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Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, formerly socialist countries
have gone through manifold transformations, whilst remnants of
socialism remain ubiquitous. The volume explores various spaces of
the postsocialist landscape, presenting a mixture of real and
imaginary spaces, of memory and nostalgia, of aesthetic and
political symbolism, of the global East and the global South, of
academic and essayistic writing. It casts a glance at the
heterogeneous relics of socialism and their transformation in very
different parts of the world. From the description of
(post-)socialist interiors, facades, neighborhoods, parks,
monuments, and objects towards the imaginary spaces of literature,
the contributors describe the concreteness and intimacy of some of
the places that span across and even beyond of what is left of the
"second world" today.
"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 here argue that socialist realism has never been a
monolithic art form. Essays demonstrate, among other things, 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.
"Contributors," Antoine Baudin, Svetlana Boym, Greg Castillo,
Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Boris Groys, Hans Gunther, Julia
Hell, Leonid Heller, Mikhail Iampolski, Thomas Lahusen, Regine
Robin, Yuri Slezkine, Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, Xudong Zhang,
Sergei Zimovets
More than six years in the making, Intimacy and Terror: Soviet
Diaries of the 1930s is the result of a unique international
collaborative investigation by Russian, French, and Swiss scholars
into hundreds of private, unpublished diaries found in remote
libraries, archives, and family holdings. Intimacy and Terror
reveals for the first time the private lives of a broad cross
section of Russians during the harshest years of Stalin's purge -
not just the now-familiar stories of those who were deported or
killed. The ten diaries reveal the day-to-day thoughts of ordinary
citizens, some far removed from political turmoil, some closely
enmeshed. Together they paint an extraordinarily broad portrait of
Russian life in the thirties; their insights into the daily life of
that time have astonished even the Russian historians who read the
original manuscripts. The diarists range from the ambitious
literary bureaucrat who moves forward by denouncing his colleagues
to the young unlettered careerist learning the ways of Soviet
success; from the wife of a government bureaucrat, who writes in a
pure Stalinist prose, to the candid thoughts and uncertainties of a
dissident; from a provincial sailor on a distant Arctic vessel to
Moscow intellectuals who meet and recount their conversations with
Anna Akhmatova. Some of the diarists are wholly oblivious to the
terrors of Stalin's purges; others see the failures of the regime
as clearly as those writing today. To set the diaries in context,
the book begins with a "Chronicle of the Year 1937" - an
extraordinary montage comprised of excerpts from the daily
newspaper Izvestiya juxtaposed with corresponding entries from a
collective farmer's diary - and alsoincludes a chronology of major
events in the Soviet Union during the latter half of the decade.
The diaries bring us the true-life counterparts of characters we
remember from classic Russian literature. Intimacy and Terror
provides an unprecedented, intimate view of daily life in Russia at
the height of Stalinism.
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