Word: realisms
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...overbearing and probably plotting condominium with the Soviets. Now that the power balance is no longer clear cut and the American nuclear shield no longer as protective, no one can blame Europe for trying to be realistic. But would in not be the better part of realism to seek, instead of accommodation and special deals with the Soviets, joint measures against them? That may be easily said on the American side of the Atlantic but not so easily on a continent shared with Soviet tanks. Europe, however, cannot have it both ways. If the U.S. is to be impressed...
According to the dogma of Socialist Realism, all art and literature must conform to the triple standard of partinost (party character), ideinost (socialist content) and narodnost (closeness to the people). For Stalin, this ideal was most faithfully reflected in the work of his favorite painter, Alexander Gerasimov, whose portraits of the dictator in various noble poses hung in museums, offices, factories and homes everywhere. At the same time, in the '30s and '40s, Stalin used every kind of coercion to apply the Socialist Realism doctrine, destroying the avant-garde and the contacts with Western artists that it needed...
...Socialist Realism is the only method of our art," wrote one of the surviving hacks in 1954. "Any other method is a concession to bourgeois ideology. In our country, where socialism has been victorious, where there has arisen a moral and political unity of the people unprecedented in the history of mankind, there is no special basis for different directions in art." Thus the lid clamped down, and it has remained down ever since, condensing the bland, dull, obsequious and piously idealistic nature of official "realism...
...faded. And still they come: surprising new writers who have shattered the deadening conventions of the past. They have recoiled from the novel, viewing it as prefabricated Stalinist architecture. The genre of choice is the short story or novella. Many writers have managed gradually to escape from Socialist Realism, with its obligatory jargon and hortatory themes, traveling a world away -back to 19th century realism. Even Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the two major Russian writers to produce big novels, did so in the classical manner...
...Steel Bird, which was published last year in the U.S., marks Aksyonov's break with realism in favor of the grotesque. This novella features a ghastly humanoid with a metal carapace who blackmails the superintendent of an apartment house into letting him live in the elevator. Acting with Stalinist guile, the steel bird takes over the entire building and its tenants. The structure soon collapses; the creature is left to roost triumphantly atop the elevator shaft, surveying the debris...