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Chapter Seven Socialist Realism: The PetriWed Utopia 109 THE UTOPIAS OF CREATION that the Revolution engendered were not “transcended” in Socialist Realism, but were assimilated by it. In the Socialist Realist theory of creativity we Wnd fragments of practically all the aesthetic projects of the revolutionary era. The populism of Soviet art is inconceivable without the contribution of the RAPPists who continued the Proletkult experiment and, afterward, under the aegis of the state, brought the “army of poets” out into the literary arena. The Partymindedness that comprises the “living soul” of Socialist Realism arose from a synthesis of RAPPist “restraint” with Perevalist “organicity.” Finally, the Stalinist directive regarding professionalism (“expertise” [masterstvo]) had strong support in the literature of the leftist “specialists.” The “ardent revolutionaries ” brought their projects to the altar of Socialist Realism. We will not enumerate the victims (historians of Soviet culture have been busy doing this for half a century). Far more important is recognizing the profound naturalness of the genesis of the Socialist Realist aesthetic, its synthetic nature. Like any battle, the “literary struggle” of the 1920s was waged in the name of victory. Nevertheless, the victory of a utopia means its death, since in victory the modal status of the utopian vision is transcended—the gap between the “real” and the “vital” is removed. The battle of the utopias is thus a battle for self-annihilation. In victory, life-creating conXict and dynamism are transcended. Petrifaction begins. A new building is constructed over the ruins. Thus revolutionary culture congeals in Socialist Realism—the petriWed utopia. From the multitude of real preconditions (the inner crisis of revolutionary culture, the sense of overall crisis in literature as the 1930s neared, the authorities’ recognition of the necessity for the real inclusion of literature in the new political-aesthetic project, the exhaustion of literary institutions’ characteristic means of functioning in revolutionary culture, “readers’ requirements,” and so on), not one can be chosen as deWning. The deWning factor was their conXuence. Such conXuence could not but be natural, for each of the preconditions had its own genesis. This cultural situation obliges one to speak of the necessity of Socialist Realism, which was not “imposed on art” (as traditional Sovietology has maintained, and as the situation is conceptualized in postmodernist criticism of Socialist Realism1), but was a natural and historically inevitable phase of the development of revolutionary culture. The utopianism of revolutionary culture, as we have seen, was in the constant modeling of some kind of future art despite the fundamental impossibility of developing any productive theory of creativity in the framework of the political-aesthetic project assigned by the Revolution. This state of impasse at times endows the search within this cultural project with high drama. However, the utopian impulse also emanated from a constant dissatisfaction with the “artistic potential of revolution” that was “available.” This dissatisfaction (in turn) was an expression of the struggle of elite groups (which had recognized the value of “ideological creative work” in the revolutionary project) for “hegemony.” All of this gave rise to the view of current literature (with frequently contrasting appraisals) as something temporary, as a sort of “prologue” to the art of the future. Such future-orientedness is especially apparent in the Wrst postrevolutionary years, when the zeal of worldwide revolution still gripped the minds of the adepts of the new culture. This is above all true of the concept of cultural development advocated by Trotsky. As is well known, his Literature and Revolution (Literatura i revoliutsiia), published in 1923, was the Wrst book in Soviet criticism that attempted to present an integral view of current literature that transcended literary groups (within the lines of demarcation inside the new culture itself, of course). Trotsky was an opponent of “proletarian culture” because in it he saw a disregard for the “mission of the proletariat”—creating a “classless culture” in the future “leaderless commune.” His whole concept, in his own words, was “under the banner of European and worldwide revolution.” Hence his conclusion: “Our era is not yet the era of the new culture, but only the threshold to it.”2 Trotsky’s view was not accepted by Proletkult ideologues because it apportioned no place for them—everything was moved forward into the future. Trotsky painted this future thus: That the proletariat will impose its own stamp upon culture during the time of dictatorship is incontestable. But from here it is still a very long way to proletarian culture, if we understand it as a...

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