature while stigmatizing the gauchists and to carry out “on the literary face in the communist mediums a fight solved against the deviationists of right-hand side” ( Pravda , October 27th, 1929). The literary field is thus seen imposing responsibilities. Certain authors thus follow this way which preaches a primacy of the function so much so that a new kind appears, otcherki , being connected with the journalistic account since the fiction in is generally absent. Kinds of reports literary see thus day which are as much of illustration of class struggle such as it takes place in the campaigns, from which most famous is undoubtedly, cleared Grounds of Mikhaïl Cholokhov which employs very stereotyped characters, with the firm ideological positions.

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