Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses
372
Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses
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Overview
This collection on the export of Socialist Realism into Central and Eastern Europe after WWII is the first work on the subject which offers an in-depth analysis of the particularities of distinct national and cultural contexts and explores complexities of the cultural Sovietisation of the region.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783086993 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2018 |
| Series: | Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 372 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Natalia Jonsson-Skradol is a research associate at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her work focuses on unconventional approaches to discursive practices of repressive regimes – mostly Stalinism, but also German and Italian fascism.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
HOW SOCIALIST REALISM WAS EXPORTED TO EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES AND HOW THEY GOT RID OF IT
Hans Günther
This chapter concerns debates that took place in Eastern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s that, as I believe, played a crucial role in the cultural development of the region after the war. More specifically, this is a story about how Eastern European writers tried to come to terms with socialist realism and how they strove to get rid of it. For purposes of practical convenience, 'Eastern Europe' refers here to all the countries that were under Soviet hegemony after the war, including the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia; discussion on the issue of Central Europe is beyond the scope of this chapter.
First of all, it is important to clarify the very definition of the socialist realist canon – a topic that Evgeny Dobrenko and I treated in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon. Canonical formations are among the strongest cultural mechanisms of stabilization, selection and exclusion. On the one hand, they form protective barriers against the ever-changing flow of time and, on the other, they select and channel various currents of tradition. Socialist realism belongs to the so-called strong canons, wherein the mechanism of automatization and disautomatization – which, according to the Russian Formalist school, dominates the evolution of literature – does not work the usual way because the canon is stabilized by ideological, religious or other strict views.
Elsewhere, I introduced a model of successive stages of the Soviet socialist realist canon. First, there is the protocanon that, since the nineteenth century, was the textual reservoir of the canon proper – suffice it to mention authors like Chernyshevskii and later on Gorky or Gladkov. During the subsequent phase (1928–34) the canon was formulated in a more or less rigid way. The normative system of socialist realism, with its founding postulates – such as revolutionary romanticism, typicality, partiinost', narodnost' and so forth – came into being in the first half of the 1930s. Very soon after the first Writers' Congress of 1934 it became obvious that these regulative demands aimed at establishing state control over literature, at getting rid of elements of 'degeneration' that in the 1936 campaign and in the post-war zhdanovshchina came to be associated with formalism and naturalism. The two following stages – the Thaw of the early 1950s and the phase of postcanonicity beginning with the 1970s when literature drifted away from the norms of socialist realism – mark the decline of the doctrine. I argue that socialist realism having been exported to Eastern Europe at a particular stage of its development is of decisive importance for what happened later.
But before I proceed, a self-critical confession is in order. The discussion of the last twenty years has shown that the canon of socialist realism is not only determined 'from above', as I argued in my book Die Verstaatlichung der Literatur. Here, Evgeny Dobrenko's study The Making of the Soviet Reader offered new insights into the problem by throwing light on the preferences of the mass reader. In fact, the Soviet canon is characterized by the spasms of narrowing and broadening normativity depending on the political situation. And this is why it is of crucial importance to remember that the export of Soviet culture to Eastern Europe coincided with the beginnings of the Cold War and a period of extreme dogmatism in Soviet ideology, the buzz words of the time being 'kowtowing to the bourgeois West', 'rootless cosmopolitanism', 'decadence', 'aestheticism', 'lack of content' and 'formalism', to name just a few. The main task of Soviet critics was to castigate and unmask antipatriotic aberrations, not only in literature but also in literary criticism, especially in comparative criticism: the attacks against the school of Veselovsky are a case in point. The unacknowledged, but powerful, driving forces behind these campaigns were anti-Semitism, nationalism and isolationism. Unfortunately, Eastern Europe became acquainted with the doctrine of socialist realism just at its worst point, when the Soviet canon had narrowed down to a mere instrument of exclusion and prohibitions. Socialist realism at the end of the 1940s turned out to be less socialist than Russian. It was cut off from the European context and closely linked not only with pre-revolutionary Russian history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but with the whole orthodox and slavophile background of Russian culture. The well-known formula 'socialist in content, national in form' was reduced to a doctrine whereby the idea of socialism coincided with the idea of Russian nationalism. No wonder that not only Sovietization but Russification was felt by the Eastern European nations as a severe threat to their national cultures.
One of the main consequences of Sovietization was the interruption or even destruction of the national cultural heritage – a heritage that included not only classical literature but also the highly developed and more recent tradition of modernism. Between the world wars there existed in most of these countries strong leftist and avant-garde movements, which were wiped out and replaced by the ritualized Soviet genre of the construction novel, the aim of which was to give an optimistic simulacrum of socialism being constructed. The years after 1948-49 were years of a strict imitation of the Soviet model, with the suppression of deviant authors and literary schools carried out in a more or less uniformly rigid way across the region.
The literary policy as such in Eastern European countries was fairly uniform – writers' congresses, resolutions against formalism, parrot-like repetitions of Soviet slogans, censorship. It is much more illuminating to examine the kind of literary traditions that were suppressed during the socialist realist period, as well as the starting point(s) of the process of de canonization and its possible connections with the efforts to take up interrupted continuity For reasons of space, I will restrict myself to some significant examples.
In general, the history of socialist realism in Eastern Europe may be compared to a theatre play. It starts as a tragedy with several actors on stage: one playing the commander-in-chief, and several others who are forced to learn, or at least to imitate, his language and carry out his orders. As the performance progresses, one actor after another takes their leave. What began as a tragedy ends as a clownish farce. But first things first.
Following Tito's break-up with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia was the first country to leave the Soviet bloc and, by extension, the dogmatic version of socialist realism. In the particularly short period of the reign of Soviet-type socialist realism in the country one topic was central: the omnipresent partisan myth that lay at the basis of the emergence of the new state. Dozens of books and films glorified the 'People's War of Liberation'. Before the war, Yugoslavia had its own literary traditions, Belgrade being a stronghold of surrealism, while Croatian literature showed more affinity to German expressionism. There also existed influential groups of writers with a pronounced social commitment. Miroslav Krleza, the most important Croatian writer and author of the modernist novel The Return of Filip Latinovicz (1932), had been a member of the Communist Party until 1939.
Understandably, for Serbian and Croatian authors the socialist realist interlude was a painful interruption of their aesthetic traditions, as it comes across strongly in Krleza's famous speech at the Third Writers' Congress in Ljubljana in 1952. Reading the text of the speech, one is struck by the breadth of Krleza's cultural references when he talks about literature and art, which is especially noticeable in comparison with the primitive views of the Soviet Party Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov's acolytes. In Krleza's eyes, socialist realism was a compromised slogan, the only aim of which was a propaganda of the hegemony of the Soviet Communist Party. Zhdanov's verdicts on modern art, based on the notorious dictum of the authors being engineers of human souls, are compared with the Catholic inquisition: in both cases, Krleza says, the institutions did not hesitate to set up an intellectual crematorium, burning heretics. Alluding to Laszlo Rajk's trial in Hungary, Krleza says: 'By issuing directives and ultimatums you can cut off heads, but not create Art'. For Krleza, Zhdanov's position is 'an aesthetic Jesuitism', an uncreative retelling of pre-war vulgar social-democratic theories that were directed against any form of l'artpour l'art, or whatever was taken for l'artpour l'art. The main fault of these theories, the writer continued, was that they did not understand that the modern slogan of 'useless art' was a protest against bourgeois utilitarianism. Socialist art, the writer continued, cannot negate the heritage of Baudelaire, Dali, Picasso or Éluard, nor can it ignore modern aesthetic movements such as impressionism or symbolism. According to Krleza, the main achievements of the Zhdanov era are Michurin apples in science, operetta-style happy endings in literature and the massacre of civilization in politics. Instead of the rightist and counter-revolutionary gerasimovshchina and zhdanovshchina, socialist art needs freedom and a variety of styles. With this in mind, it stands to reason that the main task of writers in Yugoslavia should be to create an independent socialist literature that is not an imitation of Soviet or Western culture. It should focus on the specific problems of the region with its tragic historical background and fight the backward mentality of the people. Krleza's speech obviously supported Tito's ideology of the Third Path and was a milestone in the decanonization of socialist realism in Yugoslavia.
The second actor who left the stage of Eastern European socialist realism spoke Polish, and he managed to escape without being punished. The escape took place in 1956, the year of Khrushchev's famous speech, the rebellion in Poznan and the Polish October. One month after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow a conference took place in Warsaw at which the well-known theatre critic Jan Kott gave a speech on 'Mythology and Truth', in which he presented a radical critique of socialist realism. Kott started with the claim of young Marx that a true analysis of history means a transition from mythology to truth. In reality, though, the speaker continued, mythology survived in many forms, for instance in the myth of the 'enemies of the people'. Such were his exact words: 'Mythology gives birth to the Inquisition. The Inquisition backs up mythology'. This mythology also extended to art and literature, which degenerated to the level of empty liturgical formulas about the constant growth of industrial production and life becoming ever happier. According to Kott, Soviet literature had lost touch with reality already in the beginning of the 1930s when it became but a means of illustration, glorification, decoration and so forth. The Marxist analysis of the development of art and literature outlived its usefulness at the threshold of the twentieth century when it started claiming that bourgeois realism came closest to socialist realism and that modern art was decadent. This caused a fatal split between the revolutionary movement and the spirit of the avant-garde and innovation. Here Kott was referring to the strong tradition of avant-garde art in pre-war Poland, of which the Awangarda Krakowska (Vanguard of Krakow) poetic movement, or the well-known Polish constructivism, were but two examples.
According to Kott, the development of progressive Polish literature was brought to an end in 1949, when a control of writers was introduced, and they began to be treated like schoolboys. In 1950 Andrzej Andrzejewski, the author of the novel Ashes and Diamonds (1947), had to submit to the demands for self-criticism. The famous novel was filmed only in 1958. At the end of his speech Kott drew the audience's attention to some tendencies in Polish literature that still left reason for optimism, especially in the genre of short prose. Kott concluded by expressing hope that in the future literature would again contribute to overcoming mythology and promoting the truth.
If we were to return to our theatre metaphor, we would notice that one of the actors turned out to be less obedient than his role demanded, even though he did not actually leave the stage – maybe because the commander-in-chief decided to punish him by making him stick it out till the very end. This actor spoke Czech. The time between 1948 and Stalin's death in 1953 was especially difficult in Czechoslovakia. With millions of books burnt and many authors silenced, it is little wonder that this period is often referred to as 'the time of darkness' (temno). Though less successful than Poland in escaping the constraints of socialist realism, Czechoslovakia was similar to Poland in that it, too, could look back on a flourishing tradition of modern art, literature and literary criticism in the twentieth century: suffice it to mention the Czech Poetism of the Devetsil group, with artists like Vitezslav Nezval and Karel Teige who in the 1930s moved towards surrealism; or the Prague Linguistic Circle, with scholars like Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky The communist putsch of 1949 put an end to these traditions. Twice, critics like Ladislav Stoll were given an opportunity to persecute progressive ideas in academia and the arts: first in the 1950s and then, again, after 1968. It is no exaggeration to say that in Czechoslovakia the consequences of the disruption of the progressive cultural traditions that dogmatic socialist realism had brought about were really tragic.
Together with that, however, it was in Czechoslovakia that in May 1963 an event took place that had a major aftermath, not only for Czech literature, but also for the cultural atmosphere of the entire Eastern bloc: a conference on Kafka in the castle of Liblice near Prague. Almost overnight, Liblice became the epicentre of an earthquake that was felt throughout the region. The way to the conference was paved by Western communist revisionism, especially by Roger Garaudy's book on 'realism without shores', in which the author pleaded for a rehabilitation of the modernist art of Picasso, Aragon and Kafka. The Marxist revisionist, Austrian Ernst Fischer, appealed to the socialist world: 'Bring back Kafka's work from its compulsory exile! Give him a permanent visa!'. This visa was granted Kafka most reluctantly, and it took many years before the main works of the author were published in the socialist countries.
Eduard Goldstücker, one of the organizers of the conference, asked himself and the other participants why the communists were so afraid of Franz Kafka. If we want to find an answer to this question, we will inevitably come across one catchword that was repeated in most of the papers presented at the conference: alienation. The concept of alienation was borrowed by the revisionists from young Marx. According to orthodox Soviet ideology, only in a bourgeois society could there be alienation. Goldstücker broke this taboo when he said that during the period of transition to socialism people might feel even more alienated than in capitalism: 'And because alienation exists, Kafka is relevant. We cannot turn a blind eye to the facts. We cannot believe that something real stops existing because we do not take note of it, ignore it'. For Goldstücker Kafka is a 'master destroyer of illusions', a classic of world literature and one of the epoch-making artists of the twentieth century.
The socialist realist stronghold never recovered from the breach that opened after the rehabilitation of Kafka. The relevance of the German-speaking author from Prague was reasserted for thematic as well as artistic reasons. Kafka was called 'a realist in a higher sense of the word' and a 'poet of our absurdity' – which is exactly why he was feared by the regime more than other decadent writers, such as Joyce or Proust. Novels like The Castle or The Process make readers face their loneliness in a world of insuperable strangeness, the despair of being at the mercy of uncontrollable forces like bureaucracy or the machinery of power. Kafka's approach to reality was defined by his parabolic style, whereby the world was not simply reproduced but typical situations of alienation were disclosed through symbolic images. One German speaker at the conference compared Kafka's prose with Bertolt Brecht's parables wherein alienation (Entfremdung) is revealed through the device of 'making strange' ('Verfremdung'). However, in the GDR debates on Kafka, which were triggered by the Liblice conference, it was not Bertold Brecht who set the tone but György Lukács with his Marxist–Hegelian aesthetics. Comparing Kafka with Thomas Mann in his collection of essays Wider den mißverstandenen Realismus, Lukács gave preference to Thomas Mann because his novels reflect the concrete totality of society. For Lukács there exists a close alliance between critical realism and socialist realism, an alliance that is opposed to modernism. As an aside, it is worth mentioning that since perestroika this issue has also been discussed in Russia, though with an opposite result: now classical realism was reproached for being responsible for the rise of socialist realism.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements, ix,
Introduction Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol, 1,
Part 1. INSTITUTIONS,
Chapter One How Socialist Realism Was Exported to Eastern European Countries and How They Got Rid of It Hans Günther, 17,
Chapter Two Literary Monopolists and the Forging of the Post–World War II People's Republic of Letters Rossen Djagalov, 25,
Chapter Three Once Dr Faul Has Left: The Agony of Socialist Realism in Poland, 1955–56 Evgeny Dobrenko, 39,
Chapter Four From Literature Censored by Poets to Literature Censored by the Party: Censorship in the Czech Literary Culture of 1945–55 Pavel Janacek, 61,
Chapter Five The Demise of 'Socialist Realism for Export' in 1947: VOKS Receives John Steinbeck and Robert Capa Vladislav M. Zubok, 71,
Chapter Six The Soviet Factor and the Institutionalization of Bulgarian Literature after World War II Tatiana V Volokitina, 89,
Chapter Seven Cultural Renewal in Eastern Germany – Mission Impossible for Soviet Cultural Officers and German Anti-Fascists? Anne Hartmann, 101,
Part 2. DYNAMICS,
Chapter Eight Socialist Writers and Intellectuals in a Divided Nation: The Early GDR Experience Helen Fehervary, 117,
Chapter Nine Stalinism's Imperial Figure: Hero or Clerk of the Pax Sovietica? Benjamin Robinson, 129,
Chapter Ten From Avant-Garde to Socialist Realism: Continuities and Discontinuities in Hungarian and Romanian Literature Imre Jozsef Balâzs, 147,
Chapter Eleven The Short Life of Socialist Realism in Croatian Literature, 1945–55 Ivana Perusko, 165,
Chapter Twelve Literature in Socialist Yugoslavia: Constructing Collective Memory, Institutionalizing the Cultural Field David Norris, 183,
Chapter Thirteen 'Yesterday and Tomorrow': The Forms of the Slovak Literature of Socialist Realism, 1945–56 René Bilik, 199,
Chapter Fourteen Socialist or Realist: The Poetics of Politics in Sovietized Hungary Melinda Kalmâr, 217,
Part 3. DISCOURSES,
Chapter Fifteen Introducing Socialist Realism in Hungary, 1945–51: How Politics Made Aesthetics Tamas Scheibner, 237,
Chapter Sixteen When Writers Turn against Themselves: The Soviet Model and the Bulgarian Experience, 1946–56 Plamen Doinov, 261,
Chapter Seventeen Big Brother's Gravity: East European Literature in the Mirror of Soviet 'Thick Journals' in the Late 1940s Evgeny Ponomarev, 281,
Chapter Eighteen The Coming One: Prolegomena to the Positive Hero of Czech Socialist Realism as a Transforming and Transformed Subject Vit Schmarc, 297,
Chapter Nineteen Will Freedom Sing as Beautifully as Captives Sang about It? Reshaping the Croatian Canon, 1945–55 Nenad Ivic, 319,
Chapter Twenty The Salon in the Camp: Friendship Societies and the Literary Public Sphere in the SBZ and Early GDR Natalia Jonsson-Skradol, 327,
Conclusion Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol, 343,
List of Contributors, 349,
Index, 355,
What People are Saying About This
‘This excellent collection will have a lasting impact on the field: it is the first large-scale examination of socialist realism across Eastern and Central Europe, attentive to its institutional frames, inner dynamics and competition with local cultural traditions. A truly pioneering contribution.’ —Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London, UK