Gutkin: The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic

When the war was over Russia was ready for a dose of normalcy. The pure revolutionaries and those that sided with the revolutionaries were prepared to reap great rewards for their efforts and the bureaucracy just installed was set for them. The average person that was not a revolutionary or an artist in the avant-garde was not prepared for anything but living a much more cosy life that was similar to the the kulaks that they ousted and the byt that they maligned. The demand for better clothes and a nice home and good food was increasing. 92

For the revolutionaries the demand for this kind of life was against what they felt they had fought for. They had expected that the new human would come about automatically with the revolution that promised it. The rise of this kind of demand was tantamount to a bourgeois counter revolution and setting back the communism that was promised. The lack of spirit for the pure communist way was just as damning as the lack of ability to live without the physical comfort. 93

The problem made it all the way up the ranks and troubled Lenin and Krupskaya. She taught that a communist should be prepared to give up the comforts of the home if the party needed it. They fought the focus on human comforts by changing the access to comforts that the party members got. They also passed directives that mandated the articles not to show many of the comforts in the newspapers from shoes to food. They were hoping to make a distiction between the old way of byt and the new way of the soviet man. The problems with food and housing shortage that was continually a problem in the soviet union was not just a result of the push for military and industry or the problems with a centrally planned economy. The problems, to what extent they actually played a role in the real life were ideological issues between the socialist ideal and the material goods of life. The idea that the material world would become no more of a bother to the communist man than the ideological world was assumed. Food and clothing and home were to be non-issues for all of mankind. 93

The avant-garde that became the movers in the LEVFRONT and futurist movements were not making just art, but they were trying to form a new way of life for the people. They felt that this byt had not only formed the way we lived in the specific, as in clothes or homes, but also presuposed a value system that was outdated and not fit for the new man. They called for the end to the bytoviks and the romantic novelists and symbolists. 94

When the civil war was over the political side of things took a break from the war styled rhetoric and game the people a respite in NEP, but the avant-gard that was grew out of this era kept on with the attack and kept using the same war-like vocabulary. 94

The Levfront took to the people to remake the minds of the people. They hoped to remove the bourgeois cozy aspects of people's apartments and living spaces and wanted to lead them to a higher life. They wanted to replace icons with Marx's picture and remove the samovars, the pianos and pillows. The were at war against the "ugly philistine aesthetic" that was against the cheap crap that most people fill their apartments with. They started creating household items that were both good and functional and not just nice looking or comfortable. 95 They wanted their items to represent the dynamic new life that the new man would lead. Art was coinciding with the everyday. 96

They were the forebearers of the socialist Realist aesthetic. They wanted to show the "reality in its revolutionary development." They were trying not to just show byt - "in its inertia and dependence on an established patterns of things, but bytie - a diametrically perceived reality which is in a state of perpetual formation, reality understood as advancement toward the commune which is not to be forgotten for a single minute. 96

They wanted to eradicate byt by restructuring it within the factory and the factory within the society which is under communism. 96 This, thus sought to put the family and art under the control of the party and the state. It became the artist's job to describe society and life correctly to show the new everyday world, and thus became closer to the new Socialist Realist view.