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Socialist Realism without Shores offers an international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism -- an aesthetic that, contrary to expectations, survived the death of its originators and the demise of its original domain. This expanded edition of a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly brings together scholars from various parts of the globe to discuss socialist realism as it appears across genres in art, architecture, film, and literature and across geographic divides -- from the "center", Russia, to various points at the "periphery" -- China, Germany, France, Poland, remote republics of the former USSR, and the United States.The contributors argue that socialist realism has never been a monolithic art form, and demonstrate, for example, that its literature could accommodate psychoanalytic criticism; that its art and architecture could affect the aesthetic dictates of Moscow that made "Soviet" art paradoxically heterogeneous; and that its aesthetics could accommodate both high art and crafted kitsch. Socialist Realism without Shores also addresses the critical discourse provoked by socialist realism -- Stalinist aesthetics, "anthropological" readings; ideology critique and censorship; and the sublimely ironic approaches adapted from sots art, the Soviet version of postmodernism.
List of contents
Introduction / Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko 1
Socialist Realism in Search of Its Shores: Some Historical Remarks on the "Historically Open Aesthetic System of the Truthful Representation of Life / Thomas Lahusen 5
Socialist Realism
with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero / Katerina Clark 27
A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic Categories / Leonid Heller 51
A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism / Boris Groys 76
Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question / Greg Castillo 91
Paradoxes of Unified Culture: From Stalin's Fairy Tale to Molotov's Lacquer Box / Svetlana Boym 120
The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, or, Who "Invented" Socialist Realism? / Evgeny Dobrenko 135
Censorship as the Triumph of Life / Mikhail Iampolski 165
Wise Father Stalin and His Family in Soviet Cinema / Hans Günther 178
Son of the Regiment: Deus ex Machina / Sergei Zimovets 191
Soft-Porn, Kitsch, and Post-Fascist Bodies: The East German Novel of Arrival / Julia Hell 203
"Why is the Soviet Painting Hidden From Us?" Zhdanov Art and Its International Relations and Fallout, 1947–53 / Antoine Baudin 227
W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism:
The Black Flame as Socialist Realism / Lily Wiatrowski Phillips 257
The Power of Rewriting: Postrevolutionary Discourse on Chinese Socialist Realism / Xudong Zhang 282
Primitive Communism and the Other Way Around / Yuri Slezkine 310
The Past as a Dustbin, or, The Phantoms of Socialist Realism / Régine Robin 337
Index 357
Notes on Contributors 367
About the author
Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds.
Summary
Offers an international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism - an aesthetic that, contrary to expectations, survived the death of its originators and the demise of its original domain. This edition discusses socialist realism as it appears across genres in art, architecture, film, and literature and across geographic divides.
