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1 Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space KATERINA CLARK For decades Soviet and Western cultural critics bandied about the term “socialist realism” as a virtually self-evident category that applied in all creative fields. Of course some common stipulations for socialist realism were widely applicable—for example, mandatory optimism, aesthetic conservatism, moral puritanism, and partiinost, the last somewhat barbarously translated as “party-mindedness” and generally meaning enthusiasm for things Bolshevik. Few critics, however, addressed the question, Is there such a thing as a socialist realism, or did “socialist realism,” in practice, have different conventions for each field, despite common factors such as those just named? Traditionally, Soviet literature—or, more specifically, the novel—has been regarded as the cornerstone of socialist realism, and within that literature, the “positive hero” is the key element that defines the tradition . The positive hero encapsulates the cardinal public virtues, and his or her career over the course of the novel symbolically recapitulates the nation’s progress toward communism, thereby legitimating the status quo and affirming that Soviet society is on the correct, Marxist-Leninist track. The hero fulfills these functions within an elaborate system of verbal signs such as motifs, plot functions, and epithets organized as a de facto code that enables the heroic biography to perform its task. Clearly, several of the arts, especially those with little or no narrative component, such as painting and architecture, but also many of the performing arts such as opera, ballet, and music, were limited in the extent to which they could find analogs for the highly elaborated verbal code of the Soviet novel. Another common denominator is to be found in most, though not all, examples of Soviet culture that are labeled socialist realist. (This common denominator does not particularly apply to music, especially when a given composition has no thematic dimension.) At the heart of many canonical works of socialist realism lie spatial myths in which 3 “heroes” or “leaders” function as human embodiments of, or emissaries from, a higher-order space. Even unadorned socialist realist buildings (that is, those with no clear thematic potential) could be interpreted as expressing such spatial myths. Arguably, in the novel, at the level of deep structure, the hero’s mission is not ultimately his public task to build that power station, raise those economic yields, or drive out that enemy, not even just to grow as a communist, but to mediate between two different orders of space that might somewhat tritely be classified as the sacred and the profane. Consequently, architecture, as spatial architectonics, could be seen as the quintessential genre of socialist realism . Significantly, perhaps, in the first half of the 1930s, the very decade when the conventions of socialist realism were being established, architecture was the branch of the arts that received the greatest attention from the leadership. Architecture’s central role in Stalinist culture has its own logic in that building and spatial organization lie at the heart of Marx’s account of society: the base-and-superstructure model. This potential was picked up in Bolshevik Party rhetoric about “building communism.” Building also assumed tremendous importance in Stalinist culture because of the utopian aspects in the notion of living “in communism,” the perfected society. By the thirties, the Russian Revolution was at least fifteen years old, and the realization of the new society still proved elusive. Yet (or perhaps consequently) in that decade building was given a privileged status in both the leadership’s pronouncements and its practical programs. At the beginning of 1931, a time of general reevaluation of the country ’s goals and ideals as the first Five-Year Plan wound down and leaders took stock and planned the second, Party leaders in their speeches began to use architectural models to explicate the current historical moment and its place in the overall Marxist-Leninist model of history. It was said recurrently that with the plan and its concomitant cultural revolution, the “foundation” ( fundament) of socialist society has been laid; now it was time to construct its “edifice” (zdanie).1 Then, at the Party plenum in June 1931, a plan for rebuilding many of the major Soviet cities was announced. Thereafter, throughout the decade (as had been less true earlier), plans for particular towns and buildings were supervised closely by Party leaders, especially by the Moscow Party head Lazar Kaganovich, who in 1933 was appointed head of the supervisory body, Arkhplan. Whether as cause or as...

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