Socialist realism in Soviet literature. Socialist realism (prof.

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 for the construction of 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 being as an act and creativity, the purpose 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, whose philosophy 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 opposition of the people and leaders.

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

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

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

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

Speaking about the fact that art should be owned by the people, that it is precisely 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 common proletarian cause, a detail of one great mechanism.

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

To ensure a strict adherence to the method, the creation of pictures, the composition of prose and poetry, etc., had to be subordinated to the exposure of capitalist crimes. At the same time, each work was supposed 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, dramaturgy. This method asserted a number of principles.

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

The works were supposed to contain a description of heroic deeds, revolutionary struggle, building a brighter 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.

The film "Circus" directed by Grigory Alexandrov ends like this: a demonstration, people in white clothes with shining faces march to the song "My dear country is wide." This shot, a year after the release of the film, in 1937, will be literally repeated in Alexander Deineka's monumental panel "Stakhanovites" - except that instead of a black child sitting on the shoulder of one of the demonstrators, here a white child will be put on the shoulder of the Stakhanovites. And then the same composition will be used in the gigantic canvas “Notable People of the Land of the Soviets”, written by a team of artists under the guidance of Vasily Efanov: this is a collective portrait, which presents together heroes of labor, polar explorers, pilots, akyns and artists. Such a genre is an apotheosis - and it most of all gives a visual representation of the style that almost monopolistically dominated Soviet art for more than two decades. Social realism, or, as critic Boris Groys called it, "Stalin's style."

Socialist realism became an official term in 1934, after Gorky used the phrase at the First Congress of Soviet Writers (before that there were occasional uses). Then it got into the charter of the Writers' Union, but it was explained in a very vague and very crackling way: about the ideological education of a person in the spirit of socialism, about the depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. This vector — striving for the future, revolutionary development — could somehow still be applied to literature, because literature is a temporary art, it has a plot sequence and the evolution of characters is possible. And how to apply this to the fine arts is not clear. Nevertheless, the term spread to the entire spectrum of culture and became mandatory for everything.

The main customer, addressee and consumer of the art of socialist realism was the state. It viewed culture as a means of agitation and propaganda. Accordingly, the canon of social realism charged the Soviet artist and writer with the obligation to depict exactly what the state wants to see. This concerned not only the subject, but also the form, the way of depiction. Of course, there might not have been a direct order, the artists worked, as it were, at the call of their hearts, but there was a certain receiving authority over them, and it decided whether, for example, the picture should be at the exhibition and whether the author deserves encouragement or quite the opposite. Such a power vertical in the matter of purchases, orders and other ways to encourage creative activity. The role of this receiving authority was often played by critics. Despite the fact that there were no normative poetics and sets of rules in socialist realist art, criticism was good at catching and broadcasting the supreme ideological vibes. In tone, this criticism could be mocking, annihilating, repressive. She ruled the court and approved the verdict.

The state order system was formed back in the twenties, and then the main hired artists were members of the AHRR - the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. The need to fulfill the social order was recorded in their declaration, and the customers were state bodies: the Revolutionary Military Council, the Red Army, and so on. But then this commissioned art existed in a diverse field, among many completely different initiatives. There were communities of a completely different kind - avant-garde and not quite avant-garde: they all competed for the right to be the main art of our time. AHRR won this fight, because its aesthetics corresponded both to the tastes of the authorities and to the taste of the masses. Painting, which simply illustrates and records the plots of reality, is understandable to everyone. And it is natural that after the forced dissolution of all artistic groups in 1932, it was precisely this aesthetic that became the basis of socialist realism - mandatory for execution.

In social realism, a hierarchy of pictorial genres is rigidly built. At its top is the so-called thematic picture. This is a pictorial story with the right accents. The plot has to do with modernity - and if not with modernity, then with those situations of the past that promise us this beautiful modernity. As it was said in the definition of socialist realism: reality in its revolutionary development.

In such a picture, there is often a conflict of forces - but which of the forces is right is demonstrated unequivocally. For example, in Boris Ioganson's painting "At the Old Ural Plant" the figure of the worker is in the light, while the figure of the exploiter-manufacturer is immersed in shadow; besides, the artist rewarded him with a repulsive appearance. In his painting “The Interrogation of the Communists”, we see only the back of the head of the white officer conducting the interrogation - the back of the head is fat and wrinkled.

Boris Ioganson. At the old Ural factory. 1937

Boris Ioganson. Interrogation of communists. 1933Photo by RIA Novosti,

Thematic paintings with a historical and revolutionary content merged with battle paintings and historical ones proper. Historical ones went mainly after the war, and they are close in genre to the apotheosis paintings already described - such operatic aesthetics. For example, in the painting by Alexander Bubnov "Morning on the Kulikovo Field", where the Russian army is waiting for the start of the battle with the Tatar-Mongols. Apotheoses were also created on conditionally modern material - these are the two “Kolkhoz holidays” of 1937, by Sergei Gerasimov and Arkady Plastov: triumphant abundance in the spirit of the later film “Kuban Cossacks”. In general, the art of socialist realism loves abundance - there should be a lot of everything, because abundance is joy, fullness and fulfillment of aspirations.

Alexander Bubnov. Morning on the Kulikovo field. 1943–1947State Tretyakov Gallery

Sergei Gerasimov. Collective farm holiday. 1937Photo by E. Kogan / RIA Novosti; State Tretyakov Gallery

Scale is also important in socialist realist landscapes. Very often this is a panorama of the "Russian expanse" - as if the image of the whole country in a particular landscape. Fyodor Shurpin's painting "Morning of Our Motherland" is a vivid example of such a landscape. True, here the landscape is only a background for the figure of Stalin, but in other similar panoramas, Stalin seems to be invisibly present. And it is important that landscape compositions are horizontally oriented - not a striving vertical, not a dynamically active diagonal, but horizontal static. This world is unchanging, already accomplished.

On the other hand, exaggerated industrial landscapes are very popular - giant construction sites, for example. Motherland is building Magnitogorsk, Dneproges, plants, factories, power plants and so on. Gigantism, the pathos of quantity - this is also a very important feature of socialist realism. It is not formulated directly, but manifests itself not only at the level of the theme, but also in the way everything is drawn: the pictorial fabric noticeably becomes heavier and denser.

By the way, the former “jacks of diamonds”, for example Lentulov, are very successful in depicting industrial giants. The materiality inherent in their painting turned out to be very useful in the new situation.

And in portraits this material pressure is very noticeable, especially in women's ones. Not only at the level of pictorial texture, but even in the entourage. Such fabric heaviness - velvet, plush, furs, and everything feels slightly worn, with an antique touch. Such, for example, is Johanson's portrait of the actress Zer-Kalova; Ilya Mashkov has such portraits - quite salon-like.

But in general, portraits in an almost educational spirit are considered as a way to glorify outstanding people who, through their work, have earned the right to be portrayed. Sometimes these works are presented directly in the text of the portrait: here Academician Pavlov is thinking tensely in his laboratory against the backdrop of biological stations, here the surgeon Yudin performs an operation, here the sculptor Vera Mukhina sculpts a statuette of Boreas. All these are portraits created by Mikhail Nesterov. In the 80s and 90s of the 19th century, he was the creator of his own genre of monastic idylls, then he fell silent for a long time, and in the 1930s he suddenly turned out to be the main Soviet portrait painter. And the teacher of Pavel Korin, whose portraits of Gorky, the actor Leonidov or Marshal Zhukov already resemble monuments in their monumental structure.

Mikhail Nesterov. Portrait of the sculptor Vera Mukhina. 1940Photo by Alexey Bushkin / RIA Novosti; State Tretyakov Gallery

Mikhail Nesterov. Portrait of a surgeon Sergei Yudin. 1935Photo by Oleg Ignatovich / RIA Novosti; State Tretyakov Gallery

Monumentality extends even to still lifes. And they are called, for example, by the same Mashkov, epic - "Moscow Sned" or "Soviet bread" . The former "jacks of diamonds" are generally the first in terms of material wealth. For example, in 1941, Pyotr Konchalovsky paints the painting “Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy visiting the artist” - and in front of the writer a ham, slices of red fish, baked poultry, cucumbers, tomatoes, lemon, glasses for various drinks ... But the trend towards monumentalization is general . Welcome-Xia all heavy, solid. In Deineka, the athletic bodies of his characters are heavy, gaining weight. Alexander Samokhvalov in the series "Metrostroevki" and other masters from the former association"Circle of Artists"the motif of the “big figure” appears - such female deities, personifying earthly power and the power of creation. And the painting itself becomes heavy, thick. But stop - in moderation.

Because moderation is also an important sign of style. On the one hand, a brush stroke should be noticeable - a sign that the artist worked. If the texture is smoothed out, then the work of the author is not visible - and it should be visible. And, say, with the same Deineka, who previously operated with solid color planes, now the surface of the picture becomes more embossed. On the other hand, extra maestry is also not encouraged - it's immodest, it's a protrusion of oneself. The word "bulge" sounds very menacing in the 1930s, when a campaign against formalism is being waged - in painting, and in a children's book, and in music, and in general everywhere. It's like a fight against the wrong influences, but in fact it's a fight in general with any manner, with any methods. After all, the technique calls into question the sincerity of the artist, and sincerity is an absolute fusion with the subject of the image. Sincerity does not imply any mediation, and reception, influence - this is mediation.

However, there are different methods for different tasks. For example, for lyrical subjects, a kind of colorless, “rainy” impressionism is quite suitable. It manifested itself not only in the genres of Yuri Pimenov - in his painting "New Moscow", where a girl rides in an open car in the center of the capital, transformed by new construction sites, or in the later "New Quarters" - a series about the construction of outlying microdistricts. But also, say, in Alexander Gerasimov’s huge canvas “Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov in the Kremlin” (the popular name is “Two Leaders after the Rain”). The atmosphere of rain denotes human warmth, openness to each other. Of course, such an impressionistic language cannot exist in the depiction of parades and celebrations - everything there is still extremely strict, academic.

Yuri Pimenov. New Moscow. 1937Photo by A. Saykov / RIA Novosti; State Tretyakov Gallery

Alexander Gerasimov. Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov in the Kremlin. 1938Photograph by Viktor Velikzhanin / TASS newsreel; State Tretyakov Gallery

It has already been said that socialist realism has a futuristic vector - aspiration to the future, to the outcome of revolutionary development. And since the victory of socialism is inevitable, the signs of the accomplished future are also present in the present. It turns out that in socialist realism time collapses. The present is already the future, and one beyond which there will be no next future. History reached its highest peak and stopped. Deinekov's Stakhanovites in white clothes are no longer people - they are celestials. And they are not even looking at us, but somewhere into eternity - which is already here, already with us.

Somewhere around 1936-1938 it gets its final form. Here is the highest point of socialist realism - and Stalin becomes an obligatory hero. His appearance in the paintings of Efanov, or Svarog, or anyone else looks like a miracle - and this is the biblical motif of a miraculous phenomenon, traditionally associated, of course, with completely different heroes. But that's how genre memory works. At this moment, social realism really becomes a great style, the style of a totalitarian utopia - only this is a utopia that has come true. And since this utopia has come true, then there is a freezing of style - a monumental academicization.

And any other art, which was based on a different understanding of plastic values, turns out to be forgotten art, "under the cupboard", invisible. Of course, the artists had some bosoms in which they could exist, where cultural skills were preserved and reproduced. For example, in 1935, a monumental painting workshop was founded at the Academy of Architecture, led by artists of the old school - Vladimir Favorsky, Lev Bruni, Konstantin Istomin, Sergei Romanovich, Nikolay Chernyshev. But all such oases do not exist for long.

There is a paradox here. Totalitarian art in its verbal declarations is addressed specifically to man - the words "man", "humanity" are present in all the manifestos of socialist realism of this time. But in fact, socialist realism partly continues this messianic pathos of the avant-garde with its myth-creating pathos, with its apology for the result, with the desire to remake the whole world - and among such pathos there is no place left for an individual. And the "quiet" painters, who do not write declarations, but in reality just stand up for the protection of the individual, petty, human - they are doomed to an invisible existence. And it is in this “cupboard” art that humanity continues to live.

The late socialist realism of the 1950s will try to appropriate it. Stalin - the cementing figure of style - is no longer alive; his former subordinates are at a loss - in a word, the era has ended. And in the 1950s and 60s, social realism wants to be social realism with a human face. There were some foreshadowings a little earlier - for example, Arkady Plastov's paintings on rural themes, and especially his painting "The Fascist Has Flew" about a senselessly murdered shepherd boy.

But the most revealing are the paintings by Fyodor Reshetnikov “Arrived on vacation”, where a young Suvorov citizen salutes his grandfather at the New Year tree, and “Again the deuce” is about a careless schoolboy (by the way, on the wall of the room in the painting “Again the deuce” there is a reproduction of the painting "Arrived for the holidays" - a very touching detail). This is still socialist realism, this is a clear and detailed story - but the state thought, which was the basis of all the stories before, is reincarnated into a family thought, and the intonation changes. Socialist realism is becoming more intimate, now it is about the lives of ordinary people. This also includes the later genres of Pimenov, this also includes the work of Alexander Laktionov. His most famous painting, Letter from the Front, which was sold in many postcards, is one of the main Soviet paintings. Here and edification, and didacticism, and sentimentality - this is such a socialist realist philistine style.

“Socialist realism affirms being as an act, as creativity, the goal of which is the continuous development of the most valuable individual abilities of a person for the sake of his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his health and longevity, for the sake of great happiness to live on the earth, which he, in accordance with the continuous growth of his needs, wants to process everything, as a wonderful dwelling of mankind, united in one family ”(M. Gorky).

This characteristic of the method was given by M. Gorky at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. And the term “socialist realism” itself was proposed by the journalist and literary critic I. Gronsky in 1932. But the idea of ​​the new method belongs to A.V. Lunacharsky, revolutionary and Soviet statesman.
A perfectly justified question: why was a new method (and a new term) needed if realism already existed in art? And how did socialist realism differ from just realism?

On the need for socialist realism

The new method was needed in a country that was building a new socialist society.

P. Konchalovsky "From the mowing" (1948)
First, it was necessary to control the creative process of creative individuals, i.e. now the task of art was to promote the policy of the state - there were still enough of those artists who sometimes took an aggressive position in relation to what was happening in the country.

P. Kotov "Worker"
Secondly, these were the years of industrialization, and the Soviet government needed an art that would raise the people to "labor exploits."

M. Gorky (Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov)
Having returned from emigration, M. Gorky headed the Union of Writers of the USSR, created in 1934, which included mainly writers and poets of a Soviet orientation.
The method of socialist realism demanded from the artist a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideological reworking and education in the spirit of socialism. This setting for cultural figures in the USSR operated until the 1980s.

Principles of socialist realism

The new method did not deny the heritage of world realistic art, but predetermined the deep connection of works of art with contemporary reality, the active participation of art in socialist construction. Each artist had to understand the meaning of the events taking place in the country, be able to evaluate the phenomena of social life in their development.

A. Plastov "Haymaking" (1945)
The method did not exclude Soviet romance, the need to combine the heroic and the romantic.
The state gave orders to creative people, sent them on creative business trips, organized exhibitions, stimulating the development of new art.
The main principles of socialist realism were nationalism, ideology and concreteness.

Socialist realism in literature

M. Gorky believed that the main task of socialist realism is the education of a socialist, revolutionary view of the world, a corresponding sense of the world.

Konstantin Simonov
The most significant writers representing the method of socialist realism: Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Tvardovsky, Veniamin Kaverin, Anna Zegers, Vilis Latsis, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Alexander Serafimovich, Fyodor Gladkov, Konstantin Simonov, Caesar Solodar, Mikhail Sholokhov, Nikolai Nosov, Alexander Fadeev , Konstantin Fedin, Dmitry Furmanov, Yuriko Miyamoto, Marietta Shaginyan, Yulia Drunina, Vsevolod Kochetov and others.

N. Nosov (Soviet children's writer, best known as the author of works about Dunno)
As we can see, the list also includes the names of writers from other countries.

Anna Zegers(1900-1983) - German writer, member of the Communist Party of Germany.

Yuriko Miyamoto(1899-1951) - Japanese writer, representative of proletarian literature, member of the Communist Party of Japan. These writers supported the socialist ideology.

Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeev (1901-1956)

Russian Soviet writer and public figure. Laureate of the Stalin Prize of the first degree (1946).
From childhood, he showed the ability to write, was distinguished by the ability to fantasize. He was fond of adventure literature.
While still studying at the Vladivostok Commercial School, he carried out the instructions of the underground committee of the Bolsheviks. He wrote his first story in 1922. In the course of working on the novel The Defeat, he decided to become a professional writer. "Defeat" brought fame and recognition to the young writer.

Frame from the film "Young Guard" (1947)
His most famous novel is “Young Guard” (about the Krasnodon underground organization “Young Guard”, which operated on the territory occupied by Nazi Germany, many of whose members were destroyed by the Nazis. In mid-February 1943, after the liberation of Donetsk Krasnodon by Soviet troops, not far from the city of mine No. 5, several dozen corpses of teenagers tortured by the Nazis, who during the period of occupation were in the underground organization Young Guard, were recovered.
The book was published in 1946. The writer was sharply criticized for the fact that the “leading and guiding” role of the Communist Party was not clearly expressed in the novel; he received criticism in the Pravda newspaper, in fact, from Stalin himself. In 1951, he created the second edition of the novel, and in it he paid more attention to the leadership of the underground organization by the CPSU (b).
Standing at the head of the Union of Writers of the USSR, A. Fadeev carried out the decisions of the party and government in relation to the writers M.M. Zoshchenko, A.A. Akhmatova, A.P. Platonov. In 1946, the well-known decree of Zhdanov came out, effectively destroying Zoshchenko and Akhmatova as writers. Fadeev was among those who carried out this sentence. But the human feelings in him were not completely killed, he tried to help the financially distressed M. Zoshchenko, and also fussed about the fate of other writers who were in opposition to the authorities (B. Pasternak, N. Zabolotsky, L. Gumilyov, A. Platonov). Hardly experiencing such a split, he fell into depression.
May 13, 1956 Alexander Fadeev shot himself with a revolver at his dacha in Peredelkino. “... My life, as a writer, loses all meaning, and with great joy, as a deliverance from this vile existence, where meanness, lies and slander fall upon you, I am leaving life. The last hope was to at least say this to the people who rule the state, but for the past 3 years, despite my requests, they can’t even accept me. I ask you to bury me next to my mother ”(A. A. Fadeev’s suicide letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU. May 13, 1956).

Socialist realism in the visual arts

In the visual arts of the 1920s, several groups emerged. The most significant group was the Association of Artists of the Revolution.

"Association of Artists of the Revolution" (AHR)

S. Malyutin "Portrait of Furmanov" (1922). State Tretyakov Gallery
This large association of Soviet artists, graphic artists and sculptors was the most numerous, it was supported by the state. The association lasted 10 years (1922-1932) and was the forerunner of the Union of Artists of the USSR. Pavel Radimov, the last head of the Association of the Wanderers, became the head of the association. From that moment on, the Wanderers as an organization actually ceased to exist. The AKhRites rejected the avant-garde, although the 1920s were the heyday of the Russian avant-garde, which also wanted to work for the benefit of the revolution. But the paintings of these artists were not understood and accepted by society. Here, for example, the work of K. Malevich "Reaper".

K. Malevich "Reaper" (1930)
Here is what the artists of the AHR declared: “Our civic duty to humanity is the artistic and documentary depiction of the greatest moment in history in its revolutionary outburst. We will depict today: the life of the Red Army, the life of the workers, the peasantry, the leaders of the revolution and the heroes of labor ... We will give a real picture of events, and not abstract fabrications that discredit our revolution in the face of the international proletariat.
The main task of the members of the Association was to create genre paintings based on subjects from modern life, in which they developed the traditions of painting by the Wanderers and "brought art closer to life."

I. Brodsky “V. I. Lenin in Smolny in 1917” (1930)
The main activity of the Association in the 1920s was exhibitions, of which about 70 were organized in the capital and other cities. These exhibitions were very popular. Depicting the present day (the life of the Red Army soldiers, workers, peasantry, leaders of the revolution and labor), the artists of the AHR considered themselves the heirs of the Wanderers. They visited factories, factories, Red Army barracks to observe the life of their characters. It was they who became the main backbone of the artists of socialist realism.

V. Favorsky
Representatives of socialist realism in painting and graphics were E. Antipova, I. Brodsky, P. Buchkin, P. Vasiliev, B. Vladimirsky, A. Gerasimov, S. Gerasimov, A. Deineka, P. Konchalovsky, D. Maevsky, S. Osipov, A. Samokhvalov, V. Favorsky and others.

Socialist realism in sculpture

In the sculpture of socialist realism, the names of V. Mukhina, N. Tomsky, E. Vuchetich, S. Konenkov, and others are known.

Vera Ignatievna Mukhina (1889 -1953)

M. Nesterov "Portrait of V. Mukhina" (1940)

Soviet monumental sculptor, Academician of the USSR Academy of Arts, People's Artist of the USSR. Laureate of five Stalin Prizes.
Her monument "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" was installed in Paris at the World Exhibition of 1937. Since 1947, this sculpture has been the emblem of the Mosfilm film studio. The monument is made of stainless chromium-nickel steel. The height is about 25 m (the height of the pavilion-pedestal is 33 m). Total weight 185 tons.

V. Mukhina "Worker and Collective Farm Girl"
V. Mukhina is the author of many monuments, sculptural works and decorative and applied items.

V. Mukhina "Monument" P.I. Tchaikovsky" near the building of the Moscow Conservatory

V. Mukhina "Monument to Maxim Gorky" (Nizhny Novgorod)
An outstanding Soviet sculptor-monumentalist was N.V. Tomsk.

N. Tomsky "Monument to P. S. Nakhimov" (Sevastopol)
Thus, socialist realism has made its worthy contribution to art.

1. Prerequisites. If in the field of natural science the cultural revolution was reduced mainly to a "revision" of the scientific picture of the world "in the light of the ideas of dialectical materialism", then in the field of humanities, the program of party leadership in artistic creativity, the creation of a new communist art, came to the fore.

The aesthetic equivalent of this art was the theory of socialist realism.

Its premises were formulated by the classics of Marxism. For example, Engels, discussing the purpose of the "tendentious" or "socialist" novel, noted that the proletarian writer achieves his goal when, "when, truthfully depicting real relations, he breaks the prevailing conditional illusions about the nature of these relations, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world , casts doubts about the immutability of the foundations of the existing ..." At the same time, it was not at all necessary "to present the reader in finished form with the future historical resolution of the social conflicts he depicts" . Such attempts seemed to Engels a utopian deviation, which was resolutely rejected by the "scientific theory" of Marxism.

Lenin singled out the organizational moment more: "Literature must be party." This meant that it "cannot be in general an individual matter, independent of the general proletarian cause." “Down with non-Party writers! - categorically declared Lenin. - Down with the superhuman writers! Literary work must become a part of the common proletarian cause, "wheel and cog" of one single, great social-democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the entire working class. Literary work must become an integral part of organized, planned, united Social-Democratic Party work. Literature was assigned the role of "propagandist and agitator", embodying in artistic images the tasks and ideals of the class struggle of the proletariat.

2. The theory of social realism. The aesthetic platform of socialist realism was developed by A. M. Gorky (1868-1936), the main "petrel" of the revolution.

According to this platform, the outlook of the proletarian writer must be permeated with the pathos of militant anti-philistinism. Philistinism has many faces, but its essence lies in the thirst for "satiety", material well-being, on which all bourgeois culture is based. The petty-bourgeois passion for the "meaningless accumulation of things" and personal property has been instilled in the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Hence the duality of his consciousness: emotionally the proletariat gravitates toward the past, intellectually toward the future.

And consequently, the proletarian writer needs, on the one hand, with all perseverance to pursue "the line of a critical attitude to the past", and on the other hand, "to develop the ability to look at it from the height of the achievements of the present, from the height of the great goals of the future." According to Gorky, this will give socialist literature a new tone, help it develop new forms, "a new direction - socialist realism, which - it goes without saying - can only be created on the facts of socialist experience."

Thus, the method of socialist realism consisted in decomposing everyday reality into "old" and "new", that is, in fact, bourgeois and communist, and in showing the bearers of this new in real life. It is they who should become the positive heroes of Soviet literature. At the same time, Gorky admitted the possibility of "speculation", an exaggeration of the elements of the new in reality, considering this as an anticipatory reflection of the communist ideal.

Accordingly, the writer categorically spoke out against criticism of the socialist system. The critics, in his opinion, only “litter the bright working day with rubbish of critical words. They suppress the will and creative energy of the people. After reading the manuscript of A.P. work, I do not think that it will be printed, published.This will be prevented by your anarchist frame of mind, apparently inherent in the nature of your "spirit".

Whether you wanted it or not, you gave the coverage of reality a lyrical-satirical character, which, of course, is unacceptable to our censorship. With all the tenderness of your attitude towards people, they are colored ironically in you, they appear to the reader not so much as revolutionaries as "eccentrics" and "crazy" ... I will add: among modern editors, I do not see anyone who could evaluate your novel by its virtues ... That's all I can tell you, and I'm very sorry that I can not say anything else. And these are the words of a man whose influence was worth the influence of all Soviet editors combined!

For the sake of glorifying "socialist achievements" Gorky allowed the creation of a legend about Lenin, exalted the personality of Stalin.

3. The novel "Mother". Articles and speeches by Gorky in the 20-30s. summed up his own artistic experience, the pinnacle of which was the novel "Mother" (1906). Lenin called it "a great work of art" that helps to strengthen the labor movement in Russia. Such an assessment was the reason for the party canonization of Gorky's novel.

The plot core of the novel is the awakening of revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat, suppressed by want and lack of rights.

Here is the usual and bleak picture of suburban life. Every morning, with a lingering factory whistle, "from the little gray houses ran out into the street like frightened cockroaches, gloomy people who had not had time to refresh their muscles with sleep." They were workers from a nearby factory. The non-stop "hard labor" diversified in the evenings with drunken, bloody fights, often ending in serious injuries, even murders.

There was no kindness or responsiveness in people. The bourgeois world has drained out of them a sense of human dignity and self-respect. “In the relations of people,” Gorky darkened the situation even more, “there was most of all a feeling of lurking malice, it was as old as incurable muscle fatigue. People were born with this disease of the soul, inheriting it from their fathers, and it accompanied them with a black shadow to the grave, prompting in the course of life to a series of deeds, disgusting with their aimless cruelty.

And people are so accustomed to this constant pressure of life that they did not expect any changes for the better, moreover, they "considered all changes capable of only increasing oppression."

Such was the "poisonous, convict abomination" of the capitalist world pictured in Gorky's imagination. He did not care at all how the picture he depicted corresponded to real life. He drew his understanding of the latter from Marxist literature, from Lenin's assessments of Russian reality. And this meant only one thing: the position of the working masses under capitalism is hopeless, and it cannot be changed without a revolution. Gorky also wanted to show one of the possible ways of awakening the social "bottom", gaining revolutionary consciousness.

The solution of the task was served by the images he created of the young worker Pavel Vlasov and his mother Pelageya Nilovna.

Pavel Vlasov could completely repeat the path of his father, in which, as it were, the tragedy of the position of the Russian proletariat was personified. But the meeting with the "forbidden people" (Gorky remembered Lenin's words that socialism was introduced into the masses "from the outside"!) opened up a life perspective for him, led him onto the path of the "liberation" struggle. He creates an underground revolutionary circle in the suburb, rallies the most energetic workers around him, and they develop political enlightenment.

Taking advantage of the story of the "bog penny", Pavel Vlasov openly delivered a pathetic speech, urging the workers to unite, to feel like "comrades, a family of friends, firmly connected by one desire - the desire to fight for our rights."

From that moment on, Pelageya Nilovna accepts the work of her son with all her heart. After the arrest of Pavel and his comrades at the May Day demonstration, she picks up a red flag dropped by someone and addresses the frightened crowd with fiery words: “Listen, for the sake of Christ! All of you are relatives ... all of you are of the heart ... look without fear "What happened? Children, our blood, go in the world, they follow the truth... for everyone! For all of you, for your babies, they doomed themselves to the way of the cross... they are looking for bright days. They want another life in truth, in justice.. They want good for everyone!"

Nilovna's speech reflects her former way of life - a downtrodden, religious woman. She believes in Christ and the need for suffering for the sake of "Christ's Resurrection" - a bright future: "Our Lord Jesus Christ would not exist if people did not die for his glory..." Nilovna is not yet a Bolshevik, but she is already a Christian socialist. By the time Gorky wrote Mother, the Christian socialist movement in Russia was in full force and supported by the Bolsheviks.

But Pavel Vlasov is an undisputed Bolshevik. From beginning to end, his consciousness is permeated with the slogans and appeals of the Leninist party. This is fully revealed at the trial, where two irreconcilable camps come face to face. The image of the court is based on the principle of multifaceted contrast. Everything related to the old world is given in depressingly gloomy tones. It's a sick world in every way.

"All the judges seemed to their mothers to be unhealthy people. Painful fatigue was reflected in their postures and voices, it lay on their faces - painful fatigue and annoying, gray boredom." In some ways, they are similar to the workers of the settlement before their awakening to a new life, and it is not surprising, because both are the product of the same "dead" and "indifferent" bourgeois society.

The depiction of revolutionary workers is of a completely different character. Their mere presence at the court makes the hall more spacious and brighter; one feels that they are not criminals here, but prisoners, and the truth is on their side. This is what Paul demonstrates when the judge gives him the floor. "A man of the party," he declares, "I only recognize the judgment of my party and I will not speak in my defense, but - at the request of my comrades, who also refused to defend myself, I will try to explain to you what you did not understand."

But the judges did not understand that they were not just "rebels against the king", but "enemies of private property", enemies of a society that "considers a person only as an instrument of its own enrichment." “We want,” Pavel declares in phrases from socialist leaflets, “now to have so much freedom that it will give us the opportunity to win all power over time. Our slogans are simple - down with private property, all means of production - to the people, all power - to the people, labor - obligatory for all. You see, we are not rebels!" Paul's words "slender rows" cut into the memory of those present, filling them with strength and faith in a brighter future.

The Gorky novel is inherently hagiographic; for the writer, partisanship is the same category of holiness that was the property of hagiographic literature. Party membership was assessed by him as a kind of involvement in the highest ideological sacraments, ideological shrines: the image of a person without party membership is the image of an enemy. It can be said that for Gorky party membership is a kind of symbolic distinction between polar cultural categories: "one's own" and "alien". It ensures the unity of ideology, endowing it with the features of a new religion, a new Bolshevik revelation.

Thus, a kind of hagiographization of Soviet literature was carried out, which Gorky himself saw as a fusion of romanticism and realism. It is no coincidence that he called for learning the art of writing from his medieval countryman from Nizhny Novgorod, Avvakum Petrov.

4. Literature of socialist realism. The novel "Mother" caused an endless stream of "party books" dedicated to the sacralization of "Soviet everyday life." Of particular note are the works of D. A. Furmanov (“Chapaev”, 1923), A. S. Serafimovich (“Iron Stream”, 1924), M. A. Sholokhov (“Quiet Don”, 1928-1940; “Virgin Soil Upturned” , 1932-1960), N. A. Ostrovsky ("How the steel was tempered", 1932-1934), F. I. Panferov ("Bars", 1928-1937), A. N. Tolstoy ("Walking through the torments", 1922-1941), etc.

Perhaps the largest, perhaps even larger than Gorky himself, apologist for the Soviet era was V. V. Mayakovsky (1893-1930).

In every possible way glorifying Lenin, the party, he himself frankly admitted:

I wouldn't be a poet if
this is not what he sang
in the stars of the five-pointed sky of the immense vault of the RCP.

The literature of socialist realism was tightly protected from reality by the wall of party myth-making. She could exist only under "high patronage": she had little of her own strength. Like hagiography with the church, it has grown together with the party, sharing the ups and downs of communist ideology.

5. Cinema. Along with literature, the Party considered cinema to be the "most important of the arts". The importance of cinema increased especially after it became sound in 1931. One after another, film adaptations of Gorky's works appear: "Mother" (1934), "Gorky's Childhood" (1938), "In People" (1939), "My Universities" (1940), created by director M. S. Donskoy. He also owned films dedicated to Lenin's mother - Mother's Heart (1966) and Mother's Fidelity (1967), which reflected the influence of the Gorky stencil.

Pictures on historical and revolutionary themes come out in a wide stream: a trilogy about Maxim directed by G. M. Kozintsev and L. Z. Trauberg - “The Youth of Maxim” (1935), “The Return of Maxim” (1937), “The Vyborg Side” (1939); “We are from Kronstadt” (directed by E. L. Dzigan, 1936), “Deputy of the Baltic” (directed by A. G. Zarkhi and I. E. Kheifits, 1937), “Shchors” (directed by A. P. Dovzhenko, 1939) , "Yakov Sverdlov" (director S. I. Yutkevich, 1940), etc.

The exemplary film of this series was Chapaev (1934), filmed by directors G. N. and S. D. Vasiliev based on Furmanov’s novel.

Films that embodied the image of the "leader of the proletariat" did not leave the screens either: "Lenin in October" (1937) and "Lenin in 1918" (1939) directed by M. I. Romm, "The Man with a Gun" (1938) directed by S. I. Yutkevich.

6. Secretary General and artist. Soviet cinema has always been the product of an official order. This was considered the norm and was strongly supported by both the “tops” and the “bottoms”.

Even such an outstanding master of cinematography as S. M. Eisenstein (1898-1948), recognized as "the most successful" in his work films that he made on the "order of the government", namely "Battleship Potemkin" (1925), "October "(1927) and" Alexander Nevsky "(1938).

By government order, he also shot the film "Ivan the Terrible". The first series of the picture was released in 1945 and was awarded the Stalin Prize. Soon the director finished editing the second series, and it was immediately shown in the Kremlin. The film disappointed Stalin: he did not like that Ivan the Terrible was shown as some kind of "neurasthenic", repentant and worried about his atrocities.

For Eisenstein, such a reaction from the Secretary General was quite expected: he knew that Stalin took an example from Ivan the Terrible in everything. Yes, and Eisenstein himself saturated his previous paintings with scenes of cruelty, causing them to "select the subject, methodology and credo" of his directorial work. It seemed to him quite normal that in his films “crowds of people are shot, children are crushed on the Odessa stairs and thrown off the roof (“Strike”), they are allowed to be killed by their own parents (“Bezhin meadow”), they are thrown into blazing fires (“Alexander Nevsky ") etc.". When he began work on Ivan the Terrible, he first of all wanted to recreate the "cruel age" of the Moscow Tsar, who, according to the director, for a long time remained the "ruler" of his soul and "beloved hero".

So the sympathies of the general secretary and the artist completely coincided, and Stalin had the right to count on a corresponding end to the film. But it turned out differently, and this could only be taken as an expression of doubt about the expediency of the "bloody" policy. Probably, the ideologized director, tired of the eternal pleasing of the authorities, really experienced something similar. Stalin never forgave such things: Eisenstein was saved only by an untimely death.

The second series of "Ivan the Terrible" was banned and saw the light only after the death of Stalin, in 1958, when the political climate in the country was inclined towards a "thaw" and intellectual dissent began to ferment.

7. "Red wheel" of socialist realism. However, nothing changed the essence of socialist realism. He was and remained a method of art, designed to capture the "cruelty of the oppressors" and "the madness of the brave." Its slogans were communist ideology and party spirit. Any deviation from them was considered capable of "damaging the creativity of even gifted people."

One of the last resolutions of the Central Committee of the CPSU on questions of literature and art (1981) strictly warned: "Our critics, literary journals, creative unions, and, above all, their party organizations, must be able to correct those who are pushed in one direction or another. And, of course, actively, on principle to act in those cases when works appear that discredit our Soviet reality. Here we must be irreconcilable. The Party has not been and cannot be indifferent to the ideological orientation of art ".

And how many of them, genuine talents, innovators of literary affairs, fell under the "red wheel" of Bolshevism - B. L. Pasternak, V. P. Nekrasov, I. A. Brodsky, A. I. Solzhenitsyn, D. L. Andreev, V T. Shalamov and many others. others

To understand how and why socialist realism arose, it is necessary to briefly characterize the socio-historical and political situation of the first three decades of the beginning of the 20th century, because this method, like no other, was politicized. The decay of the monarchical regime, its numerous miscalculations and failures (the Russo-Japanese war, corruption at all levels of power, cruelty in suppressing demonstrations and riots, "Rasputinism", etc.) gave rise to mass discontent in Russia. In intellectual circles it has become a rule of good taste to be in opposition to the government. A significant part of the intelligentsia falls under the spell of the teachings of K. Marx, who promised to arrange the society of the future on new, fair conditions. The Bolsheviks proclaimed themselves to be genuine Marxists, distinguishing themselves from other parties by the scale of their plans and the "scientific"ness of their forecasts. And although few people really studied Marx, it became fashionable to be a Marxist, and therefore a supporter of the Bolsheviks.

This craze also affected M. Gorky, who began as an admirer of Nietzsche and by the beginning of the 20th century gained wide popularity in Russia as a harbinger of the coming political "storm". In the writer's work, images of proud and strong people appear, rebelling against a gray and gloomy life. Gorky later recalled: “When I first wrote the Man with a Capital Letter, I still did not know what kind of a great man he was. His image was not clear to me. In 1903, I realized that the Man with a Capital Letter was embodied in the Bolsheviks led by Lenin ".

Gorky, who had almost outlived his passion for Nietzscheism, expressed his new knowledge in the novel Mother (1907). There are two central lines in this novel. In Soviet literary criticism, especially in school and university courses in the history of literature, the figure of Pavel Vlasov, who grew from an ordinary artisan to the leader of the laboring masses, came to the fore. The image of Pavel embodies the central Gorky concept, according to which the true master of life is a man endowed with reason and rich in spirit, at the same time a practical figure and a romantic, confident in the possibility of the practical realization of the age-old dream of mankind - to build a kingdom of reason and goodness on Earth. Gorky himself believed that his main merit as a writer was that he was "the first in Russian literature and, perhaps, the first in life like this, personally, to understand the greatest significance of labor - labor that forms everything that is most valuable, everything beautiful, everything great in this world."

In "Mother" the labor process and its role in the transformation of the personality is only declared, and yet it is the man of labor who is made in the novel as the mouthpiece of the author's thought. Subsequently, Soviet writers will take into account this oversight of Gorky, and the production process in all its subtleties will be described in works about the working class.

Having in the person of Chernyshevsky a predecessor who created the image of a positive hero fighting for universal happiness, Gorky at first also painted heroes towering above everyday life (Chelkash, Danko, Burevestnik). In "Mother" Gorky said a new word. Pavel Vlasov is not like Rakhmetov, who everywhere feels free and at ease, knows everything and knows how to do everything, and is endowed with heroic strength and character. Paul is a man of the crowd. He is “like everyone else”, only his faith in justice and the necessity of the cause he serves is stronger and stronger than that of the others. And here he rises to such heights that even Rakhmetov was unknown. Rybin says about Pavel: “A man knew that they could hit him with a bayonet, and they would treat him to hard labor, but he went. Mother lay down on the road for him - he would step over. Would he go, Nilovna, through you? ..." And Andrey Nakhodka, one of the characters most dear to the author, agrees with Pavel ("For comrades, for the cause - I can do anything! And I will kill. At least my son ...").

Even in the 1920s, Soviet literature, reflecting the fiercest intensity of passions in the Civil War, told how a girl kills her beloved - an ideological enemy ("Forty-first" B. Lavrenev), how brothers destroyed by a whirlwind of revolution in different camps destroy each other, how sons put fathers to death, and they execute children ("Don stories" by M. Sholokhov, "Cavalry" by I. Babel, etc.), however, writers still avoided touching on the problem of ideological antagonism between mother and son.

The image of Paul in the novel is recreated with sharp poster strokes. Here in the house of Pavel, artisans and intellectuals gather and conduct political disputes, here he leads a crowd indignant at the arbitrariness of the directorate (the story of the "swamp penny"), here Vlasov walks at a demonstration in front of a column with a red banner in his hands, here he says in court accusatory speech. The thoughts and feelings of the hero are revealed mainly in his speeches, the inner world of Paul is hidden from the reader. And this is not Gorky's miscalculation, but his credo. “I,” he once emphasized, “start from a person, and a person begins for me with his thought.” That is why the protagonists of the novel so willingly and often come up with declarative justifications for their activities.

However, it is not for nothing that the novel is called "Mother", and not "Pavel Vlasov". The rationalism of Paul sets off the emotionality of the mother. She is driven not by reason, but by love for her son and his comrades, because she feels in her heart that they want good for everyone. Nilovna does not really understand what Pavel and his friends are talking about, but she believes that they are right. And this faith she has akin to religious.

Nilovna and “before meeting new people and ideas, she was a deeply religious woman. But here is the paradox: this religiosity almost does not interfere with the mother, but more often helps to penetrate the light of the new dogma that her son, the socialist and atheist Pavel, carries.<...>And even later, her new revolutionary enthusiasm takes on the character of some kind of religious exaltation, when, for example, going to a village with illegal literature, she feels like a young pilgrim who goes to a distant monastery to bow to a miraculous icon. Or - when the words of a revolutionary song at a demonstration are mixed in the mind of a mother with Easter singing to the glory of the risen Christ.

And the young atheist revolutionaries themselves often resort to religious phraseology and parallels. The same Nakhodka addresses the demonstrators and the crowd: “Now we have gone in procession in the name of the new god, the god of light and truth, the god of reason and goodness! Our goal is far from us, the crowns of thorns are close!” Another of the characters in the novel declares that the proletarians of all countries have one common religion - the religion of socialism. Pavel hangs a reproduction in his room depicting Christ and the apostles on the way to Emmaus (Nilovna later compares her son and his comrades with this picture). Already engaged in the distribution of leaflets and becoming her own in the circle of revolutionaries, Nilovna "began to pray less, but thought more and more about Christ and about people who, without mentioning his name, as if not even knowing about him, lived - it seemed to her - according to his precepts and, like him, regarding the earth as the kingdom of the poor, they wished to share equally among the people all the riches of the earth. Some researchers generally see in Gorky's novel a modification of the "Christian myth of the Savior (Pavel Vlasov), sacrificing himself for the sake of all mankind, and his mother (that is, the Mother of God)" .

All these traits and motifs, had they appeared in any work by a Soviet writer of the 1930s and 1940s, would have been immediately regarded by critics as "slander" against the proletariat. However, in Gorky's novel, these aspects of it were hushed up, since "Mother" was declared the source of socialist realism, and it was impossible to explain these episodes from the standpoint of the "main method".

The situation was further complicated by the fact that such motives in the novel were not accidental. In the early nineties, V. Bazarov, A. Bogdanov, N. Valentinov, A. Lunacharsky, M. Gorky and a number of other lesser-known social democrats, in search of philosophical truth, moved away from orthodox Marxism and became supporters of Machism. The aesthetic side of Russian Machism was substantiated by Lunacharsky, from whose point of view the already obsolete Marxism became the "fifth great religion." Both Lunacharsky himself and his like-minded people also made an attempt to create a new religion that professed a cult of strength, a cult of a superman, free from lies and oppression. In this doctrine elements of Marxism, Machism and Nietzscheism were bizarrely intertwined. Gorky shared and in his work popularized this system of views, known in the history of Russian social thought under the name of "god-building".

First, G. Plekhanov, and then even more sharply, Lenin came out with criticism of the views of the breakaway allies. However, in Lenin's book "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" (1909), Gorky's name was not mentioned: the head of the Bolsheviks was aware of the power of Gorky's influence on the revolutionary-minded intelligentsia and youth and did not want to excommunicate the "petrel of the revolution" from Bolshevism.

In a conversation with Gorky, Lenin commented on his novel as follows: "The book is necessary, many workers participated in the revolutionary movement unconsciously, spontaneously, and now they will read "Mother" with great benefit to themselves"; "A very timely book." Indicative of this judgment is the pragmatic approach to a work of art, which follows from the main provisions of Lenin's article "Party Organization and Party Literature" (1905). In it, Lenin advocated for "literary work," which "cannot be an individual matter, independent of the general proletarian cause," and demanded that "literary work" become "a wheel and a cog in the single great social-democratic mechanism." Lenin himself had in mind party journalism, but from the beginning of the 1930s, his words in the USSR began to be interpreted broadly and applied to all branches of art. In this article, according to an authoritative publication, "a detailed demand for communist party spirit in fiction is given ...<.. >It is the mastery of communist party spirit, according to Lenin, that leads to liberation from delusions, beliefs, prejudices, since only Marxism is a true and correct doctrine. at the same time tried to involve him in practical work in the party press ... ".

Lenin succeeded quite well. Until 1917, Gorky was an active supporter of Bolshevism, helping the Leninist party in word and deed. However, even with his "delusions" Gorky was in no hurry to part: in the journal "Letopis" (1915) founded by him, the leading role belonged to the "archically suspicious bloc of Machists" (V. Lenin).

Almost two decades passed before the ideologists of the Soviet state discovered the initial principles of socialist realism in Gorky's novel. The situation is very strange. After all, if a writer caught and managed to embody the postulates of a new advanced method in artistic images, then he would immediately have followers and successors. This is exactly what happened with romanticism and sentimentalism. The themes, ideas and techniques of Gogol were also picked up and replicated by representatives of the Russian "natural school". This did not happen with socialist realism. On the contrary, in the first decade and a half of the 20th century, the aestheticization of individualism, the burning interest in the problems of non-existence and death, the rejection not only of party spirit, but of citizenship in general, are indicative of Russian literature. M. Osorgin, an eyewitness and participant in the revolutionary events of 1905, testifies: "... The youth in Russia, moving away from the revolution, rushed to spend their lives in a drunken drug frenzy, in sexual experiments, in suicide circles; this life was also reflected in literature" ("Times ", 1955).

That is why, even in the social-democratic environment, "Mother" at first did not receive wide recognition. G. Plekhanov, the most authoritative judge in the field of aesthetics and philosophy in revolutionary circles, spoke of Gorky's novel as an unsuccessful work, emphasizing: "people do him a very bad service, encouraging him to act as a thinker and preacher; he was not created for such roles" .

And Gorky himself in 1917, when the Bolsheviks were just asserting themselves in power, although its terrorist character had already manifested itself quite clearly, revised his attitude towards the revolution, coming out with a series of articles "Untimely Thoughts". The Bolshevik government immediately shut down the newspaper that published Untimely Thoughts, accusing the writer of slandering the revolution and failing to see the main thing in it.

However, Gorky's position was shared by quite a few artists of the word, who had previously sympathized with the revolutionary movement. A. Remizov creates the "Word about the destruction of the Russian land", I. Bunin, A. Kuprin, K. Balmont, I. Severyanin, I. Shmelev and many others emigrate and oppose Soviet power abroad. The "Serapion brothers" defiantly refuse any participation in the ideological struggle, striving to escape into a world of conflict-free existence, and E. Zamyatin predicts a totalitarian future in the novel "We" (published in 1924 abroad). The assets of Soviet literature at the initial stage of its development were proletarian abstract "universal" symbols and the image of the masses, the role of the creator in which was assigned to the Machine. Somewhat later, a schematic image of the leader is created, inspiring the same masses of people with his example and not demanding any concessions for himself ("Chocolate" by A. Tarasov-Rodionov, "Week" by Y. Libedinsky, "The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov" by I. Ehrenburg). The predestination of these characters was so obvious that in criticism this type of hero immediately received the designation - "leather jacket" (a kind of uniform of commissars and other middle managers in the first years of the revolution).

Lenin and the party he led were well aware of the importance of influencing the population of literature and the press in general, which at that time were the only means of information and propaganda. That is why one of the first acts of the Bolshevik government was the closure of all "bourgeois" and "White Guard" newspapers, i.e., the press that allows itself to dissent.

The next step in introducing the new ideology to the masses was the exercise of control over the press. In tsarist Russia, there was censorship, guided by a censorship charter, the content of which was known to publishers and authors, and non-compliance with it was punishable by fines, the closure of the printed organ and imprisonment. In Russia, Soviet censorship was declared abolished, but freedom of the press practically disappeared with it. Local officials, who were in charge of ideology, were now guided not by censorship regulations, but by "class instinct", the limits of which were limited either by secret instructions from the center, or by their own understanding and zeal.

The Soviet government could not act otherwise. Things did not go at all as planned according to Marx. Not to mention the bloody Civil War and intervention, both the workers themselves and the peasants repeatedly rose up against the Bolshevik regime, in whose name tsarism was destroyed (the Astrakhan rebellion of 1918, the Kronstadt rebellion, the Izhevsk workers' formation that fought on the side of the whites, "Antonovshchina", etc. d.). And all this caused retaliatory repressive measures, the purpose of which was to curb the people and teach them unquestioning obedience to the will of the leaders.

With the same goal, after the end of the war, the party begins to tighten ideological control. In 1922, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b), having discussed the issue of combating petty-bourgeois ideology in the literary and publishing field, decided to recognize the need to support the Serapion Brothers publishing house. There was one stipulation in this resolution, insignificant at first glance: support for the "Serapions" would be provided as long as they did not take part in reactionary publications. This clause guaranteed the absolute inactivity of the party organs, which could always refer to the violation of the stipulated condition, since any publication, if desired, could be qualified as reactionary.

With some streamlining of the economic and political situation in the country, the party begins to pay more and more attention to ideology. Numerous unions and associations still continued to exist in literature; individual notes of disagreement with the new regime still sounded on the pages of books and magazines. Groups of writers were formed, among which there were those who did not accept the displacement of Rus' by "condo" industrial Russia (peasant writers), and those who did not propagate Soviet power, but did not argue with it and were ready to cooperate ("fellow travelers") . "Proletarian" writers were still in the minority, and they could not boast of such popularity as, say, that of S. Yesenin.

As a result, proletarian writers who did not have special literary authority, but who realized the power of the influence of the party organization, the idea arises of the need for all supporters of the party to unite in a close creative union that could determine the literary policy in the country. A. Serafimovich, in one of his letters of 1921, shared with the addressee his thoughts on this matter: "... All life is organized in a new way; how can writers remain artisans, handicraft individualists. And the writers felt the need for a new order of life, communication, creativity, the need for a collective principle.

The party took the lead in this process. In the resolution of the Thirteenth Congress of the RCP(b) "On the Press" (1924) and in the special resolution of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) "On the Party's Policy in the Field of Fiction" (1925), the government directly expressed its attitude towards ideological trends in literature. The resolution of the Central Committee declared the need for all possible assistance to "proletarian" writers, attention to "peasant" writers and a tactful and careful attitude towards "fellow travelers". With the "bourgeois" ideology, it was necessary to wage a "decisive struggle." Purely aesthetic problems have not yet been touched upon.

But even this state of affairs did not suit the party for long. "The impact of socialist reality, meeting the objective needs of artistic creativity, the policy of the party led in the second half of the 20s - early 30s to the elimination of "intermediate ideological forms", to the formation of the ideological and creative unity of Soviet literature ", which as a result should have given " universal consensus."

The first attempt in this direction was not successful. RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) vigorously promoted the need for a clear class position in art, and the political and creative platform of the working class, led by the Bolshevik Party, was offered as an exemplary one. The leaders of the RAPP transferred the methods and style of party work to the writers' organization. Dissenters were subjected to "study", which resulted in "organizational conclusions" (excommunication from the press, defamation in everyday life, etc.).

It would seem that such a writers' organization should have suited the party, which rested on the iron discipline of execution. It turned out differently. The Rappovites, "frantic zealots" of the new ideology, imagined themselves to be its high priests and, on this basis, dared to propose ideological guidelines for the supreme power itself. Rapp's leadership supported a small handful of writers (far from the most outstanding) as truly proletarian, while the sincerity of "fellow travelers" (for example, A. Tolstoy) was questioned. Sometimes even such writers as M. Sholokhov were classified by the RAPP as "expressors of the White Guard ideology." The party, which had concentrated on restoring the country's economy destroyed by the war and the revolution, at a new historical stage was interested in attracting to its side the largest possible number of "specialists" in all fields of science, technology and art. The Rapp leadership did not catch the new trends.

And then the party takes a number of measures to organize a writers' union of a new type. The involvement of writers in the "common cause" was carried out gradually. "Shock brigades" of writers are organized and sent to industrial new buildings, to collective farms, etc., works that reflect the labor enthusiasm of the proletariat are promoted and encouraged in every possible way. A new type of writer, "an active figure in Soviet democracy" (A. Fadeev, Vs. Vishnevsky, A. Makarenko, and others) becomes a prominent figure. Writers are involved in the writing of collective works like "The History of Factories and Plants" or "The History of the Civil War", initiated by Gorky. To improve the artistic skills of young proletarian writers, the journal "Literary Study" is being created, headed by the same Gorky.

Finally, considering that the ground had been sufficiently prepared, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution "On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations" (1932). So far, nothing like this has been observed in world history: the authorities have never directly interfered in the literary process and have not decreed the methods of work of its participants. Previously, governments banned and burned books, imprisoned authors or bought them, but did not regulate the conditions for the existence of literary unions and groups, much less dictated methodological principles.

The resolution of the Central Committee spoke of the need to liquidate the RAPP and unite all writers who support the policy of the party and seek to participate in socialist construction into a single Union of Soviet Writers. Similar resolutions were immediately adopted by the majority of the union republics.

Soon preparations began for the First All-Union Congress of Writers, which was led by the organizing committee headed by Gorky. The writer's activity in carrying out the party line was clearly encouraged. In the same 1932, the "Soviet public" widely celebrated Gorky's "40th anniversary of literary and revolutionary activity", and then the main street of Moscow, the plane and the city where he spent his childhood were named after him.

Gorky is also involved in the formation of a new aesthetic. In the middle of 1933 he published an article "On Socialist Realism". It repeats the thesis repeatedly varied by the writer in the 1930s: all world literature is based on the struggle of classes, "our young literature is called upon by history to finish off and bury everything hostile to people," i.e., "philistinism" widely interpreted by Gorky. The essence of the affirmative pathos of the new literature and its methodology are briefly and in the most general terms. According to Gorky, the main task of young Soviet literature is "... to excite that proud joyful pathos that gives our literature a new tone, which will help create new forms, create the new direction we need - socialist realism, which - it goes without saying - can be created only on the facts of socialist experience. It is important to emphasize one circumstance here: Gorky speaks of social realism as a matter of the future, and the principles of the new method are not very clear to him. In the present, according to Gorky, socialist realism is still being formed. Meanwhile, the term itself already appears here. Where did it come from and what was meant by it?

Let us turn to the memoirs of I. Gronsky, one of the party leaders assigned to literature to guide it. In the spring of 1932, says Gronsky, a commission of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was created to specifically address the problems of restructuring literary and artistic organizations. The commission included five people who did not show themselves in literature: Stalin, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Stetsky and Gronsky.

On the eve of the commission meeting, Stalin summoned Gronsky and declared that the issue of dispersing the RAPP had been resolved, but “creative issues remain unresolved, and the main one is the question of Rapp’s dialectical-creative method. Tomorrow, at the commission, the Rapp’s people will certainly raise this issue. in advance, before the meeting, determine our attitude towards it: do we accept it or, on the contrary, reject it. Do you have any proposals on this matter? .

Stalin's attitude to the problem of the artistic method is very indicative here: if it is unprofitable to use the Rappov method, it is necessary to put forward a new one right there, in opposition to it. Stalin himself, busy with state affairs, had no ideas on this score, but he had no doubt that in a single artistic union it was necessary to introduce a single method into use, which would make it possible to manage the writers' organization, ensuring its clear and harmonious functioning and, therefore, the imposition of a single state ideology.

Only one thing was clear: the new method must be realistic, because all sorts of "formal contrivances" by the ruling elite, brought up on the work of revolutionary democrats (Lenin resolutely rejected all "isms"), were considered inaccessible to the broad masses, namely, the art of the proletariat was supposed to focus on the latter. . Since the end of the 1920s, writers and critics have been groping for the essence of the new art. According to Rapp's theory of the "dialectical-materialistic method", one should have been equal to the "psychological realists" (mainly L. Tolstoy), putting at the forefront a revolutionary worldview that helps "tearing off all and sundry masks." Approximately the same was said by Lunacharsky ("social realism"), and Mayakovsky ("tendentious realism"), and A. Tolstoy ("monumental realism"), among other definitions of realism there were such as "romantic", "heroic" and simply "proletarian". Note that the Rappovites considered romanticism in contemporary art unacceptable.

Gronsky, who had never thought about the theoretical problems of art before, started with the simplest - he suggested the name of the new method (he did not sympathize with the Rappovists, therefore the method did not accept them), rightly judging that later theorists would fill the term with appropriate content. He proposed the following definition: "proletarian socialist, and even better communist realism." Stalin chose the second of the three adjectives, justifying his choice as follows: “The advantage of such a definition is, firstly, brevity (only two words), secondly, clarity and, thirdly, an indication of continuity in the development of literature (literature of critical realism, which arose at the stage of the bourgeois-democratic social movement, passes, develops into the literature of socialist realism at the stage of the proletarian socialist movement).

The definition is clearly unfortunate, since the artistic category in it is preceded by a political term. Subsequently, the theorists of socialist realism tried to justify this conjugation, but were not very successful in doing so. In particular, academician D. Markov wrote: “... tearing the word “socialist” from the general name of the method, they interpret it in a bare sociological way: they believe that this part of the formula reflects only the artist’s worldview, his socio-political convictions. Meanwhile, it should be it is clearly understood that we are talking about a certain (but also extremely free, not limited, in fact, in its theoretical rights) type of aesthetic knowledge and transformation of the world. This was said more than half a century after Stalin, but it hardly clarifies anything, since the identity of the political and aesthetic categories has not yet been eliminated.

Gorky at the First All-Union Writers' Congress in 1934 defined only the general trend of the new method, also emphasizing its social orientation: "Socialist realism affirms being as an act, as creativity, the purpose of which is the continuous development of the most valuable individual abilities of a person for the sake of his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his health and longevity, for the sake of great happiness to live on earth. Obviously, this pathetic declaration added nothing to the interpretation of the essence of the new method.

So, the method has not yet been formulated, but has already been put into use, the writers have not yet realized themselves as representatives of the new method, and its genealogy is already being created, historical roots are being discovered. Gronsky recalled that in 1932, “at a meeting, all the members of the commission who spoke and chaired by P. P. Postyshev stated that socialist realism as a creative method of fiction and art actually arose long ago, long before the October Revolution, mainly in the work of M. Gorky , and we have just given it a name (formulated)" .

Socialist realism found a clearer formulation in the Charter of the SSP, in which the style of party documents makes itself felt tangibly. So, “socialist realism, being the main method of Soviet fiction and literary criticism, requires from the artist a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. working people in the spirit of socialism. Curiously, the definition of social realism as main method of literature and criticism, according to Gronsky, arose as a result of tactical considerations and should have been removed in the future, but remained forever, since Gronsky simply forgot to do it.

The Charter of the SSP noted that socialist realism does not canonize the genres and methods of creativity and provides ample opportunities for creative initiative, but how this initiative can manifest itself in a totalitarian society was not explained in the Charter.

In subsequent years, in the works of theoreticians, the new method gradually acquired visible features. Socialist realism was characterized by the following features: a new theme (first of all, the revolution and its achievements) and a new type of hero (worker), endowed with a sense of historical optimism; disclosure of conflicts in the light of the prospects for the revolutionary (progressive) development of reality. In the most general form, these signs can be reduced to ideology, party spirit and nationality (the latter meant, along with topics and issues close to the interests of the "masses", the simplicity and accessibility of the image, "necessary" for the general reader).

Since it was announced that socialist realism arose even before the revolution, it was necessary to draw a line of continuity with pre-October literature. As we know, Gorky and, first of all, his novel "Mother" was declared the founder of socialist realism. However, one work was, of course, not enough, and there were no others of this kind. Therefore, it was necessary to raise the creativity of the revolutionary democrats to the shield, which, unfortunately, could not be placed next to Gorky in all ideological parameters.

Then the signs of a new method begin to look for in modern times. Better than others fit the definition of socialist realist works "Rout" by A. Fadeev, "Iron Stream" by A. Serafimovich, "Chapaev" by D. Furmanov, "Cement" by F. Gladkov.

K. Trenev's heroic revolutionary drama Lyubov Yarovaya (1926), which, according to the author, expressed his full and unconditional recognition of the truth of Bolshevism, was especially successful. The play contains the entire set of characters that later became a "common place" in Soviet literature: an "iron" party leader; who accepted the revolution "with his heart" and who has not yet fully realized the need for the strictest revolutionary discipline "brother" (as the sailors were then called); the intellectual slowly comprehending the justice of the new order, weighed down by the "burden of the past"; adapting to the harsh necessity of the "petty bourgeois" and "enemy", actively fighting the new world. In the center of events is the heroine, in agony comprehending the inevitability of the "truth of Bolshevism."

Lyubov Yarovaya faces a difficult choice: in order to prove her devotion to the cause of the revolution, she must betray her husband, beloved, but who has become an implacable ideological adversary. The heroine makes the decision only after making sure that the person who was once so close and dear to her understands the welfare of the people and the country in a completely different way. And only by revealing the "betrayal" of her husband, abandoning everything personal, Yarovaya realizes herself as a true participant in the common cause and convinces herself that she is only "a faithful comrade from now on."

A little later, the theme of man's spiritual "perestroika" would become one of the main topics in Soviet literature. The professor (“Kremlin Chimes” by N. Pogodin), a criminal who has experienced the joy of creative work (“Aristocrats” by N. Pogodin, “Pedagogical Poem” by A. Makarenko), peasants who have realized the advantages of collective farming ( "Bars" by F. Panferov and many other works on the same topic). The writers preferred not to talk about the drama of such a "reforging", except perhaps in connection with the death of a hero on his way to a new life at the hands of a "class enemy".

On the other hand, the intrigues of enemies, their deceit and malice towards all manifestations of a new bright life are reflected in almost every second novel, story, poem, etc. The “enemy” is a necessary background that makes it possible to highlight the virtues of a positive hero.

A new type of hero, created in the thirties, manifested itself in action, and in the most extreme situations ("Chapaev" by D. Furmanov, "Hatred" by I. Shukhov, "How the Steel Was Tempered" by N. Ostrovsky, "Time, Forward!" . Kataeva and others). "The positive hero is the holy of holies of socialist realism, its cornerstone and main achievement. The positive hero is not just a good person, he is a person illuminated by the light of the most ideal ideal, a model worthy of any imitation.<...>And the virtues of a positive hero are difficult to enumerate: ideology, courage, intelligence, willpower, patriotism, respect for a woman, readiness for self-sacrifice ... The most important of them, perhaps, is the clarity and directness with which he sees the goal and rushes towards it. ... For him, there are no internal doubts and hesitations, unsolvable questions and unsolved mysteries, and in the most complicated business he easily finds a way out - along the shortest path to the goal, in a straight line ". A positive hero never repents of his deed and if he is dissatisfied with himself only because he could have done more.

The quintessence of such a hero is Pavel Korchagin from the novel "How the Steel Was Tempered" by N. Ostrovsky. In this character, the personal beginning is reduced to the minimum that ensures his earthly existence, everything else is brought by the hero to the altar of revolution. But this is not a redemptive sacrifice, but an enthusiastic gift of the heart and soul. Here is what is said about Korchagin in a university textbook: "To act, to be needed by the revolution - this is the desire carried by Pavel through his whole life - stubborn, passionate, the only one. It is from such a desire that Paul's exploits are born. A person driven by a lofty goal, as if forgets about himself, neglects what is dearest of all - life - in the name of what is really dearer to him than life ... Pavel is always where it is most difficult: the novel focuses on key, critical situations. aspirations...<...>He literally rushes towards difficulties (the fight against banditry, the suppression of a boundary riot, etc.). In his soul there is not even a shadow of discord between "I want" and "I must." The consciousness of revolutionary necessity is his personal, even intimate.

World literature did not know such a hero. From Shakespeare and Byron to L. Tolstoy and Chekhov, writers portrayed people who seek the truth, doubting and making mistakes. There was no place for such characters in Soviet literature. The only exception, perhaps, is Grigory Melekhov in The Quiet Don, which was retroactively classified as socialist realism, and at first was regarded as a work, of course, "White Guard".

The literature of the 1930s and 1940s, armed with the methodology of socialist realism, demonstrated the inextricable link between the positive hero and the collective, which constantly had a beneficial effect on the individual and helped the hero shape his will and character. The problem of leveling the personality by the environment, which was so indicative of Russian literature before, practically disappears, and if it is planned, it is only with the aim of proving the triumph of collectivism over individualism ("The Defeat" by A. Fadeev, "The Second Day" by I. Ehrenburg).

The main sphere of application of the forces of a positive hero is creative work, in the process of which not only material values ​​are created and the state of workers and peasants is strengthened, but Real People, creators and patriots are also forged ("Cement" by F. Gladkov, "Pedagogical poem" by A. Makarenko, "Time, forward!" V. Kataev, films "Bright Path" and "Big Life", etc.).

The cult of the Hero, the Real Man, is inseparable in Soviet art from the cult of the Leader. The images of Lenin and Stalin, and with them the leaders of a lower rank (Dzerzhinsky, Kirov, Parkhomenko, Chapaev, etc.) were reproduced in millions of copies in prose, in poetry, in dramaturgy, in music, in cinema, in the visual arts ... Almost all prominent Soviet writers, even S. Yesenin and B. Pasternak, told about Lenin and Stalin "epics" and sang songs of "folk" storytellers and singers to the creation of Leniniana to one degree or another. "... The canonization and mythologization of leaders, their glorification are included in genetic code Soviet literature. Without the image of the leader (leaders), our literature did not exist at all for seven decades, and this circumstance is, of course, not accidental.

Naturally, with the ideological sharpness of literature, the lyrical element almost disappears from it. Poetry, following Mayakovsky, becomes a herald of political ideas (E. Bagritsky, A. Bezymensky, V. Lebedev-Kumach, and others).

Of course, not all writers were able to imbue the principles of socialist realism and turn into singers of the working class. It was in the 1930s that there was a mass "leaving" in historical subjects, which to a certain extent saved from accusations of being "apolitical". However, for the most part, historical novels and films of the 1930s-1950s were works closely connected with the present, clearly demonstrating examples of the "rewriting" of history in the spirit of socialist realism.

Critical notes, still sounding in the literature of the 1920s, are completely drowned out by the sound of victorious fanfare by the end of the 1930s. Everything else was rejected. In this sense, the example of the idol of the 1920s, M. Zoshchenko, is indicative, who is trying to change his former satirical manner and also turns to history (the stories "Kerensky", 1937; "Taras Shevchenko", 1939).

Zoshchenko can be understood. Many writers then strive to master the state "recipes" so as not to literally lose their "place under the sun." In the novel by V. Grossman "Life and Fate" (1960, published in 1988), which takes place during the Great Patriotic War, the essence of Soviet art in the eyes of contemporaries looks like this: and the government "Who in the world is sweeter, more beautiful and whiter than everyone?" answers: "You, you, the party, the government, the state, are all rosier and sweeter!" Those who answered differently are being squeezed out of literature (A. Platonov, M Bulgakov, A. Akhmatova and others), and many are simply destroyed.

The Patriotic War brought the people the hardest suffering, but at the same time it somewhat eased the ideological pressure, because in the fire of battles the Soviet people gained some independence. His spirit was also strengthened by the victory over fascism, which came at a heavy price. In the 40s, books appeared that reflected a real, full of drama life ("Pulkovo Meridian" by V. Inber, "Leningrad Poem" by O. Bergholz, "Vasily Terkin" by A. Tvardovsky, "Dragon" by E. Schwartz, " In the trenches of Stalingrad" by V. Nekrasov). Of course, their authors could not completely abandon ideological stereotypes, because in addition to political pressure, which had already become customary, there was also auto-censorship. And yet their works, in comparison with the pre-war ones, are more truthful.

Stalin, who had long ago turned into an autocratic dictator, could not indifferently watch how through the cracks in the monolith of unanimity, on the construction of which so much effort and money had been spent, shoots of freedom sprout. The leader considered it necessary to remind that he would not tolerate any deviation from the "common line" - and in the second half of the 40s a new wave of repressions began on the ideological front.

The infamous resolution on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad (1948) was issued, in which the work of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko was condemned with cruel rudeness. This was followed by the persecution of "rootless cosmopolitans" - theater critics, accused of all imaginable and unimaginable sins.

In parallel with this, there is a generous distribution of prizes, orders and titles to those artists who diligently followed all the rules of the game. But sometimes sincere service was not a guarantee of security.

This was clearly manifested in the example of the first person in Soviet literature, General Secretary of the Writers' Union of the USSR A. Fadeev, who published the novel The Young Guard in 1945. Fadeev portrayed the patriotic impulse of very young boys and girls who, against their will, remained in the occupation and rose to fight the invaders. The romantic coloring of the book further emphasized the heroism of the youth.

It would seem that the party could only welcome the appearance of such a work. After all, Fadeev drew a gallery of images of the representatives of the younger generation, brought up in the spirit of communism and who in practice proved their devotion to the precepts of their fathers. But Stalin began a new campaign to "tighten the screws" and remembered Fadeev, who had done something wrong. Pravda, an organ of the Central Committee, published an editorial devoted to the Young Guard, which noted that Fadeev did not sufficiently highlight the role of the party leadership of the youth underground, thereby "perverting" the real state of affairs.

Fadeev reacted as he should. By 1951, he created a new edition of the novel, in which, contrary to life's authenticity, the leading role of the party was emphasized. The writer knew exactly what he was doing. In one of his private letters, he joked sadly: "I am remaking the young guard into the old one."

As a result, Soviet writers carefully check every stroke of their work with the canons of socialist realism (more precisely, with the latest directives of the Central Committee). In literature ("Happiness" by P. Pavlenko, "Chevalier of the Golden Star" by S. Babaevsky, etc.) and in other forms of art (movies "Kuban Cossacks", "The Legend of the Siberian Land", etc.), a happy life is glorified in free and generous land; and at the same time, the owner of this happiness manifests himself not as a full-fledged versatile person, but as "a function of some transpersonal process, a person who has found himself in a" cell of the existing world order, at work, at work ... .

It is not surprising that the "production" novel, whose genealogy dates back to the 1920s, becomes one of the most widespread genres in the 1950s. A modern researcher builds a long series of works, the very names of which characterize their content and orientation: "Steel and Slag" by V. Popov (about metallurgists), "Living Water" by V. Kozhevnikov (about meliorators), "Height" by E. Vorobyov (about builders domain), "Students" by Y. Trifonov, "Engineers" by M. Slonimsky, "Sailors" by A. Perventsev, "Drivers" by A. Rybakov, "Miners" by V. Igishev, etc., etc.

Against the backdrop of building a bridge, smelting metal, or a "battle for the harvest," human feelings look like something of a minor nature. The protagonists of the "production" novel exist only within the limits of a factory shop, a coal mine or a collective farm field, outside these limits they have nothing to do, nothing to talk about. Sometimes even contemporaries, who had endured everything, could not stand it. So, G. Nikolaeva, who tried at least a little to "humanize" the canons of the "production" novel in her "Battle on the Road" (1957), four years earlier, in a review of modern fiction, also mentioned V. Zakrutkin's "Floating Village", noting that the author " he focused all his attention on the fish problem ... He showed the features of people only insofar as it was necessary to "illustrate" the fish problem ... the fish in the novel overshadowed people ".

Depicting life in its "revolutionary development", which, according to party guidelines, improved every day, writers generally cease to touch on any shady sides of reality. Everything conceived by the heroes is immediately successfully put into action, and any difficulties are no less successfully overcome. These signs of Soviet literature of the fifties found their most convex expression in S. Babaevsky's novels "Chevalier of the Golden Star" and "Light Above the Earth", which were immediately awarded the Stalin Prize.

Theorists of socialist realism immediately substantiated the need for just such an optimistic art. “We need holiday literature,” wrote one of them, “not literature about “holidays,” but precisely holiday literature that raises a person above trifles and accidents.

Writers sensitively caught the "requirements of the moment." Everyday life, the depiction of which in the literature of the 19th century was given so much attention, was practically not covered in Soviet literature, because the Soviet person had to be above the "trifles of everyday life." If the poverty of everyday existence was touched upon, it was only to demonstrate how a Real Man overcomes "temporary difficulties" and achieves universal well-being by selfless work.

With such an understanding of the tasks of art, it is quite natural to give birth to the "conflict-free theory", which, for all the short duration of its existence, expressed the essence of Soviet literature of the 1950s in the best possible way. This theory boiled down to the following: class contradictions have been eliminated in the USSR, and, therefore, there are no reasons for the emergence of dramatic conflicts. Only the struggle between "good" and "better" is possible. And since in the country of the Soviets the public should be in the foreground, the authors were left with nothing but a description of the "production process." In the early 1960s, the "conflict-free theory" was slowly forgotten, because it was clear to the most undemanding reader that "holiday" literature was completely out of touch with reality. However, the rejection of the "theory of non-conflict" did not mean the rejection of the principles of socialist realism. As an authoritative official source explained, “the interpretation of life’s contradictions, shortcomings, difficulties of growth as “little things” and “accidents”, opposing them to “holiday” literature - all this does not at all express an optimistic perception of life by the literature of socialist realism, but weakens the educational role of art, tears off him from the life of the people."

The renunciation of one too odious dogma has led to the fact that all the others (party, ideological, etc.) have become even more vigilantly guarded. It was worth several writers during the short-term "thaw" that came after the XX Congress of the CPSU, where the "cult of personality" was criticized, to come out with a bold (at that time) condemnation of bureaucracy and conformism in the lower levels of the party (V. Dudintsev's novel "Not by Bread Alone", A. Yashin's story "Levers", both 1956), how a massive attack began on the authors in the press, and they themselves were excommunicated from literature for a long time.

The principles of socialist realism remained unshakable, because otherwise the principles of the state structure would have to be changed, as happened in the early nineties. In the meantime, literature "should have been bring to consciousness what is in the language of regulations "be aware". Moreover, she should formalize And lead to some system disparate ideological actions, introducing them into consciousness, translating into the language of situations, dialogues, speeches. The time of artists has passed: literature has become what it was supposed to become in the system of a totalitarian state - a "wheel" and a "cog", a powerful tool for "brainwashing". Writer and functionary merged in the act of "socialist creation".

And yet, from the 60s, the gradual disintegration of that clear ideological mechanism that took shape under the name of socialist realism began. As soon as the political course inside the country softened a little, a new generation of writers, who had not gone through the harsh Stalinist school, responded with "lyrical" and "village" prose and fantasy, which did not fit into the Procrustean bed of socialist realism. A previously impossible phenomenon also arises - Soviet authors publishing their "impossible" works abroad. In criticism, the concept of social realism imperceptibly fades into the shadows, and then almost completely goes out of use. It turned out that any phenomenon of modern literature can be described without using the category of socialist realism.

Only orthodox theorists remain in their former positions, but they, too, when talking about the possibilities and achievements of socialist realism, have to manipulate the same lists of examples, the chronological framework of which is limited to the mid-50s. Attempts to expand these limits and classify V. Belov, V. Rasputin, V. Astafiev, Yu. Trifonov, F. Abramov, V. Shukshin, F. Iskander and some other writers as social realists looked unconvincing. The detachment of devout adherents of socialist realism, although thinned, nevertheless did not disintegrate. Representatives of the so-called "secretary literature" (writers holding prominent positions in the joint venture) G. Markov, A. Chakovsky, V. Kozhevnikov, S. Dangulov, E. Isaev, I. Stadnyuk and others still depicted reality "in its revolutionary development", they still painted exemplary heroes, however, already endowing them with minor weaknesses designed to humanize ideal characters.

And as before, Bunin and Nabokov, Pasternak and Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, Babel and Bulgakov, Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn were not honored with ranking among the peaks of Russian literature. And even at the beginning of perestroika, one could still come across a proud statement that socialist realism is "essentially a qualitative leap in the artistic history of mankind ...".

In connection with this and similar statements, a reasonable question arises: since social realism is the most progressive and effective method of all that existed before and now, then why those who worked before its occurrence (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov) created masterpieces on which they studied adherents of socialist realism? Why did the "irresponsible" foreign writers, about the flaws of whose worldview the theoreticians of socialist realism so willingly talked about, not hasten to take advantage of the opportunities that the most advanced method opened up for them? The achievements of the USSR in the field of outer space exploration prompted America to intensively develop science and technology, while the achievements in the field of art of the artists of the Western world for some reason left them indifferent. "... Faulkner will give a hundred points ahead of any of those whom we, in America and in the West in general, refer to as socialist realists. Is it then possible to speak of the most advanced method?"

Social realism arose at the behest of the totalitarian system and faithfully served it. As soon as the party loosened its grip, socialist realism, like shagreen leather, began to shrink, and with the collapse of the system, it completely disappeared into oblivion. At present, social realism can and should be the subject of impartial literary and cultural studies - it has long been unable to claim the role of the main method in art. Otherwise, social realism would have survived both the collapse of the USSR and the collapse of the joint venture.

• As A. Sinyavsky accurately noted back in 1956: "... most of the action takes place here near the factory, where the characters go in the morning and from where they return in the evening, tired but cheerful. But what do they do there, what work and what kind of products the plant produces in general remains unknown" (Sinyavsky A. Literary encyclopedic dictionary. S. 291.
• Literary newspaper. 1989. May 17. C. 3.