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This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of
Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more
broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape
played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the
former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the
1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate
postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a
conscious attempt to create a new Soviet culture. In painting,
architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape
were enlisted to help mold the masses into joyful, hardworking
citizens of a state with a radiant, utopian future - all under the
fatherly guidance of Joseph Stalin. the contributors show how
Soviet space was sanctified, coded, and sold as an ideological
product. They explore the ways in which producers of various art
forms used space to express what Katerina Clark calls a cartography
of power - an organization of the entire country into a hierarchy
of spheres of relative sacredness, with Moscow at the center. The
theme of center versus periphery figures prominently in many of the
essays, and the periphery is shown often to be paradoxically
central. hikers' magazine, advertisements, and the Soviet musical,
the authors show how cultural producers attempted to naturalize
ideological space, to make it an unquestioned part of the
worldview. Whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old,
whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the
painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a
consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the
Soviet ideological imagination. essayists assert continuities with
the prerevolutionary past. One example is the importance of the
mother image in mass songs of the Stalin period; another is the
boundless longing inspired in the Russian character by the burden
of living amid vast empty spaces. But whether focusing on the new
or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film
documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin,
the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the
landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination.
This provocative work takes issue with the idea that Socialist
Realism was mainly the creation of party leaders and was imposed
from above on the literati who lived and worked under the Soviet
regime. Evgeny Dobrenko, a leading expert on Soviet literature,
argues instead--and offers persuasive evidence--that the aesthetic
theories underpinning Socialist Realism arose among the writers
themselves, born of their proponents' desire for power in the realm
of literary policymaking. Accordingly, Dobrenko closely considers
the evolution of these theories, deciphering the power relations
and social conditions that helped to shape them.
In chapters on Proletkult, RAPP, LEF, and Pereval, Dobrenko
reexamines the theories generated by these major Marxist literary
groupings of the early Soviet Union. He shows how each approached
the problems of literature's response to the presumed social
mandate of the young communist society, and how Socialist Realism
emerged as a conglomerate of these earlier, revolutionary theories.
With extensive and detailed reference to supporting testimony and
documents, Dobrenko clearly demonstrates how Socialist Realism was
created from within the revolutionary culture, and how this culture
and its disciples fully participated in this creative process. His
work represents a major breakthrough in our current understanding
of the complex sources that contributed to early Soviet
culture.
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