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Conclusion Historical Lessons of Socialist Realism I HAVE ATTEMPTED to establish a connection, a genetic link, between the visionary theories of the two Russian revolutionary avant-gardes and socialist realism during the revolutionary period that stretched from the 1890s to the beginning of the 1930s. For all their differences , the Bolsheviks and the successive artistic avant-garde movements shared the ideal of attaining a future ideal society that would rise above material contingency and allow everyone to become a demiurge. It was this shared goal that opened the potential for their competition and/or cooperation . In the period before 1917, the two groups worked in parallel, but after the Bolshevik coup the artistic avant-garde was compelled, by the very logic of its own utopian aesthetics, to abandon its independent aesthetic project of creating the ideal life and to merge this project with that of the Bolsheviks . Thus, socialist realism as a form of cultural consciousness emerged as the result of complex mutations and combinations of several competing mythological or belief systems and visionary designs for an ideal society that interacted in the Russian cultural tradition. Soviet life in reality was a far cry from the ideal society that either of the two avant-gardes had envisioned. In fact, the ideal society existed only in rhetoric. Although it was Stalin who announced that socialism had been achieved and won in the Soviet Union, the claim that the utopian goal of universal creativity had been attained was expressed most clearly in the finale of Panferov's socialist realist epic Bruski (1937). Here all the model new men and new women are gathered-Kirill, the Communist industrial organizer; Stesha, the top-notch worker and mother; Fenia, the revolutionary love; Pavel, the aviator; and Arnol'dov, the artist. The author chooses the Old Bolshevik , Bogdanov, to sum up the vision of the ideal, future-like Present: Now not only artists are creators [tvortsyJ. All are. You, Stesha, weren't you creating as the head of the tractor brigade? And Pavel, isn't he a creator? And Kirill? This is the strength of which our country consists. And Stalin-the great genius, artist-creator, such as history has not seen before. Marx was dreaming about such creativity. Lenin began creating. And Stalin, he opened up entirely and creates, and makes millions rise up, rise up and create. That is our country's dynamic force. And your painting, comrade Arnol'dov, is remarkable for its reflection of the life created by our creators.] 150 Historical Lessons of Socialist Realism Revolutionary dreams are pronounced realized-and all new Soviet men have become artists-demiurges. The finale emphasizes that the ultimate master of utopian reality is of course the socialist realist writer. Indeed, the political power appropriated and adapted the imagination of the revolutionary avantgarde to fit its own institutionalized project, and it used this imagination as a "stabilizing instrument, a necessary element of prestige, a tool of propaganda , mobilization, and manipulation of the masses."2 During the two and a halfto three decades that followed Stalin's death, the cultural system encoded in the socialist realist aesthetics remained fairly stable, although it understandably underwent some modifications. Today, however, the system of myths and beliefs that gUided several preceding generations has been repudiated and dismantled. Perestroika itself constituted a restructuring of consciousness or, rather, the inevitable recognition of the modifications in the nation's mentality that began in Soviet society in the late 1950s and 1960s with the disintegration of the utopian consciousness. Perestroika 's first and beloved literary progeny, such as Anatolii Rybakov's The Children of the Arhat (Deti Arhata) and Vladimir Dudintsev's The White Gowns (Belye odezhdy), both ofwhich were published in book form in 1987, relied on the apparatus of socialist realism, including the obligatory happy ending in which good triumphs over evil and the vista opens onto the bright future. The only difference was that good and evil had traded places; what was marked by positive virtues in the conventional socialist realist novel (for example, Stalin and the security police) now received negative value and vice versa, without major stylistic or structural alterations that would allow these novels to be distinguished from their homogeneous predecessors. In the decade since the beginning of perestroika, characterized by the revolutionary changes that brought down the Soviet Union itself, socialist realism , as a worldview and a social contract regulating the relations between art and society, has died. Russia's artistic scene at present is no...

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