Page 186 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 186
Ideology in the 20th Century: studies of literary and social discourses and practices
exaggeration of truth lying at the core of the narrative world. This is, in a
way, why Soviet dissident critic Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) stated in
his On Socialist Realism, as early as 1959, that socialist realism is a ‘loath-
some literary salad’ (Tertz 1960, 91). In other words, socialist realism on
the one hand hyperbolized characters, transforming them into mytho-
logical figures and, on the other hand, sold fiction as undisputed reality
and truth. The latter strategy broke all the imaginable conventions of mi-
metic projections, as any socialist realist representation claimed to consti-
tute rather than duplicate the truth. In Katerina Clark’s words, “fiction-
al, historical, and actual experience were homogenized insofar as they all
tended to be refracted through the lens of myth to form one of the arche-
typal patterns” (1981, 40). Greg Carleton underlined the effects of this
principle put forward by Clark and showed convincingly that literary
186 genres lost their specificity during socialist realism precisely as a result of
the abolishment of genre peculiarities. As the distance between fiction
and non-fiction became unnoticeable, reading conventions were destined
to follow the same path: “[s]ubordinating concerns for genre to the reifi-
cation of topoi ensures that the constitution of textual function occurs at
an antecedent and higher axis than genre per se” (1994, 1004).
But socialist realism in literature does not comprise socialist realist
literature only. Those analyses have largely grounded their arguments on
the literary corpus of the official literature of the party, commissioned
in the Soviet Union bureaus and written to fit the strict criteria initial-
ly formulated in 1932 and actively in force since 1934, when a unique
mode of representation was adopted. In communist Romania after 1946,
and officially after 1948, this high role inside the cultural field was re-
served for the “truly faithful, or those whom the truly faithful had giv-
en this privilege to” (Goldiș 2011, 17). A paradoxical guideline for crea-
tivity, socialist realism was, in fact, a slaughterhouse for literature of the
past and present. It is possible to claim that no other ideology has set
such direct goals in reorganizing world literature and the bourgeois liter-
ary canon as the Soviet state-planned culture. While modern literatures
in Europe have established their canonical figures through what Fran-
co Moretti has called ‘blind canon makers’ (2000, 210), the Soviet Union
and the annexed Eastern European cultures after World War II did an-
ything but that. However, the process of selection and production of lit-
erature should not be seen only against this one-way negotiation of lit-
erary space alone; the general taste of the masses and the international
scene undoubtedly also played a crucial role, no matter how convincing-
ly Boris Groys argues the opposite by stating that “socialist realism was
exaggeration of truth lying at the core of the narrative world. This is, in a
way, why Soviet dissident critic Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) stated in
his On Socialist Realism, as early as 1959, that socialist realism is a ‘loath-
some literary salad’ (Tertz 1960, 91). In other words, socialist realism on
the one hand hyperbolized characters, transforming them into mytho-
logical figures and, on the other hand, sold fiction as undisputed reality
and truth. The latter strategy broke all the imaginable conventions of mi-
metic projections, as any socialist realist representation claimed to consti-
tute rather than duplicate the truth. In Katerina Clark’s words, “fiction-
al, historical, and actual experience were homogenized insofar as they all
tended to be refracted through the lens of myth to form one of the arche-
typal patterns” (1981, 40). Greg Carleton underlined the effects of this
principle put forward by Clark and showed convincingly that literary
186 genres lost their specificity during socialist realism precisely as a result of
the abolishment of genre peculiarities. As the distance between fiction
and non-fiction became unnoticeable, reading conventions were destined
to follow the same path: “[s]ubordinating concerns for genre to the reifi-
cation of topoi ensures that the constitution of textual function occurs at
an antecedent and higher axis than genre per se” (1994, 1004).
But socialist realism in literature does not comprise socialist realist
literature only. Those analyses have largely grounded their arguments on
the literary corpus of the official literature of the party, commissioned
in the Soviet Union bureaus and written to fit the strict criteria initial-
ly formulated in 1932 and actively in force since 1934, when a unique
mode of representation was adopted. In communist Romania after 1946,
and officially after 1948, this high role inside the cultural field was re-
served for the “truly faithful, or those whom the truly faithful had giv-
en this privilege to” (Goldiș 2011, 17). A paradoxical guideline for crea-
tivity, socialist realism was, in fact, a slaughterhouse for literature of the
past and present. It is possible to claim that no other ideology has set
such direct goals in reorganizing world literature and the bourgeois liter-
ary canon as the Soviet state-planned culture. While modern literatures
in Europe have established their canonical figures through what Fran-
co Moretti has called ‘blind canon makers’ (2000, 210), the Soviet Union
and the annexed Eastern European cultures after World War II did an-
ything but that. However, the process of selection and production of lit-
erature should not be seen only against this one-way negotiation of lit-
erary space alone; the general taste of the masses and the international
scene undoubtedly also played a crucial role, no matter how convincing-
ly Boris Groys argues the opposite by stating that “socialist realism was
