scholarly journals Was Soviet Music Middlebrow? Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, Socialist Realism, and the Mass Listener in the 1930s

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Fairclough
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Soviet Music ◽  
Programmatic Music

Symphonic music composed under Stalin presents both ethical and aesthetic problems. Often assumed to have been composed in a compromised style by composers who were either coerced into abandoning their “real” modernist inclinations or who were in any case second-rate, these works have been labelled variously socialist realist, conformist, conservative, or even dissident, depending on the taste and opinion of those passing judgement. This article argues that picking and choosing which symphony is socialist realist and which is not cannot be justified either logically or historically, and that we should no longer attempt to define any non-texted or non-programmatic music in this way. The Anglophone term “middlebrow” holds out the possibility of describing this repertoire without implying ethical or artistic compromise on the composers’ part, acknowledging that, in the absence of any elite or “highbrow” musical culture, composers shared the aim of reaching a mass audience.

Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko and the melodrama of High Stalinism

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.

“Socialist Realist” Critiques of Neoliberal “Shock Therapy”

2019 ◽  
pp. 431-451
Author(s):  
April A. Eisman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Shock Therapy ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
German Art ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
East German ◽  
Insight Into

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.

Socialist Realism and Socialist Realist Romanticism

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-277
Author(s):  
Irina Zavedeeva ◽  
Albina Ozieva ◽  
Jeremy Howard
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Socialist Realist

Leonid Polovinkin: Few Strokes to the Portrait of the Composer

10.34690/21 ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 80-105
Author(s):  
С.А. Пасынкова
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Natural Development ◽  
Soviet Music

Статья посвящена жизни и творчеству Леонида Алексеевича Половинкина (1894-1949) - талантливого музыканта, яркого и самобытного композитора, выпускника Московской консерватории (класс Н. Я. Мясковского). В настоящее время его обширное творческое наследие, изучение которого во многом усложняет отсутствие изданных партитур и аудиозаписей, находится почти в полном забвении. Имя Половинкина ассоциируется лишь с его ранними фортепианными сочинениями и работами в области детского театра. Творческая деятельность Половинкина, продолжавшаяся три десятилетия, отражает эволюцию отечественного музыкального искусства 1920-1940-х годов. Если его первые работы наполнены новыми звучаниями и смелыми открытиями, то произведения 1930-1940-х годов в первую очередь под воздействием доктрины социалистического реализма стилистически меняются, становясь более традиционными. Однако и в них слышатся отголоски экспериментов 1920-х годов. The article is dedicated to the life and creative work of Leonid A. Polovinkin (18941949) who was a talented Russian musician, an outstanding composer with the highly original manner of writing. Polovinkin graduated from the Moscow Tchaikovsky сonservatory where he studied composition under Nikolai Ya. Myaskovsky. Nowadays the huge heritage of Polovinkin is almost completely forgotten. At the best, his name is associated with his early piano pieces or works for childrens theaters. His works are neither published nor recorded and that further complicates the studying of his versatile heritage, which is quite worthy of a monograph about it to be written. Polovinkins creative work had been continuing for three decades (from 1920s till 1940s) and reflected the evolution of Soviet music of the period. His early works are full of discoveries in harmonic aspects. In 1930s, his style, because of its natural development but also under the influence of doctrines of socialist realism in art, began to change and finally became more traditional. But there was still an echo of his early music in it.

Stalinallee

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.

scholarly journals Hidden Modernism: Architecture Theory of the Socialist Realist Gap

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-97 ◽  
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.

Lyrical Socialist Realism

October ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 147 ◽  
pp. 56-77 ◽  
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).

scholarly journals MUSICAL LIFE OF CHUVASHIA IN THE EARLY 1930s

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 98-105
Author(s):  
Andrey V. Mankov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Radio Broadcasting ◽  
Symphonic Orchestra ◽  
15Th Anniversary ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Soviet Music ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The article studies the main directions of musical life of Chuvashia at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in the USSR in the 1930s. The issues of the journal “Soviet music” were used as a historic source. The article, in particular, tells about the achievements of the Republic in creating the national culture within the framework of the Cultural Revolution which were demonstrated in the days of celebrating in 1935 the 15th anniversary of the Chuvash autonomous region formation. At this, the author pays special attention to the role of Cheboksary music college in forming the musical arts of the region and which became the center of musical life in Chuvashia. The article describes the creative activities of the leading music workers and composers of the Republic of the studied period (S.M. Maksimov, V.M. Krivonosov). The conclusion is made about undoubted successes in the development of musical culture of Chuvashia in the early 1930s. It adopted more modern forms at those times. Thus, in these years in the Chuvash territory the first major musical compositions in the Chuvash language are created. In the republic there were a symphonic orchestra and a state choir, music radio broadcasting was created. Composers from Chuvashia became known both at home and abroad where their songs were performed. Composers actively studied the Chuvash musical folklore.

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

2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-101 ◽  
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.

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

Slavic Review ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 573-587 ◽  
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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document