One Day–Fifty Years Later

Slavic Review ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Wachtel
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Fiftieth Anniversary ◽  
Original Publication ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Unusual Representative

November 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) in the Moscow journal Novyi mir. In this article, Andrew Wachtel considers Solzhenitsyn's pathbreaking work in its original publication context. It examines the editorial preface and the two orthodox contemporary works of Soviet socialist realism the editor chose as bookends for One Day, illustrating the ways in which the surrounding literary context serves to emphasize the socialist realist bona fides of the then unknown Solzhenitsyn. The intertextual links connecting One Day with the works that surround it help to demonstrate that at this point in his career, far from being a dissident, Solzhenitsyn could plausibly be read as an appropriate, albeit unusual, representative of official Soviet literature.

“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

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).

What Faith the God-Contemporary? Chingiz Aitmatov's Plakha

Slavic Review ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-226
Author(s):  
Anthony Olcott
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Soviet Literature

Chingiz Aitmatov has long been a powerful figure in Soviet literature, but few critics in the west or the Soviet Union have treated him as a serious writer. Many of the reasons why Aitmatov's reputation is not commensurate with his achievement are clear enough; the few westerners who have bothered with Aitmatov tend to agree that he offers "a somewhat new mix from the old patterns of Soviet literature with an admixture of Central Asian lore, but the game he is playing is as old as socialist realism itself.

scholarly journals GRAMMAR OF TIME IN UDMURT SOCREALISTIC POETRY: GAI SABITOV’s CREATIVITY

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 866-874
Author(s):  
A.A. Аrzamazov
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Individual Author ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Poetic Texts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Text Content ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Selection Of

This article discusses the individual structural-semantic, grammatical and stylistic peculiarities of the poetic texts of Gui Sabitov, who is one of the brightest representatives of the Udmurt socialist realism. Udmurt socrealistic idiostyles as a national-specific variant of this artistic method has never been the object of interpretation. The relevance of the study is dictated by the insufficiency of the linguistic and poetic approach in considering the phenomenon of development of Udmurt literature, the lack of scientific works focused both on the grammar of poetry and on the temporality category of the poetic whole, its artistic contexts. The article analyzes the multi-level relationship of the grammatical sphere and the artistic semantics of G. Sabitov’s texts, shows the interconversion of form and text content, linguistic elements, the ideological plan of expression and the individual author’s worldview. The novelty is the selection of the main grammatical and lexical segments of the lyrical translation of temporality, the identification of scenarios of individual author semantization of the present tense, the study of Gui Sabitov’s poetic corpus from the point of view of linguistic realities that are projected onto the Udmurt Soviet literature in general.

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.

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