PERSPECTIVES: Socialist Realism's final days (07/16/00)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Socialist Realism's final days

It was a rainy Saturday morning in May. I was in Kyiv - the only visitor in a three-room gallery of a much larger museum. The rooms were dark to conserve energy, but a woman in her mid-50s turned on the lights for me, then hovered discretely in the background as I assessed the works. There were 50 or 60 paintings on the walls. After five or 10 minutes, I felt I needed to say something to break the awkward silence, so without really meaning it, I gestured toward a painting and said, "Beautiful."

"Do you really think so?" the attendant replied.

At first, I was taken aback. I was just making polite conversation and here she was, challenging my perfunctory praise. What she wanted, of course, was a genuine conversation.

"For me," she said, "he's just a typical Soviet painter."

I knew what she meant. There were a few landscapes, a portrait or two, seascapes and lots of scenes from Soviet life. Nothing bold and, as I think back, nothing worth remembering, other than the criticism of the woman who panned the artwork she was there to protect. The paintings were all expertly done, but they were all in a style called Socialist Realism.

Joseph Stalin initiated Socialist Realism in the early 1930s when he decreed that all artists had to belong to Communist Party-controlled unions and furthermore, all creative expression - whether displayed, published or performed - had to "educate the workers in the spirit of Communism." People and surroundings had to be "realistic," in an idealized, way that glorified the Soviet Union, the Party and its leaders. Any "avant-grade" art - particularly abstract or expressionist - was strictly forbidden.

I asked about the painter.

The attendant told me his name. He's now in his 90s, she said, still living in Kyiv and, as far as she was concerned, he had wasted his talent. But then, she went on, so had every other artist who created in the Soviet era. She was right, of course.

Defined according to a formula devised by Communist Party bureaucrats, Socialist Realism, for the most part, produced mediocrity and drabness. From today's perspective, Soviet era architecture and paintings, the formalistic statuary and stilted poetry seem banal. At its core, though, the style is dark and grim, harnessing talent to serve perverse political ends.

Pavlo Tychyna is a good example.

In 1918 Mr. Tychyna was a young man in his mid-20s writing magnificent verse that found an enthusiastic audience of young people, giddy with revolutionary fervor. In one memorable poem, "The Golden Echo", for example, he describes Ukraine's Independence Day, weaving visual images with aural ones, flashing back and forth from the present to the past, from the Milky Way to the golden-domes of Kyiv's skyline, all the while pushing the Ukrainian language to its lyrical limits. In the 1920s, Mr. Tychyna became a major figure in the "Ukrainian Renaissance," editing a literary journal, writing ground-breaking verse and mentioning a number of aspiring writers. Then came the '30s and the same poet who for inspiration had tapped into classical literature, the Old and New Testaments, current events and creation itself began writing sing-song screeds about class warfare: "dump all the rulers in a great big pit, bourgeois after bourgeois..."

This was serious stuff; in 1930s Ukraine words had consequences. Like a Stephen King novel, people were dying by the millions. Some because they owned land. Others because they were doing with Ukrainian what T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost were doing with the English language. Unlike Mr. Tychyna, they were unwilling or unable to shift gears and write Socialist Realist panegyrics to Stalin and the party. By the millions, they were dumped into Mr. Tychyna's "great big pit." I saw one of those mass graves from the 1930s in Berdychiv. Nearly every community in Ukraine has one.

Under Stalin it wasn't just poets who had to answer for their failure to conform to a new cultural ideology. Theater producers were arrested because their stage sets were too abstract "bourgeois." Professors were shot because they had once taught that the Ukrainian language had a letter "g" - "bourgeois nationalist!"

If Tychyna wrote angry verse demanding that "bourgeois after bourgeois" be dumped into one big pit, didn't he do it to escape the same fate for himself? And deep down, who can blame him? Poet Mariyka Dyka refused to go along with the secret police and was torn to pieces by police dogs in the courtyard of the Kharkiv NKVD. Writer Mykola Khvyliovy and Education Minister Mykola Skrypnyk declined to choose between artistic freedom and a painful death - and committed suicide instead. And who can blame them for that decision? Every fourth person in Ukraine was soon to die or was already dead. Because Mr. Tychyna lacked the courage to accept death from the state or by his own hand, he went along. I imagine at some point, the painter whose works I saw in Kyiv, decided to do the same thing. So did everyone else who survived Stalin. My parents and others who shared their good fortune, escaped having to make that choice by emigrating to the West. And who can blame them?

After Stalin's death in 1952 things calmed down, and that's pretty much how they stayed for two generations. Every branch of the arts - painting, literature, theater, film, music, even postcards - had an in-house censor who passed on the political correctness of every work of art, every performance. Make the wrong move and you could get in serious trouble - and so would all your relatives and everyone who knew you. As a result, people became adept at censoring themselves and each other. With a constant undercurrent of fear, all spontaneity, creativity, innovation and outrageousness were squeezed out of Soviet society. Mr. Tychyna never approached the poetic brilliance of his youth. Painters did competent pictures that challenged no one, but they paid the bills.

That's why the woman at the museum looked at the paintings she was guarding and saw wasted talent, a wasted life - no doubt she felt the same about her own life. Like everyone else, she was read the party Line and fell into place. She kept her thoughts to herself and so did everyone else. The mindset that society created still has a lot of momentum going for it. And that's why Ukraine is stuck in such a rut.

Interestingly, though, the museum attendant was full of optimism for her country's future. "The generation coming of age today is free," she said, "and for them there's hope. They have a completely different way of thinking. It's amazing."

Sadly, she set the cut-off date for the new mindset at a very early age. Her own son, she said, is 28. He was 20 when independence came, and she wondered whether it's not too late for him. After all, he was raised under that system, she said, and pointed to the paintings on the wall.

"So were you," I replied, "and you're not only astute enough to tell a good painter from a mediocre one, you're bold enough to tell a stranger that his taste in art is seriously flawed. Maybe there's hope for your son and his generation as well."

She laughed gently. "God willing..."

I left the gallery and she turned off the lights.

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