In the second half of the 1930s, when the threat of fascism was growing in the West, and Japanese aggression in the East, the idea of consolidating the nation was more and more taken over by Soviet culture. It seems to me that the relations of power that governed cultural life, official discourse, and public rituals were articulated during this period through tropes whose source was the category of the sublime.
In the Stalinist culture of the late 1930s, we find a shift from industrial and urban themes to images of the wild and the sublime 1 . The imagination is captured by geography and landscapes, at the same time landscape painting is becoming popular, with which many works of the 18th century about the sublime and beautiful are associated (before that it was not at all the leading genre of Soviet art). The resurgent fascination with landscape painting and the prevailing styles during this period were more than a matter of taste. A similar trend was observed in late 18th-century England and mid-19th-century America, when painting became the dominant art form and "the landscape and the idea of the nation were deeply intertwined" 2 . In Stalinist Russia in the late 1930s, cinema, as another visual medium of communication, also began to play an important role in the formation and expression of personal and social self-identity - through images of wildlife and amazing mountain peaks. In addition, during these years, in the journal Literary Critic (and other publications), figures from Lukács's circle translated into Russian and printed numerous passages from Hegel's Aesthetics, which expounded his understanding of the sublime 3 . Even Kant's aesthetics4 was widely discussed in this journal (albeit in a critical spirit), and Hegel and Schiller were constantly quoted in critical and theoretical articles.
In the second half of the 1930s, various genres of romantic art (painting, poetry, theater and historical novel), romantic authors (Walter Scott, Byron, Pushkin, Lermontov) and romantic theorists also became popular. Paying attention to this, I am not going to prove once again that the “Great Rollback” of the revolution occurred in the USSR in the 1930s, 5 or explore the influence of nineteenth-century romanticism on Stalinist culture. As a heuristic model for discussing the characteristic narratives and cultural tropes of the Stalin era, I propose the theory of the sublime as it was formulated in classical philosophy, primarily in the texts of the 18th century. In addition, I will consider the sublime as the dominant that structures these tropes and narratives into a kind of “poetics of space”.
I would like to suggest that instead of the long-established view of Stalinism as a reinterpretation of the Christian religion, we can more adequately define this culture - at least for the second half of the 1930s - as a kind of variant of the aesthetics of the sublime.
SUPERIOR
Although in the classical formulations of Longinus, Kant, Hegel and Edmund Burke 6 there are several options for understanding the sublime, a set of common features of this concept can be indicated. The sublime in its classical interpretation appears in a number of impressive natural forms - giant cliffs, deep gorges, cascading waterfalls, boulders hanging over an abyss, seething streams - which the observer encounters unexpectedly, finding himself in a place far from his monotonous everyday life and, as a rule, , solitary, although at the same time the sublime and is not limited to nature itself. Burke, for example, wrote that the sublime can be present in all terrestrial objects, including those created by man, if their dimensions are "huge and majestic" 7 .
The sublime is also commonly understood as a stage where tension is felt and adventure is possible. A typical list of settings for the sublime, as noted in the paintings of the famous painter of such scenes, Salvator Rosa, includes “…[places] of solitude, loneliness and danger; rocky or storm-tossed shores; mountain ranges and secluded hollows leading to caves and robber lairs; trees burned by lightning or withered by time, stretching out their huge arms to a dark sky, gloomy or thunderclouds or a dim sun” 8, an area where wolves or other wild animals can prowl. Such views contrast with pictures of the beautiful, which are commonly thought to create a sense of harmony, symmetry and order. The sublime violates the norms of beauty, but it excites the observer thanks to what Schiller, with characteristic Sturm und Drang (Sturm und Drang) enthusiasm, extolled as “bold disorder”.
Thus the scene of the sublime, no matter how mobile its elements, is by its very nature dynamic. The sublime, in fact, is an affect and evokes an emotional response. It is a place where drama is played out, but this drama is partly due to the magnitude of the phenomena presented in it. The very word "sublime" is Greek hypsos(height); and verticality that strikes the viewer - soaring rocks, sheer towers, giant trees - is the key to the concept of the sublime (mountains were added to this list in the 18th century) 9 . But the emphasis on the vertical dimension is accompanied by an extreme openness of the horizontal perspective, which is an obvious or hidden effect of this verticality. The height makes possible a panoramic vision that extends almost to infinity. In fact, in the sublime, all dimensions are hypostasized, including depth (deep caves, sheer gorges, and so on).
These scales are so enormous that the view of the sublime overwhelms the viewer, giving him a feeling of infinity. Burke, in his classic text on the sublime (A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757), develops this idea: really were such” 10 . One can note this “as if”, from which it follows that the appeal to the sublime arises, in fact, at the tropological level, and is not generated by real natural forms. But this “as if” can also be read in the sense that the viewer experiences dizzying danger indirectly or at a distance, which is possible only in the scene of the sublime created by art.
A characteristic feature of the scene of the sublime is the insight that opens up to the viewer in a peculiar moment of epiphany (epiphany). The most famous examples can be found in the poetry of Wordsworth (although it should be noted that he practically did not fall into the circle of attention of readers or critics of the Stalin era, although similar fragments can also be found in Byron, who was then well known). Paradigmatic in this sense, the episode occurs in Wordsworth's autobiographical poem "The Prelude, or the Growing Up of the Poet's Consciousness" (1805), where the hero sets off on a journey to Mount Snowdon; there the light of the moon, "like a flash," illuminates the surroundings, revealing an endless expanse of exciting rocks stretching to the sea (Book XIII, verses 35-91). As in another, similar fragment of the same work (book VI, verses 533-536), Wordsworth speaks of a certain power that transcends both nature and the feelings of the hero. Epiphany - illumination - contains not only the ability to see openly what is hidden behind fog and darkness, but, more importantly, a revelation regarding human consciousness and imagination. The creative ability of "higher minds" allows them to come into contact with that area that is beyond the limits of sensory reality.
When, in such texts, the viewer is suddenly presented with a breathtaking view, he (she) feels the majestic power or reality, the transcendent. A number of classical theorists of the sublime emphasize its connection with the Absolute, with God. Hegel really did away with the former requisites of the sublime (all these rocks and cascading waterfalls) and began to talk about it in terms of the relationship between God and man, the infinite and the finite. “God is the creator of the universe,” he declares in Aesthetics, and “this is the most mature expression of the sublime.” God, according to Hegel's reasoning, "does not pass into the created world as into his own reality" 11 .
Although most of the classical theorists of the sublime were religious, not all of them, like Hegel, insisted on his absolute connection with God, and least of all - romantics. Thomas Weiskel has described the romantic sublime as “an attempt to redefine the meaning of the transcendent precisely at the moment when the traditional mechanisms of the functioning of the sublime—religious, ontological, and (one might conclude) psychological and even perceptual—can no longer be realized or used. In the broadest perspective, the sublime is a global analogy, a grandiose translation of the otherworldly into a naturalistic plane; in short, a stunning metaphor…” 12 . However, despite the fact that the sublime turned out to be secularized among some romantics, it retained its links with the other world and the Absolute. Regardless of whether God is meant or not, the sublime contains a moment of awareness of power and "a grandiose translation of the other world into a naturalistic plane."
In Stalin's Russia, the sublime was endowed with a completely functional character and served as a source of narrative strategies for representing Stalin's power. The appropriation of the figurative potential of the sublime became, in fact, a way of naturalization (“naturalization”) of the grandiose power of Stalin himself. The most typical example of this is the scene of the meeting with Stalin himself, which is presented as a confrontation with the figure of the sublime. This is especially evident in the films of the Stalin era, where there are many commonplaces associated with the sublime, which is presented in its most unpretentious form. One of the common topoi is a visit to Stalin, when the heroes are speechless and unable to utter a word at the sight of a leader whose personality surpasses any possible norms. This is entirely in keeping with the tradition of understanding the sublime, in which, as Terry Eagleton writes, “[God] transcends all ideas [of him] and strikes the tongue with dumbness - and this, if you think in terms of aesthetics, points to his exalted character” 13 . In one of Grigory Alexandrov's musical comedies of the 1930s, The Bright Path (1940), the heroine receives an award from a high party leader - a character who is too superior to all others to be presented on the screen and which one can only guess , - loses consciousness and is carried away into a sparkling bright world in a car similar to a flying carpet 14 .
But in the classical theories of the sublime, the essential side of its effect is not only the excitement that borders on swoon that the viewer experiences, but also, paradoxically, horror(terror), and Salvator Rosa indeed once called his landscape "a way of conveying horror" 15 . Kant and especially Burke emphasized this dark side of the sublime. As Burke pointed out, "...infinity has a tendency to fill the soul with an ecstatic horror of this kind, which is the most direct consequence and the surest criterion of the sublime." The power of the sublime so transcends the limits of the finite and the mortal that the individual who encounters it is overcome by the feeling that he is threatened with destruction, and the "excitement" that this power causes can be terrifying. Burke also states that “when we meditate on the Deity…when we meditate on such a vast subject, being, as it were, under the wing of an omnipotent power, which also possesses an all-round omnipresent, we ourselves shrink, decreasing to the insignificant size of our own nature, and thus we ourselves, as it were, destroy ourselves in his eyes… if we rejoice, we rejoice, shaking with fear” 16 . However, Schiller noted rather the dual nature of the sublime: “The feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling. It's a combination of... horror with joy which can rise to rapture” 17 .
It is hardly necessary to remind that the second half of the 1930s was an era of horror in the most literal sense of the word, when, according to the characterization of the sublime from Terry Eagleton's "Holy Terror", "the mind itself falls into madness" 18 . Horror And trembling("trembling") were the dominant emotions: on the one hand, it was awe at the might of Stalin, but also, on the other hand, awe at the constant danger of being arrested, seized by the very scale of the arrests.
It can be argued that the appropriation of the figurative potential exalted by the Soviet rhetoric of the second half of the 1930s was a step aimed at making Soviet “reality” adequate to this horror/terror. These extraordinary times implied precisely such an image of Stalin and such a nature (reality), which had an excessive, fearsome scale. However, the horror of the purges can be seen not as a separate phenomenon (when the imaginary of the sublime is used as if to compensate for violence), but as an integral part of the most dominant mode of the sublime. During the purges, the Soviet people felt as if crushed, faced with a reality of such dimensions that made them aware of their own insignificance, if not insignificance in the face of the Absolute. In the midst of the sublime landscape, they were lonely figures, invisible against the backdrop of its gigantic scale, the unpredictability, the “suddenness” of this breathtaking force. Although during the purges, bureaucratic procedures were accompanied by the keeping of records of interrogations, lists of displaced persons, and so on, these formal practices faded into the background before the drama of the sublime and incredible stories of all sorts of abominations and crimes.
The rhetoric associated with the enemies of the people changed. In the early 1930s, in podium speeches and newspaper editorials, the population was urged to get rid of "saboteurs" - dangerous elements that threatened the communist "bright future". In the minutes of the show trials of the second half of the 1930s, enemies are spoken of more as wild animals and robbers, like characters in romantic adventure texts, or as sinister figures that appear to the imagination at the sight of a sublime landscape (although, as has long been noted, and Christian images like Trotsky's "Judas").
Theorists of the sublime also put forward the idea of its pedagogical potential. In the reasoning of Hegel and Schiller, the sublime appears as a way to overcome the long-standing dualism of the material and “spiritual” (consciousness), as a way to eliminate the differences between the subjective and the objective. In their scenarios, a three-part drama unfolded, which included the inner man, the outer world, and the Absolute (or transcendent). Hegel writes about this, using the categories of Romantic art as a whole: “This exaltation constitutes the basic principle ... [and is carried out due to the fact that the spirit] leaves the external element into soulful merging with itself and posits external reality as a kind of existence disproportionate to it.”
In Hegel's scenario, the subject includes the Sublime in the plane of his inner being, but this can only be achieved through the mediating function of the Absolute. The subject recognizes "the finiteness of man and the irresistible separation of God" and rejects the "external contingency of existence" in favor of a "spiritual light that illuminates itself" while bathing in its "inner bliss" 19 . “The entire content [of romantic art] is concentrated on the inner life of the spirit, on feeling, representation, on the soul ... But since this absolute content seems to be concentrated in subjective soul and all processes are enclosed in the inner human life, then the scope of the content of the word is infinitely expands and unfolds into an infinite variety” 20 . The contradictory nature of the sublime, associated with the simultaneous appearance in its viewer of two extreme reactions - joy and horror - is parallel to the absolute contrast of the two main poles of the corresponding narrative: the extraordinary expansion of the phenomenon of the sublime in the physical world and its localization in the inner, “intimate” sphere.
The motive for introducing the sublime into the conscious life of the “I” is also central to Schiller's scenario of the encounter of the individual with the sublime. The subject enters the sphere of the sublime, but it is not the sublime itself that is destroyed, but his daily life: “The contemplation of boundless distances and boundless heights, the vast ocean at his feet and the even more vast ocean in front of him, the spirit of man is torn away from the narrow sphere of reality and depressing slavery physical life. In the simple grandeur of nature, he will find a higher standard and, surrounded by her great images, he will not be able to endure the petty in his thinking.
Therefore, Schiller does not consider the sublime an alternative to the beautiful, which he evaluates lower: he clearly gives preference to the sublime and idealizes it. For Schiller, beauty, harmony, pampered taste, and the like can satisfy only as long as the individual does not come face to face with "bold disorder" - something that goes beyond a clear system of "connections" that have influence "in salons and cells of the scientist”, but are, in essence, banal, boring, domesticated and even “false” 21 .
In Stalinist culture, the hyperbolic expansion of all possible perspectives in the external world is duplicated by its logical counterbalance, “intimate” internal [space], when the subject begins to realize that the true sublime resides in the “I”, but in such an “I”, which strives for the transcendent and brings it inward. For Schiller, the reward for such a step is “freedom”, opening the boundaries of the “petty”, characteristic of the “city dweller”, who willingly deals with “trifles”, as a result of which he becomes “frail and lethargic”. Liberty, he says, “is a much more interesting sight for noble souls than prosperity and order without freedom, when the sheep patiently follow the shepherd, and the autocratic will is degraded to the role of a service part in a clockwork” 22 . Concepts such as “autocratic will”, the challenge to “welfare”, “order”, the comparison of citizens who follow social norms with “sheep” were, of course, problematic in the context of Stalinism, which prided itself on its socialist character and at the same time demanded a political conformity - despite the fact that Stalinist political culture created narratives akin to romantic ones: about breaking with everything banal and ordinary, with insignificant and too domestic, and even - in the name of an opportunity that could simply take your breath away - with the prescriptions of common sense.
The grandiose and mobilizing constructions, which had the sublime as their source, do not fit into the boundaries of the rational. Although science in this case is not rejected at all, it ceases to be associated with ready-made schemes and categories, reliable methods of fixation and accuracy - values typical of the Enlightenment. Most theorists of the sublime (Burk, Hegel, Schiller, and so on) in trying to define it have spoken of a sense of a power that transcends anything quantifiable and utilitarian. Something similar can be seen in Stalinist science, where the main effort was to achieve something extraordinary, something that defied all previous concepts and limitations, and even the generally accepted laws of nature.
Stalinist culture creates individuals who are called to perform scientific feats, literally embodying the sublime image of the “willful” subject, who combines both that which does not fit into the usual boundaries, and the adherence to clearly ordered and interconnected conventions; at the same time, he “ascends” to the highest manifestations of human nature. The Stakhanovites can be a clear example here, and therefore it is quite significant that the name of Alexei Stakhanov appeared in the USSR of the 1930s next to the greatest Russian scientists, such as Lomonosov, Mendeleev and Pavlov 23 .
The second half of the 1930s, when the category of the sublime seems to become dominant in Soviet culture, was also the time of the final codification of Stalin's ideology. Its naturalization also belongs to the same period. In 1938, simultaneously with the trial of Bukharin, another indicative text was published - “History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Short Course”, which will be referred to simply as “Short Course”. A political textbook, such as the Short Course, might seem like an unsuitable object for the study of the sublime, but we find it in the key fourth chapter for this text, in its second section, “On Dialectical and Historical Materialism”, which abundantly quotes Engels, Marx and to a lesser extent Lenin, which describes the basic structure of revolutions 24 . Although this chapter, as is customary in Marxist writings, attacks the "idealist" philosophical tradition - represented by Kant, but also by Hegel and Schiller - between these two philosophical systems, Marxism and activist idealism, there is a similarity that testifies to the text written by Stalin, which naturalizes the political revolution in the mode of sublime narration. This section of the “Short Course” presents revolution as a transition from quantitative to qualitative change, described in the form of natural phenomena, and the main example is the moment when, after a gradual change in the temperature of water, it itself suddenly changes in its composition: heated water turns into steam or when cooled it becomes ice. All things in the world are interconnected - the text emphasizes - and what happens in nature also takes place in the public sphere. Phenomena in society can be “natural and inevitable”, like this or that phenomenon in nature, and it is analogous to what happens at the moment when, so to speak, the class struggle “heats up”. History develops not along a continuous line, but “in leaps” (here the concept of a “qualitative leap” taken from Engels is used), and “quantitative changes do not occur gradually, but quickly, suddenly, in the form of a jump-like transition from one state to another. They do not occur by chance, but in accordance with laws” 25 . In other words, political revolutions are presented here as organic processes, although the text quickly returns to its own track and assigns a priority role in the movement of history to the development of productive forces.
The model of historical progress is portrayed as a form of dramatic realization of the sublime. Change occurs “suddenly” (a common scenario for comprehending the sublime), by means of a “jump” into a radically different “state”, a transformation of the thing itself, which transcends the incremental, quantitative change. And although the Short Course insists that its description of a reality in constant motion is the opposite of the idealistic picture, which allegedly asserts “peace and immobility, stagnation and immutability”, but, as was shown above, the scenario of the sublime itself suggests a dramatic movement leading to the transcendent , - that is, a dynamic identical to that which turns out to be especially important in this Stalinist textbook for describing processes in the natural world 26 .
Shortly after the appearance of The Short Course, Sergei Eisenstein published an article in the journal Art of Cinema with the somewhat misleading title "On the Structure of Things" 27 . In the last part of this article (dated January 1, 1939), Eisenstein writes about "ecstasy" - a word which, he explains, comes from "ex-stasis", which means "exit from the ordinary state", but the concept that is used here , - “ condition” - turns out to be the same that was used in the “Short Course” to denote the transition from one state to another at the moment of the “jump” from quantitative to qualitative change. “Ecstasy” or “pathos” imply a transition “from the usual state” to something radically different, qualitatively different, which in one place of the article is directly identified with the “jump from quantity to quality”. Here Eisenstein uses an image from the "Short Course" - water turning into steam, or ice turning into water, and the moment when cast iron becomes steel 28 . Therefore, like the sublime, "jump" and "ecstasy" refer to moments of epiphany [divine self-revelation].
But it should be noted that in the second half of the 1930s, as in the days of romanticism, the sublime found itself in a privileged position in relation to the beautiful. The Romantics completely changed the order that their predecessors, like Kant and Burke, for whom the beautiful stood above the sublime (although they all agreed that both were valuable) argued. Schiller's preference for the sublime is well felt in his pejorative remark: "Are we not more pleased with the intelligent disorder of the natural landscape than with the obtuse order of the French garden" 29 . As if anticipating Nietzsche, Schiller in his lamentations calls those who cling to the illusory world of “beautiful” and refined “weak” and “coddled”, too enchanted by the sensual world of women and intimacy. Urban space, which was also seen as a kind of home world, was scorned. Thus, as in most of these classical theories, the sublime was associated with gender and was associated with the masculine, while the beautiful was more feminine.
The Stalinist culture of the late 1930s, to a certain extent, preferred places that are far from cities, in the midst of secluded nature. In the scene of the sublime, we find an impressive place, potentially suitable for the unfolding of a revolution, where there is no numbness inherent in the boring world of offices and apartments. A feature of the culture of the second half of the 1930s—whether in novels, films, paintings, or the rhetoric used to describe the central events of political culture, such as long-distance air travel—was a very specific design that literally dazzled the observer with incredible horizontal and vertical perspectives.
As I wrote in another work, “height” was the main symbolic value of the Soviet political culture of the 1930s, expressed by the well-known motto “higher, and higher, and higher.” In political culture, “height” was not only expressed in terms of “working plan”, but also declared itself in such central symbols as the exploits of pilots (the plane became a new embodiment of the sublime), which were glorified in cinema 31 , literature and art 32 . The vertical was traditionally associated with power, and press reports about the flights of Soviet aviators implied Stalin's participation - in the rituals associated with this, it was depicted either in the sense of route planning, or in the form of a meeting of pilots with the leader after their triumphant return.
At the same time, the huge scale of the country, its vast expanses, were certainly emphasized. In the then stories about the heroes of aviation, both of these dimensions are more or less clearly presented - both vertical and horizontal: the pilots actually flew “higher and higher and higher”, but their main feats were to set records on flights over long distances. The country's wide expanses are also accentuated, for example, in the well-known song from the 1936 musical comedy Circus, filmed by Grigory Alexandrov, Eisenstein's former assistant. The film is set in Moscow, but the images of the main song come from the natural world of “forests, fields and rivers”. The syntactic structure of the two lines is presented in such a way as to emphasize both power and authority (“ wide my native country, Many it has forests, fields and rivers…”) 33 .
For the Soviet ideology, one of the problematic aspects of the romantic understanding of the sublime was the idea of persons of a higher order, whom Schiller called "noble minds" or "people of a lofty soul", superior to mere "sheep". Nevertheless, the Soviet political culture of the late 1930s represented just such an anthropological hierarchy 34 . The Soviet system (at least on a symbolic level) created the image of a person of a higher order, embodied in the Stakhanovites and other national heroes. As such, these figures from various narratives of the sublime were not self-worth; they were only actors in the symbolic dramas of power. The role assigned to Stalin in stories about pilots and climbers was that the imperious view of the world from the “height” ultimately belonged to him, despite the fact that in reality the ritual ascent to the heights was performed by these “understudies” instead of him. . The function of the "heroes" was to certify the highest order - that which is extraordinary - or the greatness of the people they represented. According to Schiller, “history shows that the decline of a people follows the decline of its aesthetic culture. Refinement leads to relaxation and loss of freedom.” However, the symbolic heroes of the late Stalinist era were courageous figures representing a mature nation, no longer enchanted by the relaxing “beauty” and harmony, but ready to face the “bold disorder”, step up to the very edge of the abyss and even step further.
IMPERIAL HIGH
Although the leitmotif words from the song to "The Circus" use the most trivial versions of the commonplaces of the sublime, the extraordinary physical extent they attribute to the USSR/Motherland/Russia is not merely an aid or a trope. Aleksandrov's films are pictures of dominion and dominance, and the "broad" expanses of the country they praise directly refer to outward expansion. All this presupposes the sublime, which, on the one hand, is associated with vast spaces (up to the stratosphere in “Circus”), and on the other hand, is expansive in another sense of the Russian word “wide”, which not only denotes a physical quality, but metaphorically refers and to a special character trait. The “wide” person is open and generous by nature; the “wide country”, as shown in one of the last scenes of the film, where the inhabitants of the Soviet Union welcome people from any ethnic group cordially, is a country that opens its arms wide to its citizens in order to embrace the entire multitude of peoples inhabiting it. The very natural forms of Russian geography, as it were, contribute to this inclusiveness.
Thus, this sublime had an imperial character 35 - it glorified Soviet domination over the countries and peoples conquered in former times by the Russian Empire. But, as some scholars seeking to go beyond the overly Manichaean definitions of post-colonial theories have recently argued, empires themselves are highly ambiguous entities.
The imperial sublime of Soviet culture in the second half of the 1930s arose simultaneously with the expansion of the symbolic national horizons of the state. Starting around 1935, in Literaturnaya Gazeta and other print media dealing with culture, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of materials devoted to non-Russian peoples or images of their cultures (this is also typical of publications on literature and art in Pravda and Izvestiya ”); this includes national epics, as well as original pseudo-folk tales about the exploits of Soviet heroes.
For the Soviet citizen of the 1930s, the sense of national horizons was constantly expanding. The geographical periphery of the country (where ethnic minorities mainly lived) became the central theme of its political culture. This was the culmination of a gradual process of spreading Soviet culture further and further away from the capitals and European Russia. Already during the first five-year plan, one can notice how its space is expanding as troupes from the republics begin to come to Moscow for theater and dance festivals, and leading avant-garde architects design buildings for the republican capitals. Gradually, national film studios began to open in the republics (although initially Russian filmmakers mainly worked for them). But the gradual incorporation of the non-Russian republics into the dominant cultural sphere has not yet seriously affected the basic myths of Soviet political culture. During the first five-year plan, for example, the sense of periphery remained Eurocentric. The main project of these years, which was the subject of several novels and films, Magnitostroy, seemed to emerge as if by magic on a remote and windswept plain. But in reality it was located just beyond the border of European Russia, south of the Urals; in fact, all of Siberia, stretching to the Pacific Ocean, was still silent. However, by the second half of the 1930s, the area that was represented in literature and cinema already covered Siberia and further territories, up to Komsomolsk in the Far East, the Pamir Mountains in the south and the Arctic in the north.
The feeling of the periphery was largely conveyed in the descriptions of grandiose natural landscapes. Although the central press devoted to culture published a lot of materials about the Soviet republics (which was clearly connected with the adoption of the Stalinist Constitution, which guaranteed the equality of nationalities), however, the peoples themselves who lived on the periphery of the country, in these materials, perhaps, received much less attention. than the sublime landscape of the outskirts. For example, in a book about the Pamirs, it was not so much the local population that was depicted, but the exploits of the military who conquered Stalin Peak.
Some scholars have recently written about the sublime as the prevailing mode of ordering and "softening" perceptions of places such as colonial India, New Zealand and South Africa, where the local population was under imperial rule 36 . As far as the Soviet Union is concerned, the analogy seems more appropriate not with the British Empire, but with America in the 19th century. There, as in Russia, the strengthening of the empire and the nation took place through the development and settlement of adjacent territories (in the case of America, this was expansion to the West, while tsarist Russia advanced simultaneously in several directions to the most extreme frontiers); at the same time, the local population, as a rule, was included in the structures of subordination, and natural resources were purposefully exploited. Recently, historians have begun to note that the artists who painted views of the American West were often associated with groups engaged in the development of natural resources there. This aspect seems much less pronounced in those paintings where natural landscapes were endowed with features of the sublime (sometimes Byron's poetry served as a source of inspiration for them).
As in America at the beginning of the 19th century, in the Soviet cultural representations of the second half of the 1920s, the people in a very characteristic way move towards a remote and exciting nature, to the outskirts. And if the most impressive American landscape is usually located in the West, then the most striking Soviet mountains are located precisely on the periphery. The sublime nature in Stalinist culture was not usually presented in the form of rocks, rushing streams or waterfalls (as in Pushkin and Lermontov, in German images of the sublime, or in much of the English and American poetry and painting associated with this topic). Even what Susan Layton called the “poetic discourse of the Caucasian sublime,” which was so characteristic of 19th-century Russian literature, turned out to be least characteristic of the culture of the 1930s 37 .
A typical image of the distant periphery in Stalinist culture is the icy desert that can be found in Siberia, although the most impressive examples of this kind were in the regions of the Arctic. Wide snow-covered expanses were generally considered the most specific Russian landscape, they were also associated with the final triumph of Russia over Napoleon - a great victory over an invading empire. They were also a mythological space where various dramas could be played out - the space of the extreme, the sphere of the absolutely transcendent. Despite the presence of the local population there, these expanses seemed to be virgin territory. Deserts represent a kind of infinite nothingness, and therefore a pure possibility, and it is Stalin who endows them with meaning, especially since they are also associated with the Siberian exile of the future leader. In the film "Chkalov" (1941), dedicated to the ace of Soviet aviation, the climax scene was the fight of the hero with the Arctic cold, in which he wins.
The predominance of snowy expanses over other images of the sublime is also evident in Eisenstein’s film “Alexander Nevsky” (1938), where the famous battle on the ice of Lake Peipsi (it belonged to the outlying lands in those distant times) quite naturally becomes the central episode. It is the ice and the advantages that it gave the Russian soldiers, and not superiority in weapons, that lead to victory over a foreign enemy. The scene of the battle itself is presented as an endless field of ice stretching to the horizon, while Alexander Nevsky directs what is happening from a cliff, rising strangely in the middle of a frosty desert. This strangeness is determined by the fact that the scene itself refers to medieval battle paintings, which depict similar rocks (but there is no ice); and at the same time, the place from which Alexander Nevsky observes the battle makes possible an imperious gaze that contains the sublime. In this battle, the Russians are trying to push the foreigners back from their borders; here it is the knights of the Teutonic Order (read: Germans). However, the initial episodes of the film are a prototype of the future battle with the Mongols and make you remember the then confrontation between the Soviet Union and Japan. Indeed, one of the reasons why it was the battle on Lake Peipsi that became at that time a topos of political culture (Eisenstein was by no means the only one who portrayed him38) was that then, in 1938, a real clash with the Japanese at Lake Khasan in the Soviet Far East.
The imperial sublime, as already mentioned, was associated not only with the defense of the territory, but also with the exploration of its possibilities. On May 21, 1937, a group of four, led by Ivan Papanin, went by plane to the North Pole region to spend nine months doing scientific research. The four of them drifted on a floating ice floe south along the coast of Greenland, making measurements of the depth of the sea, gravity and magnetic field, but by the beginning of 1938 the expedition was in a dangerous position, as the ice floe on which the polar explorers began to crack and flooded their tent. The dramatic rescue of the members of the expedition (February 29, 1938) excited the whole country. Upon arrival in Moscow, the polar explorers were honored with a solemn welcome.
The article “Unparalleled feat”, which appeared in one of the February issues of Pravda for 1938, gives a clear idea that the significance of the expedition from the official point of view was not limited to extraordinary risk, heroism and courage, but also implied a special contribution to science. The Arctic theme appears in the heroic narratives of Stalin’s time starting at least from 1934 and the Chelyuskin expedition 39 , but in this narrative the sublime and science are inextricably linked with each other, which is also symptomatic of the “drift” that captured science itself. . “But although the North Pole had already been discovered [by the American Robert Peary],” the Pravda article says, “science still knew almost nothing about it.” Peary spent only 30 hours at the Pole and could not even measure the depth of the ocean; others simply flew over the North Pole. “Only the Bolsheviks were able to solve the problem.” The goal was not to reach the pole; there it was necessary to deploy a scientific station that would be engaged in a comprehensive study of the Central Arctic Basin: “In fact, a whole scientific institute was deployed on the ice floe ... For ten long months, four Soviet people fought against the elements, snatching the secret from her.” The purpose of the expedition was to "reveal the secrets of the pole to the end." Apparently, the main task of the expedition was to measure the depth of the ocean in those places where it reached from 30 to 40 miles - for this, a hydrological station was created. At this depth, scientists reached a warm current that originates off the coast of Florida; and the Soviet flag, hoisted on a floating ice floe, turned out to be directly related to the problem of “development” of nature. “You need to visit the North yourself,” the article notes later, “to understand how much work is spent on extracting a few cubic centimeters of water from great depths.” The researchers on the ice - like true Stakhanovists - had to work at a feverish pace, 15-16 hours a day, barely finding time to sleep 40 .
Papanin's expedition measured what remained unknown to other nations. But this very mastery of the sublime was made possible, as the propaganda imagined, thanks to Stalin's leadership. As in the case of the pilots who set records in long-distance flights, the actions of the polar explorers were directed directly by Stalin. The tasks of the expedition in fact were not limited only to the equipment of the research station - it became an intermediary in the drama of the sublime, which also implies the cosmic and the absolute. Although the polar explorers were actually engaged in scientific measurements, the story of their work is translated into the language of the rhetoric of the sublime and immeasurable. The study of the ocean by the Papanin expedition turned out to be connected with epistemology of a higher order and the parameters of the sublime (due to its extraordinary depth), as well as with the mastery of the territory and dominance over physical resources.
The drama and rhetoric of the sublime intersected with the reality of political purges. The epic of the Papaninites chronologically coincided with the repressions against Bukharin and his associates. He was arrested on February 27, 1937, shortly before the meeting of the expedition members with Stalin about the plan of their work (March 13, 1937) and their departure (March 22, 1937). At the beginning of 1938, during the preparation and conduct of the trial of Bukharin and other members of the "right-wing Trotskyist bloc", the attention of the media was to a large extent focused on the fate of the polar explorers. Bukharin was interrogated just at the time when the expedition was “pulling out” the secrets of the pole from nature. Press reports about the dramatic history of polar heroes side by side with information about the trial of Bukharin (March 2-13 - court hearings, 14th - execution of the sentence), where the accusers "fully revealed" the "atrocities" of the accused, showing the "true essence" of those who were presented as bandits or wild animals.
The story of the rescue of the Papanin expedition is primarily about power and can be reduced to a parable about how the USSR-Russia and Stalin were able to conquer the icy deserts. Since the expedition was fighting on ice, cut off from their country by thousands of miles of ocean, the Soviet people (who daily followed its fate through the central press and radio) were in awe. And only Stalin - the leader and visionary - could cope with the drama of rescuing polar explorers lost in the midst of sublime nature. Stalin did not need to direct the events on the spot, since the expedition had radio contact with Moscow. Wireless radio, devoid of material support in the space that lies between the Arctic periphery and Moscow, connected the undeveloped, wild nature and the Kremlin. Since the masses waited with bated breath for a denouement, and Stalin himself led the rescue, the Soviet people as a political nation were in this story as if recreated anew, on the other side of the public stage.
Among literary genres, the most important for the Stalinist culture of the second half of the 1930s was the novel of exploration and discovery, in which the main setting was the exciting nature. Then the Soviet cult of Jules Verne and other authors who wrote about scientific expeditions arose. There were many films and novels that sang of adventure in far and unknown places; one of the most popular was the film by Sergei Gerasimov "Seven Courageous" (1936), which told about an expedition to an observation station in the Arctic, cut off from the rest of the world. Another well-known film is the adaptation by Vladimir Vainshtok and David Gutman of Jules Verne's novel The Children of Captain Grant, created in the same year 1936 41 . Films about aviation were just as widely known in those years - the already mentioned Aerograd by Dovzhenko (1935, filmed - which is symptomatic for that time - in the Soviet Far East, near the border), Pilots by Yuli Raizman (1935), Three heroines” by Dziga Vertov (1938), and finally, “Valery Chkalov” by Mikhail Kalatozov (1941).
But the romance of adventure and discovery was also linked to the possibility of economic exploitation. Edward Said in his article “Invention, memory and place” notes that “the mapping, conquest and annexation of territories in what Joseph Conrad called the dark places of the earth ... [and] the great journeys of the discoverers from Vasco da Gama to Captain Cook were not motivated not only by curiosity and scientific fervor, but also by the spirit of domination. In modern times, Defoe's novel "Robinson Crusoe" became a fundamentally important parable that tells how geography and conquest are interconnected - a parable that almost supernaturally anticipated the appearance decades later of such historical figures as Cleve and Hastings in India, or scientists travelers and explorers in Africa like Murchison” 42 .
As a classic novel that presents this version of the sublime, one can consider the famous socialist realist work, which enjoyed incredible success, “Two Captains” by Veniamin Kaverin, a coming-of-age saga connected with the imperial theme of “reclaiming” and the history of sublime ice-covered deserts. Kaverin began writing the novel in 1936; the first book appeared in the pioneer magazine Koster in 1938-194043 (the second book appeared already in 1944, outside the period considered here).
The narration in the novel is in the first person - the orphan Sanya Grigoriev from the provincial town of Ensk, who leaves for Moscow, where he enters school. Thanks to a number of coincidences, Sanya is involved in the disclosure of a secret related to Captain Tatarinov, who in 1912 went on a ship to explore the North Sea, but never returned. The narrator falls in love with the captain's daughter, Katya, and feels an increasing need to get to the bottom of everything that happened to Tatarinov. However, he is hindered by the captain's cousin, Nikolai Antonovich, who, thanks to one of the many coincidences in this novel, turns out to be the director of the school where Sanya himself studies. In this peculiar version of Hamlet, it turns out that the cousin fell in love with the captain's wife and therefore deliberately poorly equipped the expedition, hoping that it would fail. When the captain died, his brother deceived the captain's family and eventually, overcoming the resistance of the widow, persuaded her to marry him (later, having learned the truth, she, unlike Hamlet's mother, poisoned herself and died). The development of the plot is based on the fact that Sanya gradually collects material exposing this villain, although Nikolai Antonovich and his accomplice Romashka, who studies with Sanya and later becomes another contender for Katya's hand, interfere with him at every step. And most of the novel, quite in the spirit of the times, is mutual accusations and revelations that are played out either in the home space, or at school meetings, or on the pages of the central press. As a result, Sanya wins, and Katya, still indecisive, leaves her uncle's apartment and becomes Sanya's life partner.
The counterpoint of all these revelations in the work of Kaverin is woven into the line of an adventure novel-investigation. Sanya and Katya spend a lot of time as children reading together about great travelers who discovered continents or crossed the Arctic or Antarctic; they devoured books about Columbus, Cortes, Amerigo Vespucci, Balboa, about Arctic explorers like Amundsen, Nansen, or Franklin, and about Russian polar explorers like Sedov. They enjoy reading the diaries and letters of these travelers, as well as fictional adventure stories, especially those of Jules Verne and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
These children's hobbies determine their choice of future profession. Sasha grows up to be a pilot who flies from a base located in the Arctic, and Katya becomes a geologist, and her expedition eventually finds gold in the Southern Urals. When Sanya sees her photo “on horseback, in men’s pants and boots, with a carbine over his shoulder, in a wide-brimmed hat”, this image geologist reminds Sana of Ferdinand Cortes, who discovered Honolulu 44 . Snow expanses here, of course, are intended for use and exploitation, but this does not come to the fore in the novel, but is present mainly in the stories of secondary characters. Rather, these deserts are presented here in their awesome form. hopeless gorges - like stages on which representations of the sublime are played out.
Throughout the book, personal dramas intertwine with the imperial narrative. This is especially noticeable in those parts whose action takes place in the Arctic. Frozen deserts symbolize both virgin territory and some kind of challenge, as is clearly seen at the climax of the novel. Sasha, now an Arctic pilot, has just been told that Romashka is diligently courting his beloved Katya and seems to be doing well. At the same moment, he receives a call from the NKVD (an eloquent detail for a novel written in the midst of the purges!) and informs him that a local leader was wounded under suspicious circumstances “on a hunt” in a remote northern region. The callers want Sanya to deliver a doctor there, who will help the wounded, and also investigate the real cause of the accident. During the flight, Sanya's anxious thoughts about his relationship with Katya are interrupted by the sight of frozen deserts. “Below was the Yenisei - a wide white ribbon among the white banks, along which there was a forest ... Then I left the river, and the tundra began - even, endless, snowy, not a single black dot, and there was nothing to cling to the eye ... Snow, snow, snow wherever you look." At this moment, Sanya decides to go to Moscow to talk with Katya, but soon another sublime vision opens up to him. “Here are the mountains!” he exclaims. "They were sticking out of the clouds, illuminated by the sun." But here there is also horror, combined with joy: “In the rare gaps, gorges were visible - beautiful, very long gorges - certain death in the event of a forced landing” 45 . A similar description could be taken from Wordsworth's "Prelude" (which is quite possible for Kaverin, who is known for his attachment to English culture).
Sanya begins to mentally compose a letter to Katya, when a strong snowstorm suddenly rises; he can't see anything, and the plane's engine starts to go haywire. Then he notices the gorges below - "long and completely hopeless", and he manages to get the plane away from them, and then miraculously land with little damage 46 . When the blizzard subsides after three days, the crew discovers a nearby settlement of local residents - the Nenets. The plane is out of order, and a meter-long piece of wood is needed to fix it; and in the spirit of the great Pacific navigators and African explorers of the past, the hero of the novel and his companions offer the Nenets in exchange a miracle of civilization - a stove. The villagers are amazed as they see that the stove can heat water much faster than their fires. In search of a tree, Sanya stumbles upon a piece of Captain Tatarinov's ship called "Santa Maria" and realizes that the ship drifted in the ice from 1912 to 1914 (like Papanin's expedition). Thus, Tatarinov then discovered that the territory, which the researchers had previously declared “open”, in fact, does not exist in the indicated place. Even earlier, Sanya realized that it was he who was the first explorer of the Northern Land (six months before Lieutenant Velkitsky announced that this was his discovery). Thus, as Sanya notes, Tatarinov "changed the map of the Arctic" 47 .
It goes without saying that maps are extremely important when founding empires. In the 1930s, there were several projects for mapping the remote corners of the Soviet Union, and maps also play a prominent role in Kaverin's novel. Sanya and the plane's crew try to get the Nenets to draw a map to help them get to their destination, Vanokan, but the Nenets don't know what maps are and one of them draws a deer. However, Moscow is able to map space and manage it: in the end, the crew will know the location of the nearest city. When the wounded man was found and he was taken to the local hospital, lamps from all over the village were brought into the makeshift operating room, so that “the room immediately lit up with a light unprecedented in Wanokan” 48 .
Although Sanya and his companions leave the primus, “light” and “cards” to the local residents, nevertheless, the sublime is still associated with a privileged position. Exciting nature outside is adequate to the inner stormy drama of feelings inside a person. The love conflict and the drama of the sublime are resolved by a rescue operation carried out on the instructions of the NKVD, and a subsequent trip to Moscow. The decision of the protagonist of the novel to return to Moscow is connected with his personal life, but in fact he goes there to beat up the thresholds of various bureaucratic instances. The sublime is a counterbalance to the bureaucratic world, compensating for its dullness. This corresponds to what Schiller called the emergence of “people of a lofty soul” beyond what he rejected as “petty” and what characterizes a “city dweller” who willingly deals with trifles 49 .
Note that both heroes - Sanya and Katya - come to understand themselves among the sublime nature, far from urban centers: he is among the icy deserts and treacherous gorges, and she is in the Ural Mountains, but then both heroes return to Moscow. Sleigh's trip to the capital is a variant of one important moment in the standard scheme of a socialist realist novel, when the protagonist travels to Moscow from his distant village or from those places where he has to work, with an important mission entrusted to him. There he meets some high boss (perhaps even Stalin himself) and returns home inspired to new exploits. Now the hero is ready to carry out any task set by the state - to fulfill the production plan, complete the construction of the dam, and so on. However, in The Two Captains, Sanya does not meet with any high-ranking leaders, and although he is forced to deal with administrative affairs, the plot of the novel is built mainly around how his visit to Moscow helps to establish relations with Katya and contributes to the implementation of his own task - to expose Katya uncle. But the drama, which unfolds on the plane of the sublime and is closely connected with the true and false figures of the Father, who compete with each other 50, ultimately concerns the question of power.
The functioning of the sublime in Stalinist culture was intended to naturalize and reinforce power relations, and to shift action from the urban, bureaucratic world with its obvious limitations and restraining conventions to the “virgin” and exciting periphery, thereby minimizing the presence of the boring imaginary. world of apartments and institutions. Heroes and researchers from among the characters of the novel went “beyond” in the literal sense - beyond the Arctic Circle, which was an allegory of going beyond the prosaic world in general. Terry Eagleton noted about Walter Scott (as already mentioned, he was very popular in the Soviet Union at that time) that in his historical novels “the romantic suggests the miraculous and the transgressive, and the realism the earthly; so that, in creating a complex unity of these two literary modes, Walter Scott uses a form of writing that simultaneously corresponds to both the revolutionary origins and the everyday reality of the early bourgeois era” 51 .
Similarly, in Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky" we see the alternation of images of nature (like the wide panoramas of the opening episodes) with pictures of city squares. As soon as the battle is over, Alexander Nevsky assumes a ceremonial role and arrives in Novgorod, where he officially greets the victorious warriors as they return to the city, accompanied by a cheering crowd. In this scene, Alexander Nevsky repeats Stalin's now standard greeting to the members of Papanin's expedition or the hero aviators after their triumphant return to Moscow. Alexander's attention is attracted by two warrior-heroes. They are half-dead from the wounds received in battle, but the prince not only revives them, but in addition becomes their matchmaker, since marriage symbolizes the return to the stream of life - which he himself cannot do if, following Freud's analysis in “Psychology of the Masses and the Analysis of the Human "I" (1921), wants to maintain his status as a charismatic leader.
The metropolis, although outside the stage where most of the dramatic scenes are played out, is by no means excluded from Stalin's narratives of the sublime. Moscow might seem like a kind of opposite of the sublime, but in reality it is rather its counterpart. In stories like the rescue of Papanin's expedition, Stalin fits into the sublime landscape without leaving the walls of the Kremlin, but the same principle works in the opposite direction - the sublime landscape itself is associated with the Kremlin. Wildlife and the metropolitan center are a couple. The metropolitan center (or its medieval equivalent, the Kremlin) has become a component of the dramatic rescue story of those who fought in the sublime nature and now represent the nation/people as a whole. In other words, the cult of Moscow did not fade at all during these years. The connection between these two principles presupposes a kind of patronage (Stalin personally sends and equips “his” expeditions and maintains contact with them), but at the same time, an ontological contiguity of two privileged spaces. Moscow was both a headquarters for operations and a place empowered by the sublime. But just as at the time when the sublime flourished in the art and poetry of England and America, there was a close connection between the representations of the sublime in nature and those clients in the metropolis (here in Moscow) who were the main customers of this art, promoted it, and also contributed to the creation of an idea of the city from an elevated position - from a bird's eye view.
In Stalinist culture, all spaces turned out to be symbolic spaces, since each embodied a specific stage of historical development. But since during these years the cultural sphere itself expanded, the former binary hierarchy of space - the provincial city as less developed versus the more advanced Moscow - was replaced by a transition to a third given that was placed on the periphery. The drama unfolding in the realm of the sublime began to obscure what was happening in the provincial environment. Now everything was focused on these spaces that form a couple - on the remote periphery of sublime nature and in Moscow itself - with the importance of the provincial center further decreasing. So, for example, in “Two Captains”, the initial contrast between the provincial Ensk (the very name of the city emphasizes its typicality and provinciality) and the capital, where the hero arrives, is removed by Sanya Grigoriev’s trip to the Arctic, where most of the positive characters of the book go one way or another.
In "Two Captains" the images of the sublime, the exposure of opponents and the personal experiences of the heroes are enclosed in the same ideological and figurative series. Sanya Grigoriev does not see well, being among blinding white snows, and at the same time he is blinded by passion. But, as W.J.T. Mitchell, "the landscape [as] ... a powerful ideological representation" can "erase history and clarity", which makes it a "place of amnesia and erasure" 53 . Obviously, in this novel (created at the height of the Stalinist practice of producing “non-faces” and “non-spaces”) there is a certain degree of “erasing”; after all, the natural scenery of the action, the frozen spaces, are the places of the camps where the prisoners really found themselves face to face with the boundlessness of Soviet territory. This area for the prisoners of the camps was “hopeless” in a much more literal sense than for Sanya, who observed it from the air (and they were much more involved in the development of natural resources than the hero Kaverin).
In the cultural production of these years, the “erasing” of space was also associated with the erasure of time. I emphasize this despite the obvious tendency of Stalinist culture to use historical precedents, as the researchers of The Great Rollback have already written about more than once. Romantic travel plays a large role in culture during this period, but travel, as Paul Fussell noted in his work on travelogues, is “a journey through time and space”, and there, indeed, “the figure of time is transmitted as space” 54 . Here the perception of the sublime is likened to an epiphany and, by virtue of the intensity of experience, puts an end to linear and monotonously increasing time (as can be seen in the "Short Course"); in the same way that the sublime "erases" the surrounding spaces in the mind - perhaps this is another reason that the radio occupied such a prominent position in the political culture of those years. It was thanks to the radio that the vast expanses that lay between Moscow and the Soviet/imperial periphery as a place for the dramas of the sublime were overcome - and thereby eliminated and erased. Thus, in the chronotope of the sublime, time was intertwined with space.
As in the case of spatial erasure, within the framework of a kind of temporal sublime, cultural production on historical themes actually erased - removed - the distance between “then” and “now”. A striking example is the authoritative review of the film "Alexander Nevsky" by Mikhail Koltsov, which appeared in 1938 in "Pravda", after the premiere, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the October Revolution. The author falls into lyricism when he writes about how Russia, shown in Eisenstein's film, seems to jump over all the past centuries in order to connect with the present times 55 . Eisenstein wanted to show Alexander Nevsky even after the Battle of the Ice, and end the film with his death, but Stalin rejected this idea. Alexander Nevsky did not die on the screen, just as the two warrior heroes inspired by him did not die either. It can be assumed that Stalin did not want the hero of the picture to die, since it follows from this that the people's leader is also mortal. He always wanted the “good guys” to save themselves at the moment when they were ready to fall into the abyss - like in a silent movie the heroine is always pulled off the rails, right before she is run over by a train. Stalin at the last moment solved the problem of saving polar explorers, just as during the show trials he saved the entire Soviet people, who were threatened with death due to the machinations of numerous enemies. The audience was horrified by the drama played out in the sphere of the sublime, from the sublimity of the sacrifice itself - but after that the general order was restored.
And at the same time, the existence of a culture that depends on intense moments of epiphany and, feeding on the millenarian pathos of the sublime, in fact, resists any normality, is generally difficult to maintain. Stalinist culture never really lost sight of the opposite - the importance of everyday life and material progress. The new class became more and more firmly established, and its way of life became more and more prosperous and attractive 56 , which was also accompanied by an increase in consumption 57 . In some films of the late 1930s, young women visiting the capital do not at all pretend to meet the sublime, but, on the contrary, open-mouthed, run around the shops in search of tempting goods 58 .
The Great Purge is generally considered to have ended in early 1939. As the horror receded somewhat, artists and writers began to use a different kind of landscape, characterized more by "beauty" than by the features of the sublime. But this did not become a return to the same cult of beauty that marked the beginning of the thirties. Just as Marx, in Louis Bonaparte's Eighteenth Brumer, wrote about a history that at first appears as a tragedy and the second time as a farce, we could say that the ideal of "beauty" was emblematically embodied in the first half of the 1930s. in the projects of the “new Moscow”, and after the dramatic intervention of the sublime, he returned to his contemporaries already as kitsch. This entropic, consumerist penchant for kitsch is evident in one painting project that was highly favored in the art magazines of the late 1930s: three paintings depicting bouquets of roses. The scenography of the drama has moved from wide spaces and rocky peaks to a more comfortable and homely atmosphere of dacha 59 .
Per. from English. Natalia Movnina
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1) Even in the socialist realist novel of that time, which, apparently, can be attributed to the "production" genre - in "Derbent Tanker" by Yuri Krymov (1938) - although it tells mainly about oil tankers in the Caspian Sea, the central episode is a strong storm that the hero must cope with.
2) Barringer Tim. The Course of Empires: Landscape and Identity in America and Britain, 1820-1880 // Wilton Andrew, Barringer Tim. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. P. 39.
3) Hegel G.W.F. Works. T. XII. Lectures on aesthetics. Book One / Per. B.G. Stolpner. M.: Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences, 1938. Fragments of Hegel's "Aesthetics" translated by Stolpner were also published in "Literary Criticism" in No. 10, 11 for 1934, No. 1, 2, 6, 8 for 1935, No. 3, 5, 7 for 1936, Nos. 4, 5 for 1937 and Nos. 1, 7, 8 for 1938.
4) calm L. Aesthetics of Kant // Literary critic. 1935. No. 3. S. 17-37.
5) Timasheff Nicholas. The Great Retreat: the growth and decline of communism in Russia. N.Y.: E.P. Duton, 1946.
6) Longinus' treatise On the Sublime attracted the attention of European readers after it was translated by Boileau in 1674. The 18th century saw Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), the chapters on the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) and his Observations on the Sense of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), and in Hegel's Aesthetics (compiled from notes of his lectures and published posthumously in 1835). Equally important was the work of Friedrich Schiller "On the Sublime" (which is given in the edition: Schiller Friedrich von.On the Sublime // Schiller F. von. Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays / Trans. by Julius A. Elias. New York, 1966. P. 210).
7) Burke Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Oxford; New York: The World's Classics, 1990. P. 59-61 (Russian translation: Burke E. A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. M.: Art, 1979).
8) The quote is actually taken from a description of the Salvator Rosa painting by the painter Henry Fuseli (1741-1785), quoted from: Wilton Andrew. The Sublime in the Old World and the New // Wilton Andrew, Barringer Tim. American Sublime... P. 12.
9) Nicolson Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959.
10) Burke Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Oxford; New York: The World's Classics, 1990. P. 67. Rus. trans.: Burke E. A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. S. 102.
11) Longin. About the sublime. (IX. 10) he also quotes Genesis (I: 3). This quote from Longinus is given in Hegel's lectures: Hegel G.W.F. Aesthetics: In 4 volumes. T. 2. M .: Art, 1969. S. 84.
12) Weiskel Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. P. 4.
13) Eagleton Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. P. 41.
14) In fact, M.I. should have awarded her a medal. Kalinin, but here a leader of such a high level is meant that he is not even shown, and the viewer must assume that it is Stalin who is meant. See also the meeting with Stalin in the film Chkalov (1941), where the pilot hero is reduced to a trembling figure.
15) Wilton Andrew. The Sublime in the Old World and the New // Wilton Andrew, Barringer Tim. American Sublime… P. 19.
16) Burke E. Philosophical research ... S. 102-103, 98-99.
17) Schiller F. Sobr. cit.: In 7 vols. T. 6. M .: Fiction, 1957. S. 492.
18) Eagleton Terry. Holy Terror. P. 53-54.
19) This formulation is comparable to the description of romanticism in the famous book by M. Abrams “The Mirror and the Lamp” (1953).
20) Hegel G.W.F. Aesthetics: In 4 vols. T. 2. M .: Art, 1969. S. 232, 235, 239.
21) Schiller F. Sobr. op. T. 6. S. 497, 498.
22) Ibid. pp. 498, 499.
24) History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course. M., 1938. S. 99-127.
25) Ibid. pp. 102-106.
26) Ibid. S. 101.
27) Eisenstein S. On the structure of things // Art of cinema. 1939. No. 6. S. 7-20.
28) Ibid. S. 15.
29) Schiller F. Sobr. op. T. 6. S. 498.
30) This is especially noted by Burke and in Kant's Observations on the Sense of the Beautiful and the Sublime.
31) See especially: “Pilots” by Yu. Raizman (1935), “Aerocity” by A. Dovzhenko (1935), where the flight of Soviet aircraft to the Soviet Far East appears in the first episodes, and “Valery Chkalov” by Mikhail Kalatozov (1941), which depicts an exhilarating and deadly flight over the icy north to America.
32) A good example is the painting by the leading Soviet artist Alexander Deineka, as well as the mosaic on the flight theme, intended in 1938 for the new Mayakovskaya metro station in Moscow.
33) A similar example was in the song that became the leitmotif of Alexandrov's musical comedy "Volga-Volga" (1938).
34) See: Clark Catherine. Soviet novel: History as a ritual. Yekaterinburg: Publishing House of the Yekaterinburg University, 2002. Ch. five.
35) Ram Harsha. The Imperial Sublime. A Russian Poetics of Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
36) Barringer Tim. The Course of Empires… P. 60.
37) Layton Susan. Russian Literature and Empire: the Conquest of the Caucasus. N.Y.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. P. 46.
38) Several articles about Lake Peipus were published in Pravda.
39) Mezhericher L. Heroism embodied in pictures // Soviet photo. 1934. No. 4-5.
41) Note that the plot of “Children of Captain Grant” in terms of searching for the lost father in remote spaces (here in the Pacific Ocean) can be compared with “Two Captains” by Kaverin, which are discussed below.
42) Said E. Invention, Memory and Place // Landscape and Power / W.J.T. Mitchell (Ed.). 2 ed. Chicago; London: Chicago University Press, 2002. P. 147.
43) Bonfire. 1938. No. 8-12; 1939. No. 1, 2, 4-6, 9-12; 1940. No. 2-4. Book II appeared in "October" in 1944 (No. 1-2, 7-8, 11-12). The first part of the novel was first published as a separate book in Detgiz in 1940, and the second - in the same publishing house in 1945.
44) Cavern V. Two captains. Bonfire. 1939. No. 10. S. 38.
45) Ibid. pp. 29-30.
46) Ibid. pp. 30-31.
47) Ibid. S. 36.
48) Ibid. S. 39.
49) Schiller F. Sobr. op. T. 6. S. 498.
50) Since the publishers of my book “Soviet novel. History as a Ritual” was required to limit its scope, I was forced to cut many sections, including a detailed analysis of this novel in connection with the themes of orphanhood and false and true fatherhood.
51) Eagleton Terry. Holy Terror. P. 61.
52) See, for example, Alexander Medvedkin's film New Moscow, released in 1938 (but quickly withdrawn from distribution).
53) Mitchell W.J.T. Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness // Landscape and Power. P. 262.
54) Fussell Paul. Travel and the British Literary Imagination of the Twenties and Thirties // Temperamental Journeys. Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel / Michael Kowalewski (Ed.). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992. P. 87.
55) Koltsov Mikhail. Wealthy people. Truth. 1938. November 7th. P. 2. See also: Krutikov N. Alexander Nevskiy. Truth. 1938. December 4th.
57) See: Fitzpatrick Sheila. Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; especially ch. 4, “The Magic Tablecloth” (see: Fitzpatrick Sh. Everyday Stalinism. Social history of Soviet Russia in the 30s: city / Per. from English. L.Yu. Pantina. 2nd ed. M.: ROSSPEN, 2008. - Note. ed.). See, for example: New buildings on Gorky Street // Pravda. 1938. February 1.
58) For example, in “Girl with character”. In another film, Ivan Pyryev's Pig and Shepherd (1941), the scene in which the heroine's companions rush to Moscow shops is of interest, while she herself remains at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in order, at first glance, to learn more about growing pigs, but in fact - to meet the sublime.
59) For example, the film “Hearts of Four” (1941) by K. Yudin and the story “Timur and his team” (1940) by A. Gaidar.
History and cultural studies [Izd. second, revised and additional] Shishova Natalya Vasilievna
14.2. The formation of the Soviet system (1917 - 1930s)
General characteristics of the period
The process of formation and approval of the Soviet system took place in complex, constantly changing conditions, which significantly influenced its forms, methods and pace. It can be divided into several stages.
The most important events of the first stage (1917–1920) were the October Revolution, which unfolded in the context of the ongoing World War I, and the ensuing bloody civil war, which lasted four years. The post-war reconstruction and socio-economic transformations in the 1920s took place against the backdrop of a relative stabilization of the world economic and political system. However, the decade ended with a severe global economic crisis in 1929-1932. The thirties were a period of forcing a social experiment with the aim of building socialism in our country. It took place in conditions when fascist parties came to power in a number of European countries, proclaiming a policy of national revenge, when the international situation sharply worsened, and the threat of a new world war became a reality.
In 1917, Russia experienced a revolutionary explosion of tremendous force. According to a number of historians, it was not so much a natural result of the previous development of capitalist relations (as was traditionally considered in Soviet historiography), but a form of resolving the most acute socio-economic and political contradictions of Russian society. The imposition and interweaving of social contradictions that need to be resolved is the “challenge” of history that Russia had to respond to. The researchers believe that the leading ones were the contradictions caused by Russia's lagging behind the advanced, industrialized countries in the field of technology, labor productivity, armament of the army, and the general culture of the population. That is, just those that made the implementation of a general civilizational breakthrough urgent. The country was faced with the tasks of industrialization, restructuring the agricultural sector of the economy, raising the general level of culture of the population, democratizing public life, expanding the rights and freedoms of the individual. Russia has already begun to solve them, but the implementation of new trends was hindered by traditional social structures and relations.
Another group of contradictions were the specific internal disagreements of Russian society: between peasants and landowners, workers and entrepreneurs, interethnic, between the center and the outskirts, etc. The defining factor in this group was the gap between the autocratic form of government and the interests of the majority of society.
Another group of contradictions resulted from the hardships of the world war. The growing economic ruin, the threat of famine, the bitterness of losses and defeats, fatigue and disappointment in the war gave rise to protest in various sections of the population. It was precisely these contradictions that were destined to play the role of the detonator of a revolutionary explosion.
Ideology. Political system
In 1917, Russia was literally swept by a wave of broad popular movements. The only party that, on the crest of this wave, was able not only to rise to power, but also to keep it, was the Bolshevik Party. It was this party and the ruling elite formed on its basis that acted as an initiative, creative minority, which was to take on the task of resolving socio-economic and political contradictions.
What predetermined the victory of the Bolsheviks in the struggle for power? First of all, they proposed as their immediate program a whole series of political slogans that reflected the urgent, vital interests of various social movements. The Bolsheviks promised peace to the war-torn people, land to the peasants, factories to the workers, and demanded that all power be transferred to the Soviets, which were representative bodies created democratically.
Moreover, the Bolshevik Party not only proposed political slogans that accurately took into account the alignment of forces, but also implemented them immediately after the conquest of power. The first decrees of the Soviet government - on peace, on land, on workers' control, as well as the "Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia" provided him with the support of peasants, workers, front-line soldiers, representatives of national minorities. The Bolsheviks proposed to society as the main goal and main value orientation the construction of a communist society - a society of social justice, where oppression and exploitation of man by man will be destroyed. Although their program contained only the most general, very brief description of the future structure, the communist ideal was firmly established in the mass consciousness, became a generator of social optimism, a means of uniting and mobilizing the masses. In other words, he united, brought together the elite and the masses at a certain stage.
It is natural to ask why this happened. The first to reflect on this topic were historians and philosophers of the Russian diaspora - L. Karsavin, N. Berdyaev, G. Fedotov, S. Frank and others. This problem attracted the attention of historians in post-Soviet Russia. According to researchers, the social ideal proposed by the Bolsheviks coincided with the stable moral and ethical orientations of national self-consciousness. It is characterized by the search for truth and goodness, higher justice, faith in the possibility of a kind of kingdom of God on earth, arranged on the principles of brotherly love and understanding. As N. A. Berdyaev noted, “communism included familiar features” of the spiritual ideal of a significant part of Russian society: “the thirst for social justice and equality, the recognition of the working classes as the highest human type, the disgust for capitalism and the bourgeoisie…”.
In developing policies in various fields, the Bolsheviks proceeded from the provisions of Marxist theory. The ideological determinism of the policy of the ruling party is one of the most important features of Soviet society. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that Marxism is a rather contradictory and complex scientific doctrine, the assimilation of which requires a certain level of education, culture, and requires great effort and time. The vast majority of not only the population of the country, but also members of the ruling party did not have all this. Therefore, already in the 1920s, there was a tendency to compress Marxist-Leninist theory into generalized formulations that had the character of an official doctrine. This process culminated in 1938 with the publication of a brief "History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)", after which a special resolution was adopted declaring the book "an encyclopedia of basic knowledge in the field of Marxism-Leninism."
The main political process of the 1920s and 1930s was the formation of state institutions and power mechanisms of the Soviet system. The Civil War showed the untenability of the Bolshevik idea of the dictatorship of the people through the Soviets, since even then the difference in the nature of the Soviets, which reflected the opposing interests of various social groups, was already manifested. In conditions of war and devastation, only a rigid centralization of control could correct the situation. The powers of the central executive bodies were consistently expanded, a large number of emergency bodies were created that exercised power in addition to the Soviets.
In the 1920s, the process of concentrating the main functions of state administration in the hands of the party and state apparatus was completed, a new ruling stratum was formed - nomenclature. The nomenclature (from Latin - a list) is a list of the most important posts and positions in state, Soviet, economic and other bodies, candidates for which were previously considered and approved by party committees. The nomenklatura is also called the people who occupied these posts and constituted a special social group with their own interests, lifestyle, ideology, and privileges.
In the same years, a change of elites took place in the ruling party itself, real power passed from the old Bolsheviks into the hands of the nomenklatura, which was formed primarily from the replenishment that came to the party during the years of the civil war and after it ended. People from the lower classes of society brought with them social anger and cruelty into political life and power structures. These people lacked experience, knowledge, education, common culture, so they tried to compensate for all this with loyalty to the party and enthusiasm. Gradually, the criterion of devotion, first to the idea, and then to the people who personified it, became the main one in the selection and placement of personnel.
In the 1930s, after a wave of mass repressions, the new "socialist" intelligentsia became one of the main sources of replenishment of the leading cadres. The circumstances under which this layer of Soviet leaders (young, energetic, but inexperienced) came to the fore left a deep imprint on their fate. The psychology of the nominees of the 1930s is well revealed in one of A. Beck's novels, The New Appointment. The hero of the novel was a man of this time: ““Soldier of the Party” - these were not empty words for him. Then, when another expression came into use, “Stalin’s soldier”, he proudly and, no doubt, rightfully considered himself such a soldier ... " The main life commandment of people of this type was the obligatory and unconditional execution of orders. Soon after the October Revolution, the anti-democratic nature of the new government began to manifest itself. This was evidenced by the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the deprivation of political rights of certain groups of the population, the violation of freedom of speech, the press, the introduction of censorship, and much more.
During the civil war, all parties, except for the Bolsheviks, were finally ousted from political life. In 1922–1923 a series of trials took place over the former political allies of the Bolsheviks - the Mensheviks and the Left Social Revolutionaries, who were accused of crimes against the Soviet regime. These parties were banned. Thus, the creation of a one-party political system was completed.
The forcing of socialist construction in the 1930s on the basis of coercion and violent methods led to a tightening of the political regime in the country. A special place in the mechanism of power was occupied by punitive and repressive bodies (NKVD, NKGB, etc.), controlled only by Stalin. The country was swept by mass repressions. The trials of the old intelligentsia, specialists (the so-called “Shakhty case”, “academic case”, the trials of the Industrial Party, the Labor Peasant Party) supplemented the judicial and non-judicial reprisals against the remnants of the opposition party groups (L. Kamenev, G. Zinoviev, N. Bukharin, A Rykov and others), party and military personnel. The peak of mass repressions occurred in 1936–1938. Their main goal is to relieve social tension by identifying and punishing "enemies", suppressing any oppositional sentiments in the bud, and ensuring the unconditional power of the center over the periphery. The number of political prisoners in the 1930s exceeded 3 million people.
Elected authorities, democratic rights and freedoms, proclaimed by the Constitution of 1936, were of a formal nature. The real power was in the party-state apparatus, which relied on social demagogy and the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses, on the one hand, and on punitive and repressive bodies, on the other. The new government sought to control all spheres of public life without exception - the economy, culture, social relations, and spiritual life. The nationalization of public life is the most important trend in the development of the Soviet political system in the 1920s and 1930s, which makes it possible to characterize it as totalitarian.
Economy
In the sphere of economic relations, the Bolsheviks considered it necessary to abolish private ownership of the means of production as the basis of exploitation, commodity-money relations as an instrument of class violence. They were to be replaced by public property, the organization of society according to the type of communes, and broad self-government of the working people. According to a number of philosophers (S. Frank, N. Berdyaev), the Bolsheviks' calls for the destruction of private property were supported by millions because they corresponded to the deep aspirations of the national character. The Russian people did not have "disinterested faith in the sanctity of the principle of property" (S. Frank). Russia was a country where big money did not command unconditional respect, and it was necessary to earn public recognition in other ways. According to M. Tsvetaeva, "the awareness of the untruth of money in the Russian soul is indestructible."
The theoretical ideas of the Bolsheviks determined the first steps in the economic field. In 1917–1920 land, thousands of industrial enterprises, banks, transport and communications, trade, housing stock were nationalized. Thus, a powerful public sector was created in the economy. Very soon it became clear that in conditions of war, an acute shortage of raw materials, fuel, labor, food, emergency measures were needed in order to get the economy going. The emerging management system was based on the principles of monopolization of the produced product, centralized distribution, command (directive) method of management, forced labor. Such measures as the curtailment of money circulation, equalization in payment and distribution, the abolition of payment for heating, food, utilities, transport, consumer goods, created an external, formal resemblance to the communist society as it seemed at that time. Hence the name of the economic policy of the period of the civil war - war communism.
Gradually, measures that the ruling party itself initially assessed as forced began to be seen as optimal for moving towards communism. There was a growing conviction in the party that the policy of war communism could be used even after the end of the war to restore the economy and build socialism. However, attempts to preserve and strengthen the military-communist measures led to a sharp aggravation of social tension, caused a total crisis of the Soviet system. Particular dissatisfaction, up to open resistance, was caused by the surplus appropriation among the peasants - a system of procurement of agricultural products, which deprived them of their interest in increasing production beyond the bare necessities, since the "surplus" was confiscated in favor of the state. It became clear that a revision of the ways of overcoming the crisis and advancing towards socialism was necessary. These complex tasks were solved within the framework of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which the party launched in 1921.
The new policy was based on the idea of allowing various forms of ownership in the country's economy, including the private one. Economic levers were to become the main ones in the management of the national economy, it was with their help that it was supposed to establish an exchange between the city and the countryside, instead of curtailing commodity-money relations, freedom of trade was proclaimed. The surplus appropriation was replaced by a tax in kind, which created the economic interest of the peasants in the restoration and expansion of production.
The NEP was a cycle of successive measures to overcome the crisis. They were dictated by objective circumstances (like war communism once was), but gradually came to be seen by Lenin and some other Bolshevik leaders as a possible program for building socialism by economic means. However, by the end of the 1920s, the situation had changed. 1927 was the year of "military anxiety" caused by the complication of diplomatic relations between the USSR and a number of countries, in 1929-1932. the global economic crisis broke out. The leadership of the Communist Party came to the conclusion that the aggressiveness of imperialism was growing, that a new phase of wars and revolutions was approaching. In this regard, the task was to strengthen the USSR as the base of the world revolution, to create a powerful military-political potential. This presupposed the acceleration of the pace of socialist transformations and, above all, the implementation of the accelerated industrialization of the country.
The transition to a new political course - the offensive of socialism along the entire front - was also due to the preservation of the "military-communist" ideology among a significant part of the ruling elite - to quickly, on the basis of enthusiasm, storm to introduce socialism. The year of the “great turning point” was 1929. The new course in the economy included: the curtailment of the NEP, the abolition of independent enterprises, the replacement of commodity-money relations between them with directive planning and state supply; a significant expansion of capital investments in industry while reducing investments in the social sphere; complete collectivization based on the use of violent methods, a sharp increase in state grain procurements on the basis of coercion; transition from predominantly economic to predominantly command, administrative methods of management.
The result of the economic breakthrough of the 1930s was the creation of a powerful industry capable of mastering the production of products of any degree of complexity, the opening of about 9 thousand industrial enterprises. In terms of industrial production, by the beginning of the 1940s, the country had taken second place in the world after the United States. However, the lag of our economy behind the level of Western countries was overcome only in the basic branches of heavy industry, the development of which was given special attention, since they were the most advanced in that era (energy, metallurgy and engineering, chemical industry), were the basis of the military-industrial complex and at the same time an "industrializing industry" - a transmission mechanism of industrial technology to other sectors of the economy.
Forced industrialization plunged the country into a state of general mobilization and tension, as in war, because plans, as a rule, were unrealistic. Increasing economic chaos and social disorder, they caused an increasing need for state management of the economic sphere, which replaced the laws of a market economy.
The administrative-command system, which became the main means and result of the forced transformations of the 1930s, contained deep contradictions, it contained limited opportunities for economic development. Based on the execution of orders from the center, it extinguished and limited the initiative and independence of producers, did not create conditions for their interest in the growth of production.
The end of the 1920s and 1930s became the time when the ruling party again and again tried to realize its ideas about a socialist society, completely abandon the use of economic levers (including money circulation) in organizing economic life, relying on enthusiasm, impulse and revolutionary impatience of the masses. However, each time this turned out to be impossible and it was necessary to retreat, soften the tough economic policy, look for ways to stabilize the situation in industry and agriculture.
social structure. public consciousness
The establishment of the political system, transformations in the field of the economy were associated with complex processes that took place in the social sphere. After the end of the civil war, Russian society was a society of broken social layers and ties. The social structure has changed radically. The human losses were huge - since 1914 they amounted to about 20 million people; more than 2 million people emigrated from Russia. There was a liquidation of the remnants of the exploiting classes - the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy, the clergy, the officers, the bourgeois intelligentsia. The urban population decreased, the number of industrial workers in the leading industrial centers decreased by 5-7 times, the process of declassing the proletariat began - the workers returned to the countryside to peasant labor. White and red terror, devastation, famine, epidemics claimed thousands of lives, gave rise to child homelessness (in 1922 there were about 7 million homeless children), and led to a sharp increase in crime. Society as a whole was tired of the war, upheavals, and needed a respite.
The transition to the New Economic Policy was welcomed by the general population. The peasantry got the opportunity to manage their land. The recovery of industry and commerce created new jobs. This policy was supported by a significant part of the intelligentsia, as they expected that within its framework a class of new owners would grow and strengthen, which would force the authorities to abandon extremism in the economy and politics and evolve towards the formation of "normal" bourgeois-democratic orders. These sentiments were reflected in the collection of articles "Change of milestones" (Prague, 1921), which gave the name to the whole movement - "Smenovekhovism".
However, there were also social forces in society that were not interested in the NEP. The Bolsheviks, seeking to destroy the old society and thus clear the way for the construction of a new one, turned to the lowest, most obscure and uneducated sections of the working class and peasantry. It seemed to them that the less these people were attached to the old, by definition bourgeois culture, the easier and faster they would accept the new socialist ideals. Back in 1918, M. Gorky wrote that the Bolsheviks put forward "inflammatory slogans, awakening the basest and darkest instincts of the crowd." The consequence of this was that the value orientations, moods, life aspirations of the lower social strata, declassed elements began to play a significant role in society. The slogan of social justice was perceived by them as a call for the redistribution of social wealth, transformed in their minds into an accessible and understandable one - "rob the loot." It was these social strata who had a negative attitude towards the NEP, which forced them to put up with property differences. The townspeople were dissatisfied with the continued unemployment, rising food prices, and the abolition of cards. A significant part of the peasant poor sought to improve their situation on the basis of the principle: "Take away and divide." Many could not calmly look at private Nepmen who were fattening in expensive restaurants: “What did you fight for in civilian life ?!” These sentiments were also strong among party and Soviet workers. The transition to speeding up socialist construction at the end of the 1920s was close to the psychology of the backward sections of the workers and peasants, who were inclined to assault methods, striving to break out of difficulties faster, in spite of everything.
From the end of the 1920s and during the 1930s, the trend in the social sphere to oust those social groups that were not associated with state or collective, cooperative property was gaining strength. Severe tax pressure and repressive measures led to the disappearance of the Nepman bourgeoisie (owners and tenants of small and medium-sized industrial enterprises, private traders). As a result of the policy of complete collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks, individual peasants disappeared in the countryside, and a collective-farm peasantry was formed. At the same time, according to various estimates, from 5 to 7 million peasants and members of their families became victims of repression, about 5 million people died from the famine of 1932-1933. in the grain regions of the country, which was the result of the use of emergency measures during grain procurement.
In 1933, the passport system was introduced, but the collective farmers were not issued passports and they were actually attached to the collective farms, not having the right to leave the village without permission.
An extremely important process, reflecting the structural changes in Soviet society during this period, was a sharp increase in the number of factory workers, the urban population. Thus, during the first five-year plan alone, the number of workers increased from 2.7 to 12.4 million people. In total, from 1926 to 1939, the urban population increased by 30 million people. These changes in the social sphere testified to the transition from the traditional to the industrial type of society.
The position of the intelligentsia remained difficult, the policy of the ruling party towards it was contradictory. On the one hand, in the conditions of unfolding industrialization, the Soviet government needed specialists and sought to win them over to its side using various means, and on the other hand, it had a deep distrust of them. At the same time, the technical intelligentsia associated with production was declared closer to the class of the proletariat than the humanitarian one. This approach led to the emigration and forced expulsion from the country in the 1920s of a large number of representatives of the creative intelligentsia.
In the 1930s, the policy towards the old intelligentsia became even tougher. A number of public trials took place over its representatives, who were accused of wrecking and helping class enemies. These processes made it possible to make the intelligentsia responsible for economic difficulties, disproportions and disruptions in the economy that arose as a result of forcing industrialization (that is, to remove responsibility for the above from the leadership of the country and the party). The old specialists were to be replaced by the new intelligentsia, which was formed from workers and peasants.
Forced industrialization, the chaotic and unplanned growth of cities led to interruptions in their food supply, and an aggravation of the housing problem. The material situation of the workers and their families was deteriorating, and there was a decline in real wages. At many construction sites, the principle has triumphed: "first - the factory, then - the city." The already huge, as they said then, “commodity hunger” sharply escalated. Constant interruptions in the supply of cities forced the introduction of a rationing system for the distribution of goods. In the second half of the 1930s, the situation of workers and peasants began to improve, but the actual standard of living of most urban strata was below the level of 1928. But even a temporary stabilization of the situation, a certain increase in well-being contributed to an increase in enthusiasm, which was expressed, in particular, in the development of the Stakhanov movement .
Under the influence of the fundamental changes that took place in various spheres of society, a new type of personality began to take shape. In Soviet historiography, this process was viewed as a process of improving human nature, cultivating new qualities in him - collectivism, comradeship, selflessness, devotion to socialist ideals, the ability to subordinate personal interests to public ones. In the literature of recent years, assessments have changed - the Soviet person has lost attractive qualities and acquired negative traits: he is a slave, a performer, his ideal is wretched equality. Many philosophers and historians of the Russian diaspora, as well as Western researchers, did not assess changes in the Russian national type so unequivocally.
Obviously, the personality type of a Soviet person was formed under the influence of various factors. The upheavals experienced by the country, accelerated industrialization and urbanization (growth of cities) led to the fact that millions of people appeared in the country, cut off from their native soil, forced to part with their usual rural way of life, to master a new urban life. People who were knocked out of their social cells for various reasons, lost touch with traditional culture and habitual life, hardly got used to life in the city, took root in a new place.
The rapid increase in the number of people associated with modern technology, industrial labor, has significantly changed the socio-cultural characteristics of society. The Russian philosopher N. Berdyaev called the technology and technization of life a force "having almost cosmic significance for the fate of mankind." He emphasized that technogenic civilization turns a person into the image and likeness of a machine, leads to the disintegration of a person into certain functions, the leveling of the personal, individual beginning in a person, facilitating the ability to manipulate him. Moreover, these processes do not depend on the social system, they are a natural consequence of the transition to an industrial and urban society.
One of the most important factors in the formation of a special type of personality of a Soviet person was the official ideology, which affirmed in society a new system of values, moral and ethical attitudes. She claimed to be universal, the embodiment of truth and historical justice, while the ideals she proclaimed had to be taken on faith, and their implementation belonged to the future. In addition, the radical reorganization of society and man, necessary for the realization of socialist ideals, was supposed to be carried out using violence. In the new system of values, human individuality was valued low, everyone had to feel first of all a participant in the construction of a new society, ready to sacrifice everything for the common cause. However, recognizing the importance of the official ideology in the life of Soviet society, one cannot but agree with those researchers (A. Gurevich, I. Kondakov) who believe that mainly those aspects of ideology that find their soil in cultural archetypes, in the mentality of the people take root in society processed in accordance with them.
At one time, N. Berdyaev, G. Fedotov, N. Lossky wrote that the striking difference between a Soviet person and a Russian is apparent. Thus, according to Fedotov, the revolution destroyed only the upper historical layers in the Russian person, which were formed in the 18th-19th centuries, and led to the triumph of the Moscow type: “The age-old habit of obedience, the weak development of personal consciousness, the need for freedom, the ease of life in a team,“ in service and tax ”- this is what unites a Soviet person with old Moscow”. The transfer of the capital to Moscow can in this sense be regarded as a symbolic act. The Soviet government also worked on the Russian man - thanks to her, he learned "the superficial, narrowed content of modern civilization - military sports life, Marxism, Darwinism and technology".
Despite all the difficulties, the scale of the socio-economic transformations of the 1930s gave rise to people's feelings of optimism and belonging to a great era. Generations of people who grew up under the Soviet regime, sincerely devoted to it and ready to defend it with weapons in their hands, entered into life. They believed that the most progressive and just social system was being created in our country. In the diary of Zhenya Rudneva, a Moscow schoolgirl who was a pilot during the war, one can read the following lines written in 1937: “You find the only joy in the newspapers when you read about us, about the USSR - my wonderful Motherland. Today is exactly one year from the day when Comrade Stalin made a report on the draft Constitution, in 10 days - Constitution Day, in 17 days - elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Everyone is in high spirits ... I live a full-blooded life. And how can I not love my Motherland, which gives me such a happy life?!”
At the same time, the consequence of mass repressions, the establishment of an administrative-command system, became such features of public consciousness and behavior as the refusal of independence in decision-making, blind obedience to orders, fear of responsibility, the folding of the psychology of the “man-cog” in the state mechanism, the fall of creative initiative, fear and suspicion.
Soviet society was characterized by a willingness to take what was desired for reality, a rejection of criticism and doubts about the superiority of its own development model. The public consciousness perceived and evaluated the past and present through the prism of rigid dual categories. The division of the world into “us” and “them”, into friends and enemies, oriented, aimed society at struggle. "We" are the first and only country of socialism, "they" are the hostile capitalist environment, the clash of these two worlds is inevitable. A typical image of the USSR is given in one of Stalin's speeches of those years: “Among the raging waves of economic shocks and military-political catastrophes, the USSR stands apart like a cliff, continuing its work of socialist construction, the struggle to preserve peace”. This specificity of social consciousness is very accurately reflected in the poetic lines:
... I remember, I did not regret the holiday
No black ink, no white,
The whole world on white and red
Shared unconditionally.
… I knew about the Azov blast furnaces
And that Rome is on strike again.
And I burned with love for my friends
And he was irreconcilable to enemies!
E. Vinokurov. From poems about childhood
The psychology of life in a besieged fortress, the expectation of war, the need to be vigilant in the midst of numerous external and internal enemies, firmly entered the consciousness of pre-war society.
culture
In the 1920s and 1930s, complex and contradictory processes took place in the sphere of culture. The element of destruction brought to life by the revolution dealt a tangible blow to Orthodox culture, the culture of the Russian provinces, and the estate culture. At the same time, the revolution could not overnight extinguish the creative energy of the Russian cultural revival. It is his impulses that explain the emergence in the early 1920s of many new artistic movements, scientific schools in sociology, psychology, pedagogy, and the natural sciences.
Despite the hardships of the civil war, folklore and ethnographic expeditions were organized, new museums and publishing houses were created. One of the most famous is the World Literature publishing house, which carried out a lot of educational work. Its editorial board included M. Gorky, A. Blok, N. Gumilyov, E. Zamyatin, K. Chukovsky. Many literary circles and studios appeared, in which people from various social strata were engaged, they were led by well-known writers, such as, for example, V. Khodasevich, A. Bely. The amateur theatrical movement gained wide scope.
Thus, the revolution simultaneously manifested both a destructive and a creative force. The dominance of destructive tendencies was explained not only by the fact that the revolution itself is called upon primarily to destroy, but also by the fact that for the most part not cultural forces capable of positive work were involved in active actions, but the most undeveloped and dark ones. As these forces became more and more firmly established in the state, they crushed under themselves the element of creative energy that made its way at the initial stage of the revolution.
An important place in the cultural life of the 1920s was occupied by discussions about attitudes towards the cultural heritage of the past and about what the new culture should be like. Supporters of the left currents considered it necessary to abandon bourgeois culture, to break with the past, to create something absolutely new outside of historical and cultural traditions. In 1917, the Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) organization was formed, whose members were opponents of the old culture and advocated the creation of a new one, insisting that it be purely proletarian, that is, it should be addressed to the proletariat and created only by proletarian artists and writers.
In addition, representatives of the avant-garde believed that art is a means of transforming social reality and educating a new person. The most important position of their aesthetic system: art is not only a way of reflecting the real world, real reality, but also a means of transforming and changing it. A prominent figure in Proletkult A. Gastev introduced the term "social engineering". In relation to art, it meant a radical restructuring of art by means of not only social life, but also the human psyche. One of the leaders of the Left Front (LEF) group, the futurist S. Tretyakov, wrote that "the art worker must become a psycho-engineer, a psycho-constructor...".
The idea of "forging a new man" by means of literature and art was one of the central ideas in the discussions of the creative intelligentsia of the 1920s, it was shared by representatives of various currents of the Russian avant-garde. The LEF group, which included V. Mayakovsky, D. Burliuk, O. Brik, was engaged in the search for new expressive forms to solve this problem in literature, in the theater - Vs. Meyerhold, in architecture - K. Melnikov, in cinema - S. Eisenstein, G. Kozintsev and many others. In the visual arts, the left movements were represented by: the Society of Easel Artists (OST), the 4 Arts group (K. Petrov-Vodkin, P. Kuznetsov), the Society of Moscow Artists (OMH) (P. Konchalovsky, I. Mashkov, A. Lentulov, R. Falk), constructivists (V. Tatlin, L. Lissitzky), etc.
Supporters of the left movements, due to their revolutionary nature, found themselves in the center of a social explosion, they were the first to cooperate with the new government, seeing in it a kindred force. They took part in the implementation of the monumental propaganda plan, were engaged in the "revolutionary" design of cities. M. Chagall, one of the "founding fathers" of modern art, and during the years of the revolution - Commissar of the People's Commissariat for Education, later wrote about this time: "...Lenin turned Russia upside down just like I do in my paintings".
The fundamental concept of creating a new man put forward by the avant-garde became the main task of Soviet culture. However, on the issue of expressive means and forms of the new culture, the ruling party made a choice in favor of traditionalism and realism, banning experiments in this area by directive order (Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations” of April 23, 1932) and declaring socialist realism the unified and obligatory artistic method for Soviet literature and art. This choice was made largely in connection with the belief of the Bolsheviks that the new culture, which will have to appeal to the undereducated and cultural sections of the population, should use the most familiar and understandable forms for these social strata.
The Charter of the Union of Soviet Writers, established in 1934, formulated the basic principles of the new method, stated that it “requires from the artist a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically reshaping and educating the working people in the spirit of socialism..
One of the main tasks of Soviet art was to create the image of a positive hero, an active life changer, selflessly devoted to the party and the state, to whom all Soviet people, especially young people, were to be equal. A distinctive feature of art has become social optimism. They permeated the novels of M. Sholokhov, L. Leonov, V. Kataev, N. Ostrovsky, the films “Chapaev” by S. and G. Vasiliev, “Earth” by A. Dovzhenko, “Deputy of the Baltic” by I. Kheifits and A. Zarkhi, “ Komsomolsk" by S. Gerasimov, a trilogy about Maxim G. Kozintsev and others.
The most talented works of those years reflected the remaining inertia of the revolutionary upsurge, the romantic vision of the events of the revolution and the civil war, the enthusiasm of the creators of the new society, who sincerely believed in the possibility of realizing their dreams.
In the 1930s, artistic culture became more and more canonical; a strict hierarchy of genres and themes was established in it. She openly focused on the "social order" of the ruling elite. For example, paying great attention to showing the events of the revolution and the civil war, creating images of leaders, artists, writers, filmmakers often deliberately created pictures and images that had little in common with reality. So, in the official portraits of Stalin, the shortcomings of his physical appearance disappeared - not a living, real person appeared before the audience, but a symbol, the personification of an idea. At the same time, domestic history was undergoing a significant transformation in literature and art.
Not only the past, but also the future was subject to transformation on the basis of ideological attitudes. Thus, “defense literature”, “defense cinematography”, which appeared in the 1930s as a response to the growing military threat, portrayed the future war in full accordance with official forecasts as a dashing campaign, as an instant victory over the enemy without casualties and difficulties. For example, the hero of the film "Tankmen" was sent to reconnaissance, but overfulfilled the task - he began hostilities, reached Berlin and captured Hitler. After the outbreak of the war, one of the leaders of the Union of Writers A. Surkov was forced to admit that “... before war, we often disorientated the reader about the true nature of future tests. We portrayed the war too lightly. I don't want to offend anyone, but the slogans "and we are in the water. we won’t drown, and we won’t burn in fire”, “ebullient, powerful, invincible by anyone…” cultivated thoughtless narcissism… Before the war, we served the reader war in a colorful candy wrapper, and when this candy wrapper unfolded on June 22, a scorpion crawled out of it, which painfully bit our hearts - the scorpion of the reality of a difficult, big war ".
The specifics of the mass audience of the 1930s (primarily the low level of education and culture) not only determined its interest in the most understandable and accessible forms of cultural life (especially cinema), but also made them extremely effective. B. Babochkin, analyzing the success of the film "Chapaev", wrote that for the audience of the 30s, the immediacy of the perception of the film, "complete faith in the authenticity, the primordial nature of the events taking place was approaching its absolute, its hundred percent". Visual screen images, like the heroes of literature, firmly entered the minds of people, were perceived by them with great confidence. The possibilities of art were actively used by the ruling elite to create a myth about the happy life of the people building socialism, to manipulate public consciousness.
The main criterion for assessing works of culture in the 30s was their compliance with the official ideology. An uncompromising struggle was waged against cultural figures whose works did not meet the strict requirements of "socialist realism". Thus, in the second half of the 1930s, a campaign was carried out to overcome "formalism" and "naturalism" in art. D. Shostakovich, S. Eisenstein, N. Zabolotsky, Yu. Olesha, I. Babel were accused of formalism. Artists A. Lentulov and D. Shterenberg were called "dirty bastards with malicious intent."
The most important feature of Soviet culture was the strict control over it by the party and the state. Already in the 1920s, cultural institutions were nationalized, and a management system began to take shape, which lasted until the 1990s. In 1922–1923 Glavlit and Glavrepertkom were created, which monitored compliance with censorship requirements in the press and the repertoire of theaters and cinemas.
The party-state control over various spheres of cultural life intensified even more in the 1930s. Then creative unions were created, outside of which the work of cultural figures was impossible, as well as a number of special bodies that carried out centralized management of culture: the All-Union Committee for Radio Broadcasting, the Committee for the Arts, the Main Directorate of Cinematography, the All-Union Committee for Higher Education, etc.
In relation to the cultural heritage, the principle of "mastering" it was proclaimed, that is, the need for cultural continuity and the preservation of tradition was recognized. However, mastery meant rethinking, reassessment of the spiritual heritage of the past from the point of view of the class interests of the proletariat. The whole culture was divided into progressive and reactionary, which could and should have been discarded. As a result, for a number of generations of Soviet people, literature, art, philosophy of the early 20th century. remained unknown, as they were assessed as decadent and decadent.
In the 1930s, a pragmatic, utilitarian approach to culture intensified, its development was directly linked to the solution of current economic problems. Under the conditions of accelerated industrialization, one of the most important tasks of the cultural revolution was recognized as the rapid training of a sufficient number of workers with the necessary knowledge and skills. If on the eve of the October Revolution three-quarters of the adult population of Russia could neither read nor write, by the mid-1930s the vast majority of the adult population had become literate. During this period, not only primary, but also secondary and higher schools developed rapidly. As in other areas of culture, the class approach was consistently implemented in the education system. Those from workers and peasants enjoyed the preferential right to enter universities, the admission of "socially alien elements" was limited.
An analysis of the socio-cultural processes of this period shows that Soviet culture was formed as an urban, industrial culture. In this capacity, it opposed not only bourgeois culture, but also peasant culture. At its core, it was popular culture. It closely intertwined processes inherent in the culture of the era of industrial revolutions, and specific ones, due to the peculiarity of the development of Soviet society. The former include, first of all, the democratization of culture and education, the emergence and spread of new types of art based on the use of technical means (radio, cinema), thanks to which the achievements of culture became available to the widest sections of the population, and the formation of mass culture.
The specificity of Soviet culture was its deep ideologization, the directive approval of a single artistic method (unification of culture), the restriction of freedom of creativity, the loss of a significant part of the cultural heritage, the annihilation (destruction) of cultural traditions, the elevation of mass culture to the rank of official, a utilitarian attitude towards it, isolation, isolation from world culture.
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The work is devoted to the development of culture in the post-war period (20-30s) in the world. The theme of the main directions of painting, architecture, cinematography, theater, literature of Western Europe and the USA is revealed.
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Culture of the 1920s-1930s Presentation on Modern History by a student of the 9th "A" class of the Vidnovskaya secondary school No. 4 Gorelkina Elizaveta Checked by: history teacher - Mazuryak V.M.
Arising at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. the new artistic movement was given a name that emphasized its modernity - modernism. It represented different trends and groups that did not have a single ideological and artistic program. Common were the departure from the traditions and ideals of the old art, as well as the search for new artistic forms and means. The World War and its aftermath, revolutions, social conflicts, the rise of nationalism and extremism, as well as the crisis of culture in a number of countries - all this had a huge impact on the art and literature of the 1920s. Changes in culture and art
Modern style. A special place in the artistic culture of the late XIX - early XX century. occupied the Art Nouveau style, which spread to many European countries. It was based on the idea that art creates beauty and brings it into life, which in itself is not very good and attractive. One of the means to achieve this goal was considered to be the synthesis of various arts: architecture, decorative and applied arts, painting, graphics, etc. Alphonse Mucha's new trends. Maud Adams as Joan of Arc. Poster 1909
D. Michelucci Villino Liberty in Florence. 1911
The most daring search for new artistic forms and means of expression was carried out by the so-called avant-garde movements and groups. Poets here experimented with the forms and size of the verse, artists - with the color and composition of paintings. The painters did not set themselves the task of displaying any object close to reality; their paintings often had no plot at all. The decisive role was played by the visions and feelings of the artist himself. Vanguard
Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square
Juan Gris. Mug of beer and card. Collage. 1913
Juan Gris, A man in a cafe. 1914. New York
Modernism: Fauvism - the most intense sound of open colors Primitivism contains a deliberate simplification of the picture, making its forms primitive. Expressionism seeks not so much to reproduce reality as to express the emotional state of the author. Cubism is characterized by the use of emphatically geometrized conditional forms, the desire to "split" real objects into stereometric primitives. Abstractionism refuses to depict forms close to reality in painting and sculpture.
A. Matisse. "Red Room" 1908
The Scream by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1893)
Chagall Mark Zakharovich, Over the city
Marianna Veryovkina, Red City (1909)
Pablo Picasso. Three musicians. 1921
Composition with red, blue and yellow. 1930. Oil on canvas. Piet Mondrian
In post-war literature, writers of the “lost generation” occupied a prominent place: the German E. M. Remarque, the American E. Hemingway, the Englishman R. Aldington, and others. They participated in the war and could not forget what they saw and experienced. Showing the life of their heroes in the war, they protested against the terrible extermination of people in their everyday life. Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s
In contrast to the writers of the "lost generation", many figures of European culture saw in the turbulent events of the first decades of the 20th century. implementation of the most important social and political ideas. They were attracted by the active struggle of people against inequality and injustice, for social and national liberation. Such views were shared by the French writers A. Barbusse and R. Rolland, the German G. Mann, the American T. Dreiser, and others. Their heroes did not find a place for themselves in bourgeois society. Some of them fought against this society, as in A. Barbusse's novel "Fire", while others, like Clyde Griffiths from "An American Tragedy" by T. Dreiser, sought to break through in it at any cost and died without reaching their goal.
Some masters of culture, who did not belong to any ideological and artistic associations and political parties, turned to new social ideas, believing that they would help overcome the injustice and inhumanity of the existing system. Among them was one of the brightest and most original writers of the 20th century. B. Brecht. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was born into a wealthy family. Already in his youth, he came to a spontaneous rejection of the burgher, bourgeois way of life, which was reflected in his first plays.
History of the first decades of the XX century. provided rich food for a special literary genre - social fiction. The authors of such works tried to present in the circumstances they invented, outside the real place and time, the events and models of social relations, the features of which they observed in the world around them. In 1920, E. Zamyatin wrote the science fiction novel "We", which became one of the first creations in the dystopian genre. Later, O. Huxley's novels Brave New World (1932) and D. Orwell's 1984 (1949) also appeared in this genre. Dystopia
In the visual arts of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as in literature, new trends of both realistic and modernist orientation appeared. One of the most striking manifestations of innovation in realistic art was the Mexican school of monumental painting, created by the artists D. Rivera, X. C. Orozco, D. A. Siqueiros and others. The founders of the school were contemporaries and participants in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917. Visual arts 1920-1930s
Significant changes took place in the 1920s and 1930s in the modernist movement. Many of its representatives, having witnessed the war and social upheavals, sought to escape from reality, hide in their own world. Considering life cruel, unmanageable and meaningless, they decided that art should not display, explain and improve it. These ideas formed the basis of Surrealism that arose in the 1920s. Its creators argued that creativity is primarily a reflection of the artist's subconscious feelings. Changes in the modernist movement
Dali Salvador. Dream.
Surrealists most often depicted on their canvases certain fantasies, random combinations of bodies and objects, often deliberately distorted, deformed. Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory"
The formation of a mass society in the industrial countries in the 1920s and 1930s created the conditions for the widespread dissemination of artistic culture. The positive thing was that works of art were more accessible to various strata and groups of the population, became part of public life. The costs, according to connoisseurs of art, consisted in replacing unique, high-quality samples with serial, ordinary art products. Culture in mass society
New trends visibly manifested themselves during this period in the art that creates the environment for people - architecture. Here, the currents of rational, constructivist architecture stood out, widely spread in many countries, including Russia.
In rationalism and constructivism, simplicity, the correspondence of the forms and the internal layout of the building to its purpose were put in the first place. The well-known school of rationalism "Bauhaus" was created by German architects headed by W. Gropius. The Bauhaus style quickly acquired an international character.
In the 1920s and 1930s, cinematography became a mass art form. It was the time of the formation of cinema, each year brought new artistic and technical discoveries. One of the pinnacles of world cinema during this period was the work of the outstanding actor and director Ch. Chaplin. Cinema
Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977) was born in London in an acting family and followed in the footsteps of his parents from his youth. As a young actor, he came to the United States, where he began directing comedy films at one of the studios in Los Angeles. In 1919, together with several actors and directors, he founded the independent film company United Artistes. Chaplin's most famous films are The Kid (1920), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936).
The forced modernization of Soviet society had a significant impact on culture. The establishment of the regime of personal power of I. V. Stalin and the strengthening of the totalitarian system led to the unification of cultural processes, the rejection of the cultural revolutionary diversity of the 1920s, the tightening of control over the spiritual and cultural sphere, and repressions against cultural figures.
In the 1930s cultural management bodies were reorganized. If earlier most of the managerial functions were concentrated in the People's Commissariat for Education, then after the resignation in 1929 of A. V. Lunacharsky, serious changes took place: new sectoral management bodies were created - the All-Union Committee for the Arts, the All-Union Committee for Higher Education. Only the lighting system remained under the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat for Education.
Public education continued to solve the problems of eradicating illiteracy. At the turn of the 1920-1930s. the enthusiasm for industrialization and collectivization also embraced the sphere of education. An all-Union cult campaign for literacy was announced. A census of the illiterate and the registration of volunteers in the cult of the army were carried out. Thanks to the colossal work by the end of the 1930s. the problem of illiteracy was solved. According to the 1939 census, the proportion of literates was 87.4%.
By 1933, the transition to compulsory four-year education was completed in the general education school. The expansion of secondary education began. In cities, seven-year schools were reorganized into ten-year schools. Curricula have been revised. Since 1934, the teaching of national history and geography was restored.
The higher school carried out the task of training personnel for the national economy. Compared with the pre-revolutionary period, the number of universities and the number of students increased tenfold. Since 1935, social restrictions on admission to universities were abolished. In general, in the 1930s. the higher school successfully trained the Soviet technical and humanitarian intelligentsia.
Science was oriented towards meeting the needs of socialist construction. By the mid 1930s. The process of Sovietization of the Academy of Sciences was completed. Ideological control was established over scientists, a new charter was introduced, academic degrees and titles that were canceled in 1918 were restored. The Academy of Sciences itself was transferred from Leningrad to Moscow.
Planning was introduced into the scientific sphere. Huge scope acquired geological and geographical research. Mineral deposits were discovered: oil between the Volga and the Urals, coal in the Moscow region and Kuzbass.
There were undeniable achievements in the industrial and scientific potential of the country. In 1931, the first television programs began to be broadcast from Moscow. In 1935, the first line of the Moscow metro came into operation. In the late 1930s new models of military equipment were created: T-34 and KV tanks, I-153 fighter, etc.
Soviet scientists made world-wide discoveries in the field of physics (in particular, I. Tamm and I. Frank discovered the electron, etc.).
The social sciences were under severe pressure from the "Short Course of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks" published in 1938, for which it was impossible to go beyond the ideological and methodological framework.
Literature. In artistic culture, the processes of uniformity and unification in the mainstream of the Bolshevik ideological and class predestination were rapidly gaining momentum. The decisive factor here was the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of April 23, 1932 "On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations", on the basis of which various art associations were liquidated and united creative unions were created.
In August 1934, the First All-Union Congress of Writers took place, which created the Writers' Union headed by M. Gorky. Only socialist realism, extended to all areas of artistic creation, was recognized as the fundamental method of literature. In 1936-1938. on the initiative of the party leadership, a campaign was launched to combat formalism and naturalism in art. Composers (D. Shostakovich), theater and film directors (S. Eisenstein, V. Meyerhold), artists (V. Tatlin, V. Favorsky, A. Lentulov, A. Rodchenko and others) were criticized.
Theatre. On the theater stage in the 1930s dominated by the Soviet play. The history of the theater of this period included the "Optimistic Tragedy" by Vs. Vishnevsky. Mass was the opening of children's theaters.
Cinema. Revolutionary changes in cinema are associated with the advent of sound cinema. The first such film was "Start in Life" (1931) directed by N. Eck. The main theme of the cinema is the life of the Soviet people, their participation in the revolution ("Deputy of the Baltic" by I. Kheyfets), industrialization ("Komsomolsk" by S. Gerasimov) and collectivization ("Tractor Drivers" by I. Pyryev), etc.
Architecture. in architecture until the late 1930s. constructivism prevailed. According to the designs of the Vesnin brothers, the ZIL Culture Palace (1934), Dneproges (1932) were built. In the same period, the Administrative Building on Okhotny Ryad appeared (1936) designed by architect V. Langmaia (now the State Duma of the Russian Federation is located in this building); hotel "Moscow" (1935) on Manezhnaya Square, built according to the project of architects L. I. Savelyev, O. A. Staprap and A. V. Shchusev.
The outstanding architect A. V. Shchusev (1873-1949) worked fruitfully, among whose creations the Lepin Mausoleum (1930), Moskvoretsky Bridge (1938), etc.
Painting. Historical and revolutionary themes prevailed in painting. One of the creators of Leniniana was I. Brodsky with the painting "Lenin in Smolny" (1930). Leading artist of socialist realism in the 1930s. was B. Ioganson with the paintings "Interrogation of the Communists" (1933), "At the old Ural factory" (1937).
Sculpture. In this area, the sculpture "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" (1937) by V. Mukhina has become a symbol of the time.
