Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses

Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures

ANTHEM SERIES ON RUSSIAN, EAST EUROPEAN AND EURASIAN STUDIES

The Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies publishes original research on the economy, politics, sociology, anthropology and history of the region. The series aims to promote critical scholarship in the field, and has built a reputation for uncompromising editorial and production standards. The breadth of the series reflects our commitment to promoting original scholarship on Russian and East European studies to a global audience.

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Editorial Board

Bradley F. Abrams – President, Czechoslovak Studies Association, USA

Jan C. Behrends – Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, Germany

Dennis Deletant – Georgetown University, USA

Tomasz Kamusella – University of St Andrews, UK

Walter G. Moss – Eastern Michigan University, USA

Marshall T. Poe – University of Iowa, USA

Arfon Rees – University of Birmingham, UK

Maria Todorova – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures

Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses

Edited by

Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol

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Names: Dobrenko, E. A. (Evgeny Aleksandrovich), editor. | Jonsson-Skradol, Natalia.

Title: Socialist realism in Central and Eastern European literatures: institutions, dynamics, discourses / edited by Evgeny Dobrenko, Natalia Jonsson-Skradol.

Description: London; New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2018. | Series: Anthem series on Russian, East European and Eurasian studies; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017058324 | ISBN 9781783086979 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Europe, Eastern – Intellectual life. | Europe, Eastern – Cultural policy. | Socialist realism in literature. | European literature – History and criticism. | East European literature – History and criticism. | Europe, Eastern – Politics and government – 1945– | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Eastern. | LITERARY CRITICISM / European / Eastern (see also Russian & Former Soviet Union). | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Communism & Socialism.

Classification: LCC DJK50. S635 2018 | DDC 809/.894709045–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058324

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-697-9 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-697-1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Our thanks go to the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, which funded the research project Literary Pax Sovietica: National Revival and Cultural Unification in Post-War Eastern Europe, conducted by Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol at the University of Sheffield in 2013–17. Under the auspices of this research grant both the original conferences and the edited volume were planned. Additional financial support from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the International Visegrad Fund, the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies, the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund and the University of Sheffield made it possible to organize two international conferences at the University of Sheffield, which provided the initial inspiration for the present volume and where earlier versions of most of the texts collected here were presented. The first conference, Socialist Realism in Eastern and Central European Literatures: Origins, Institutions, Discourses (2013), was followed by Literary Pax Sovietica: Late Stalinism and East European Literatures (2014). Without the assistance from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Charles University in Prague, Casimir the Great University in Bydgoszcz (Poland), the University of Trnava (Slovakia), the Institute of Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Institute of World Literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Czech Literature at the Czech Academy of Sciences, the conferences would not have been such a success. Our heartfelt thanks go to Tamás Scheibner of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, whose contribution to the conferences from which this volume emerged was indispensable and whose continuous dedication to the project, professionalism and tact are greatly appreciated. We want to express our special thanks to Jesse Savage and to Stuart Murray of Anthem Press for skilful editing and invaluable help with various aspects of this volume’s completion.

INTRODUCTION

Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol

Soviet cultural policy in Eastern Europe after World War II has been the topic of many articles, monographs and dissertations since the initial post-war years. The growth or decline of interest in the subject has often been determined by the political and social context of a specific moment, with the research focus shifting accordingly. The novelty of the theme and the extent of transformations in the European political and cultural sphere spurred the earliest studies, in which researchers focused on ‘the scope and scale of oppression and uniformity behind the Iron Curtain, as did later scholars working on the immediate postwar decade’.¹ As new academic disciplines (behaviourism, the study of cultures at a distance) and research institutions emerged at the beginning of the Cold War, scholars’ concern with literature involved reading literary texts only insofar as experts were searching for reliable information on everyday life behind the Iron Curtain. The loosening of restrictions on travel around 1956 brought with it more direct contacts and thus more focused scholarly attention to cultural policies as possible harbingers of political changes, but the general paradigm of research remained in place, the assumption being that Soviet ideology governed Soviet institutions, and the institutions were then replicated in the new satellites so that they, in their turn, could replicate and propagate the new ideology.

The next wave of interest in the subject came with the collapse of the system and the opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s. Still, the basic Sovietological premise proved to be the basis of much of the later research, even if some of the interpretations sought to go against the hitherto unanimously accepted premise of external imposition and internal (more or less forced) compliance. As an author recently noted, ‘The principal interpretative themes of this [S]‌ovietization historiography have developed around two closely-related problems. The first can be summarized under the heading of uniformity versus diversity, the second under the title of outside imposition versus indigenous development’.² The underlying premise behind this volume is that a new research paradigm is called for. What if it is not uniformity versus diversity, or imposition versus indigenous development, but both the one and the other? What if the four practices were equally indispensable for the functioning of the system – at least for as long as it kept functioning?

The writings collected in the present volume are an attempt to look at the events of the first post-war years from this both uniformity and imposition and diversity and indigenous development perspective. Recent research evidence suggests convincingly that in retrospect the introduction of the Soviet cultural model was much less the smooth endeavour it was made to appear and much more of a work in progress.³ Those in charge had to negotiate the precarious terrain of local cultural and political controversies, finding themselves caught between the pull towards tradition and the urge towards innovation in some countries, or between a sincere interest in the new concept of art and a complete refusal to accept the new rules in others. Paradoxically, the one thing all the different experiences – of introducing, or importing, or imposing the Soviet model in the specific national contexts – had in common is that in each case it was very much a give-and-take, a response to the local conditions, an acceptance of the necessity to have the originally inflexible theory accommodate the daily reality of an unfamiliar country, language and culture.

Some of the questions addressed in the present volume are: To what extent did the local versions of socialist realism actually originate in the pre-war traditions of the respective countries, and to what extent did they emerge from the political necessity of the moment? Were the new cultural institutions in any way grounded in the local traditions, or were they constructed to create these very traditions? Were the local actors actually actors, swept up in the ‘youthful enthusiasm for a Communist future [which] was widespread among middle-class intellectuals, in East and West alike’,⁴ or were they merely pawns in the hands of the Soviets?

Contributors to this volume are experts on different countries of the former Soviet bloc, and each chapter addresses specific aspects of cultural Sovietization. The structure is dictated by the particularity of the subject matter. The distinctly Soviet concepts that were imported from Moscow may have sounded appropriately uniform on paper and in speeches, but the reality behind them differed significantly from country to country, and it was certainly different, to a greater or lesser extent, from what these concepts were supposed to refer to when viewed from the ‘centre’. One such concept – that of socialist realism – was central to the whole endeavour. Without a definition more precise than ‘the new artistic method’ for the new society, ‘socialist realism’ was an umbrella term for the ideologically correct spirit of literature and the arts, whether it be products of creative activity or the theory according to which such products were supposed to be created, institutions supervising artistic endeavours or the way these endeavours were talked about in the press, official reports and speeches.

Traditionally literature had been central to the construction of national and political identities in Eastern and Central Europe.⁵ However, up until now the publications that offer in-depth analysis of the continuities and discontinuities of the literary and cultural developments in the countries in question have been for the most part limited to individual national contexts and often written in the respective languages for local audiences.⁶ As to works of a more comparative nature, they are unquestionably valuable in showing why the deceptively convenient model of total uniformity does not do justice to what was actually happening in practice, but they are – for understandable reasons – usually limited to a comparison of a pair of countries that share some aspects of cultural history.⁷ Finally, publications that are broad in scope and include contributions by a variety of authors – though an invaluable source of rarely available factual and analytical information on often marginalized cultural traditions – tend to have an encyclopaedic structure, thus leaving it to the interested reader to do the work of determining specific core issues and tracing the analysis of them in the entries on specific cultures.⁸

In this volume, we opted for a form of presentation that would make it possible, on the one hand, to introduce enough diversity so that the texts cover examples representative of the whole range of cultural contexts that fell within the Soviet zone of influence and, on the other, to ensure that the contributions are focused enough, conceptually and temporally, to allow for a productive dialogue on the origins of a whole era in modern European cultural history.

Two words are important here: ‘dialogue’ and ‘origins’, or rather the other way around: ‘origins’ and ‘dialogue’. The origins of socialist realism to which the title refers can be understood in more than one sense. There are, of course, the ‘origins’ in the sense of an official, clearly designated moment of beginning, and that would be the imposition of the doctrine by the Soviet authorities in the first post-war years, marked in each country by a specific event – a declaration at a writers’ congress, the publication of an official statement, a speech made by a key cultural official. But there are also ‘origins’ in a vaguer, less straightforward sense of the word, pointing to those moments, or personalities, or literary works, or styles of writing in a particular literary tradition that marked – or could be chosen post factum as if they had marked – the awakening of local artists’ interest in the Soviet creative enterprise. The relations between origins in the first sense and origins in the second sense were by no means self-evident, and the creation of Eastern European post-war literatures was to a great extent dependent on how successful the master ideologues were in propagating the connection between the two.

‘Dialogue’ refers, of course, to the already-mentioned premise that the imposition of socialist realism was in practice a result of negotiations between the parties involved – that is, of a dialogue. But ‘dialogue’ also best describes the principle according to which this volume has been structured. Without necessarily engaging in a direct discussion with each other, the texts often approach similar issues from slightly different perspectives, thus creating a kind of telescopic vision of the subjects discussed. In the introduction to a collection of articles on the public sphere in the Eastern bloc, the editors – Gábor Rittersporn, Jan Behrends and Malte Rolf – plead for the writing of ‘an histoire croisée of Soviet-type societies’,⁹ that is, a kind of history that would be equally sensitive to what the different societies had in common and to the differences between them; to what they shared with the powerful ‘centre’ and to what made each of them unique. A history of this kind would recognize that parallels between some of the societies were dividing lines between others, and what were borders in some cases were channels of influence in others.

The first post-war decade, the years of late Stalinism, on which the contributions to this volume focus, covers a whole era in the political and cultural history of (Eastern) Europe. The new cultural norms, the new vocabulary for describing these norms and the new institutions that functioned to regulate the production of this vocabulary, were established, reached their heyday and started to decline in the years that separated the establishment of the new power from the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the events in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The three parts of the present volume – ‘Institutions’, ‘Dynamics’ and ‘Discourses’ – address the three pillars of the theory and practice of the new cultural policy. The chapters in the first part – ‘Institutions’ – explore, from different perspectives and in different contexts, the paths towards the creation of an institutional framework for all matters literary and, in a broader sense, cultural. The authors look at the new roles and responsibilities that replaced the old ones in the domains of censorship, editing, publishing, professional contacts and hierarchies; at the ceremonies and rituals that first helped introduce and sustain, and then maintained, the illusion of a new method of creating and reading literature. The chapters in the second part – ‘Dynamics’ – look at the changes in the literary sphere of the countries not only as a result of decisions made by either the Soviet or the national governments, but as responses to political transformations in the countries in question, and as an attempt to adapt to the post-war reality by revising, transforming and updating previously popular theories and practices of artistic engagement with the world. It was often a thin line between reviving a tradition and revising it, bringing the national canon back to life and creating a new one, developing a new philosophy of artistic freedom inspired by the progressive European tradition and making the new cultures hermetically closed to any foreign influence. The third part – ‘Discourses’ – deals with how whatever transformations and routines that were currently on the agenda shaped the language in which these very transformations and routines, the past and the future, were to be talked about and how this language was to be understood and used by both producers and consumers of literature.

Hans Günther’s chapter, which opens the volume, covers the whole ‘socialist realist era’ in Eastern Europe – the years from the introduction of the method to its demise, which happened at different moments in different countries. The author’s premise is that in order to understand both the origins and the end of socialist realism in the region, one should consider, first of all, the moment in the doctrine’s development at which it was imported into the satellites and, second, the particularities of the national cultural and literary traditions. The fact that the Soviet theory of creativity was introduced into Eastern Europe at a time when it was at its most dogmatic – combined with the determination of some leading intellectuals in the respective countries to restore the disrupted continuity of the national tradition – increased the tension between the imported model and the local striving towards intellectual independence. The author looks closely at several instances when the socialist realist idea effectively came to an end on a particular day, with a particular statement by a respected intellectual, whether Miroslav Krleža’s speech in Yugoslavia in 1952, Jan Kott’s speeches and articles in 1956, or the conference on Franz Kafka in Czechoslovakia in May 1963. Regardless of what the specific time and context were, these events marked the termination of the reign of socialist realism in Eastern Europe as an institution, even if it was to remain as a concept in the official rhetoric of the countries for decades to come.

Failed attempts to create a unified cultural and literary sphere in the ‘second world’ are also at the centre of Rossen Djagalov’s contribution, which deals with two special features of the institutionalization of literature in the Soviet bloc: the unusual formats in which the new cultural empire was to be moulded, and the frequent substitution of individuals with appropriate life histories for office holders with clearly defined functions. The starting point of the researcher’s analysis of archival materials is that the bureaucracy of Soviet post-war internationalism was literature-centred and, as such, it looked to create institutions that would promote the vision of a unity of cultures (the ‘People’s Republic of Letters’) and not just of a political bloc. Such institutions were international in their very basis, a good example being the International Congress of Writers from People’s Democracies that was planned for July 1948. Even though (or possibly because) the event never took place, the detailed plans for its organization offer an excellent idea of how the Soviet authorities envisioned the ideal cultural cooperation between the satellites and the centre in that special format that was on the border between a strictly organized, formal procedure and informal, personal communication. The congress was supposed to be the platform for subsequent publications on matters pertaining to the literary culture of the ‘Second World’; it was also to become the seal of approval for those who would be invited and would thus become the ‘official masters’ of the new literature in their respective countries. The plans for the congress, in Djagalov’s view, mark a point of transition from the cosmopolitanism of 1930s Moscow and the cultural pan-Slavism of the earlier 1940s to a new form of cultural internationalism, which would be based on a format habitually associated with a free exchange of opinions, although in this case it was, of course, to be carefully orchestrated and strictly controlled.

Realizing the idea of cultural internationalism became especially challenging when a particular satellite was becoming more and more reluctant to cooperate, as the next chapter shows. Taking Jan Kott’s speech on ‘Mythology and Truth’ in March 1956 as one of his central reference points, Evgeny Dobrenko cites this particular incident as an example of a series of ‘explosive’ interventions by Polish intellectuals that set off a snowball effect when the initial intention to criticize the institutions in charge of the implementation of socialist realism was understood as – or became, or brought about – a criticism of the method and of the system. The chapter traces the events that preceded and followed a revision of the Stalinist principles of creativity by leading Polish intellectuals in 1955–56, including Soviet responses in the press and on the institutional level, that is, via Soviet representatives in the ‘troubled’ country. The interrelationship among the paradigm of creativity and the political system and institutions set up to promote, regulate and supervise the application of the theory was exceedingly complex. Poland was exemplary of the somewhat paradoxical situation in many of the satellites: those who were on the side of the idea and believed in the importance of art serving the idea turned against the institutions regulating this service and the system supporting these institutions.

Pavel Janáček also takes up the issue of continuity versus discontinuity of a national (in his case, Czechoslovakian) cultural tradition. His approach is particularly challenging in being at odds with the traditional view: instead of emphasizing the rupture in the course of the development of the national literature and culture, Janáček suggests that it might be more useful to look at the continuity in the institutionalization of ‘literary management’ – or, in other words, institutions of censorship and related procedures. The end of the liberal democratic First Republic in Czechoslovakia in 1938 marked the beginning of an era of authoritarian censorship that, with some minor changes, persisted until 1958. This system of dispersed censorship, as the author defines it, was characterized by three main features: the perception of literature and culture as a national project; an excessive bureaucratization of the editing/censorship; and a massive outreach of censorship, not just in terms of pre-publication procedures, but also as a set of physical measures aimed at the removal of undesirable volumes from public libraries. Janáček suggests, somewhat counter-intuitively, that the creation of a central supervising body in the late 1940s weakened the power of censorship, and it was a subsequent return to the already established practices of literary and cultural management that kept the system going for so long.

Vladislav Zubok considers yet another form of institutionalization that Soviet internationalism brought with it: that of an authority set up to regulate international cultural relations. The body in question was VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries), and while its heyday in the 1930s has been the subject of scholarly interest, it is usually accepted that following World War II the organization practically ceased to exist in everything but name. Zubok takes issue with this view and argues that a closer look at the post-war activities of, and personnel changes in VOKS can help throw light on the implications for Soviet international relations of shifts in the cultural policy of late Stalinism. Two new trends were gaining momentum in the Soviet Union in parallel, and both had major significance for the shaping of the future of Soviet cultural internationalism. Domestically, the anti-Western campaign dealt a hard blow to previously established networks with Western cultural activists, however sympathetic to the Soviet project. Internationally, the shift of emphasis from cultural propaganda aimed at the West to establishing ties with the new Eastern European satellites called for a complete restructuring of the model of international propaganda on how life was lived and art was made in the Soviet Union. Looking closely at circumstances around the 1947 visit to the USSR of American writer John Steinbeck and his companion photographer Robert Capa, Zubok points to a watershed moment in the reorganization of the whole mechanism of Soviet international cultural propaganda.

VOKS is also a central reference in Tatiana Volokitina’s analysis of Soviet cultural relations with Bulgaria after the war. What should have been a pretty straightforward case of one-to-one copying, the historian claims, in practice turned out to be a much more intricate web of sometimes one-sided, sometimes mutual influences and misguided attempts at building up a smoothly functioning cultural partnership between two very similar traditions. As Volokitina’s archival research shows, if the relationship between the cultural authorities of the two states were far from straightforward, it was not for lack of trying on both sides. The eagerness of Soviet officials to promote socialist realism in all its forms and shapes was matched by the willingness of their Bulgarian colleagues to learn, and quite often to share experience. There was, however, hardly a level of interaction between the two parties where things went smoothly. Whether it was about finding writers with ‘correct’ biographies for personal contacts, requesting and sending out the ‘right’ kind of literature, having the ‘right’ kind of books read in the ‘correct’ way, adopting the ‘desirable’ practices in the writers’ union – the road was fraught with surprises. It is exactly for this reason that, as the scholar argues, the history of socialist realism in Eastern Europe should not be limited to measuring its success or failure as a practice of state censorship. It was, more than anything else, expressive of social dynamics, geopolitical changes and the creative challenges that post-war Europe was facing.

Anne Hartmann’s chapter concludes the section on institutions and examines the case of the Soviet Occupation Zone in East Germany before the zone became known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The transitional nature of this geographical and political entity was not limited to the official designations of the territory and the body governing it (that body being SMAD – the Soviet Military Administration in Germany). As Hartmann’s analysis shows, when it comes to politics, the culture and politics of culture during the whole period between 1945 and 1948 involved unlikely liaisons and experiments and attempts at an institutionalization of processes that had never been institutionalized before. At the centre of the chapter are the figures of Soviet cultural officers who, in their very being, exemplified many of the paradoxes of the era. They were passionate socialists and Stalinists – but also firm believers in the cultural revival of Germany; they had a deep knowledge of German cultural heritage and an absolute conviction in the superiority of Soviet culture when it came to the future. They saw no contradiction at all between these sympathies and affinities, but as Soviet domestic policy shifted in the direction of increased isolationism and the anti-cosmopolitan campaign gathered momentum, the enlightened, passionate and ideologically loyal cultural officers were among the first victims of the new agenda. Those very personnel changes Zubok discusses in his contribution are also touched upon here, but the focus is on the aftermath for East Germany: the change from the relatively pluralistic (though ideologically inspired) policies to authoritarian ones, the organization of increasingly uniform cultural events – all of this culminating in the celebration of socialist realism as the only authentically socialist creative method. Because of the distinctive position of East Germany/the GDR in the Soviet bloc, the implications of these rapid changes exceeded the borders of the country and were illustrative of a deeper crisis at the core of the Stalinist international enterprise.

Opening the section on Dynamics, the following chapter addresses the intertwining between personal biographies of leading German writers of the 1930s–1950s and the cultural policy in East Germany. Unlike Anne Hartmann, Helen Fehervary emphasizes not the growing uniformity of creative expression but the implications of the fact that East German arts and letters were allowed to be not just socialist, but also (or primarily) anti-fascist. The return from exile of major German writers and artists to the Soviet sector of Germany after the war provided a solid foundation for the advancement of East German culture as an heir to the German humanistic cultural heritage, but it also created a multiplicity of personal, sometimes conflicted, narratives and visions of what the distinctly German version of socialist art could, and should, be.

Benjamin Robinson, too, chooses to look at the distinctly German way into socialism through the lens of a personal story. The figure at the centre of his piece is that of ‘national Bolshevik’ Ernst Niekisch, whose career as a thinker spans different (post-1918 and post-1945) versions of pax – forms of a peaceful coexistence of states and national entities. Niekisch’s vision of nationalism as a means of unifying rival groups and of establishing non-partisan legitimacy that would be superior to any form of class divisions addressed theories and practices of affective engagement, class consciousness and national culture. In his thinking, traditionally socialist realist notions (such as that of planning) and the traditional socialist realist character of the worker acquired an unexpected dimension as concepts and figures of the European, and more specifically German, heritage of engagement with the realities of a post-world-war world.

The issue of tradition, within and beyond national boundaries, is a topic that becomes further complicated when state borders do not coincide with the boundaries of a nation, a culture, a language. Such is the case examined by Imre Balázs, who also accords a lot of attention to connections between experiences of ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’ that marked the implementation of socialist realism in the region. Here, the writers were Hungarian, but they created their most significant works pre–World War II and beyond the borders of Hungary. Having made their reputations as writers by being active in the avant-garde circles of Central and Western Europe, after the war many of them found themselves to be representatives of a ‘minority literature’ (Hungarian literature in Romania). The situation was somewhat paradoxical, as these were the writers who had been closest to socialist literature before the war, but who, because they had been avant-gardists, had trouble being integrated into the new socialist realist canon. Balázs is particularly interested in the dynamics of intersections between styles that might have been more similar than the new regime was willing to admit, and between the writers who chose, or had to choose, different ways of coping with the new demands imposed upon their future and their past, their creativity and their private biographies. Evoking the same question of continuity versus discontinuity that some of the other contributors also touch upon, Balázs argues that it is by looking at the personal stories of some of the key figures that we have a better chance of understanding the shifts, the intersections, the growing together and the growing apart of the different canons, styles, forms of living and creating.

The question of continuity and discontinuity was even more central to a very particular experiment in the implementation of socialist realism – that of Yugoslavia, or, more specifically, Croatia. Somewhat provocatively, Ivana Peruško argues that, contrary to the traditional view, the Sovietization of her home country had a positive effect on post-war literature and the arts in that it was a wake-up call, a moment that shook up the otherwise somewhat dormant literary life, if only for the simple reason that copying the Soviet model demanded a growth in the literacy levels of the population. One of the possible explanations of the minimal negative effect that the rapid Sovietization of 1945–48 had on Croatian letters is that those few years marked the beginning as well as the end of the process, which after the Stalin-Tito break was followed by a de-Sovietization and a turn to the West. The particularity of the ‘Croatian style’ of socialist realism is that it had simply no time to materialize in practice. Just one novel was written that could be classified as ‘socialist realist’, and the rest of it was but talk about socialist realism, whether in speeches by ideologues or in the writings of literary theorists. Then, following the split between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in 1948–49, talk about socialist realism became talk against socialist realism, with key cultural figures calling for an alternative way for Croatian and Yugoslav literature. Croatian socialist realism, if so, stands out as a special case clearly marked by the ‘before’ and the ‘after’, a point of reference for subsequent negations rather than a point of departure – an example of what did not work rather than what did. But, as always, that which is absent is worth looking at as much as what is present, and in this sense, the little-studied and short-lived phenomenon of Croatian socialist realism is definitely worth examining.

David Norris also makes a case for the unique position of Yugoslav literature in the socialist (realist) canon. While agreeing with Ivana Peruško on the importance of the fact that the Soviet-typed model of socialist realism in Yugoslavia was short-lived at best, he places the emphasis elsewhere. For Norris, the importance of the exclusion of Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc in terms of cultural and literary policy was primarily in that the cultural authorities and writers themselves were left to work out their own, alternative mode of socialist literature, which would be best adapted to the needs of Yugoslavia as a socialist country of a non-Soviet type. Out of this need arose a special kind of socialist literature which, though not bearing many markers of socialist realism, still had a central role in the creation of a new society. In this specific case, the new society meant a consolidated, nationally conscious community that would be acutely aware of its heroic past, having been liberated from fascism and from the oppression of capitalist exploitation not by a foreign army but by the sheer will of national partisan units. Unified literature for a unified nation – such was the motto of Yugoslav letters, and this is what it remained for the rest of the existence of Yugoslavia as a supposedly socialist state. Thus, even though the general outcome might be similar to what it was in other socialist countries, with the machinery of state censorship suppressing dissident voices or alternative narratives, the driving force behind the literary enterprise was quite different in Yugoslavia compared to other countries of the bloc.

Using literature to commemorate a heroic past of the ideologically desirable kind is also the topic of René Bílik’s contribution. The scholar analyses the debates that accompanied the introduction (or imposition) of a new kind of literature in Czechoslovakia and, more specifically, in Slovakia immediately after the war. Of central importance in those debates were the topics of a ‘mighty Slavdom and pan-Slavic reciprocity’, with authors, critics and cultural functionaries alike looking for ways to ensure a commemoration of the national literary and cultural heritage that would correspond to a vision of Czechoslovakia, and Slovakia, as part of the Slavic union of nations. This ‘East versus West’ debate provided the background against which the first exercises in socialist realist writing were performed. The author is particularly interested in questions of genre and the role of debates on, and practices of, genre writing in the particular cultural context.

Unlike other countries, Hungary may not have had to face the challenge of creating a unified national memory to keep together disparate national groups. However, as Melinda Kalmár’s chapter makes obvious, the cultural and political heritage of the country positioned in the centre of Europe made for a colourful assembly of interest groups, social and political movements as well as artistic unions, each of which had a particular vision of the best version of the future and of the best way to get there. Quite a few of these groups were close to the Soviets in their preferences, or so it seemed until the time of ‘great cultural debates’ that erupted in the late 1940s and that were, to a great extent, orchestrated from Moscow. The debates around the works and aesthetic theories of some of the key cultural figures of Hungary (among them the composer Béla Bartók and the philosopher György Lukács) effectively put an end to the idea of a culturally pluralist society but, at the same time, by making artists and the interested public recognize that the creation of an authentically socialist realist culture was a virtual impossibility, they indirectly brought about a subsequent loosening of the hard grip of the party authorities on cultural matters. A detailed analysis of close contacts between intellectuals and party leaders against the background of political and aesthetic debates of the time offers a cross section of the processes of Sovietization in a country with a rich cultural tradition – a story of Sovietization that can be seen simultaneously as a success and as a failure.

The first chapter in the section on Discourses continues the Hungarian theme. Tamás Scheibner’s contribution touches upon many of the issues discussed in Melinda Kalmár’s text: the rival groups of writers with alternative visions of creativity, debates as to the degree of a writer’s artistic autonomy in a socialist state, the overlapping, or lack thereof, of control from Moscow and local interests and priorities. However, by choosing to focus on the figure of György Lukács and his activities in post-1945 Hungary, Scheibner comes to a conclusion different from that of many other researchers of the Hungarian literary and cultural scene of the time. According to the scholar, the world-renowned theorist of literature had quite an ambiguous role in the introduction of socialist realism in his home country: while promoting the benefits of a pluralist approach for as long as such an approach was called for, Lukács advocated a strict control over literature and the arts in a socialist state, and after 1948 turned into a proponent of an even more radical implementation of socialist realism. Lukács’s fall from grace is to be explained by the fact that, from the point of view of the Soviet authorities, he embodied a wrong kind of discourse when it came to the propagation of socialist realism. Rooted in the European tradition and phrased in the language of high culture, his ‘idiom’ could not remain acceptable for long.

In the chapter on the rituals of self-criticism in the Bulgarian Writers’ Union, Plamen Doinov closely reads numerous archival sources from 1944 to the late 1980s, showing that the imposition of practices of self-criticism on all professional groups, but especially on the writers’ community, had as its goal the acquisition and practice of a certain type of language and style. For writers, it was a matter of acquiring a new idiom by which, even before they put pen to paper, they could define themselves as ‘new people’ and ‘new writers’. The multiple forms and contexts of self-criticism (from desperate pleas for forgiveness in private letters addressed to those in power, to ritualized confessions in the narrow professional circle of fellow writers, to widely publicized ritualistic acknowledgements of one’s past ‘sins’ in front of a huge audience) covered nearly all possible forms of engagement within one’s own professional community, with the new power, with readers, with one’s own works and with the critics of one’s own works. Seen from this perspective, socialist realism was not just about a particular form of narrative, but about the modality of perceiving the world – and perceiving oneself in the world. As key figures in the propagation of the new way of life, writers played a particularly important role in this.

The focus of the next contribution is metadiscourse – encoding, communication by means of extra-textual signs. While the other contributors mostly talk about how the Soviet model was transposed onto Eastern Europe, Evgeny Ponomarev is interested in how that very socialist realism that had been exported into Eastern Europe was then reintroduced to the Soviet public as the product of a supposedly organic development of the national literatures. The author offers a survey of Soviet literary ‘thick journals’, which from the late 1940s to the early 1950s featured poems, stories and excerpts from novels by Eastern European authors. Obliged to respond promptly and efficiently to the most minute shifts in the Soviet cultural policy abroad, the journals’ editors had to be sensitive not only to the content of the pieces selected, but also to the names and biographies of the authors, the form of presentation (Arranged alphabetically or by relative significance? By the names of the authors or countries? With or without biographical notes? Translated by a well-established Soviet poet or ‘just’ by a professional translator?). These subtle means of communication with, on the one hand, supervising authorities, and on the other, the readers, were of primary importance for establishing a pattern of talking about the new language of socialist realism – even if neither of the implied addressees was actually aware of a message being addressed to them.

Vít Schmarc’s reflections on the positive hero in Czech production novels of the late 1940s and early 1950s invite the reader to consider both the advantages and limitations of applying analyses of the Soviet version of socialist realism to other literatures. Even though the Soviet case was, undoubtedly, the model for the others, there were, by necessity more often than by choice, significant differences between the Soviet idea(l) of the positive hero and the heroes of other national literatures, of which the Czech case is an example. The problematic situation that defined the origins of socialist realism in the satellites – when, on the one hand, Soviet literature was celebrated as the example to follow and, on the other, no clear guidelines were offered as to how national versions of the same model were to be created – left many writers unsure as to what exactly was expected from them. The task of celebrating the national, but also promoting the socialist, was not an easy one. In general, the figure of the worker featured as an embodiment of the future in the present, of all the positive qualities one could have as an individual and a member of the new society. Hence the promotion of the Czech version of the socialist production novel, which might, at a first glance, seem indistinguishable from its Soviet prototypes, but which, as the researcher claims, revealed a lot about the relative differences in the (self-)positioning of Czech literature vis-à-vis the Soviet prototype. How and why this happened can best be seen if one looks closely at the kinds of positive heroes in the Czech novels and compares them with the Soviet models. The Czech hero might well appear and sound much like the Soviet one, but it is through minor differences that his figure conveyed certain messages to the readers – citizens of the new state.

Positive heroes of the future were a concern not only of the writers, but also of the readers of a newly socialist country, as Nenad Ivić shows in his chapter on the shaping of the Croatian literary canon in the first post-war years. A whole generation of ex-soldiers, young people in need of orientation in life, was eager to learn and to read. The problem was, however, that it was not so easy to know what were the right books of, and for, the new era. Ivić thinks it unfortunate that in more recent studies much of the literature created in Croatia in the first post-war years is easily dismissed as low-quality products of immediate political necessities, and he pleads for a closer look at the kind of works the political and social changes called for. From his point of view, it is not only what these works said that is of importance, but what was said about them, how the new values were debated and promoted and why certain texts, motifs and plots were deemed more appropriate for introduction into the social consciousness – in other words, how the discursive field of the new literary reality was constructed. Ivić’s concise analysis offers a detailed interpretation of the literary and cultural debates of the time, clearly showing the importance of the period not only for a study of socialist realism in Eastern Europe but also for a history of the sociology of reading and a history of cultural discourses.

Taking East Germany/the early GDR as an example, Natalia Jonsson-Skradol looks at the encounters between producers, consumers and managers of literature as agents in the creation of a new public sphere – a space that was supposedly for open public debate, but where in reality the new social, political, personal and creative roles were being introduced and practiced. Central to the analysis is the role of the Society of German–Soviet Friendship in the organization of cultural events. The coming together of both producers and consumers of the new literature as ‘friends’ defined a qualitatively new model of communication by means of, around, and about literature as a form of (re-)education, when one general concept defined a whole discursive field – genres of writing, topics, references, forms of reading, subjects of discussions, questions to be asked and answers to be given. In the circular semiotics of the new society, ‘the word’ (or concept, or idea) was quite literally ‘in the beginning’ – after which it materialized as an institution, as a state structure.

Following World War II, Eastern Europe was in ruins – literally and metaphorically. Nation-building in the new nations that had just recently experienced a collapse of empires, of half-fascist and fascist regimes, state terror, rampant nationalism and anti-Semitism and the crash of a newly regained independence, was even more challenging than achieving economic recovery. These deeply traumatic experiences demanded to be worked through – a process complicated by the fact that the countries found themselves practically under foreign occupation. In these conditions especially, literature acquired a special importance. As a realm of language, historical consciousness and political imaginary, literature was the foundation stone of any project of nation-building.

Eastern European literatures of the time were full of tensions, the main ones of which are analysed in this volume. This includes the tension between the internationalist Soviet imperial ideology and nationalistic impulses – the basis of the (re)construction of the young nations – as well as the critical tension between the right-wing nationalist ideologies that followed the demise of fascism and the reality of peasant countries and patriarchal societies. There was also the problem related to the dynamics of the political and aesthetic project as a whole: revolutionary transformations demanded revolutionary art, but the countries in question had a long established aesthetic tradition of realism and the short-lived history of avant-garde interwar movements, which now had no place in the conventional Soviet context. Hence the difficulty the avant-gardists faced while fitting into the new artistic norms, and the problem of the discourse of modernization as a whole. Yet another important conflict was that between the unifying Soviet cultural project and the variety of traditions in Eastern Europe, some of which were ancient, while others were quite young, some of which were open to modernist trends, while others were still at the stage of peasant enlightenment.

Even this short overview of challenges the Soviet projects of nation-building and cultural unification faced in post-war Eastern Europe makes it clear how complex the whole endeavour was. The contributions in this volume address these questions and others. In many instances, this is the first time English-speaking readers will be introduced to the latest research in the field, supported by extensive references to previously inaccessible archival sources.

Notes

1 Babiracki, ‘Interfacing the Soviet Bloc’, 377.

2 Amar, ‘Sovietization as a Civilizing Mission in the West’, 30.

3 See, for example, Clybor, Prophets of Revolution ; Babiracki, ‘Interfacing the Soviet Bloc’; the texts collected in Apor, Apor and Rees, Sovietization of Eastern Europe ; Connelly, Captive University .

4 Judt, Postwar 199.

5 See, for example, Tihanov, ‘Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe?’, in particular 77–80; Scribner, Requiem for Communism , 9; Bauman, ‘Intellectuals in East-Central Europe’, 162.

6 Examples include, but are by no means limited to, Hartmann, ‘Schriftsteller als kulturpolitische Kader’; Włodarczyk, Socrealizm ; Doinov, Sotsrealisticheski kanon ; Knapík, Únor a kultura .

7 See, for example, Śliwińska; Sozialistischer Realismus in der DDR und in Polen ; Zlateva, ‘Za i protiv sovetskiia opit’; Kupiecki, Kult Józefa Stalina w Polsce 1944–1956 .

8 Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe ; Segel, Columbia Guide .

9 Rittersporn, Behrends and Rolf, ‘Open Spaces and Public Realm’, 434.

Bibliography

Amar, Tarik Cyril. 2008. ‘Sovietization as a Civilizing Mission in the West’. In The Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period, edited by Balázs Apor, Péter Apor and E. A. Rees. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 29–45.

Apor, Balázs, Péter Apor and E. A. Rees, eds. 2008. The Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing.

Babiracki, Patryk. 2011. ‘Interfacing the Soviet Bloc: Recent Literature and New Paradigms’. Ab Imperio 4: 376–407.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 1987. ‘Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change’. Eastern European Politics and Societies 1: 2 (Spring): 162–86.

Clybor, Shawn. 2010. ‘Prophets of Revolution: Culture, Communism, and the Czech Avant-Garde, 1920–1960’. PhD dissertation, Northwestern University.

Connelly, John. 2000. Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer, eds. 2004. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Doinov, Plamen, ed. 2009. Sotsrealisticheski kanon / Alternativen kanon. Sofia: PAN.

Hartmann, Anne. 2011. ‘Schriftsteller als kulturpolitische Kader: Auswirkungen der sowjetischen Präsenz auf das kulturelle Leben in der SBZ’. In Schriftsteller als Intellektuelle: Politik und Literatur im Kalten Krieg, edited by Sven Hanuschek, Therese Hörnigk and Christine Malende. Berlin: De Gruyter, 159–72.

Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London: William Heinemann.

Knapík, Jiří. 2004. Únor a kultura: Sovětizace české kultury 1948–1950. Prague: Nakladatelství Libri.

Kupiecki, Robert. 1993. Kult Józefa Stalina w Polsce 1944–1956. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa szkolnie i pedagogiczne.

Rittersporn, Gábor T., Jan C. Behrends and Malte Rolf. 2003. ‘Open Spaces and Public Realm: Thoughts on the Public Sphere in Soviet-Type Systems’. In Public Spheres in Soviet-Type Societies, edited by Gábor T. Rittersporn, Malte Rolf and Jan C. Behrends. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 423–52.

Scribner, Charity. 2003. Requiem for Communism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Segel, Harold B. 2003. The Columbia Guide to the Literatures of Eastern Europe since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press.

Śliwińska, Katarzyna. 2005. Sozialistischer Realismus in der DDR und in Polen: Doktrin und normative Ästhetik im Vergleich. Dresden: Thalem.

Tihanov, Galin. 2004. ‘Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?)’. Common Knowledge 10: 1 (Winter): 61–81.

Włodarczyk, Wojciech. 1986. Socrealizm: Sztuka polska w latach 1950–1954. Paris: Libella.

Zlateva, Аnka. 2000. ‘Za i protiv sŭvetskiia opit v deinostta na tvorcheskite sŭiuzi v Bŭlgariia v kraia na 40-te i nachaloto na 50-te godini’. In Bŭlgariia i Rusiia prez XX vek: Bŭlgaro-ruski nauchni diskussii, edited by Vitka Ivanova et al. Sofia: Gutenberg, 404–17.

Part 1

INSTITUTIONS

Chapter One

HOW SOCIALIST REALISM WAS EXPORTED TO EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES AND HOW THEY GOT RID OF IT

Hans Günther

This chapter concerns debates that took place in Eastern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s that, as I believe, played a crucial role in the cultural development of the region after the war. More specifically, this is a story about how Eastern European writers tried to come to terms with socialist realism and how they strove to get rid of it. For purposes of practical convenience, ‘Eastern Europe’ refers here to all the countries that were under Soviet hegemony after the war, including the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia; discussion on the issue of Central Europe is beyond the scope of this chapter.

First of all, it is important to clarify the very definition of the socialist realist canon – a topic that Evgeny Dobrenko and I treated in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon. Canonical formations are among the strongest cultural mechanisms of stabilization, selection and exclusion. On the one hand, they form protective barriers against the ever-changing flow of time and, on the other, they select and channel various currents of tradition. Socialist realism belongs to the so-called strong canons, wherein the mechanism of automatization and disautomatization – which, according to the Russian Formalist school, dominates the evolution of literature – does not work the usual way because the canon is stabilized by ideological, religious or other strict views.

Elsewhere, I introduced a model of successive stages of the Soviet socialist realist canon.¹ First, there is the protocanon that, since the nineteenth century, was the textual reservoir of the canon proper – suffice it to mention authors like Chernyshevskii and later on Gorky or Gladkov. During the subsequent phase (1928–34) the canon was formulated in a more or less rigid way. The normative system of socialist realism, with its founding postulates – such as revolutionary romanticism, typicality, partiinost’, narodnost’ and so forth – came into being in the first half of the 1930s.² Very soon after the first Writers’ Congress of 1934 it became obvious that these regulative demands aimed at establishing state control over literature, at getting rid of elements of ‘degeneration’ that in the 1936 campaign and in the post-war zhdanovshchina came to be associated with formalism and naturalism. The two following stages – the Thaw of the early 1950s and the phase of postcanonicity beginning with the 1970s when literature drifted away from the norms of socialist realism – mark the decline of the doctrine. I argue that socialist realism having been exported to Eastern Europe at a particular stage of its development is of decisive importance for what happened later.

But before I proceed, a self-critical confession is in order. The discussion of the last twenty years has shown that the canon of socialist realism is not only determined ‘from above’, as I argued in my book