Four Essays on Russia Today Art
HODIN, J. P.
ART Party's experiment with freedom proves to be short-lived By J. P Hodin For a short time after Stalin's death, it seemed that a new experiment was beginning for the Soviet artist. Influential...
...Little, it seems to me, do these artists know how shallow their image of reality must appear to the scientific mind of today...
...Unfortunately for Soviet artists, the experiment was short-lived...
...Naum Gabo, the Russian constructivist painter, thus described his differences with the party ideologists which made him leave Russia during the 1920s: "Materialist in their philosophy and Marxist in their politics, they could not see in a work of art anything but a pleasurable occupation cherished in a decadent capitalist society and totally useless, even harmful, in the new society of Communism...
...Presumably, this new freedom would be extended to art and music as well...
...The much-heralded material well-being of the artist in Soviet Russia has...
...in fact, been purchased by the loss of his art...
...Art, say the Communist leaders, cannot be without idea content...
...While more cultivated Bolsheviks, such as Trotsky and Lunacharsky, sympathized with avant-garde artists...
...It will take more than brief Party-inspired "experiments" with creative freedom to restore that art...
...Lenin condemned them sharply as suffering from the "infantile disorder" of leftism...
...During the NEP period, the attitude of toleration toward leftism turned to impatience...
...And, for a short time, such previously condemned writers as Mikhail Zoshchenko reappeared in leading Soviet publications...
...The Communist-party chiefs soon imposed once again their strict control of artistic creation, and proclaimed anew the stern principles of "socialist realism," which restrict not only social content but artistic form...
...I, however, believe that art has a specific function in the mental and social structure of human life...
...The suicide of the futurist poet Mayakovsky in 1930 is a case in point...
...Influential writers and critics called for relaxation of the pressures of ideological conformity and encouragement of individual creation...
...it is naturally difficult for a creative artist to harmonize his instincts with the Marxist theory that art is only a "superstructure based on conditions of production...
...The fact is that these principles have governed Soviet art, to a greater or lesser degree, since the inception of the Soviet regime...
...although his tragic fate disturbed many orthodox Communists, he had in fact been persecuted by the Party bosses for several years before his death...
...it can either advance the "striving of the people" or it can be "against the people's movement...
...It must have "reality,'' it must have popular quality, it must have "national form...
...Since that time, the number of talented artists who have disappeared, stopped writing or otherwise fallen from favor has increased considerably...
...Certain artists, however, stopped at the gates of our sense world, and by calling it 'realism' they retain the belief that they are reproducing the true reality...
...The impact of such criteria on dissonant music and post-impressionist painting is easily understood...
...for a long period in the postwar era, we have had the spectacle of the Soviet film industry unable, because of the paralysis inflicted by the Party, to produce more than a handful of films a year...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 32
