14. Dystopian Fiction in the Soviet Union, Proletkult, and Socialist-Realist Utopianism

This chapter introduces the reader to Dmitri Baltermants, beginning with his birth to a Warsaw-based Jewish family and then describing his development as a Soviet photographer in the 1930s. A second-generation Soviet photographer and master of the horizontal, Baltermants was trained in socialist realist aesthetics, which documented and elevated the revolutionary experiment that was Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Baltermants’s world turned upside down. The second half of the chapter focuses on the German invasion and its rapid advance through Soviet territory until its occupation of Kerch in November. The chapter walks the reader through the unfolding process of Kerch under German occupation. In a matter of two weeks, German authorities rounded up the entire population of Jews, drove them to an antitank trench in nearby Bagerovo, and then murdered them in a Holocaust by bullets. It concludes with Kerch’s liberation in late December.

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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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Mythological, Religious, and Philosophical Topoi in the Prose of Valerii Shevchuk

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2500471 ◽

1991 ◽

Vol 50 (4) ◽

pp. 905-913

Author(s):

Marko Pavlyshyn

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Status Quo ◽

Controversial Issues ◽

The Past ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

The Status ◽

Contemporary Reality ◽

Party Congress

Liberalized cultural discussion in the Soviet Union after the Twenty-seventh Party Congress in 1985 was concerned in part with the nature of a literature that would be appropriate to the new ideals of openness and restructuring. In Ukraine, as elsewhere, the debate brought forth a list of imperatives that, without challenging the socialist realist principle that literature must serve overarching social and political goals, amounted to a formula for a new kind of literary engagement. Literature must “boldly intrude into contemporary reality,” it must defend the historical, cultural, linguistic, and ecological heritage and must unmask the crimes and abuses of the past and present. It must no longer be bland and inoffensive and must not avoid controversial issues or praise the status quo as a matter of course.

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Negotiating “Historical Truth”

Journal of Musicology ◽

10.1525/jm.2016.33.3.277 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 33 (3) ◽

pp. 277-331

Author(s):

Leah Goldman

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

High Stakes ◽

Love Story ◽

Ideal Candidate ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Historical Accuracy ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

Historical Truth ◽

Bolshoi Theater

In 1925, when Soviet composer Iurii Shaporin began writing his first opera, Polina Gebl’, about the Decembrist Ivan Annenkov and the French emigrée shopgirl who followed him into exile, he had no idea how tumultuous its journey would be. It took twenty-eight years and countless revisions for the opera to gain official approval. When it finally premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in 1953, with the title The Decembrists, the love story had been backgrounded and the historical plot line vastly expanded; scenes, characters, and arias had been added, dropped, or altered; and Polina herself had been written out entirely. The negotiated process by which Polina became The Decembrists reveals much about the evolving relationship between music and power in the Soviet Union, especially in the high-stakes realm of Socialist Realist opera, in which a suitable exemplar had yet to be produced. Amidst the pressures of the late-Stalinist state’s assault on the creative intelligentsia, and in the wake of major opera scandals in the 1930s and 1940s, the Bolshoi Theater saw in Shaporin’s work an ideal candidate to fill this void: a historical opera with an unimpeachable subject, the Decembrist Revolution, understood as the foundation point of the revolutionary legacy to which the Bolsheviks laid claim. This article analyzes the intense negotiations among Shaporin, the Bolshoi and its consultants, and official censors to ensure The Decembrists’ historical accuracy, which they believed would guarantee its acceptance. Yet, as the article demonstrates, while Soviet musical authorities upheld “historical truth” as their standard, in the end the Socialist Realist ideal of “artistic truth” was far more important for The Decembrists’ success.

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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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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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Volga-Volga

Journal of Musicology ◽

10.1525/jm.2013.30.4.530 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 30 (4) ◽

pp. 530-576

Author(s):

Peter Kupfer

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Soviet Union ◽

Socialist Realism ◽

The Third ◽

Musical Comedy ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Musical Production ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

The Aesthetic ◽

The Masses

Volga-Volga (1938), the third musical comedy made by the Soviet director-composer team of Grigory Aleksandrov and Isaak Dunayevsky, is one of the most emblematic films of the Soviet 1930s. Indeed, it won its makers a Stalin Prize in 1941 and was supposedly Stalin’s favorite film. But Volga-Volga was also a success with Soviet viewers: they flocked by the millions to see the film, which was still playing in theaters at the outbreak of war in June 1941. As a combination of slapstick comedy and memorable musical numbers that addressed an appropriately Soviet theme, the film clearly spoke to both the masses and officials. But what does Volga-Volga have to say? The film tells the story of a musical “civil war” between a folk ensemble and a classical orchestra, both of which head to Moscow to participate in the national musical Olympiad. Due to “accidental” circumstances, the two ensembles eventually join forces and win the competition with a performance of the “Song about the Volga.” Though this merger of musical forces and styles seems to serve predominantly comedic purposes, the “story of a song” can also be read as a commentary on the development of music in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. In a period marked by debates and uncertainties in all realms of musical production about what exactly Socialist Realist music was to be, Aleksandrov and Dunayevsky offer as their solution a musical practice that advocates inclusivity by seeking to combine features from many types of music into a distinctly Soviet blend. This thematization of music is enhanced by the nature of the film musical, whose stylistic reliance on music as a bridge between real and ideal worlds embodies the aesthetic demands of Socialist Realism. Furthermore, the film can be understood as an instance of what film scholar Miriam Hansen calls “vernacular modernism,” namely, the adaptation of an American cinematic model into a foreign context as a tool for reflecting and refracting experiences of modernity.

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The Pandora's Box of ‘Doi Moi’: the Open-Door Policy and Contemporary Theatre in Vietnam

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x00011532 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 13 (52) ◽

pp. 372-385 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Catherine Diamond

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

National Culture ◽

Urban Areas ◽

Open Door ◽

Open Door Policy ◽

The West ◽

Contemporary Theatre ◽

Doi Moi ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Socialist Realist

In the 1990s, Vietnamese traditional theatre has seen its popular base eroded by foreign videos, television imports, and the films that have poured into the country since the advent of the ‘open door’ policy, or doi moi. As that policy is primarily economic in purpose, the advantages offered to the national culture have been questionable. The traditional forms here discussed by Catherine Diamond – tuong, hat boi, and cheo – have lost much of their status in the urban areas, though still popular in the countryside. However, the forms which address contemporary issues – ‘renovated theatre’ (cai luong), spoken theatre (kich noi), and, most recently, ‘mini-theatre’ (san khau nho) – play to significant numbers in Saigon and Hanoi, often employing a distinctive vein of satirical humour. Though trained in the academies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Vietnamese dramatists have now broken away from the socialist realist ideal and are looking towards the West and China for new artistic developments. The author of this survey, Catherine Diamond, is a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan. She has recently published Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about the traditional dancers in Southeast Asia.

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Boris Asafiev and soviet musical thought: Reputation and influence

Muzikologija ◽

10.2298/muz2130057e ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 57-74

Author(s):

Daniel Elphick

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Musical Thought ◽

Vital Part ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Musical Discourse ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

To Come ◽

Key Terms ◽

Soviet Music ◽

Musical Process

The theories of Boris Asafiev, including musical process, symphonism, and intonatsiya, proved to be hugely influential in the Soviet Union and beyond. While Asafiev?s ideas were widely adopted by theorists and audiences alike, they were also appropriated by a generation of music critics. As composers struggled to come to terms with what might constitute socialist-realist music, critics built a discourse of projecting meaning onto works via Asafiev?s theories. At the same time, multiple theorists developed and expanded his ideas. The picture that emerges is of a multitude of applications and responses to a multivalent body of work that became a vital part of musical discourse in the latter half of the Soviet Union. In this article, I survey the main theories from Boris Asafiev?s writings on music, and their significance after his death. I begin by defining key terms such as symphonism, musical process, and especially intonatsiya. I then discuss the 1948 Zhdanovshchina and Asafiev?s involvement, and the less well-known 1949 discussions on Musicology. For the remainder of the article, I provide examples of key studies from Soviet music theorists using Asafiev?s terms to illustrate how their usage expanded and, in some cases, moved away from Asafiev?s myriad intentions.

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