In 1932 the Party functionaries in the sphere of literature (I. Gronsky and V. Kirpotin) began to affirm this newly invented dogma. At the Writers’ Congress in 1934 the formula ‘socialist realism’ was, for the sake of prestige, put into the mouth of Gorky, to whom its authority was ascribed. Later, and until 1956, Stalin himself was named as creator of the theory (which was evidently not far from the truth). Gorky’s novel Mother was, as is well known, designated as the first example of ‘socialist realism’. All of which, however, tells us nothing about the essence of the theory in question. Every definition of it in the textbooks, given in deliberately unintelligible bureaucratic jargon, is extremely abstract and can be interpreted in any way one likes. Mother was a phenomenon wholly rooted in the Social Democratic propaganda tradition of the beginning of the century, and comparison with it provides no answer. From the standpoint of style and distinctive artistic features Mother is a typical product of turn-of-the-century European naturalism, and a very imperfect and second-rate one at that. A much better example of such writing is Zola’s novel Germinal. Consequently, neither the artistic nor the ideological features of Gorky’s novel (which contained a few well-realized episodes) can be regarded as innovatory in any way. There is not the slightest basis for seeing in it a new ‘artistic method’. Western literary critics therefore conclude, as a rule, that the official theory of ‘socialist realism’ is not to be taken literally, since its ‘demagogic aspect’ is too strongly marked.121 But there is in it an element which cannot be left without comment or overlooked: the idea of ‘partisanship’ as officially interpreted. This is the key concept in normative aesthetic of ‘socialist realism’.
As I have said already, Stalin’s interpretation of ‘partisanship’ had little in common with Lenin’s, although he claimed continuity. This contradiction was to be noted by critical intellectuals at the beginning of the 1960s, when they protested that ‘partisanship in literature is now understood quite differently from the way Lenin understood it.’122 However, it is the very ‘originality’ of Stalin’s idea of partisanship that interests us here.
First, this doctrine assumes that ‘the Party’ — in the form of the bureaucratic leading circles, of course — has the right to give an artist guiding instructions, to supervise his work, to ‘direct’ him. Such instructions are published periodically either as special decisions (on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, or, comparatively recently, on literary and art criticism, and so on) or as advice given to artists by the Party leaders (in every report he made to every congress, Brezhnev gave the creative intelligentsia their due share of advice and, as has been observed even in official circles, the advice handed out on different occasions is inconsistent). All these instructions are given, of course, in the name of ‘the people’, ‘the Party’, and so forth which, however, alters nothing. Such instructions can be comically detailed. Thus in the summer of 1954 writers were told to write books that would depict
the splendid image of Soviet people — advanced workers in production, masters of agriculture, people who have brought the virgin lands under cultivation and by their inspired shock-work have created plenty in foodstuffs and other material benefits.123
In Stalin’s time ‘partisanship’ was understood above all as meaning eulogy of ‘the great teacher’. And they did eulogize him. In A. Surov’s play Dawn over Moscow, the hero said of him: ‘It seems to me that, every morning, he switches on the dawn over Moscow with his own hand.’124 It would seem that one could not go further than that…
While freedom to create has been recognized by the official ideologists, very strict limits have been laid down for this freedom (fortunately, as time goes by, these limits are widening). The essence of ‘socialist realism’ as a whole is the subordination of artistic creativity to the tastes and purposes of the ruling statocratic class. These tastes and aims, however, have changed. The degree of subordination has also changed. For this reason ‘socialist realism’ can not simply be treated as a whole, as a consistent ‘artistic’ phenomenon. Analysis of concrete works also tells us little here. It has to be said that ‘socialist realism’ in the strict sense existed for a very short time, in the Stalin era alone. Where those years were concerned, one can speak of a more or less harmonious system of principles laid down by the ruling statocracy as the basis for any artistic creation. As the prominent Soviet historian A. Ya. Gurevich has said, every social phenomenon has to be studied ‘in the phase when the potentialities contained within it are revealed most fully’.123
The first distinctive feature of Stalinist aesthetics is that it is centred on literature. This characteristic of socialist-realist theory can be explained from the historico-cultural and also from the sociopolitical standpoint. In the first place nineteenth-century Russian culture, on which theoreticians of Soviet art have based (and have continued to base) themselves really was, to a large extent, ‘literature-centred’. This tradition has its roots in the depths of history. Secular literature took shape in Russia much earlier than secular art or music, even before Peter’s time. Here it may be objected that eighteenth-century Russian painting was better than the literature of the same period. But we must remember that at the level of world classics it was Russian literature, the works of Pushkin and Griboedov, that came to the fore, while the turn of Russian painting and music arrived only later. Continuity and national originality were most strongly marked in literature, and that made it the reference point for Russian art as a whole. Symphonic music and secular painting came to Russia from the West, and in their search for identity the national schools of painters and composers (the ‘Itinerants’, the ‘Mighty Handful’, and so on) based themselves above all upon the successes of literature.
Consequently, there is nothing bad about ‘literaturocentrism’ in itself. It is bad only if it is made into an obligatory norm for all the arts. The literary mode of thought was proclaimed the model for all artistic thinking. The entire terminology and all the categories of ‘socialist realism’ were drawn not from the arts as a whole, but from literature alone. The aesthetics of the Renaissance, Classicism, Romanticism, the great epochs in the history of art, expressed something vital which united all the genres. The term ‘critical realism’, applied to nineteenth-century Russian and Western art but invented later, was used only in relation to literature — in its pure form, indeed, only to prose. The theory of ‘critical realism’ in Soviet art criticism was developed under the influence of the ‘literaturocentrist’ dogma and transformed into the ‘historical element’ in the socialist-realist construct. Attempts to discover ‘critical realism’ in art amounted to mere speculation. Instead of looking for common features in Courbet and Balzac, or in the Itinerants and Tolstoy, Courbet and the Itinerants were simply reduced to Balzac and Tolstoy, forced into the framework of literary aesthetics. (The question arises: What is realism in music or, for heaven’s sake, in architecture?)
The concepts of ‘critical’ and ‘socialist’ realism were ideological twins, created in bureaucratic offices. Although they belong to different epochs, their coincidence revealed very well an approach which identified the history of art with the development of literature. This principle survived Stalin’s death. It is interesting that between the 1950s and 1970s there were very few artistic disputes between the state and writers, even though there were plenty of political disputes. On the other hand, however, the constantly recurring disputes with composers and painters were exclusively artistic in character, although sometimes they were treated later as having been political. The reason was that the aesthetics of ‘socialist realism’ is in general potentially hostile to painting and music as art forms. Every new phenomenon in these fields, if it is original at all, is quite impossible to fit into the categories of ‘literaturocentrist’ aesthetics. The revolt against ‘socialist realism’ was, for painters, mainly a revolt against ‘literaturocentrist’ norms. The painters’ refusal to let themselves be guided by literature aroused the indignation of the ‘socialist realists’, who accused their opponents of modernism, formalism and other sins. But the real issue was different: not between ‘realism’ and ‘formalism’, an antithesis thought up by the socialist-realists themselves, but between ‘socialist realism’ and painting.