SOCIALIST REALISM(socialist realism), creative method, proclaimed official. owls aesthetics is fundamental to the domestic sphere. culture and art. The formation of the doctrine of social revolution, which dominated the USSR from the middle. 1930s, preceded by theoretical judgments of A.V. Lunacharsky(Article “Tasks of Social Democratic Artistic Creativity”, 1907, etc.), based on the meaning. degrees on V.I. Lenin’s article “Party organization and party literature” (1905), as well as activities Russian Association of Proletarian Writers(RAPP), Russian Association of Proletarian Artists(RAPH) and Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia(AHRR; which declared “heroic realism”). The concept of creativity. method, borrowed from Marxist aesthetics, in the end. 1920s took shape in opposition to “dialectical-materialistic. creative method" of proletarian literature to the "mechanistic method" of bourgeois literature, which in the beginning. 1930s was rethought as a confrontation between “affirmative”, “socialist” (“proletarian”) realism and “old” (“bourgeois”) critical realism.

The term "S. R." first used in print in 1932 by the chairman of the organization. Institute of the USSR SP I. M. Gronsky (“Literary newspaper” dated May 23). As a basis creative Sov method liters S. r. was approved at the 1st All-Union Congress of Soviets. writers in 1934 (including with the active participation of M. Gorky, A. A. Fadeev, N. I. Bukharin); formulations from the report of A.A. Zhdanova(the writer’s task is “to depict reality in its revolutionary development”; “the truthfulness and historical specificity of the artistic depiction must be combined with the task of ideological reworking and education of working people in the spirit of socialism”) were enshrined in the Charter of the SP. To the fundamental for S. r. the principle of partisanship in the middle. 1930s the principle of nationality was added (in the sense of the accessibility of art for the perception of the broad masses, a reflection of their life and interests), which became just as integral to the socialist realist doctrine. Other important for the works of S. r. The features were life-affirming pathos and revolutionary romanticism. heroism. As a result, S. r. turned literature and art into a powerful ideological tool. impact (cf. the statement attributed to J.V. Stalin about writers as “engineers of human souls”). Deviation from the principles of S. r. persecuted.

Literature

In literature, the first work of S. r. the novel “Mother” by M. Gorky (1906–07) was retrospectively named, to which the scheme of the image of a “positive hero” - a person experiencing a new birth during the revolution - owes its appearance. struggle. The novels “Chapaev” by D. I. Furmanov (1923) and “The Iron Stream” by A. S. are also recognized in retrospect as classics of the literary genre. Serafimovich(1924), “Cement” by F.V. Glad kova(1925), “Destruction” by A. A. Fadeev (1927). Vivid examples of socialist realism. the novels of F. I. Panferov, N. A. Ostrovsky, B. N. Polevoy, V. N. Azhaev became the literary novels; dramaturgy by V.V. Vishnevsky, A.E. Korneychuk, N.F. Pogodin and others. Fundamentals of S. r. shaken with the beginning of the “thaw” in the middle. 1950s, but will end. liberation from his principles occurred only with the collapse of the state whose ideology he served. S. r. was not exclusively a phenomenon of owls. liters: its aesthetic. the principles were also shared by some foreign writers, including L. Aragon, M. Pui manova, A. Zegers.

art

In the fine arts S. r. was reflected in the predominance of socio-historical. myths and solemn and representative techniques of their interpretation: idealization of nature, false pathos, historical. false, rationalistic organization of the narrative, exaggerated scale of many. works (A. M. Gerasimov, V. P. Efanov, Vl. A. Serov, B. V. Ioganson, D. A. Nalbandyan, S. D. Merkurov, N. V. Tomsky, E. V. Vuchetich and many others). Meeting the standards of S. r. recognized at the same time means. works of a number of Russians owl masters era (V.I. Mukhina, S.T. Konenkova, A.A. Deineka, S.A. Chuikova, S.V. Gerasimova, A.A. Plastova, P.D. Korina, M.S. Saryan and etc.). Isolation from the world art strengthened the dogmatism and intolerance of the Socialist Revolution, especially in the post-war years, when its principles extended to the art of communist countries. block. Directive implementation of the method of S. r. in all areas of art, the uncompromising struggle against any manifestations of “formalism” and “Westernism” led to the formation of a special form in the USSR totalitarian art, seeking to suppress the various. currents avant-garde, so-called unofficial lawsuit (including post-war underground in USSR). However, already from the middle. 1960s The development of art in the USSR is less and less connected with the dogmas of the Social Revolution, which soon became an anachronism. In history architecture the term "S. R." use preim. to designate Stalin's buildings neoclassicism in the USSR and Eastern countries. Europe.

Movie

In cinema, the aesthetics of S. r. formed in the 1920s. in the most significant poster films about the revolution for this time: “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), “October” (1927) by S. M. Eisenstein; “Mother” (1926), “The End of St. Petersburg” (1927) by V.I. Pudovkin, etc. It became dominant in the 1930s, when the departure from socialist realism. canon was already practically impossible: “Great Citizen” by F. M. Ermler (1938–39), “Baltic Deputy” (1937) and “Member of the Government” (1940) by I. E. Matveev, T. V. Levchuk, I. A. Gosteva et al.

Theater

In the theater the standards of S. r. introduced into the beginning 1930s with direct with the participation of M. Gorky, contrary to the logic of the development of directing systems early. 20th century and 1920s The ideologists of the CPSU(b) directed the Soviets. theater according to the pre-director model 19th century as an art secondary to literature, life-like, politicized, didactic. Method Moscow Art Theater in a simplified, false understanding, it was declared the only fruitful one for the development of socialism. External signs of verisimilitude were combined with crude ideology, schematization, and art. external character in performance, illustrativeness, stereotypes, pathos in directing. Revolution became mandatory. theme in a pseudo-historical interpretation (for example, “Man with a Gun” by N. F. Pogodin, Moscow Theater named after Evg. Vakhtangov, 1937). Gorky’s plays “Yegor Bulychov and Others” (Vakhtangov Theatre, 1932) and “Enemies” (MKhAT, 1935), staged taking into account the “class conflict”, are the standard of the method of S. r. The productions of the works of L. N. Tolstoy, W. Shakespeare, A. P. Chekhov, and others were brought into accordance with this “Gorky” model. In performances of the 1930s, with the inevitable declarative observance of the external signs of the method of S. r. (social typification, ideology), the creativity of outstanding artists and directors formed in the previous era could not be completely suppressed. The post-war situation (until the mid-1950s), with the introduction of the “theory of non-conflict”, was marked by an increase in the deceitfulness of theatrical art, its art. decline. Abroad, there is a unique understanding of S. r. in the 1950s expressed in the works of B.

Socialist realism (lat. Socisalis - social, real is - real) - unitary, pseudo-artistic direction and method Soviet literature, formed under the influence of naturalism and so-called proletarian literature. He was a leading figure in the arts from 1934 to 1980. Soviet criticism associated with him the highest achievements of art of the 20th century. The term "socialist realism" appeared in 1932. In the 1920s, on the pages of periodicals there were lively discussions by definition, which would reflect the ideological and aesthetic originality of the art of the socialist era. F. Gladkov, Yu. Lebedinsky suggested calling new method"proletarian realism", V. Mayakovsky - "tendentious", I. Kulik - revolutionary socialist realism, A. Tolstoy - "monumental", Nikolai Volnova - "revolutionary romanticism", V. Polishchuk - "constructive dynamism". There were also such names like "revolutionary realism", "romantic realism", "communist realism".

The participants in the discussion also argued sharply about whether there should be one method or two - socialist realism and red romanticism. The author of the term “socialist realism” was Stalin. The first chairman of the Organizing Committee of the USSR SP Gronsky recalled that in a conversation with Stalin he proposed calling the method of Soviet art “socialist realism.” The task of Soviet literature and its method were discussed at M. Gorky’s apartment; Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov constantly participated in the discussions. Thus, socialist realism arose according to the Stalin-Gorky project. This term has a political meaning. By analogy, the names “capitalist” and “imperialist realism” arise.

The definition of the method was first formulated at the First Congress of USSR Writers in 1934. The charter of the Union of Soviet Writers noted that socialist realism is the main method of Soviet literature, it “requires from the writer a truthful, historically specific depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, the truthfulness and historical specificity of the artistic depiction must be combined with the task of ideological reworking and education of the working people in the spirit of socialism." This definition characterizes the typological features of socialist realism and states that socialist realism is the main method of Soviet literature. This means there cannot be any other method. Socialist realism became the method of government. The words “demands from the writer” sound like a military order. They testify that the writer has the right to freedom - he is obliged to show life “in revolutionary development,” that is, not what is, but what should be. The purpose of his works is ideological and political - “the education of working people in the spirit of socialism.” The definition of socialist realism is political in nature, it is devoid of aesthetic content.

The ideology of socialist realism is Marxism, which is based on voluntarism; it is a defining feature of the worldview. Marx believed that the proletariat was capable of destroying the world of economic determinism and building a communist paradise on earth.

In the speeches and articles of party ideologists, the terms “ibisi of the literary front”, “ideological war”, “weapons” were often found. In the new art, methodology was most valued. The core of socialist realism is the communist party. Socialist realists assessed what was depicted from the standpoint of communist ideology, sang the praises of the communist party and its leaders, the socialist ideal. The foundation of the theory of socialist realism was V. I. Lenin’s article “Party organization and party literature.” A characteristic feature of socialist realism was the aestheticization of Soviet politics and the politicization of literature. The criterion for evaluating a work was not artistic quality, but ideological meaning. Often artistically helpless works were awarded state awards.The Lenin Prize was awarded to L.I. Brezhnev's trilogy "Small Land", "Renaissance", "Virgin Land". Stalinists, Leninians, ideological myths about the friendship of peoples and internationalism brought to the point of absurdity appeared in literature.

Socialist realists depicted life as they wanted to see it according to the logic of Marxism. In their works, the city stood as the personification of harmony, and the village - disharmony and chaos. The personification of good was the Bolshevik, the personification of evil was the fist. Hardworking peasants were considered kulaks.

In the works of socialist realists, the interpretation of the land has changed. In the literature of past times, it was a symbol of harmony, the meaning of existence; for them, the earth is the personification of evil. The embodiment of private property instincts is often the mother. In the story by Peter Punch "Mom, die!" the ninety-five-year-old Gnat Hunger dies long and hard. But the hero can join the collective farm only after her death. Full of despair, he shouts “Mom, die!”

The positive heroes of the literature of socialist realism were workers, poor peasants, and representatives of the intelligentsia appeared as cruel, immoral, and treacherous.

“Genetically and typologically,” notes D. Nalivaiko, “socialist realism refers to the specific phenomena of the artistic process of the 20th century, formed under totalitarian regimes.” “This, according to D. Nalivaiko, “is a specific doctrine of literature and art, constructed by the Communist Party bureaucracy and engaged artists, imposed from above by state power and implemented under its leadership and constant control.”

Soviet writers had every right to praise the Soviet way of life, but they had no right to the slightest criticism. Socialist realism was both a rod and a bludgeon. Artists who adhered to the norms of socialist realism became victims of repression and terror. Among them are Kulish, V. Polishchuk, Grigory Kosynka, Zerov, V. Bobinsky, O. Mandelstam, N. Gumilev, V. Stus. He crippled the creative destinies of such talented artists, like P. Tychina, V. Sosyura, Rylsky, A. Dovzhenko.

Socialist realism has essentially become socialist classicism with such norms and dogmas as the already mentioned communist party spirit, nationalism, revolutionary romance, historical optimism, and revolutionary humanism. These categories are purely ideological, devoid of artistic content. Such norms were an instrument of crude and incompetent interference in the affairs of literature and art. The party bureaucracy used socialist realism as a weapon for the destruction of artistic values. Works by Nikolai Khvylovy, V. Vinnichenko, Yuri Klen, E. Pluzhnik, M. Orseth, B.-I. Antonich were banned for many decades. Belonging to the order of socialist realists became a matter of life and death. A. Sinyavsky, speaking at the Copenhagen meeting of cultural figures in 1985, said that “socialist realism resembles a heavy forged chest, which occupies the entire room reserved for literature for housing. It remained either to climb into the chest and live under its lid, or to face the chest , falling, from time to time squeezing sideways or crawling under it. This chest is still standing, but the walls of the room have moved apart, or the chest was moved to a more spacious and display room. And the clouds folded into screens have become dilapidated, decayed... none of the serious writers use them ". Tired of developing purposefully in a certain direction. Everyone is looking for workarounds. Someone ran into the forest and plays on the lawn, fortunately from the large hall where there is a dead chest, this is easier to do."

The problems of the methodology of socialist realism became the object of heated debate in 1985-1990. Criticism of socialist realism was based on the following arguments: socialist realism limits and impoverishes the artist’s creative searches, it is a system of control over art, “evidence of the ideological charity” of the artist.

Socialist realism was considered the pinnacle of realism. It turned out that the socialist realist was higher than the realist of the 18th-19th centuries, higher than Shakespeare, Defoe, Diderot, Dostoevsky, Nechui-Levitsky.

Of course, not all art of the 20th century is socialist realist. This was also felt by the theorists of socialist realism, who in recent decades proclaimed it an open aesthetic system. In fact, there were other directions in the literature of the 20th century. Socialist realism ceased to exist when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Only in conditions of independence fiction got the opportunity to develop freely. The main criterion for evaluating a literary work has become aesthetic, artistic level, truthfulness, originality of figurative reproduction of reality. Following the path of free development, Ukrainian literature is not regulated by party dogmas. Focusing on best achievements art, it occupies a worthy place in the history of world literature.

Socialist realism is a creative method of literature and art of the 20th century, the cognitive sphere of which was limited and regulated by the task of reflecting the processes of reorganization of the world in the light of the communist ideal and Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Goals of socialist realism

Socialist realism is the main officially (at the state level) recognized method of Soviet literature and art, the purpose of which is to capture the stages of the construction of Soviet socialist society and its “movement towards communism.” Over the course of half a century of existence in all developed literatures of the world, socialist realism sought to take a leading position in the artistic life of the era, contrasting its (supposedly the only true) aesthetic principles (the principle of party membership, nationality, historical optimism, socialist humanism, internationalism) to all other ideological and artistic principles.

History of origin

The domestic theory of socialist realism originates from “Fundamentals of Positive Aesthetics” (1904) by A.V. Lunacharsky, where art is guided not by what is, but by what should be, and creativity is equated with ideology. In 1909, Lunacharsky was one of the first to call the story “Mother” (1906-07) and the play “Enemies” (1906) by M. Gorky “serious works of a social type,” “significant works, the significance of which in the development of proletarian art will someday be taken into account” (Literary Decay , 1909. Book 2). The critic was the first to draw attention to the Leninist principle of party membership as determinant in the construction of socialist culture (article “Lenin” Literary Encyclopedia, 1932. Volume 6).

The term “Socialist realism” first appeared in the editorial of the “Literary Gazette” dated May 23, 1932 (author I.M. Gronsky). J.V. Stalin repeated it at a meeting with writers at Gorky on October 26 of the same year, and from that moment the concept became widespread. In February 1933, Lunacharsky, in a report on the tasks of Soviet drama, emphasized that socialist realism “is thoroughly devoted to the struggle, it is a builder through and through, it is confident in the communist future of humanity, it believes in the strength of the proletariat, its party and leaders” (Lunacharsky A.V. Articles about Soviet literature, 1958).

The difference between socialist realism and bourgeois realism

At the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), the originality of the method of socialist realism was substantiated by A.A. Zhdanov, N.I. Bukharin, Gorky and A.A. Fadeev. The political component of Soviet literature was emphasized by Bukharin, who pointed out that socialist realism “differs from simple realism in that it inevitably places in the center of attention the image of the construction of socialism, the struggle of the proletariat, the new man and all the complex “connections and mediations” of the great historical process of our time... Stylistic features , distinguishing socialist realism from bourgeois... are closely related to the content of the material and the goals of the volitional order, dictated by the class position of the proletariat" (First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. Verbatim report, 1934).

Fadeev supported the idea expressed earlier by Gorky that, unlike “the old realism - critical... our, socialist, realism is affirming. Zhdanov’s speech, his formulations: “depict reality in its revolutionary development”; “At the same time, the truthfulness and historical specificity of the artistic depiction must be combined with the task of ideological reworking and education of working people in the spirit of socialism,” formed the basis of the definition given in the Charter of the Union of Soviet Writers.

His statement that “revolutionary romanticism should be included in literary creativity as an integral part” of socialist realism was also programmatic (ibid.). On the eve of the congress that legitimized the term, the search for its defining principles was qualified as “The Struggle for the Method” - under this title one of the Rappov collections was published in 1931. In 1934, the book “In Disputes about Method” was published (with the subtitle “Collection of articles on socialist realism”). In the 1920s, there were discussions about the artistic method of proletarian literature between theorists of Proletkult, RAPP, LEF, OPOYAZ. The theories of “living man” and “industrial” art, “learning from the classics,” and “social order” were permeated through and through with the pathos of struggle.

Expansion of the concept of socialist realism

Heated debates continued in the 1930s (about language, about formalism), in the 1940s-50s (mainly in connection with the “theory” of conflict-free behavior, the problem of the typical, “positive hero”). It is characteristic that discussions on certain issues of the “artistic platform” often touched upon politics and were associated with the problems of aestheticization of ideology, with the justification of authoritarianism and totalitarianism in culture. The debate lasted for decades about the relationship between romanticism and realism in socialist art. On the one hand, we were talking about romance as a “scientifically based dream of the future” (in this capacity, at a certain stage, romance began to be replaced by “historical optimism”), on the other hand, attempts were made to highlight a special method or stylistic movement of “socialist romanticism” with its cognitive possibilities. This trend (identified by Gorky and Lunacharsky) led to overcoming stylistic monotony and to a more comprehensive interpretation of the essence of socialist realism in the 1960s.

The desire to expand the concept of socialist realism (and at the same time to “shatter” the theory of method) emerged in Russian literary criticism (under the influence of similar processes in foreign literature and criticism) at the All-Union Conference on Socialist Realism (1959): I.I. Anisimov emphasized the “great flexibility” and “breadth” inherent in the aesthetic concept of the method, which was dictated by the desire to overcome dogmatic postulates. In 1966, the Institute of Lithuania hosted the conference “Current Problems of Socialist Realism” (see the collection of the same name, 1969). The active apologetics of socialist realism by some speakers, the critical-realist “type of creativity” by others, the romantic by others, and the intellectual by others, testified to a clear desire to expand the boundaries of ideas about the literature of the socialist era.

Domestic theoretical thought was in search of a “broad formulation creative method"as in "historically open system"(D.F. Markov). The resulting discussion took place in the late 1980s. By this time, the authority of the statutory definition had finally been lost (it became associated with dogmatism, incompetent leadership in the field of art, the dictates of Stalinism in literature - “custom”, state, “barracks” realism). Based on real trends in the development of Russian literature, modern critics consider it quite legitimate to talk about socialist realism as a specific historical stage, an artistic movement in literature and art of the 1920s-50s. Socialist realism included V.V. Mayakovsky, Gorky, L. Leonov, Fadeev, M.A. Sholokhov, F.V. Gladkov, V.P. Kataev, M.S. Shaginyan, N.A. Ostrovsky, V. V. Vishnevsky, N.F. Pogodin and others.

A new situation arose in the literature of the second half of the 1950s in the wake of the 20th Party Congress, which noticeably undermined the foundations of totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Russian “village prose”, depicting peasant life not in its “revolutionary development”, but on the contrary, in conditions of social violence and deformation; literature also told the terrible truth about the war, destroying the myth of official heroism and optimism; The civil war and many episodes of Russian history appeared differently in literature. “Industrial prose” clung to the tenets of socialist realism for the longest time.

An important role in the attack on Stalin’s legacy in the 1980s belonged to the so-called “detained” or “rehabilitated” literature - the unpublished works of A.P. Platonov, M.A. Bulgakov, A.A. Akhmatova, B.L. .Lasternak, V.S.Grossman, A.T.Tvardovsky, A.A.Bek, B.L.Mozhaev, V.I.Belov, M.F.Shatrova, Yu.V.Trifonov, V.F.Tendryakov, Yu O. Dombrovsky, V. T. Shalamov, A. I. Pristavkin and others. Domestic conceptualism (Sots Art) contributed to the exposure of socialist realism.

Although socialist realism “disappeared as an official doctrine with the collapse of the State, of which it was part of the ideological system,” the phenomenon remains at the center of research that considers it “as an integral element of Soviet civilization,” according to the Parisian journal Revue des études slaves. A popular train of thought in the West is an attempt to connect the origins of socialist realism with the avant-garde, as well as the desire to substantiate the coexistence of two trends in the history of Soviet literature: “totalitarian” and “revisionist”.

It was a creative method used in art and literature. This method was considered an aesthetic expression of a certain concept. This concept was associated with the period of struggle to build a socialist society.

This creative method was considered the main artistic direction in the USSR. Realism in Russia proclaimed a truthful reflection of reality against the background of its revolutionary development.

M. Gorky is considered the founder of the method in the literature. It was he who, in 1934, at the First Congress of Writers of the USSR, defined socialist realism as a form that affirms existence as action and creativity, the goal of which is the continuous development of the most valuable abilities of the individual to ensure his victory over natural forces for the sake of human longevity and health.

Realism, the philosophy of which is reflected in Soviet literature, was built in accordance with certain ideological principles. According to the concept, the cultural figure had to follow a peremptory program. Socialist realism was based on the glorification of the Soviet system, labor enthusiasm, as well as the revolutionary confrontation between the people and the leaders.

This creative method was prescribed to all cultural figures in every field of art. This put creativity within a fairly strict framework.

However, some artists of the USSR created original and striking works that had universal significance. Only recently has the merit of a number of socialist realist artists been recognized (Plastov, for example, who painted scenes from village life).

Literature at that time was an instrument of party ideology. The writer himself was considered as an “engineer” human souls". With the help of his talent, he had to influence the reader, be a propagandist of ideas. The main task of the writer was to educate the reader in the spirit of the Party and support with him the struggle for building communism. Socialist realism brought the subjective aspirations and actions of the personalities of the heroes of all works into line with objective historical events.

At the center of any work there had to be only a positive hero. He was an ideal communist, an example for everything. In addition, the hero was a progressive person, human doubts were alien to him.

Saying that art should be owned by the people, that it is on the feelings, demands and thoughts of the masses that artistic work should be based, Lenin specified that literature should be party literature. Lenin believed that this direction of art is an element of the general proletarian cause, a detail of one great mechanism.

Gorky argued that the main task of socialist realism is to cultivate a revolutionary view of what is happening, an appropriate perception of the world.

To ensure strict adherence to the method of creating paintings, writing prose and poetry, etc., it was necessary to subordinate the exposure of capitalist crimes. Moreover, each work had to praise socialism, inspiring viewers and readers to the revolutionary struggle.

The method of socialist realism covered absolutely all spheres of art: architecture and music, sculpture and painting, cinema and literature, drama. This method asserted a number of principles.

The first principle - nationality - was manifested in the fact that the heroes in the works had to be from the people. First of all, these are workers and peasants.

The works had to contain descriptions of heroic deeds, revolutionary struggle, and the construction of a bright future.

Another principle was specificity. It was expressed in the fact that reality was a process of historical development that corresponded to the doctrine of materialism.

Socialist realism: the individual is socially active and included in the creation of history through violent means.

The philosophical foundation of socialist realism was Marxism, which asserts: 1) the proletariat is a messiah class, historically called upon to make a revolution and by force, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, transform society from an unjust to a just one; 2) at the head of the proletariat is a party of a new type, consisting of professionals called upon after the revolution to lead the construction of a new classless society in which people are deprived of private property (as it turned out, thereby people become absolutely dependent on the state, and the state itself becomes de facto property of the party bureaucracy that heads it).

These socio-utopian (and, as historically revealed, inevitably leading to totalitarianism), philosophical and political postulates found their continuation in Marxist aesthetics, which directly underlies socialist realism. The main ideas of Marxism in aesthetics are as follows.

• 1. Art, having some relative independence from the economy, is determined by the economy and artistic and mental traditions.
• 2. Art has the power to influence and mobilize the masses.
• 3. Party leadership of art directs it in the right direction.
• 4. Art must be imbued with historical optimism and serve the cause of society's movement towards communism. It must affirm the system established by the revolution. However, at the level of the house manager and even the chairman of the collective farm, criticism is acceptable; in exceptional circumstances 1941-1942 with Stalin’s personal permission, criticism of even the front commander was allowed in A. Korneychuk’s play “Front”. 5. Marxist epistemology, which places practice at the forefront, has become the basis for the interpretation of the figurative nature of art. 6. Lenin’s principle of party membership continued the ideas of Marx and Engels about classism and tendentiousness of art and introduced the idea of ​​serving the party into the artist’s very creative consciousness.

On this philosophical and aesthetic basis, socialist realism arose - an art biased by the party bureaucracy that served the needs of a totalitarian society in the formation of a “new man.” According to official aesthetics, this art reflected the interests of the proletariat, and later of the entire socialist society. Socialist realism is an artistic movement that affirms the artistic concept: the individual is socially active and included in the creation of history through violent means.

Western theorists and critics give their definitions of socialist realism. According to the English critic J. A. Gooddon, “Socialist realism is an artistic credo developed in Russia to introduce Marxist doctrine and spread to other communist countries. This art affirms the goals of a socialist society and views the artist as a servant of the state or, in accordance with Stalin's definition, as an "engineer of human souls." Gooddon noted that socialist realism encroached on the freedom of creativity, which Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn rebelled against, and “they were shamelessly used for propaganda purposes by the Western press.”

Critics Karl Benson and Arthur Gatz write: “Socialist realism is traditional for the 19th century. a method of prose storytelling and dramaturgy associated with themes that favorably interpret the socialist idea. In the Soviet Union, especially in Stalin era, as well as in other communist countries, was artificially imposed on artists by the literary establishment."

Within the biased, official art, semi-official, politically neutral, but deeply humanistic (B. Okudzhava, V. Vysotsky, A. Galich) and frontier (A. Voznesensky) art, tolerated by the authorities, developed as a heresy. The latter is mentioned in the epigram:

The poet with his poetry

Creates worldwide intrigue.

It is with the permission of the authorities

Shows nothing to the authorities.

socialist realism totalitarian proletariat marxist

During periods of softening of the totalitarian regime (for example, during the “thaw”), works that were uncompromisingly truthful (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Solzhenitsyn) also appeared on the pages of the press. However, even in tougher times, there was a “back door” next to ceremonial art: poets used Aesopian language, went into children’s literature, into literary translation. Rejected artists (underground) formed groups, associations (for example, “SMOG”, Lianozovsky school of painting and poetry), unofficial exhibitions were created (for example, “bulldozer” in Izmailovo) - all this made it easier to endure the social boycott of publishing houses, exhibition committees, bureaucratic authorities and “cultural police stations.”

The theory of socialist realism was filled with dogmas and vulgar sociological propositions and, in this form, was used as a means of bureaucratic pressure on art. This manifested itself in authoritarianism and subjectivism of judgments and assessments, interference in creative activity, violation of creative freedom, and rigid command methods of art management. Such leadership cost the multinational Soviet culture dearly, affecting the spiritual and moral state of society, and the human and creative fate of many artists.

Many artists, including the greatest, became victims of tyranny during the years of Stalinism: E. Charents, T. Tabidze, B. Pilnyak, I. Babel, M. Koltsov, O. Mandelstam, P. Markish, V. Meyerhold, S. Mikhoels . Y. Olesha, M. Bulgakov, A. Platonov, V. Grossman, B. Pasternak were pushed aside from the artistic process and remained silent for years or worked at a quarter of their strength, unable to show the results of their creativity. R. Falk, A. Tairov, A. Koonen.

The incompetence of art management was also reflected in the awarding of high prizes for opportunistic and weak works, which, despite the propaganda hype around them, were not only not included in the gold fund artistic culture, but in general they were quickly forgotten (S. Babaevsky, M. Bubennov, A. Surov, A. Sofronov).

Incompetence and authoritarianism, rudeness were not only personal characteristics of the party leaders, but (absolute power corrupts leaders absolutely!) became the style of the party leadership of artistic culture. The very principle of party leadership of art is a false and countercultural idea.

Post-perestroika criticism saw a number of important features of socialist realism. "Socialist realism. He is not at all so odious, he has quite enough analogues. If you look at it without social pain and through the prism of cinema, it turns out that the famous American film of the thirties “Gone with the Wind” is equivalent in its artistic merit to the Soviet film of the same years “Circus”. And if we return to literature, then Feuchtwanger’s novels in their aesthetics are not at all polar with A. Tolstoy’s epic “Peter the Great.” It was not for nothing that Feuchtwanger loved Stalin so much. Socialist realism is still the same “great style,” but only in the Soviet way.” (Yarkevich. 1999) Socialist realism is not only an artistic direction (a stable concept of the world and personality) and a type of “grand style,” but also a method.

The method of socialist realism as a way of imaginative thinking, a way of creating a politically tendentious work that fulfills a certain social order, was used far beyond the sphere of dominance of communist ideology, and was used for purposes alien to the conceptual orientation of socialist realism as an artistic movement. So, in 1972 at the Metropolitan Opera I saw musical performance, which struck me with its tendentiousness. A young student came on vacation to Puerto Rico, where he met beautiful girl. They dance and sing merrily at the carnival. Then they decide to get married and fulfill their desire, due to which the dancing becomes especially temperamental. The only thing that upsets the young people is that he is just a student, and she is a poor peasant girl. However, this does not stop them from singing and dancing. In the midst of the wedding revelry, a blessing and a check for a million dollars arrives from New York from the parents of a student for the newlyweds. Here the fun becomes uncontrollable, all the dancers are arranged in a pyramid - below are the Puerto Rican people, above are the distant relatives of the bride, even above are her parents, and at the very top are the rich American student groom and the poor Puerto Rican bride-girl. Above them is a striped US flag with many stars burning on it. Everyone sings, and the bride and groom kiss, and at the moment their lips join, a new star lights up on the American flag, which means the emergence of a new American state - Pueru Rico is part of the United States. Among the most vulgar plays of Soviet drama, it is difficult to find a work that, in its vulgarity and straightforward political bias, reaches the level of this American performance. Why not the method of socialist realism?

According to the proclaimed theoretical postulates, socialist realism involves the inclusion of romance in imaginative thinking - a figurative form of historical anticipation, a dream based on real trends in the development of reality and overtaking the natural course of events.

Socialist realism affirms the need for historicism in art: historically specific artistic reality must acquire “three-dimensionality” in it (the writer strives to capture, in Gorky’s words, “three realities” - past, present and future). Here socialist realism is invaded by

stools of the utopian ideology of communism, which firmly knows the path to the “bright future of humanity.” However, for poetry, this aspiration to the future (even if it is utopian) had a lot of attractiveness, and the poet Leonid Martynov wrote:

Don't honor

Yourself worthwhile

Only here, in reality,

Present,

And imagine yourself walking,

Along the border between the past and the future

Mayakovsky also introduces the future into the reality of the 20s he depicts in the plays “The Bedbug” and “Bathhouse”. This image of the future appears in Mayakovsky’s dramaturgy both in the form of the Phosphoric Woman and in the form of a time machine, carrying people worthy of communism into a distant and beautiful tomorrow, and spitting out bureaucrats and other “unworthy of communism.” I note that society will “spit out” many “unworthy” people into the Gulag throughout its history, and some twenty-five years will pass after Mayakovsky wrote these plays and the concept of “unworthy of communism” will be widespread (“by the philosopher” D. Chesnokov, with approval of Stalin) on entire peoples (already evicted from places of historical residence or subject to deportation). This is how the artistic ideas turn out even of the really “best and most talented poet of the Soviet era” (I. Stalin), who created works of art that were vividly embodied on stage by both V. Meyerhold and V. Pluchek. However, nothing surprising: reliance on utopian ideas, including the principle of historical improvement of the world through violence, could not help but result in some “liking” to the Gulag’s “urgent tasks.”

Domestic art in the twentieth century. went through a number of stages, some of which enriched world culture with masterpieces, while others had a decisive (not always beneficial) impact on the artistic process in the countries of Eastern Europe and Asia (China, Vietnam, North Korea).

The first stage (1900-1917) - Silver Age. Symbolism, Acmeism, and Futurism originated and developed. In the novel “Mother” by Gorky, the principles of socialist realism are formed. Socialist realism arose at the beginning of the twentieth century. in Russia. Its founder was Maxim Gorky, whose artistic endeavors were continued and developed soviet art.

The second stage (1917-1932) is characterized by aesthetic polyphony and pluralism of artistic movements.

The Soviet government introduces brutal censorship, Trotsky believes that it is directed against the “union of capital with prejudice.” Gorky is trying to resist this violence against culture, for which Trotsky disrespectfully calls him “the most amiable psalm-reader.” Trotsky laid the foundation for the Soviet tradition of evaluating artistic phenomena not from an aesthetic, but from a purely political point of view. He gives political rather than aesthetic characteristics of the phenomena of art: “cadetism”, “joined”, “fellow travelers”. In this regard, Stalin will become a true Trotskyist and social utilitarianism and political pragmatics will become the dominant principles for him in his approach to art.

During these years, the formation of socialist realism took place and its discovery of an active personality participating in the creation of history through violence, according to the utopian model of the classics of Marxism. In art, the problem of a new artistic concept of personality and the world arose.

There was intense controversy around this concept in the 1920s. As the highest human virtues, the art of socialist realism glorifies socially important and significant qualities - heroism, selflessness, self-sacrifice (“The Death of a Commissar” by Petrov-Vodkin), self-giving (“give your heart to the times to break” - Mayakovsky).

The inclusion of the individual in the life of society becomes an important task of art and this is a valuable feature of socialist realism. However, the individual's own interests are not taken into account. Art asserts that a person’s personal happiness lies in dedication and service to the “happy future of humanity,” and the source of historical optimism and the fullness of an individual’s life social meaning- in her involvement in the creation of a new “fair society.” The novels “Iron Stream” by Serafimovich, “Chapaev” by Furmanov, and the poem “Good” by Mayakovsky are imbued with this pathos. In Sergei Eisenstein’s films “Strike” and “Battleship Potemkin,” the fate of the individual is overshadowed by the fate of the masses. The subject becomes what in humanistic art, concerned with the fate of the individual, was only a secondary element, “social background”, “social landscape”, “mass scene”, “epic retreat”.

However, some artists moved away from the dogmas of socialist realism. Thus, S. Eisenstein still did not completely eliminate the individual hero, did not sacrifice him to history. The mother evokes the strongest compassion in the episode on the Odessa stairs (“Battleship Potemkin”). At the same time, the director remains in line with socialist realism and does not limit the viewer’s sympathy to the personal fate of the character, but focuses the audience on experiencing the drama of history itself and asserts the historical necessity and legitimacy of the revolutionary action of the Black Sea sailors.

An invariant of the artistic concept of socialist realism at the first stage of its development: man in the “iron stream” of history “flows like a drop with the masses.” In other words, the meaning of an individual’s life is seen in selflessness (a person’s heroic ability to be involved in the creation of a new reality is affirmed, even at the cost of his direct everyday interests, and sometimes at the cost of life itself), in involvement in the creation of history (“and there are no other worries!”). Pragmatic and political tasks are placed above moral postulates and humanistic orientations. So, E. Bagritsky calls:

And if the era orders: kill! - Kill.

And if the era orders: lie! - Lie.

At this stage, next to socialist realism, other artistic movements are developing, asserting their invariants of the artistic concept of the world and personality (constructivism - I. Selvinsky, K. Zelinsky, I. Ehrenburg; neo-romanticism - A. Green; acmeism - N. Gumilyov , A. Akhmatova, imagism - S. Yesenin, Mariengof, symbolism - A. Blok; literary schools and associations arise and develop - LEF, Napostovites, “Pereval”, RAPP).

The very concept of “socialist realism,” which expressed the artistic and conceptual qualities of the new art, arose in the course of heated discussions and theoretical searches. These searches were a collective effort, in which many cultural figures took part in the late 20s and early 30s, who defined the new method of literature in different ways: “proletarian realism” (F. Gladkov, Yu. Lebedinsky), “tendentious realism" (V. Mayakovsky), "monumental realism" (A. Tolstoy), "realism with socialist content" (V. Stavsky). In the 30s, cultural figures increasingly agreed on defining the creative method of Soviet art as the method of socialist realism. “Literary Gazette” on May 29, 1932 in the editorial “For work!” wrote: “The masses demand from artists sincerity, revolutionary socialist realism in depicting the proletarian revolution.” The head of the Ukrainian writers' organization I. Kulik (Kharkov, 1932) said: “...conditionally, the method that you and I could focus on should be called “revolutionary socialist realism.” At a meeting of writers at Gorky’s apartment on October 25, 1932, socialist realism was named as the artistic method of literature during the discussion. Later, the collective efforts to develop a concept of the artistic method of Soviet literature were “forgotten” and everything was attributed to Stalin.

The third stage (1932--1956). When the Writers' Union was formed in the first half of the 30s, socialist realism was defined as an artistic method that requires the writer to provide a truthful and historically specific depiction of reality in its revolutionary development; The task of educating workers in the spirit of communism was emphasized. There was nothing specifically aesthetic in this definition, nothing pertaining to art itself. The definition oriented art towards political engagement and was equally applicable to history as a science, to journalism, and to propaganda and agitation. At the same time, this definition of socialist realism was difficult to apply to such types of art as architecture, applied and decorative arts, music, to such genres as landscape, still life. Essentially, lyricism and satire turned out to be outside the specified understanding of the artistic method. It banished or questioned major artistic values ​​from our culture.

In the first half of the 30s. aesthetic pluralism is administratively suppressed, the idea of ​​an active personality is deepened, but this personality does not always have an orientation towards truly humanistic values. The leader, the party and its goals become the highest values ​​in life.

In 1941, war invades the life of the Soviet people. Literature and art are included in the spiritual support of the fight against the fascist occupiers and victory. During this period, the art of socialist realism, where it does not fall into the primitiveness of agitation, most fully corresponds to the vital interests of the people.

In 1946, when our country lived with the joy of victory and the pain of enormous losses, a resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was adopted “On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad.” A. Zhdanov spoke at a meeting of party activists and writers of Leningrad to explain the resolution.

The creativity and personality of M. Zoshchenko were characterized by Zhdanov in the following “literary-critical” expressions: “philistine and vulgar”, “non-Soviet writer”, “dirtyness and lewdness”, “turns his vulgar and low soul inside out”, “unprincipled and unscrupulous literary hooligan".

It was said about A. Akhmatova that the range of her poetry is “limited to the point of squalor”, her work “cannot be tolerated on the pages of our magazines”, that, “besides the harm”, the work of this is either a “nun” or a “harlot” can give nothing to our youth.

Zhdanov’s extreme literary-critical vocabulary is the only argument and tool of “analysis.” The rude tone of literary teachings, elaborations, persecution, prohibitions, and martinet interference in the work of artists were justified by the dictates of historical circumstances, the extremity of the situations being experienced, and the constant aggravation of the class struggle.

Socialist realism was bureaucratically used as a separator, separating “permissible” (“our”) art from “illegal” (“not ours”) art. Because of this, the diversity of domestic art was rejected, neo-romanticism (A. Green’s story “Scarlet Sails”, A. Rylov’s painting “In the Blue Expanse”), new realist existential-event, humanistic art were pushed to the periphery of artistic life or even beyond the boundaries of the artistic process ( M. Bulgakov “The White Guard”, B. Pasternak “Doctor Zhivago”, A. Platonov “The Pit”, sculpture by S. Konenkov, painting by P. Korin), realism of memory (painting by R. Falk and graphics by V. Favorsky), poetry of state the spirit of the individual (M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam, A. Akhmatova, later I. Brodsky). History has put everything in its place and today it is clear that it is these works, rejected by official culture, that constitute the essence of the artistic process of the era and are its main artistic achievements and aesthetic values.

The artistic method as a historically conditioned type of figurative thinking is determined by three factors: 1) reality, 2) the worldview of artists, 3) the artistic and mental material from which they proceed. The imaginative thinking of the artists of socialist realism was based on life basis the reality of the twentieth century, which accelerated in its development, on the ideological basis of the principles of historicism and the dialectical understanding of existence, relying on the realistic traditions of Russian and world art. Therefore, with all its tendentiousness, socialist realism, in accordance with the realistic tradition, aimed the artist at creating a three-dimensional, aesthetically multi-colored character. Such, for example, is the character of Grigory Melekhov in the novel “Quiet Don” by M. Sholokhov.

The fourth stage (1956-1984) - the art of socialist realism, affirming a historically active personality, began to think about its intrinsic value. If the artists did not directly attack the power of the party or the principles of socialist realism, the bureaucracy tolerated them; if they served, they were rewarded. “And if not, then no”: the persecution of B. Pasternak, the “bulldozer” dispersal of the exhibition in Izmailovo, the artists’ study “on top level"(Khrushchev) in the Manege, the arrest of I. Brodsky, the expulsion of A. Solzhenitsyn... - "stages long way"Party leadership of art.

During this period, the statutory definition of socialist realism finally lost its authority. Pre-sunset phenomena began to increase. All this affected the artistic process: it lost its guidelines, a “vibration” arose in it, on the one hand, the proportion of artistic works and literary critical articles of an anti-humanistic and nationalist orientation increased, on the other hand, works of apocryphal-dissident and unofficial democratic content appeared .

In place of the lost definition, the following can be given, reflecting the features of the new stage of literary development: socialist realism is a method (method, tool) for constructing artistic reality and the corresponding artistic direction, absorbing the social and aesthetic experience of the twentieth century, carrying within itself the artistic concept: the world is not perfect, “the world must first be remade, and having remade it, you can sing”; the individual must be socially active in the cause of violent change in the world.

Self-awareness awakens in this person - a sense of self-worth and a protest against violence (P. Nilin “Cruelty”).

Despite the ongoing bureaucratic interference in the artistic process, despite the continued reliance on the idea of ​​violent transformation of the world, the vital impulses of reality, the powerful artistic traditions of the past contributed to the emergence of a number of valuable works (Sholokhov’s story “The Fate of a Man”, M. Romm’s films “Ordinary Fascism” and “ Nine Days of One Year”, M. Kalatozov’s “The Cranes Are Flying”, G. Chukhrai’s “The Forty-First” and “The Ballad of a Soldier”, S. Smirnov’s “Belorussky Station”). I note that many of the most striking and historical works were dedicated to Patriotic War against the fascists, which is explained by the real heroism of the era, and the high civil-patriotic pathos that gripped the entire society during this period, and by the fact that the main conceptual orientation of socialist realism (creating history through violence) during the war years coincided with both the vector of historical development and popular consciousness, and in this case did not contradict the principles of humanism.

Since the 60s. the art of socialist realism affirms the connection of man with the broad tradition of the national existence of the people (works by V. Shukshin and Ch. Aitmatov). In the first decades of its development, Soviet art (Vs. Ivanov and A. Fadeev in the images of Far Eastern partisans, D. Furmanov in the image of Chapaev, M. Sholokhov in the image of Davydov) captured images of people breaking away from the traditions and way of life of the old world. It would seem that there was a decisive and irrevocable break in the invisible threads connecting the personality with the past. However, the art of 1964-1984 pays increasing attention to how and what features a person is connected with centuries-old psychological, cultural, ethnographic, everyday, ethical traditions, because it turned out that a person who, in a revolutionary impulse, breaks with national tradition, is deprived of the soil for a socially expedient, humane life (Ch . Aitmatov " White steamer"). Without connection with national culture, a person turns out to be empty and destructively cruel.

A. Platonov put forward an artistic formula that was “ahead of its time”: “Without me, the people are not complete.” This is a wonderful formula - one of the highest achievements of socialist realism at its new stage (despite the fact that this position was put forward and artistically proven by the outcast of socialist realism - Platonov, it could only grow on the sometimes fertile, sometimes dead, and generally contradictory soil this artistic movement). The same idea about the merging of human life with the life of the people is also heard in Mayakovsky’s artistic formula: man “flows like a drop with the masses.” However, the new historical period is felt in Platonov’s emphasis on the intrinsic value of the individual.

The history of socialist realism has instructively demonstrated that what is important in art is not opportunism, but artistic truth, no matter how bitter and “inconvenient” it may be. The party leadership, the criticism that served it, and some postulates of socialist realism demanded “artistic truth” from the works, which coincided with the momentary situation and corresponded to the tasks set by the party. Otherwise, the work could be banned and thrown out of the artistic process, and the author would be persecuted or even ostracized.

History shows that the “banners” remained outside it, and the prohibited work was returned to it (for example, the poems by A. Tvardovsky “By the Right of Memory”, “Terkin in the Next World”).

Pushkin said: “Heavy damask steel, crushing glass, forges damask steel.” In our country, a terrible totalitarian force “fragmented” the intelligentsia, turning some into informers, others into drunkards, and others into conformists. However, in some, a deep artistic consciousness was forged, combined with vast life experience. This part of the intelligentsia (F. Iskander, V. Grossman, Yu. Dombrovsky, A. Solzhenitsyn) created profound and uncompromising works in the most difficult circumstances.

By even more decisively affirming the historically active personality, the art of socialist realism for the first time begins to realize the reciprocity of the process: not only the individual for history, but also history for the individual. Through the crackling slogans of serving a “happy future,” the idea of ​​human self-worth begins to break through.

The art of socialist realism in the spirit of belated classicism continues to assert the priority of the “general”, state over the “private”, personal. The inclusion of the individual in the historical creativity of the masses continues to be preached. At the same time, in the novels of V. Bykov, Ch. Aitmatov, in the films of T. Abuladze, E. Klimov, and in the plays of A. Vasiliev, O. Efremov, G. Tovstonogov, not only does the theme of the individual’s responsibility to society, familiar to socialist realism, sound, but also a theme arises that prepares the idea of ​​“perestroika”, the theme of society’s responsibility for the fate and happiness of a person.

Thus, socialist realism comes to self-negation. Within it (and not just outside it, in disgraced and underground art) an idea begins to sound: man is not fuel for history, providing energy for abstract progress. The future is created by people for people. A person must give himself to people; selfish isolation deprives life of meaning, turns it into absurdity (the promotion and approval of this idea is a merit of the art of socialist realism). If the spiritual growth of a person outside of society is fraught with degradation of the individual, then the development of society outside and apart from a person, contrary to his interests, is detrimental to both the individual and society. These ideas after 1984 will become the spiritual foundation of perestroika and glasnost, and after 1991 - the democratization of society. However, hopes for perestroika and democratization were far from being fully realized. A relatively soft, stable and socially concerned regime of the Brezhnev type (totalitarianism with almost human face) was replaced by a corrupt, unstable terry democracy (oligarchy with an almost criminal face), concerned with the division and redistribution of public property, and not with the fate of the people and the state.

Just as the slogan of freedom put forward by the Renaissance “do what you want!” led to the crisis of the Renaissance (for not everyone wanted to do good), and the artistic ideas that prepared perestroika (all for man) turned into a crisis of both perestroika and the whole society, because bureaucrats and democrats considered only themselves and some of their own kind to be people; According to party, national and other group characteristics, people were divided into “ours” and “not ours.”

The fifth period (mid-80s - 90s) - the end of socialist realism (it did not survive socialism and Soviet power) and the beginning of the pluralistic development of domestic art: new trends in realism developed (V. Makanin), social art appeared (Melamid, Komar), conceptualism (D. Prigov) and other postmodern movements in literature and painting.

Nowadays, democratically and humanistically oriented art has two opponents, undermining and destroying the highest humanistic values ​​of humanity. The first enemy of new art and new forms of life is social indifference, the egocentrism of the individual who celebrates the historical liberation from state control and has abdicated all responsibilities to society; self-interest of neophytes of the “market economy”. The other enemy is the leftist-lumpen extremism of those dispossessed by a self-interested, corrupt and stupid democracy, forcing people to look back at the communist values ​​of the past with their herd collectivism that destroys the individual.

The development of society, its improvement must go through a person, in the name of the individual, and a self-valued personality, having unlocked social and personal egoism, must join the life of society and develop in accordance with it. This is a reliable reference point for art. Without affirming the need for social progress, literature degenerates, but it is important that progress occurs not in spite of or at the expense of man, but in his name. A happy society is one in which history moves through the channel of the individual. Unfortunately, this truth turned out to be unknown or uninteresting neither to the communist builders of the distant “bright future”, nor to shock therapists and other builders of the market and democracy. This truth is not very close to the Western defenders of individual rights, who rained bombs on Yugoslavia. For them, these rights are a tool in the fight against opponents and rivals, and not a real program of action.

The democratization of our society and the disappearance of party tutelage contributed to the publication of works whose authors strive to artistically comprehend the history of our society in all its drama and tragedy (the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn “The Gulag Archipelago” is especially significant in this regard).

The idea of ​​the aesthetics of socialist realism about the active influence of literature on reality turned out to be correct, but greatly exaggerated; in any case, artistic ideas do not become “material force.” Igor Yarkevich, in an article published on the Internet “Literature, aesthetics, freedom and other interesting things” writes: “Long before 1985, in all liberal-oriented parties it sounded like a motto: “If you publish the Bible and Solzhenitsyn tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow we will wake up in another country.” . Dominion over the world through literature - this idea warmed the hearts of not only the secretaries of the joint venture.”

It was thanks to the new atmosphere after 1985 that “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” by Boris Pilnyak, “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, “The Pit” by Andrei Platonov, “Life and Fate” by Vasily Grossman and other works that remained outside the reading circle for many years were published Soviet person. New films have appeared: “My Friend Ivan Lapshin”, “Plumbum, or a Dangerous Game”, “Is It Easy to Be Young”, “Taxi Blues”, “Should We Send a Messenger”. Films of the last one and a half decades of the twentieth century. they talk with pain about the tragedies of the past (“Repentance”), express concern for the fate of the younger generation (“Courier”, “Luna Park”), and talk about hopes for the future. Some of these works will remain in the history of artistic culture, and all of them pave the way to new art and a new understanding of the destinies of man and the world.

Perestroika created a special cultural situation in Russia.

Culture is dialogical. Changes in the reader and his life experience lead to changes in literature, not only in the emerging literature, but also in the existing one. Its content changes. “With fresh and present eyes” the reader reads literary texts and finds in them previously unknown meaning and value. This law of aesthetics is especially clearly manifested in critical epochs, when people's life experiences change dramatically.

The turning point of perestroika affected not only the social status and rating of literary works, but also the state of the literary process.

What is this condition like? All the main directions and trends of Russian literature have undergone a crisis, because the ideals, positive programs, options, and artistic concepts of the world they proposed turned out to be untenable. (The latter does not exclude the artistic significance of individual works, most often created at the cost of the writer’s departure from the concept of direction. An example of this is V. Astafiev’s relationship with village prose.)

Literature of the bright present and future (socialist realism in its “ pure form") has disappeared from culture in the last two decades. The crisis of the very idea of ​​​​building communism deprived this direction of its ideological foundation and goals. The Gulag Archipelago alone is enough for all works that show life in a rosy light to reveal their falsity.

The newest modification of socialist realism, the product of its crisis, was the National Bolshevik movement of literature. In a state-patriotic form, this trend is represented by the work of Prokhanov, who glorified the export of violence in the form of the invasion of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The nationalist form of this trend can be found in the works published by the magazines “Young Guard” and “Our Contemporary”. The collapse of this trend is clearly visible against the historical background of the flames that burned the Reichstag twice (in 1934 and 1945). And no matter how this direction develops, historically it has already been refuted and is alien to world culture.

I have already noted above that during the construction of the “new man”, connections with the deep layers of national culture were weakened and sometimes lost. This resulted in many disasters for the peoples on whom this experiment was carried out. And the worst of troubles was the new man’s readiness for interethnic conflicts (Sumgait, Karabakh, Osh, Fergana, South Ossetia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Transnistria) and civil wars (Georgia, Tajikistan, Chechnya). Anti-Semitism was complemented by rejection of “persons of Caucasian nationality.” The Polish intellectual Michnik is right: the highest and final stage of socialism is nationalism. Another sad confirmation of this is the non-peaceful divorce in Yugoslav style and peaceful divorce in Czechoslovak or Belovezhsk style.

The crisis of socialist realism gave rise to in the 70s literary movement socialist liberalism. The idea of ​​socialism with a human face became the pillar of this movement. The artist performed a hairdressing operation: the Stalinist mustache was shaved off the face of socialism and a Leninist beard was glued on. M. Shatrov’s plays were created according to this scheme. This is the current artistic means was forced to solve political problems when other means were closed. Writers put makeup on the face of barracks socialism. Shatrov gave a liberal interpretation of our history for those times, an interpretation capable of both satisfying and enlightening the higher authorities. Many spectators were delighted with the fact that Trotsky was given a hint, and this was already perceived as a discovery, or the hint said that Stalin was not entirely good. This was received with delight by our half-suppressed intelligentsia.

V. Rozov’s plays were also written in the vein of socialist liberalism and socialism with a human face. His young hero destroys furniture in the house of a former security officer with his father’s Budennov saber taken from the wall, which was once used to cut down the White Guard counter forces. Today, such temporarily progressive works have gone from being half-true and moderately attractive to being false. The age of their triumph was short.

Another current of Russian literature is lumpen intellectual literature. A lumpen intellectual is an educated person who knows something about something, but has no philosophical view to a world that does not feel personal responsibility for him and is accustomed to thinking “freely” within the framework of cautious opposition. The lumpen writer owns an art form borrowed from the masters of the past, which gives his work some appeal. However, he is not given the opportunity to apply this form to the real problems of existence: his consciousness is empty, he does not know what to say to people. Lumpen intellectuals use an exquisite form to convey highly artistic thoughts about nothing. This often happens with modern poets who master poetic technique, but lack the ability to comprehend modernity. A lumpen writer puts forward as literary hero his own alter ego, an empty, weak-willed, petty miscreant, capable of “grabbing what lies badly,” but incapable of love, unable to either give a woman happiness or become happy himself. This is, for example, the prose of M. Roshchin. A lumpen intellectual can be neither a hero nor a creator of high literature.

One of the products of the collapse of socialist realism was the neocritical naturalism of Kaledin and other exposers of the “lead abominations” of our army, cemetery and city life. This is everyday life writing like Pomyalovsky, only with less culture and less literary abilities.

Another manifestation of the crisis of socialist realism was the “camp” movement of literature. Unfortunately, many products

the writing of “camp” literature turned out to be at the level of the above-mentioned everyday life writing and lacked philosophical and artistic greatness. However, since these works dealt with everyday life that was unfamiliar to the general reader, its “exotic” details aroused great interest, and works that conveyed these details turned out to be socially significant and sometimes artistically valuable.

The literature of the Gulag brought into the people's consciousness the enormous tragic life experience of camp life. This literature will remain in the history of culture, especially in such its highest manifestations as the works of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov.

Neo-emigrant literature (V. Voinovich, S. Dovlatov, V. Aksenov, Yu. Aleshkovsky, N. Korzhavin), living the life of Russia, has done a lot for the artistic understanding of our existence. “You can’t see faces face to face,” and even at an emigrant distance, writers really manage to see a lot of important things in a particularly bright light. In addition, neo-immigrant literature has its own powerful Russian emigrant tradition, which includes Bunin, Kuprin, Nabokov, Zaitsev, Gazdanov. Today, all emigrant literature has become part of our Russian literary process, part of our spiritual life.

At the same time, bad trends have emerged in the neo-emigrant wing of Russian literature: 1) division of Russian writers according to the following criteria: left (= decent and talented) - did not leave (= dishonest and mediocre); 2) a fashion has arisen: living in a cozy and well-fed distance, giving categorical advice and assessments of events on which the emigrant’s life almost does not depend, but which threaten the very lives of citizens in Russia. There is something immodest and even immoral in such “advice from an outsider” (especially when it is categorical and contains an undercurrent: you idiots in Russia don’t understand the simplest things).

Everything good in Russian literature was born as something critical, opposed to the existing order of things. This is fine. This is the only way in a totalitarian society that the birth of cultural values ​​is possible. However, simple negation, simple criticism of what exists does not yet provide access to the highest literary achievements. Higher values ​​appear along with a philosophical vision of the world and clear ideals. If Leo Tolstoy simply spoke about the abominations of life, he would be Gleb Uspensky. But this is not world level. Tolstoy developed the artistic concept of non-resistance to evil through violence, internal self-improvement of the individual; he argued that you can only destroy with violence, but you can build with love, and you should transform yourself first of all.

This concept of Tolstoy foresaw the twentieth century, and, if it had been heeded, it would have prevented the disasters of this century. Today she helps to understand and overcome them. We miss a concept of this magnitude, spanning our era and extending into the future. And when it appears, we will have great literature again. She is on her way, and the guarantee of this is the traditions of Russian literature and the tragic life experience of our intelligentsia, gained in the camps, in queues, at work and in the kitchen.

The pinnacles of Russian and world literature “War and Peace”, “Crime and Punishment”, “The Master and Margarita” are behind us and ahead. The fact that we had Ilf and Petrov, Platonov, Bulgakov, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova gives confidence in the great future of our literature. The unique tragic life experience that our intelligentsia gained through suffering, and the great traditions of our artistic culture cannot but lead to the creative act of creating something new. art world to create true masterpieces. No matter how the historical process goes and no matter what setbacks occur, the country, which has enormous potential, will historically emerge from the crisis. Artistic and philosophical achievements await us in the near future. They will come before economic and political achievements.