The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890-1934 PDF Download

Author: Irina Gutkin
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810115453
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The past fifteen years have seen an important shift in the way scholars look at socialist realism. Where it was seen as a straitjacket imposed by the Stalinist regime, it is now understood to be an aesthetic movement in its own right, one whose internal logic had to be understood if it was to be criticized. International specialists remain divided, however, over the provenance of Soviet aesthetic ideology, particularly over the role of the avant-garde in its emergence. In The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, Irina Gutkin brings together the best work written on the subject to argue that socialist realism encompassed a philosophical worldview that marked thinking in the USSR on all levels: political, social, and linguistic. Using a wealth of diverse cultural material, Gutkin traces the emergence of the central tenants of socialist realist theory from Symbolism and Futurism through the 1920s and 1930s.

Author: Pauline Fairclough
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317005791
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
When considering the role music played in the major totalitarian regimes of the century it is music's usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. But as a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship both between art music and politicised mass culture, and between entertainment and propaganda. Nationality, self/other, power and ideology are the dominant themes of this book, whilst key topics include: music in totalitarian regimes; music as propaganda; music and national identity; émigré communities and composers; music's role in shaping identities of 'self' and 'other' and music as both resistance to and instrument of oppression. Taking the contributions together it becomes clear that shared experiences such as war, dictatorship, colonialism, exile and emigration produced different, yet clearly inter-related musical consequences.

Author: Louise Hardiman
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783743417
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia – a culture deeply influenced by the regime’s adoption of Byzantine Orthodoxy centuries before – questions of religion and spirituality were of paramount importance. As artists and the wider art community experimented with new ideas and interpretations at the dawn of the twentieth century, their relationship with ‘the spiritual’ – broadly defined – was inextricably linked to their roles as pioneers of modernism. This diverse collection of essays introduces new and stimulating approaches to the ongoing debate as to how Russian artistic modernism engaged with questions of spirituality in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ten chapters from emerging and established voices offer new perspectives on Kandinsky and other familiar names, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova, and introduce less well-known figures, such as the Georgian artists Ucha Japaridze and Lado Gudiashvili, and the craftswoman and art promoter Aleksandra Pogosskaia. Prefaced by a lively and informative introduction by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow that sets these perspectives in their historical and critical context, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives enriches our understanding of the modernist period and breaks new ground in its re-examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the visual arts in late Imperial Russia. Of interest to historians and enthusiasts of Russian art, culture, and religion, and those of international modernism and the avant-garde, it offers innovative readings of a history only partially explored, revealing uncharted corners and challenging long-held assumptions.

Author: Tatiana Klepikova
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110604175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Traditionally, privacy studies have focused on the liberal democratic societies of the global West, whereas non-democratic contexts have played a marginal role in the discussion of the private and public spheres, not in the least because of the political stances of the Cold War era. This volume offers explorations of highly diversified performances and discourses of privacy by various actors which were embedded into the culturally, economically, and politically specific constructions of late socialism in individual states of the Warsaw Pact. While the experience of socialism varied across the Bloc, there were also some reactions to socialism and some reverse responses of socialist regimes to these reactions that one can trace through all states. Contributions to this volume take us across the Eastern Bloc and beyond it—from the Soviet Union, into late socialist Poland, Romania, and East and West Germany. While looking at specific countries, they provide a glimpse into a broader perspective that reaches beyond the borders of individual late socialist states. Together, these articles document a palette of paradigms of the construction and transformation of the private spheres that overcame the national borders of individual states and left an imprint across the Eastern Bloc, thereby contributing to rethinking Cold War rhetoric in regard to these states.

Author: Christine I. Ho
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520309626
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Drawing from Life explores revolutionary drawing and sketching in the early People’s Republic of China (1949–1965) in order to discover how artists created a national form of socialist realism. Tracing the development of seminal works by the major painters Xu Beihong, Wang Shikuo, Li Keran, Li Xiongcai, Dong Xiwen, and Fu Baoshi, author Christine I. Ho reconstructs how artists grappled with the representational politics of a nascent socialist art. The divergent approaches, styles, and genres presented in this study reveal an art world that is both heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. Through a history of artistic practices in pursuit of Maoist cultural ambitions—to forge new registers of experience, new structures of feeling, and new aesthetic communities—this original book argues that socialist Chinese art presents a critical, alternative vision for global modernism.

Author: Claire McCallum
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1609092392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Between 1945 and 1965, the catastrophe of war—and the social and political changes it brought in its wake—had a major impact on the construction of the Soviet masculine ideal. Drawing upon a wide range of visual material, The Fate of the New Man traces the dramatic changes in the representation of the Soviet man in the postwar period. It focuses on the two identities that came to dominate such depictions in the two decades after the end of the war: the Soviet man's previous role as a soldier and his new role in the home once the war was over. In this compelling study, Claire McCallum focuses on the reconceptualization of military heroism after the war, the representation of contentious subjects such as the war-damaged body and bereavement, and postwar changes to the depiction of the Soviet man as father. McCallum shows that it was the Second World War, rather than the process of de-Stalinization, that had the greatest impact on the masculine ideal, proving that even under the constraints of Socialist Realism, the physical and emotional devastation caused by the war was too great to go unacknowledged. The Fate of the New Man makes an important contribution to Soviet masculinity studies. McCallum's research also contributes to broader debates surrounding the impact of Stalin's death on Soviet society and on the nature of the subsequent Thaw, as well as to those concerning the relationship between Soviet culture and the realities of Soviet life. This fascinating study will appeal to scholars and students of Soviet history, masculinity studies, and visual culture studies.

Author: Moritz Baßler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110637537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
The historical avant-gardes defined themselves largely in terms of their relationship to various versions of realism. At first glance modernism primarily seems to take a counter-position against realism, yet a closer investigation reveals that these relations are more complex. This book is dedicated to the links between realism, modernism and the avant-garde in their international context from the late 19th century up to the present day.

Author: Jacob Copeman
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1800083440
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Global Sceptical Publics is the first major study of the significance of different media for the (re)production of non-religious publics and publicity. While much work has documented how religious subjectivities are shaped by media, until now the crucial role of diverse media for producing and participating in religion-sceptical publics and debates has remained under-researched. With some chapters focusing on locations hitherto barely considered by scholarship on non-religion, the book places in comparative perspective how atheists, secularists and humanists engage with media – as means of communication and forming non-religious publics – but also on occasion as something to be resisted. Its conceptually rich interdisciplinary chapters thereby contribute important new insights to the growing field of non-religion studies and to scholarship on media and materiality more generally.

Author: Stefan Arvidsson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351536044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
This volume offers new perspectives on the appeal and profound cultural meaning of socialism over the past two centuries. It brings together scholarship from various disciplines addressing diverse national contexts, including Britain, China, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the USA. Taken together, the contributions highlight the aesthetic, narrative, and religious dimensions of socialism as it has developed through three broad phases in the modern era: early nineteenth-century beginnings, mass-based political organizations, and the attainment of state power in the twentieth century and beyond. Socialism did not attract millions of people primarily because of logical argument and empirical evidence, important though those were. Rather, it told the most compelling story about the past, present, and future. Refocusing attention on socialism's imaginative dimensions, this volume aims to revive scholarly interest in one of the modern world1s most important political orientations.

Author: Eric Laursen
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810128659
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Satire and the fantastic, vital literary genres in the 1920s, are often thought to have fallen victim to the official adoption of socialist realism. Eric Laursen contends that these subversive genres did not just vanish or move underground. Instead, key strategies of each survive to sustain the villain of socialist realism. Laursen argues that the judgment of satire and the hesitation associated with the fantastic produce a narrative obsession with controlling the villain’s influence. In identifying a crucial connection between the questioning, subversive literature of the 1920s and the socialist realists, Laursen produces an insightful revision of Soviet literary history.