Socialist Realism and Socialist Realist Romanticism

This article focuses on the East German artistic response to the 1973 putsch in Chile, an event now recognized as foundational in the development of neoliberalism. Outraged and saddened, artists in East Germany responded to the putsch with thousands of works of art. These works disrupt Western expectations for East German art, which was far more modern and complex than the term “socialist realism” might suggest. They also offer insight into the horrors of the putsch and remind us that there have been—and can once again be—alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. In addition to creating prints, paintings, and sculptures, East German artists organized solidarity events to raise money for Chile and spearheaded a book project with artists from sixteen communist and capitalist countries to document the event and losses suffered. This article ultimately shows that communist visual culture can serve as a model for art as an activist practice.

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Stalinallee

Risen from Ruins ◽

10.11126/stanford/9781503603202.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Paul Stangl

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Soviet Union ◽

Socialist Realism ◽

State Building ◽

Housing Crisis ◽

World War ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Housing Issue ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

Building Program

For more than a century before the war, debate over the “housing issue” engaged politicians and reformers in Berlin, although Communists refused to participate, seeking revolution rather than reform. After World War II, newly empowered Communists had no choice but to address the housing crisis. Initially they joined others in supporting modernist planning efforts, with a first “residential cell” that would be constructed along Frankfurter Allee in Friedrichshain. The introduction of socialist realism necessitated a halt in construction as new plans for a monumental Stalinallee were developed. This formed the centerpiece of the state building program until the 1953 Uprising, which along with a shift to industrialized construction in the Soviet Union would result in a search for a new “socialist architecture.” As a result, the section of the street between Straussbergerplatz and Alexanderplatz would be built combining some socialist-realist tenets with modernism, while highlighting technological power.

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Hidden Modernism: Architecture Theory of the Socialist Realist Gap

Periodica Polytechnica Architecture ◽

10.3311/ppar.12168 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 49 (1) ◽

pp. 92-97 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Borbála Jász

Keyword(s):

Central Europe ◽

Interwar Period ◽

Socialist Realism ◽

Le Corbusier ◽

Architectural Theory ◽

Public Buildings ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

The Difference ◽

Architecture Theory ◽

Late Modern

The aim of this paper is to clarify and exemplify the difference between modern, socialist realism and late modern in architecture. In the general pre-theoretical use of these terms, this distinction is often blurred; a unified expression, socialist realism, is used for all the aforementioned terms. This paper will examine a possible answer for this phenomenon by using examples from different areas of eastern-Central Europe, especially from Hungarian architecture.The paper first focuses on the façadism of socialist realism in the architecture of eastern-Central Europe. Following this, it shows that the architectural tendencies of classical modernism did not disappear in this period; they were just not explicitly manifest in case of public buildings for example. Finally, the paper argues that after this socialist realist gap, architectural theory and planning tendencies of the interwar period returned and continued, especially the work of Le Corbusier.

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Lyrical Socialist Realism

October ◽

10.1162/octo_a_00166 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 147 ◽

pp. 56-77 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Christina Kiaer

Keyword(s):

Everyday Life ◽

Socialist Realism ◽

Large Piece ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Critical Response ◽

Geometric Patterns ◽

Soviet Art ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

Cross Country ◽

Revolutionary History

The thirty-three-year-old artist Aleksandr Deineka was given a large piece of wall space at the exhibition 15 Years of Artists of the RSFSR at the Russian Museum in Leningrad in 1932. At the center of the wall hung his most acclaimed painting, The Defense of Petrograd of 1928, a civil-war-themed canvas showing marching Bolshevik citizens, defending against the incursions of the White armies on their city, arrayed in flattened, geometric patterns across an undifferentiated white ground. The massive 15 Years exhibition attempted to sum up the achievements of Russian Soviet art since the revolution as well as point toward the future, and Deineka, in spite of his past association with “leftist” (read: avant-garde) artistic groups such as OST (the Society of Easel Painters) and October, was among those younger artists who were anointed by exhibition organizers as leading the way forward toward Socialist Realist art—a concept that was being formulated through both the planning of and critical response to this very display of so many divergent Soviet artists. Known for his magazine illustrations and posters, Deineka had also established himself at a young age as a major practitioner of monumental painting in a severe graphic style that addressed socialist themes, such as revolutionary history (e.g., Petrograd), and, as his other works displayed at the Leningrad exhibition demonstrate, proletarian sport (Women's Cross-Country Race and Skiers, both 1931) the ills of capitalism (Unemployed in Berlin, 1932), and the construction of the new Soviet everyday life (Who Will Beat Whom?, 1932).

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Postmodernism or Socialist Realism? The Architecture of Housing Estates in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians ◽

10.1525/jsah.2016.75.1.74 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 75 (1) ◽

pp. 74-101 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Maroš Krivý

Keyword(s):

Socialist Realism ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

Living Environments ◽

Pedestrian Street ◽

Housing Estates

During the 1970s and 1980s architects in Czechoslovakia grew disaffected with sídliště (housing estates) built in the country since the late 1950s. By means of design and discourse they turned to historical typologies and advanced the concept of sídliště as meaningful living environments. In Postmodernism or Socialist Realism? The Architecture of Housing Estates in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia, Maroš Krivý argues that the historico-phenomenological turn manifested in late socialist housing estates in a revival of the pedestrian street, the urban block (perimeter and superblock), and the communicative façade. He further asserts that this turn drew inspiration and legitimation from both contemporaneous Western architectural postmodernism and domestic socialist realist architecture of the early 1950s. From the 1970s Czechoslovak postmodernists and “neo–socialist realists” credited historicity with ideological importance. But if the historico-phenomenological turn pointed to the reform of architectural industrialization for neo–socialist realists, for postmodernists it was a way of freeing architecture from its strictures.

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The Mutability of the Canon: Socialist Realism and Chingiz Aitmatov's I dol'she veka dlitsia den'

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2499307 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 43 (4) ◽

pp. 573-587 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Katerina Clark

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Socialist Realism ◽

The West ◽

The Past ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

The Way

Chingiz Aitmatov's recent novel I dol'she veka dlitsia den’ provides an excellent case study of the way the socialist realist canon can generate new paradigms out of itself. At a time when it is widely assumed in the West that all reputable Soviet authors have gone “beyond” socialist realism, the appearance of this novel is particularly instructive.Aitmatov's book has had greater impact in the Soviet Union than any other novel published there in recent years. It covers subjects that are both highly topical and sensitive politically. Yet it does so by using the conventions of socialist realism to a greater extent than has been seen in the major Soviet writing of the past fifteen years. Indeed, Aitmatov has somehow contrived to weave into the fabric of his text patterns reminiscent of every period in the development of socialist realism.

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Aqyn agha? Abai Zholy as socialist realism and as literary history

Journal of Eurasian Studies ◽

10.1016/j.euras.2017.12.001 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 2-11 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Gabriel McGuire

Keyword(s):

19Th Century ◽

Literary History ◽

Socialist Realism ◽

The Novel ◽

Social Critique ◽

Local Leader ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

Folk Literature ◽

Generational Conflicts ◽

The 19Th Century

In Mukhtar Auezov's 1942 novel Abai Zholy, socialism is an end anticipated not just by history but more specifically by Kazakh literary history. In his earlier scholarly writings, Auezov had presented Abai as a transformational figure in the emergence of written Kazakh literature. In the novel, Abai becomes not only a literary innovator but also a political reformist: Auezov's Abai is horrified by the harsh and feudalistic behavior of his father Qunanbai, a wealthy local leader, and finds companionship and inspiration in his encounters with a series of famous 19th century Kazakh aqyns (bards). Auezov thus used Abai Zholy to argue that Kazakh folk literature had always been animated by a spirit of social critique which, in its laments and desires, had anticipated the Soviet world. This paper compares these aqyns’ depiction in the novel first with Auezov's earlier scholarship on the 19th century and second with the content of the aqyns’ own surviving works. These ideas reflected both contemporaneous shifts in Soviet nationalities policy and the influence of socialist realist literary models, which commonly staged both literary history and generational conflicts as allegories of political change.

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Rattling Sabres and Evil Intruders: The Border, Heroes and Border-crossers in Panfennist and Soviet Socialist Realist Literature

Culture Unbound Journal of Current Cultural Research ◽

10.3384/cu.2000.1525.14611165 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 6 (6) ◽

pp. 1165-1181

Author(s):

Thekla Musäus

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Socialist Realism ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Soviet Society ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

Soviet Communism ◽

Border Crossers

In this article I analyse Russian and Soviet Karelian literary texts written in Finnish at the time and in the style of socialist realism, and Finnish poems, songs and novels of the same era, proposing the idea of a ‘Greater-Finland’. I turned my attention to the question of how the depiction, construction and use of borders is handled in the respective texts, and look to determine whether the opposed ideologies of Soviet Communism and Panfennism led to similar or different artificial results. This analysis proves that the texts of the two ideologies generally draw strict distinctions between the ‘heroes’ of their own side and the bad ‘Others’. Only the heroes of the plot are able to either cross borders or to establish new ones. While in the Soviet texts opponents of Soviet society inside the Soviet Union are depicted as foreign and separated through ideological, symbolic and topographical borders, the Karelians in the Finnish texts are suspected as a hybrid people, spoiled by their contact with the evil Russians.

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Struggle of Masurians with Polish Identity After the Second World War. Socialist Realist Literature Describing the nationality verification and surveying campaign

Prace Literaturoznawcze ◽

10.31648/pl.4718 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 185-206

Author(s):

Agnieszka Piekarska

Keyword(s):

Socialist Realism ◽

Second World War ◽

World War ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

History Of ◽

East Prussia ◽

Second World

This article presents the history of Masuria created by the propaganda of socialist realism. Itsaim is to show how writers presented the nationality-based verification campaign and opinion pollsin the area of former East Prussia. The author attempts to prove that social realist writers describedthe above-mentioned action as “discovering” Polish identity by the inhabitants of Masuria. In orderto do that, four stories included in the anthology Ziemia serdecznie znajoma, published in 1954, areanalysed to show that strong pressure was exerted on the Masurians to confirm their Polish nationality.

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Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko and the melodrama of High Stalinism

Cambridge Opera Journal ◽

10.1017/s0954586710000212 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 21 (3) ◽

pp. 203-236

Author(s):

Nathan Seinen

Keyword(s):

Socialist Realism ◽

The Other ◽

Soviet Period ◽

Moral Framework ◽

Mass Audience ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

The Aesthetic

AbstractThis article examines the first opera of Prokofiev's Soviet period, Semyon Kotko (1939), in light of the disparity between two forms of melodrama, one affecting the opera's composition, the other its reception. The first is the classic melodrama, which offered the composer the foundation for a vivid, intense work that would also be suitable for a mass audience; the second is the melodrama reflecting the aesthetic norms and moral framework of socialist realism and High Stalinism. The simplicity and immediacy of Kotko avoided the directed emotionalism of the officially favoured model of Romantic opera, and the Ukrainian setting prompted references to the tradition of Gogolian comedy rather than an elevation of folk content to an epic dimension. Characters conform to archetypes of classic melodrama, and together with the opera's comic elements and the unique gestural idiom of its music and manner of performance, this detracted from the required effects of sublime heroism and nationalism. While the outlines of a socialist realist plot remain in Kotko, Prokofiev's commitment to what he considered timeless values of music and drama led to a failure, in socialist realist terms, to achieve an appropriate amplification of its moral essence.

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