Petrov, The Industry of Truing Socialist Realism, Reality, Realization

The Industry of Truing: Socialist Realism, Reality, RealizationAuthor(s): Petre PetrovSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 70, No. 4 (WINTER 2011), pp. 873-892Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.70.4.0873 .

Accessed: 09/07/2014 15:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.205.136.30 on Wed, 9 Jul 2014 15:53:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.70.4.0873?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


___________________________________________________________ CONTROVERSY

The Industry of Truing: Socialist Realism,Reality, Realization

Petre Petrov

And what do you think, comrade Makarov, is human life determined by be-ing or by the idea? Because if you think about it, there is being in the idea.

—Boris Pil�niak, Golyi god (The Naked Year)

As an institutional formation and artistic practice, Stalinist socialist real-ism participates in a peculiar economy of truth that has not been suf-fi ciently appreciated in existing scholarship. In what follows, I aspire to do no more than propose a preliminary conceptual view of the notions of truth and reality in the context of Stalinist culture and ideology. The conclusions I reach are, therefore, provisional. To substantiate them fully would require a much more extensive investigation than can be accom-modated in this article. Essential for my purposes here will be a recourse to the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger from the period roughly contemporaneous with the establishment of Iosif Stalin’s political regime and its cultural program (the late 1920s to the early 1930s). With Hei-degger’s philosophical assistance, I will argue that the doctrine of socialist realism is founded upon a nonepistemological conception of truth; that is, a conception in which truth is not viewed as a correspondence between the contents of consciousness (subjective representations) and external reality. I see both Heidegger’s philosophy and the ideological thought of Stalinism as kindred responses to a common drama of modernity, con-cerning the human subject’s place in being and relationship to truth. This kinship sanctions a conceptual parallel between the ideological tenets of socialist realism and Heidegger’s “ontologization” of truth.

By its very name, socialist realism demands of its students some con-ceptual handling of “reality”—an understanding, if not an explicit defi ni-tion, of what might be meant by this. Most often, however, scholarly works on Soviet culture proceed from a ready-made notion of the real, as if this were an object of common sense, and all that needs to be done is to de-scribe how artistic representation relates to this object. The general con-sensus in Soviet studies is that socialist realism is a bogus realism, insofar as it willfully ignores the gap between actual existence and wishful ideo-logical projections. Turning a blind eye on the former and taking their

The epigraph is taken from Boris Pil�niak, Golyi god, in Sochineniia v trekh tomakh (Moscow, 1994), 1:139.

Slavic Review 70, no. 4 (Winter 2011)



874 Slavic Review

directives from the latter, Soviet literature and the arts commit epistemic violence against reality. In its most dramatic, but also crudest, enactment, this line of thinking presents the culture of the Stalinist period as a pre-meditated rape of the real:

By 1934 it became obvious: the communist version of “paradise” did not happen. . . . Stalin could not but see and understand this tragic truth. Stalin could not admit this tragic truth. Stalin could not be wrong. The paradise had to happen—and it actually did happen!!! This is where Stalin needed art. And not just art but SOCIALIST REALISM.

Art was asked not to idealize or heroicize, but to pervert and mummify the actually given [real �no dannoe]; to hide, to conceal, to take the place of unseemly Soviet reality [deistvitel �nost�]. This reality [deistvitel �nost�] was such that one could not just show the world its genuine actuality [real �nost�].1

Bypassing the spectacular complication of the last sentence, in which “re-ality” is equipped with its own “actuality” (what reality is actually like?), I note the well-trodden path of persuasion: fi rst, an appeal is made to the factual situation in the Soviet Union of the early 1930s; right after this, socialist realism makes its appearance as an intentionally designed tool of falsifi cation. An identical path is followed in Bernice Rosenthal’s account:

In reality, the standard of living fell below that of 1928. Bread was ra-tioned, the basic goods of mass consumption were accessible only to those who enjoyed special privileges . . . while millions of peasants died of hunger.

Socialist realism was created in order to hide this reality, to construct a beautiful illusion and present it as the truth. . . . The task of the writer or artist consisted in creating such illusions, in depicting reality, not as it is, but as it will be under socialism; moreover, the future was described as if it already existed.2

In such a narrative sequence—fi rst the bleak reality, then socialist real-ism—there is hardly a need to explain what the latter is “for” (and yet, the explanation is conscientiously provided).

More dispassionate commentators are likely to declare that socialist realism simply “idealized” or “mythologized” reality. Such statements are ubiquitous in studies of Soviet culture. Yet, though routinely reproduced up to the present, they yield scant intellectual value. Whenever authors seek to remove hard judgmental accents, their assertions come to differ very little from what Stalinist critics and party stalwarts asserted at the very birth of socialist realism. We should not forget that Soviet writers them-selves were quite conscious of their recourse to “myth” and the “ideal.”3

1. Mariia Chegodaeva, Sotsrealizm: Mify i real�nost� (Moscow, 2003), 53 –54, 58. Capi-talization in the original.

2. Bernice Rosenthal, “Sotsrealizm i nitssheanstvo,” in Hans Günther and Evgenii Do-brenko, eds., Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (St. Petersburg, 2000), 57. Emphasis in the original.

3. The Soviet locus classicus for the role of myth in socialist realism is Maksim Gor�kii’s report to the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers. See Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s�ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: Stenografi cheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934), 5–19.



The Industry of Truing: Socialist Realism, Reality, Realization 875

This initial, native, understanding is not signifi cantly upgraded just be-cause one fi nds it necessary to point out that the myth was in fact a myth, and that the ideal remained very distant from reality (and, thus, certifi ably unrealistic).

Where one deems the ideological-artistic deformation of reality under Stalinism to have been unusually thoroughgoing, one might be inspired to switch around the terms of the discussion and proclaim that the defor-mation itself was the ultimate real. In other words, what is most character-istic of this unfortunate stretch of historical time is the sapping of “reality” as it is commonly known (and supposedly available in places other than the Soviet Union). Socialist realism is then offered as the general name for the practice of manufacturing a surrogate reality and, in this function, becomes an indispensable component of the Stalinist system. This is the central argument in Evgenii Dobrenko’s most recent book, suggestively entitled The Political Economy of Socialist Realism. From the outset, Dobrenko issues a most welcome caution: “Soviet reality must not be read by scholars the way music is sight-read by musicians.” The reason such a naive reading is sure to miss its object is that we are dealing with a “highly aestheticized culture, a radically transformed world.”4 The degree of aesthetic transfor-mation is such that one might just as well stop all talk of “varnishing” or “idealizing” and treat this process itself as the actuality of Stalinism. This is just the line of argumentation Dobrenko pursues—a pursuit that leads him to a startling inversion. Countering the pedestrian understanding that sees socialist realism as the product of Soviet socialism, he proposes that socialist realism instead produced socialism:

Socialist Realism continually produced new symbolic capital, namely, so-cialism. This seems to have been the USSR’s most successful industry. One could say that Socialist Realism was the means for producing social-ism. It was not a matter of “Potemkin villages,” or of “glossing over” or “brightening up” reality, but of replacing it with a new reality that became “the fi rst phase of socialism,” “developed socialism,” “the early stages of communism,” and so on.5

While it begins with a promise to complicate the understanding of reality in the context of socialist realism, this argument remains fi rmly within the established paradigm. The “Rape of the Real” scenario is not unsettled just because the violation is viewed as unusually radical in its consequences. The apparent complication is indeed only apparent: the real can be evacuated (or de-realized) only if it were available, in full integrity, at some prior moment. That it was overridden by some “new,” perverse real, does not make the “old” real any more questionable or any less appealing. Precisely as erased, it remains for Dobrenko that norma-tive background against which the subsequent perversion can be appre-ciated as such. Dobrenko’s main conceptual lead comes from the work of Jean Baudrillard, whose theorization of hyperreality is asked to do for “developed socialism” what it has done for developed capitalism, that is,

4. Evgeny Dobrenko, The Political Economy of Socialist Realism (New Haven, 2007), 5, 4. Emphasis in the original.

5. Ibid., 5. Emphasis in the original.



876 Slavic Review

interpret a dramatic shift in the status of the real. Yet while in Baudrillard there is no room for some authentic state of affairs prior to or underneath the simulacra (this is precisely the paradoxical new regime of the real), in Dobrenko the veil of socialist realism can be lifted at any moment to show us the unadorned face of Soviet socialism. The talk of “de-realizing” the world bespeaks the fact that, for Dobrenko, bread lines, wretched housing, poor working conditions, and so on constitute Soviet reality per se while “everyday heroism,” “the beauty of labor,” “communist moral-ity,” and so on provide its pseudodimension. But if the real thing and its phantom double exist side by side in Stalinist Russia, it is not at all clear why the author insists so forcibly that one reality replaced another.6 Since he offers no account of what it means for something to exist, be real, or be de-realized, Dobrenko’s seemingly radical stance does not appear so very different from the highly familiar scholarly narratives he rejects.

One such narrative is that developed by Boris Groys in The Total Art of Stalinism, which Dobrenko undertakes to criticize at some length.7 Nev-ertheless, Groys’s view of Stalinism as a total aesthetic-political project is central to The Political Economy of Socialist Realism and is repeatedly evoked on its pages. Groys’s infl uential reading of Stalinist culture as a fulfi llment, on a different plane, of the demiurgic aspirations of artistic modernism, relies on the same questionable model of thought I have been criticizing thus far. The vision of the Stalinist political elite as a collective creator of the “total work of art,” that is, Soviet life, presupposes that “reality” is something available in the manner of wax or any other workable material, so that something can be “done to it.” As I suggested already, the princi-pal weakness of this approach is that it relies on an unmediated notion of reality. It shuns dialectical thinking and, more specifi cally, historical dialectics—the mode of inquiry that sees reality, not as an immediate da-tum, but as the concrete process of defi ning and redefi ning what is real.

Even in the most basic dictionary defi nition “reality” shows up with two principal meanings: 1) a factual state of affairs, a “world” or “situa-tion” as merely given; and 2) the signifi cance or “truth” of a given state of affairs (the “reality of the situation”). The second is always the reality of something; the fi rst is reality plain and simple. These two meanings are not external to each other but participate in a dialectical interplay. On close inspection, reality-plain-and-simple turns out to not be identi-cal with itself. It is always something else. Each supposedly factual “real” passes into its own further “real.” In each historical situation, there is a “tendency” or “characteristic” that is experienced as the reality of the real, its essence or underlying principle. Now, it might appear that the fi rst re-ality is a matter of unmediated presence, of simple being-there, while the second is a product of mediation (we refl ect on what is given and extract its essential characteristic). But this is a deceptive appearance. The fi rst

6. Such assertions become even more puzzling when one reads, in another place, that “Socialist Realist reality is not ‘more real’ than empirical reality.” Ibid., 46.

7. See Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton, 1992). For the criticism, see Dobrenko, Political Economy, 44 – 46.




reality is neither principally prior nor simple; it too is mediated. In fact, it is simply (2) masquerading as (1). Expressed differently, every naive real shows itself to be a holding-true, a valuation, and, as such, necessarily car-ries a reference to a subject—the subject that judges, values, and holds something to be true. In Hegelian terms, reality as an “in-itself” inevitably shows itself to be “for another.”

The slippage of (1) into (2), which is not a fault of thinking but be-longs to the very dynamic of “reality,” takes place constantly in the critical discourse on socialist realism, although it is rarely acknowledged. Take for example the previously quoted statement about the actual state of affairs in the Soviet Union during the early 1930s. It pretends to describe how things (f)actually stood prior to or outside their ideological mystifi cation. But all the force of the assertion, the appeal of the “reality” it references, derives, in fact, precisely from the comparison with the “propagandistic lies” of the regime.8 Paraphrased, the statement really says something like this: “While the Soviet propaganda machine celebrated the glorious ad-vent of socialism, the reality of the situation was that people were starving, and so on.” Proof that this is indeed how the statement is intended is that the author selects those historical facts that contrast with offi cial Soviet discourse (she does not, for example, cite the achievements of the fi rst Five-Year Plan, the unprecedented rise in the level of literacy, or other positive developments). Thus what seemed to be reality under the fi rst meaning (“an extant state of affairs”) slips into the second (“the perceived essence of a state of affairs”).

Considered from a strictly logical point of view, Stalinist ideology or its artistic instantiation, socialist realism, cannot “do” anything to reality, because the reality meant here is not external to the “doer.” Rather, it must be defi ned in advance in relation to what the doer does. Nor is it logically justifi ed to hold that an authentic reality was displaced by a sham one. This is because such a displacement is not something that happens between “realities,” as if they were entities, but is a movement internal to the very concept of “reality.” As noted earlier, “reality” itself involves this raising of what merely is into its essential determination. When Dobrenko claims that socialist realism produced a surrogate reality, he abstracts—without recognizing it—two moments constituent to the concept and rei-fi es them as separate “realities.” In its ideational scaffolding, the argument looks like this: the character of Stalinism is not properly grasped if we speak of socialist realism in terms of “lies” or “idealizations”; the reality of the situation is that these deceptions thoroughly pervaded the fabric of

8. Eva Geulen shows the same dialectic at work in the concept of “authenticity”: “Au-thenticity is a belated effect. In the beginning was not the original, but rather the repro-duction, which makes the concept of authenticity possible in the fi rst place. Authenticity becomes ‘authentic’ only against the background of reproducibility. That means, however, that authenticity is compromised from the beginning, inauthentic from the start, for its origin lies not in itself, but rather in its opposite, reproduction.” Eva Geulen, “Under Con-struction: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’” in Gerhard Richter, ed., Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (Stanford, 2002), 135.



878 Slavic Review

Soviet life so that hardly anything was left over. The truth of the second as-sertion emerges in relation to the inadequacy of the fi rst. This truth, then, is taken and substantivized. The asserted content—the pervasiveness of ideological simulacra—is called “reality,” which is said to have replaced a prior, more authentic and immediate reality. But we must recognize that this prior, simple and humble thing is nothing other than the shadow cast backward from the second notion of reality. It is as if we were imagining what the Soviet world might have been like if it were not overlain with ideological representations.

There is little to be gained from counterposing the constructs of so-cialist realism against something called “empirical reality,” for if those constructs were indeed so integrally part of Soviet life, as Dobrenko insists, then they too were obviously an object of experience, that is, they too were empirical reality. It would be necessary, then, to offer ontological criteria to explain why one sphere or type of experience should count as truer than the other. If people thought of themselves as builders of a brighter future, as many did, there is much argumentative work to be done be-fore one could conclude that such people inhabited a pseudoreality, while cynics and dissidents had their feet fi rmly planted in life-as-it-is. Finally, the opposition between some authentic world and its phantasmic super-structure (no matter how weighty this superstructure is deemed to be) remains abstract in that it does not recognize how authenticity itself has become part of the Stalinist ideological game, a pivotal part, in fact. It too is a product of the cultural-ideological industry, a simulacrum in its own right, and not some neutral standard with which to gauge the experience of simulacra.

Some may contend that I am engaging in a pretentious scholastic de-liberation, which, in the pursuit of supposed conceptual subtleties, risks letting the phenomenon under consideration slip away, potentially deny-ing the most obvious facts (for example, that Stalin’s regime covered up the disastrous famine in Ukraine). The answer to this reproach was hinted at in my earlier reference to historical dialectics. The distinction between reality as what just is and reality as what is true or most signifi cant is not some instrument of reasoning to be taken hold of prior to approaching the matter at hand, so that one can operate with greater methodological sophistication. The dialectic is to be found in the matter itself, insofar as this matter is properly historical. In other words, the permutation I noted characterizes not only “reality” as a concept but also, and primarily, “real-ity” as history. The permutation happens in the historical process, and defi nes it as such. One may venture to say that history is the continual and concrete performing of this permutation. What we call “ideology” is not to be found over against “reality,” so that we might then be curious how the former “relates” to the latter, or what it “does” to it. The work-ings of ideology—if ideology is to be taken with any kind of intellectual gravity—are located precisely within reality, in the space where what is most actual in any actual state of affairs is determined where the “reality of the situation” is decided. Rather than searching for extrinsic criteria to adjudicate what was true and what fake in Soviet life during Stalinism, we




stand to learn more by examining how Stalinist ideology itself refashioned the notion of truth and the real.

From an ideological perspective, the reality of the situation in the early 1930s, the most essential thing in Soviet Russia was the happening of socialism. And socialist realism, as an institution, as a method of represen-tation, begins with the realization of socialism’s happening.9 The party resolution that ended the existence of independent artistic organizations in the country and thus effectively opened the road to the establishment of socialist realism was issued in April 1932, the year in which the fi rst Five-Year Plan was completed. The plan was said to have laid the foundations for a socialist economy and society. Proclamations that a new era had been inaugurated were to be heard and read on all sides. But does this mean that there was an actual and genuine realization of socialism taking place in the Soviet Union? Whose realization was it?

Let us adopt a skeptical attitude and assume that the majority of peo-ple living in Stalinist Russia at the beginning of the 1930s realized nothing of the sort, that all they saw were only the contradictory features of the present (somehow the very idea of the “common people” inclines one to attribute to them an inborn sense of sober realism), many of them nega-tive, even if some positive “achievements” are mixed in for good measure. And even if we concede a great number of enthusiasts among the com-mon folk, who naively welcomed the “revolution from above” and came to believe that something like socialism was happening as a result of it, the argument surely is on the wrong track, since everyone knows that the doctrine of socialist realism did not grow organically out of the masses and their perceptions, whatever these might have been. Thus, obviously, in speaking about the realization of socialism’s happening, I could have only meant some functionaries in the party apparatus, perhaps not the entire party, but some important decision makers. But even this remains open to all sorts of challenges: how do we know that theirs was a genuine realization, how can we be sure that it was not all just for show, a charade in the face of ambiguous and often troublesome facts? This objection is insurmountable, insofar as we simply cannot have access to the intimate thoughts of Stalin and the other members of the Soviet leadership. If this is the case, how can we speak of someone realizing the advent of social-ism and take this as our point of departure in grasping socialist realism? Indeed, we cannot.

And yet, the statement stands as proposed, because the “realization” repeatedly invoked in the preceding paragraphs does not necessarily call for a “someone”; it does not refer, in the fi rst place, to people’s conscious awareness of some state of affairs. Hence, there is no need to demon-strate that anyone sincerely believed that socialism was indeed a “reality” in the early 1930s. The realization that socialism is lies in this very “is,”

9. At this point, I am using the word realization in a deliberately ambiguous way. I would like to maintain this ambiguity so as to make palpable the all-important semantic tension between the subjective and objective meanings of the word.



880 Slavic Review

not in the minds of human observers located outside of it. How can this be so?

The word realization means not only “coming to consciousness” but also “coming to be,” actualization. This second meaning is the one in-voked in the statement that socialist realism begins with the realization of socialism’s happening. But does this way of putting it not render the statement nonsensical? It appears so, because “happening” is nearly syn-onymous with the second meaning of “realization.” We seem to end up in some insipid tautology: socialist realism comes into being as the realiza-tion of socialism’s actualization. A nontautological sequence, one that we could readily comprehend, would run like this: 1) something is happen-ing; 2) a subject (individual or collective) apprehends it, has a “realiza-tion” of it; 3) this subject acts upon this realization and, in the situation we are considering, institutes socialist realism as the offi cial method of Soviet literature and the arts. Unfortunately this is just not how socialist realism comes to be. The sequence we should consider is quite differ-ent: 1) something is happening; 2) this happening is an objective unfold-ing, a coming-to-be that does not depend on people’s awareness of it: it is not fi rst people, but the Realization itself that “realizes”; 3) among other things—factories, kolkhozes, elimination of private property and trade—the Realization also realizes socialist realism as an institution. In this peculiar origination, we also have the clue to the nature of socialist realism as a representational medium.

The dialectical shift performed by Stalinist ideology is as follows: from reality as that which is merely present (observable, subject to direct ex-perience) to reality as that which makes present. The ideological vision of socialism in the 1930s and subsequently was that of an immanent state of being that externalizes its essence and, in so doing, calls to life new phenomena, new realities of life. This generative process, this imperative calling-to-life, is what I refer to as Realization. The words of novelist Mar-ieta Shaginian spoken at a meeting with young writers in 1934, provide a preliminary illustration of the meaning I invoke: “Socialism has become reality. It exists on one-sixth of the world map, and we exist in it. And from all sides, from the depths, as well as from the surface, of our new phenom-ena, of our new practice, socialism rushes toward us, surrounds us, infuses us, and, not only changes our attitude toward things and phenomena, but also opens our eyes to the essence and meaning of the transformations taking place within us.”10 Socialism-becoming-reality is the overwhelming happening Shaginian seeks to communicate to her listeners. This hap-pening brings forth from within itself “new phenomena . . . new practice.” In short, it “realizes” them, makes them present. And this is not all: by making present, socialism also makes people see. The writer’s subjective vision, her conscious realization of what is taking place around her and within her, is made possible by the other, objective Realization. The sub-ject is able to realize (understand) something only because socialism is

10. Marieta Shaginian, “Besedy s nachinaiushchim avtorom,” Novyi mir 3 (1934): 201–10.




realizing (objectifying) it before her.11 The dynamic between subjective consciousness and the objective making-present, in which the former turns out to be a function of the latter, is crucial for understanding the character of Stalinist socialist realism. To further elucidate this dynamic, as well as to place it in a broader cultural context, a short philosophical detour is in order, which will take us at some geographical remove from Stalinist Russia, but at hardly any temporal remove at all.

In those very years that marked the accomplishment of Stalin’s Great Turn and witnessed the establishment of socialist realism, a different turn, a Kehre of conceptual direction, was taking place in the thinking of Martin Heidegger. It was a departure from the inquiry undertaken in Being and Time, such that the earlier positions were not so much abandoned, as radically reconfi gured. While the 1927 opus had made central the “funda-mental constitution” of human being, Dasein, and treated the possibility of meaning or signifi cance as inherent in this constitution (itself predicated on the structure of temporality), from the late 1920s onward the concep-tual emphasis begins to shift.12 It is now the constitution of meaning, or truth, that comes to occupy center stage.13 Heidegger refers to this as the “happening” or “event” of truth. As for the stage itself, it is now called the “Open” [das Offene], the “Clearing” or “Lighting” [die Lichtung].14 These are attributes of Being, but not of human being. Man is said to stand in the open, cleared, or illuminated region, to be summoned to it, but by the same token it is understood that this region is not of man.15 Something

11. “Before” here means both “in front,” in the spatial terms of a spectacle with which one is confronted, and “prior,” in terms not so much of temporal as of ontological antecedence.

12. The most infl uential and extensive argument for a radical change in the trajec-tory of Heidegger’s thinking can be found in William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague, 1974), esp. 229–54.

13. Richardson, who sees the seminar On the Essence of Truth (delivered in 1930, pub-lished in 1943) as marking the turning point in Heidegger’s philosophical trajectory, pro-vides this pithy gloss on the Kehre: “The characteristics of this change can be stated easily enough. The purpose of [Being and Time] was primarily to pose the Being-question, but in the event it proved to be principally an analysis of the Being-comprehension of There-being [Dasein]. The focal point, then, was There-being, and Being itself was seen in this perspective; Being (the World) was considered basically as the project of There-being. In [On the Essence of Truth], however, the focal point of Heidegger’s refl ection passes subtly from There-being to Being itself.” Richardson, Heidegger, 238.

14. For a discussion of Heidegger’s linguistic handling of the “Event,” the “True,” the “Lighting,” and the “Open,” see Thomas Prufer, “Glosses on Heidegger’s Architectonic Word-Play: ‘Lichtung’ and ‘Ereignis,’ ‘Bergung’ and ‘Wahrnis,’” Review of Metaphysics 44, no. 3 (March 1991): 607–12.

15. A clear testimony to this fact is provided in Heidegger’s late “Seminar in Zährin-gen”: “This clearing . . . this freed dimension, is not the creation of man, it is not man. On the contrary, it is that which is assigned to him, since it is addressed to him: it is that which is destined to him.” Martin Heidegger, “Seminar in Zähringen 1973,” in Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington, 2003), 73. In similar spirit are the remarks found in The Principle of Reason: “We are the ones bestowed by and with the clearing and lighting of being in the Geschick of being. . . . But we do not just stand around in this clearing and lighting without being addressed; rather we stand in it as those who are



882 Slavic Review

else—Sein, not Dasein—“does” the opening, clearing, or lighting.16 Da-sein is a participant in the event through which things come to mean and come to be, but Dasein is not solely, or even primarily responsible for the event.17 Although in later years Heidegger will deny that anything like a break had taken place in his thinking after the late 1920s, he will admit to seeking a way out of possible subjectivist interpretations of his project (the kind of interpretations that Being and Time or Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics might have encouraged).18

The consequences of the Kehre for the conceptualization of reality can be glimpsed already in the 1927 seminar Fundamental Problems of Phe-nomenology, conceived as a continuation of the work begun with Being and Time.19 It is, fi rst of all, demolition work. Heidegger sets out to make good on a promise made in the recently published treatise but left unfulfi lled: to “destroy” traditional ontology.20 He begins with Kant’s famous thesis that being is not a real predicate.21 As Heidegger demonstrates, the thesis relies on a categorical distinction between essentia and existentia, which has a long history in western thought, and which Kant inherits from Scho-

claimed by the being of beings. As the ones standing in the clearing and lighting of being we are the ones bestowed, the ones ushered into the time play-space. This means we are the ones engaged in and for this play-space, engaged in building on and giving shape to the clearing and lighting of being—in the broadest and multiple sense, in preserving it.” Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington, 1996), 86.

16. In early Heidegger the situation is the obverse, as the following passage from Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) makes evident. Here Dasein is responsible for the cleared space in which the encounter with beings occurs: “All fi nite beings must have this basic ability, which can be described as a turning toward . . . [orientation toward . . . ] which lets something become an ob-ject. In this primordial act of orientation, the fi nite being fi rst pro-poses to itself a free space [Spielraum] within which something can ‘correspond’ to it. To hold oneself in advance in such a free-space and to form it originally is nothing other than transcendence which marks all fi nite comportment [Verhalten] with regard to the essent.” Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington, 1962), 75. Emphasis added.

17. As explained by Hans-Georg Gadamer: “Heidegger wants to mediate between the older point of departure from Dasein (in which its being is at stake) and the new move-ment of thought of the ‘there’ [Da] in which das Sein or Being forms a clearing. In the word place [Stätte] this latter emphasis comes to the fore: it is the scene of an event, and not primarily the site of the activity of Dasein.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Way in the Turn (1979),” in Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany, 1994), 129–30.

18. See Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. For Heidegger’s own narra-tions of how his thought developed after Being and Time, see Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964) (New York, 1993), 249–50; Martin Heidegger, “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” in Four Semi-nars, 40– 41; Martin Heidegger, “Preface,” in Richardson, Heidegger, viii–xxiii.

19. This course of lectures was delivered during the summer semester of 1927 at the University of Marburg, only a few months after the appearance of Being and Time.

20. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, 1996), 20–26. The “destruction” was to have been accomplished in the projected part 2 of the treatise, which never materialized.

21. The thesis is expounded fi rst in the early treatise “The Sole Possible Argument for a Demonstration of God’s Existence” (1763) and later incorporated in the Critique of Pure Reason. See Immanuel Kant, “The Sole Possible Argument for a Demonstration of God’s Existence,” Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. David Walford and Ralf Meer-bote (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 107–201, and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 563 – 69.




lastic philosophy. The former notion refers to the conceptual content of something, the defi nition of its “whatness” (quiddity); the latter pertains to whether this “something” can be found present (extant) in the world.22 Analogously, Kant speaks about the “reality,” as opposed to the “actual-ity” or “being” of a thing. To the “reality” of an object belongs the range of its possible predicates; to its being belongs solely the fact of our en-counter with the thing in perception. Being cannot be one of the thing’s predicates, because the fact that one perceives it contributes nothing to its concept.23

Heidegger’s objection is that the act of perception is unthinkable without a precomprehension of the thing we perceive, of its “whatness.” Hence, no rigid separation can be maintained between essence and ex-istence. They belong together in the singular happening of our being-in-the-world. In this human world, one does not just bump into existing things but approaches them understandingly. They are actual and mean-ingful for man because they are encountered always in a context of prac-tical engagement, which is also a context of (pre-) understanding. If we come across a door and know it as such, it is not because we carry in our minds an exhaustive defi nition of what a door means, but because we open and close doors in our daily comings and goings. Dasein, the kind of being that we are, is always going somewhere. This practical directed-ness (“projection” or “project,” in Heidegger’s terms) is what primordially “gives meaning” to phenomena, what makes things present for Dasein.24 This had been the argument in Being and Time. In Basic Problems Hei-degger alters nothing essential in it. And yet, against the background of Kant’s problematic and the age-old pairing essentia-existentia something novel comes into view.

When Heidegger asks “How do things become actual for Dasein?” he does it in such a way that the latter part of the question can be parenthe-sized, for the time being, while the fi rst part is being attended to: “How do things become actual (for Dasein)?” The placing of these imaginary parentheses—which will become ever more emphatic through the 1930s, as Being gradually moves to the place of prominence once occupied by human being—allows one to view coming-to-presence as a self-contained unfolding. Looking back from the distance of thirty years, Heidegger refl ects:

In the still cruder and more awkward language of the treatise Being and Time (1927) . . . the basic trait of Dasein, which is human being, is de-termined by the understanding of being. Here understanding of being never means that humans as subjects possess a subjective representation of being and that being is a mere representation. . . . Understanding of being means that according to their essential nature humans stand [steht] in the openness of the projection of being and suffer [aussteht] this un-derstanding [Verstehen] so understood. When understanding of being is experienced and thought of in this way, the representation of humans as

22. This distinction parallels the one between “intension” and “extension.”23. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 567.24. The meaning of “project(-ing)” (Entwurf, entwerfen) is discussed at length in Hei-

degger, Being and Time, 145–51, 221–23, 260– 63.



884 Slavic Review

subjects is, to speak in line with Hegel, put aside. According to their es-sential nature, humans are thinking beings only insofar as they stand in a clearing and lighting of being.25

After the subject is “put aside,” what for Kant have been the noncon-tiguous dimensions of essentia and existentia become moments of a singu-lar happening. Existence, now called simply Being, becomes the general enabling environment in which things manifest their essences or—which is the same thing—exhibit their intrinsic predicates. This is what Hei-degger refers to as “presencing” (Anwesen) or “truing” (Wahren).26 Being is what presences (das Anwesende ), or, as Heidegger states in other places, Being is presencing as such.27 As for individual human subjects who dwell in this region of self-unfolding immanence—they are enjoined to dwell “authentically,” so as to be worthy to receive the present of truth.

Having reached this point, we may take leave of Heidegger, since he has taken us to where we needed to get, namely, to an elucidation of the initially puzzling assertion that “is” may carry within itself the movement of “realization.” Translated into the terms of the earlier discussion, Hei-degger’s thesis that Being is presencing gives us: “Reality is realization,” “Actuality is actualization,” or, with specifi c reference to the context of Stalinist culture, “Socialism is the kind of reality that has realization as its constitutive principle.”28 Having Kant as a representative of traditional ontology offers the opportunity to see how the “reality” of Stalinist social-ism is not to be grasped: socialism is not a “concept” that the Soviet regime seeks to “materialize,” not an “idea” that may or may not be found as (f)actually “fulfi lled” in the world. The ubiquitous treatment of the topic in these tired terms—while affording one the dubious satisfaction of stat-ing that “socialism didn’t work” (that is, its idea was not “realized”)—does injustice to the historical-cultural peculiarity of Stalinism. By the same to-ken, it ensures that the phenomenon of socialist realism is misunderstood from the ground up.

But even in parting ways with Heidegger, there is a need to explain

25. Heidegger, Principle of Reason, 86. Emphasis added. A similarly decisive gesture of “putting aside” the subject is performed in this passage from the seminar What Is Called Thinking? (1951–52): “That which directs us to think, gives us directions in such a way that we fi rst become capable of thinking, and thus are as thinkers, only by virtue of its directive. . . . Man takes a special part in the process, in that he performs the thinking. Yet this fact, that man is naturally the performer of thinking, need not further concern the investigation of thinking. The fact goes without saying. Being irrelevant, it may be left out of our refl ection on thinking. Indeed, it must be left out.” Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York, 1976), 115. Emphasis in the original.

26. On Heidegger’s consciously elusive and polysemic deployment of Wahren (whose basic meaning is “to preserve, protect”) and Währen (“to last, abide”), see Reginald Lilly, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Heidegger, Principle of Reason, xviii–xix.

27. See Martin Heidegger, “On the Question of Being” (1955), in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 302; Heidegger, “Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture ‘Time and Being,’” On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (1972; Chicago, 2002), 27.

28. After the foregoing discussion, it should be obvious why “reality” and “actuality” are treated here as interchangeable notions. Within the overarching movement of mak-ing-present, their difference is sublated.




why he has been asked to bear witness in the case of Stalinist socialism. The recourse to Heidegger is not the result of a haphazard snatching of potent concepts from the common store of philosophical wisdom in the hope that these— on the power of their inner wealth—might shed light on the specifi c cultural problematic under consideration here. Even less is the recourse reliant on Heidegger’s well-known involvement with one totalitarian regime, as if this involvement promised that his thought will prove “in tune” with another such regime.29 If Stalinism, on the one hand, and the philosophy of Being, on the other, are indeed in tune, it is because they emerge from a common historical ground. This common ground is, most generally stated, that of modernity. More specifi cally, the two phe-nomena are related to what Theodor Adorno has called the “ontological need.”30 Adorno understands by this modern man’s desire to inhabit a world ruled by compelling objectivity. The need is, of course, “subjective,” since it is experienced by human subjects. And yet, it is also objective, since its sway is ensured by actual conditions that decisively shape the lives (and thus also the psychologies) of a great multitude of such subjects. The dramatic dislocations of the early twentieth century, occurring in a world in which the reproduction of social being obeys laws patently beyond the control, and even comprehension, of individuals, resulted in a sense of powerlessness and uprootedness. The ontological need is a reaction to this very real predicament, an attempt to reroot what has been uprooted beyond reprieve, to produce “grounding” from the very disintegration of all ground. So as not to become despair, the ontological need converts the subject’s objective loss of agency into a sign that man abides in the imperi-ous hold of Being. The individual’s inability to realize what it is that de-termines his fate—which is the same as the inability to realize oneself—is recast in a vision of reality as Realization itself, a supraindividual unfold-ing that grants me destiny, even if I am initially or wholly unaware of it.

It is unnecessary to argue at great length that the ontological need might have been pertinent to the Soviet Union of the early 1930s no less than it was pertinent to Germany of the same years. No western country experienced the kind of tectonic upheavals that shook Russian society in the fi rst three decades of the century. The facts are well-known: the harrowing social impact of early (and spasmodic) capitalist development,

29. The issue of Heiddegger’s involvement with National Socialism is treated in nu-merous publications. The more signifi cant ones include: Victor Farias, Heidegger et le na-zisme (Paris, 1987); Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago, 1989); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford, 1990); Christopher Rickey, Revolutionary Saints: Heidegger, National Socialism and Antinomian Politics (University Park, 2002); James F. Ward, Heidegger’s Political Thinking (Amherst, 1995); Reiner Schür-mann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington, 1987); Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington, 1990); Bernhard Radloff, Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism: Disclosure and Gestalt (Toronto, 2007).

30. The issue is discussed in the fi rst of two chapters of Negative Dialectics, devoted to a critique of Heidegger and Heidegger-inspired ontological investigations. See Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1995), 61–96.



886 Slavic Review

amplifi ed by a sclerotic and oppressive system of government; the devas-tations of four wars and as many revolutions (the last, and perhaps most decisive, being Stalin’s); the total overhaul of hierarchies, institutions, and customs after 1917; multiple famine disasters and epidemics, massive im-migration, and a loss of human lives on a catastrophic scale.31 The people who lived through this history should not be suspected of having exces-sive confi dence in their ability to control their own lives. Nor should it be extravagant to suppose that many of these same people were tempted by a vision that projected their predicament as an entitlement, their nonbe-longing to themselves as a fateful belonging to Truth’s self-realization.

Stalin and his associates were not Heideggerians, of course. None of them ever developed anything like a philosophical system, even less an ontological one. Yet they inhabited a contradictory (and, one might add, incompletely) modern world very similar to that of Heidegger’s postwar Germany. And the Stalinist ideologization of socialism, although never explicated in systematic conceptual idiom, manifests a similar turn toward truth understood as an ontological happening. This turn was, at the same time, a turning-away from a notion of truth as a cognitive achievement on the part of the subject. It goes without saying that Soviet scientists, for in-stance, were celebrated for their discoveries and inventions. But in Stalin-ist culture, these individual attainments of truth were invariably seen as a by-product of belonging. One knew the truth to the extent to which one was a true Soviet person. As Shaginian’s testimony suggested, it is not fi rst the person, but socialism, that knows and shows. The achievement of in-dividual subjective consciousness (the fi rst meaning of “realization”) is, so to speak, folded into the objective coming-to-be (the second meaning).

Although Heidegger places the subject in parentheses, this in no way amounts to leaving the subjective wholly out of consideration. In fact, Heidegger is able to “put aside” the subject only because it has, in a most general form, already been prefi gured in the motion of presencing/tru-ing. To adopt again G. W. F. Hegel’s way of speaking, the “for-another” has become internal to the “in-itself”: it has substantiated the latter. To clarify: the subjective moment has been incorporated into the (new) defi nition of objectivity. When Heidegger describes how things become actual, there is really no need to add “for Dasein,” because this “for” has been absorbed in the notion of becoming-actual. The subject’s presence is assumed be-forehand at the site where reality/truth is “happening.” When a particular someone, a historically specifi c individual like Shaginian, for example, turns up within this landscape of reality, she still knows and realizes. The knowledge, however, is now a subsidiary function of a greater movement:

31. Moshe Lewin has highlighted most insistently the turbulent and chaotic nature of Russia’s history during the early twentieth century and the signifi cance of this fact for the shaping of the Stalinist system. A reference to his infl uential book will have to substi-tute for a historical exposition, which is well beyond the scope of the present article. See Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985). With respect to wars, I have in mind the Russo-Japanese War (1905), World War I (1914 –1918), the Russian civil war (1918–1921), and the Russo-Polish War (1919–1920).




the self-propelled event of Being, which in this case is called “socialism.” Human thinking and knowing are principally subsequent to man’s loca-tion in Being, to the fact of one’s standing in the clearing. The most (the individual’s) thinking could do is own up to the Truing that trues. In do-ing this, thinking does not so much possess the truth, as it is possessed by it. Intellection proceeds by letting itself be claimed and owned by truth’s coming-to-be. To paraphrase, we can now set in their proper relationship the two meanings of “realization” within the present context: to realize (in the sense of conscious apprehension) means to be true to (in the sense of “owning up to,” authentically inhabiting) what the Realization realizes (in the sense of making-present).

And so we come back to the initial assertion, which should by now be much more intelligible: “Socialist realism begins with the realization of socialism’s happening.” We can proceed to develop, gradually, what this assertion implies. The party is the collective historical subject that dwells most fully in “reality,” that is, in socialism as Realization itself. From the position of this most authentic habitation, the party rules by letting itself be ruled. It decrees only what socialism itself, in its making-present, calls to life. Its resolutions legislate nothing but the necessary consequences of the “current stage in the development of socialism.” The ruling power acts as if it were merely the power of codifying and securing objective realizations.

Because the difference between essentia and existentia, between “con-cept” and “actuality,” has been sublated, the motion of coming-to-be can-not be distinguished from an explication of the object’s implied predi-cates.32 In this sense, Stalinist socialism is the happening in which the necessary features of socialism are allowed to manifest themselves. As Realization, socialism materializes what necessarily follows from the pre-supposed essence of socialism. The party governs by following (attend-ing to) what follows, since this is indistinguishable from coming-to-be. For example, from the essence of socialism it follows that liberated labor becomes ever more productive. This necessary consequence is demon-strated in the emergence of the Stakhanovite movement. The movement, one might say, is made possible, “presenced,” by the immanent existence of socialism. Conversely, the existence of Stakhanovism shows that social-ism has become reality. Harkening to the objective unfurling of socialism’s content, the party then legislates an increase in work norms in all spheres of industry.

Clearly, in this context, the question of belief is suspended. Believing is possible, but not required. There is no absolute need for anyone, includ-ing Stalin, to entertain subjective faith in the happening of socialism. The happening itself “takes care” of that. Such personal devotions may even be seen as misguided, since they exhibit the individual’s inadequate response to what is actually happening. After all, the objectivity of the happening

32. A decisively unsympathetic gloss on Heidegger’s confl ation of essence and exis-tence can be found in Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 75.



888 Slavic Review

consists precisely in this: that it does not depend on your subjective belief in order to be happening. If you still hold such a belief, after the fashion of some old religious commitment, you simply demonstrate that you are a little “out of it” (as will be argued below, one cannot be wholly out of it).

Just as it presupposes the joy and higher productivity of labor, the realized essence of socialism presupposes that there can be no competing formations in the sphere of artistic culture. The enormous transformative work of the fi rst Five-Year Plan has done away with the existence of an-tagonistic classes, which—according to Stalinist ideological reasoning—removes the sole basis on which competing artistic platforms could sub-sist. If such formations are still in evidence (Rossiskaia assotsiatsiia prole-tarskikh pisatelei [RAPP] and its subsidiaries being the most prominent and the only viable ones), this does not mean that they “have being.” Even if they are to be found in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s, this still does not demonstrate that they are “real.” Rather, they are like that father from a dream Sigmund Freud analyzes: the pathetic revenant who is alive solely because he does not yet know that he is dead. The party corrects this ontological misunderstanding. It ends the exis-tence of what is already nonexistent. By following what follows, in 1932 the Central Committee decrees the dissolution of all independent artistic organizations (a measure whose principal victim is RAPP) and charts a course toward a unifi cation of all artistic practice in the Soviet Union. This “charting” is not some voluntaristic act that imposes tendentious demands on the future. The act merely invites writers to own up to the realization of a unifi ed socialist culture already under way.

Two years later, socialist realism is proclaimed the offi cial method of Soviet literature. It is a method of representation, or so we are told by both Soviet and non-Soviet critics. Since they have not engaged suffi ciently with the issue of reality, the nature of this representation has remained largely unproblematized. What does it mean to “represent” the world in an ideo-logical world in which the instance of (subjective) awareness—and hence, of the artist’s awareness as well—is folded from the outset within the move-ment of realization as a coming-to-be? It certainly does not mean standing over against “what is happening” and giving an unprejudiced (realistic!) picture of it. Such a position is impossible. The happening allows no place that would be “over against” it.33 It encompasses every human “stand-ing.” If it seems that some Soviet citizen is merely “observing,” “refl ecting upon” the world of socialism, this is a deceptive semblance. He is in the happening, only inadequately, “obliviously,” as Heidegger would put it; his improper standing only creates the appearance that he is “out of it.”

Insofar as the prefi x “re-“ implies mediation, “representation” is not something socialist realism does. What then? The answer can be surmised from the most authoritative of authoritative statements, Stalin’s advice to

33. The impossibility is expressed in the following statement by Maksim Gor�kii: “It seems to me that some literary authors are shouting due to misunderstanding, shouting not at people but at history, which has deprived them of the possibility of fi nding some ‘plane of alienation’ [polosa otchuzhdeniia] from the universal battle.” Maksim Gor�kii, “O literature i prochem,” in O literature: Literaturno-kriticheskie stat�i (Moscow, 1953), 42.




writers reportedly offered during a meeting in Gor�kii’s apartment in 1932. The short admonition states: “Write the truth—that will be socialist real-ism.”34 These words have provoked much derision in western scholarship, due in large part to the disparity between their apparent platitude and the enormous signifi cance attributed to them in Stalinist culture. One could dismiss the idolatry and incessant parroting of every statement the leader made and still recognize that his words, in this case, point to something signifi cant. Precisely in their failure to “instruct,” to offer anything like a prescription on how best to represent the new reality of socialism, there is an indication of both what this reality is and what socialist realist writing is not. It is not a mediation, which fi rst endows the particulars of experi-ence with a unity of meaning. All this takes place before the arrival of the artistic subject on the scene and is thus independent of him. The so-called “particulars” are already the realization of the total meaningfulness of Soviet life. Nothing but this relay—from socialism to the particulars that explicate its being—is the preeminent movement of truth. Socialism is happening. In doing so, it shows. It shows that it is true (actual), and not some “utopia,” a thought-up ideal. In this sense, the showing is not a fl ashy display but has the character of truing. Before anything or anyone else, it is socialism that trues. Because, in this dynamic, truth has “hap-pened” before their appearance on the scene, writers are simply asked to write it; this means: to let truing do its work in their work, to let the showing show, to not interfere with the assertive visibility of socialism (let us remember Shaginian’s statement that socialism has the power to open one’s eyes).

An extensive demonstration of this thesis is beyond the scope of the present article, whose chief goal is to propose an adequate theoretical framework for approaching the phenomenon of socialist realism. I offer a single illustrative example, which any student of Stalinist culture will recognize as highly typical. It is drawn from an academic volume, O real-isticheskikh osnovakh sovetskoi arkhitektury, published in 1952. I choose this text from among many analogous possibilities for the additional benefi t it brings: by mating the term realistic with the craft of construction (which one does not usually associate with categories of verity), it affords an ad-vantageous perspective on the peculiarity of socialist realism.

As was customary for scholarly studies of the period, the book fea-tures, in a prominent early slot, quotations from Stalin that serve to es-tablish the orthodox trajectory that the argument will follow. One of these quotations, from Problems of Leninism, reads:

The face of our large cities and industrial centers has changed. An in-evitable feature of the large cities in bourgeois countries are the slums,

34. These words fi rst appear in print in Literaturnaia gazeta, 5 November 1932, 3, which quotes a speech by Ivan Gronskii at a plenary session of the Organizational Com-mittee of the Union of Soviet Writers (29 October 1932). In subsequent accounts, they are attributed to Iosif Stalin. See F. I. Panferov, “O novatorstve, sovremennoi teme i chitatele,” Oktiabr �, no. 10 (1933): 198; “Za literaturu zhiznennoi pravdy,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 14 Au-gust 1952, 1.



890 Slavic Review

the so-called workers’ quarters on the outskirts of the city, which present a mass of dark, damp, half-destroyed, mostly underground dwellings, where poor folk usually seek shelter, wallowing in dirt and cursing fate. Because of the revolution in the USSR, these slums have disappeared in our country. They have been replaced with newly built, good and bright workers’ quarters, so that in many instances the workers’ quarters in our country look better than the centers of cities.35

The contrast between socialism and capitalism, between “our” and “their” world (u nas versus u nikh), is one of the most common features of Stalin-ist (as well as later Soviet) rhetoric. Still, one should be surprised by how effortlessly the Leader transitions from one frame of reference to another. The initial sentence proposes a theme (the new outlook of Soviet cities), but instead of developing it further, the second sentence runs in a com-pletely different direction. What for us is an unmotivated and awkward shift is, in fact, an integral moment of the exposition. The “face of our cities” is a fact that follows from the nature of socialism. But the latter is defi ned in opposition to capitalism. Hence, the state of affairs in Soviet urban development and architecture can just as easily be deduced from “their” as from “our” way of life.

For a brief moment Stalin’s characterizations of western cities creates the impression of empirical description. To read it as such is to commit a hermeneutic blunder. The fact that cities in the capitalist west did have slummy working-class neighborhoods in no way testifi es that the observa-tion of actually existing conditions is the basis for Stalin’s statement. One word gives away the genuine basis: “inevitable” (neizbezhnyi). The adduced features of capitalist urban centers are not merely factual; they are inevi-table. Expressed better: these features can be factual only because they are inevitable consequences of capitalist development. The (f)actual is what follows. The picture of socialist urbanity is derived in the same way. The disappearance of slums, as well as the goodness and brightness of the workers’ dwellings that loom in their stead, are a consequence of the “revolution in the USSR.” “Consequence” here does not refer primarily to a practical outcome; it designates, fi rst of all, an explication of socialism’s essentia. In other words, a consequence is that which follows from the “whatness” of a socialist revolution. As noted earlier, the process whereby Stalinist socialism creates a world of things and phenomena (including workers’ housing) is indistinguishable from the unfolding of a notion’s intrinsic predicates.

Several pages further into the study, the author discusses a recent project for the urban development of Cannes. “In this project, the prin-ciple of oppression of the workers by the exploiting class has found its persistent expression.”36 A description of the project follows: the city is to be refashioned in a circular design, with housing for the rich occupying the center. Forcibly marking this inner circle and separating it from the outer one of working-class neighborhoods is a tall protective barrier. The

35. M. P. Tsapenko, O realisticheskikh osnovakh sovetskoi arkhitektury (Moscow, 1952), 20.36. Ibid., 27.




outer part of the city is planted with dull, tediously identical, poorly lit buildings, and strategically segregated: “The workers’ quarter consists of sections set widely apart, which could be easily isolated from each other [as a result of which] the city can quickly and effortlessly be turned into a prison.”37 An apt illustration of Stalin’s words quoted earlier, this excur-sion into contemporary urban planning in the west also demonstrates the extent to which, in Stalinist discourse, capitalism and socialism are homol-ogous. The former, no less than the latter, is treated as a happening that externalizes its true nature (essentia) into visible particulars. As we can see, the Cannes project is a direct, iconic, materialization of the “principle of oppression.” In other words, it is a local instance of truing. The issue of human mediation is not even raised. The architect— whoever he might be—was, evidently, a human being optimally fused with the self-unfolding essence of capitalism.

When at a later point in the book we are offered a contrasting picture of socialist urban architecture, the difference between the two worlds ap-pears to be one of content, not of form: “The socialist character of our state order has found embodiment in more than just special construc-tion projects. If we turn to mass housing, [we will see that] here as well socialist public relations have predetermined [predopredelili] the construc-tion of the new types of buildings, which emerge in our country by the thousands and which do not and cannot exist anywhere but in the USSR or the national democracies moving toward socialism.”38 This emergence by the thousands, with its connotations of organic sprouting, a sponta-neous mushroom-like growth, showcases the same materializing force at work between a universal (“the socialist character of our state order”) and particulars (specifi c erections) as witnessed in the city of Cannes. It is this force that guarantees that the kind of constructions found in the world of socialism cannot possibly appear anywhere else. The relay from “character” to its concrete manifestations is nothing other than the arc of presencing, or truing, the internal movement of reality-as-realization. Here as well, the issue of mediation is “put aside.” This issue is moot once it is accepted that “socialist relations” directly predetermine the execution of buildings. It is understood that the architects—whoever they were—stood fast in the force fi eld of this imperious determination.

In conclusion and apropos of the example just offered, let me reart-iculate what a “realistic” creation implies in the context of socialist real-ism, which will, incidentally, explain why the application of the term to housing construction is not all that idiosyncratic. On the objective side, it implies nothing less than the kind of sprouting in which the ontologi-cal ground (socialism) brings forth, out of itself, things and phenomena. This coming-forth, as a coming-to-presence, is the “real” par excellence. It is what is meant by the principal slogan of socialist realism: “reality in its revolutionary development.” On the subjective side, being a “realist” amounts to authentically living this development, staying true to the Tru-

37. Ibid.38. Ibid., 48.



892 Slavic Review

ing. Since the subject is already assumed in the happening of truth, his proper attitude—whether as an artist or not—is to assume the place of that a priori assumption. In principle, the artistic subject can opt out of the ontological obligation. Subjectively, he may entertain any sort of ideas about his creative personality and the nature of art. Yet as soon as these ideas are embodied in artistic production and enter the Stalinist public sphere, they also enter the ideological force fi eld of Truing. At any time the author’s work can be seized and read as a realization of an anti-Soviet, alien essence. The work is again a moment of “truth” ( just as the Cannes project is), only now the truth incriminates.39

39. This is how Heidegger expresses the impossibility of standing outside the event of truth: “Each one participates in this decision, even and precisely when he shrinks from this decision and believes he must act superior to today’s awakening and play the part of the supposedly ‘spiritual’ elite.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloomington, 2010), 11. The seminar Being and Truth was delivered in 1933 –1934, when Heidegger was rector of the University of Freiburg. The “awakening” of which he speaks is, of course, the National Socialist revolution in Germany.



Date post:	21-Jul-2016
Category:	Documents
Upload:	kirillov85
View:	8 times
Download:	0 times

Petrov, The Industry of Truing Socialist Realism, Reality, Realization

Documents