Proclaimed as a unitary method, socialist realism tookmany different forms depending on the time, the artistic medium and the national culture in which it was created.[34] A form of socialist realism fashionable at the time of its establishment was the so-called production novel. An example of the genre was Valentin Katayev's Time Forward! (Vremia vpered) (1932), in which young workers attempt to build a gigantic steel plant in record time. Painters produced monumental canvases celebrating the First and Second Five-Year Plans. Music was a more difficult medium, since there is nothing inherently realistic in musical composition. Prescribed methods of socialist realism in all media underwent frequent changes as party factions shifted. At all times the going description was proclaimed to be permanent, rooted in Marxism-Leninism and official. Writers, even loyal and servile writers, found it challenging to follow the line. Soviet culture was riddled with examples of canonic writers being forced to rewrite their work to conform to changing standards. Fedor Gladkov, author of Cement, and Aleksandr Fadeev, chairman of the Writers' Union and author ofthe classic Rout (Razgrom)(1927) and Young Guard (Molodaia gvardia) (1945) were forced into rewrites that changed the style of their works entirely.
The Writers' Union regularised the business of literature, providing its members with a dependable living.[35] A writer who submitted to its authority would enjoy a variety ofperquisites. The Union distributed assignments to journalists, controlled which house published which books and doled out foreign delicacies, designer clothing and even the highly sought country homes (dachas). To be a non-member meant not to be published. By the time of the First Congress, control of printing, distribution, publishing, radio, film and theatre had been firmly centralised, giving the party Central Committee absolute power of veto. The Writers' Union served as model for the other creative unions (Cinematographic Workers, Actors, Artists) that were soon established.
While it is apparent in retrospect that these policies were the tools with which the government regimented the arts, it is important to understand why artists in the years 1932-4 might have greeted them with relief. When journals, museums and theatres, arts academies and other cultural institutions fell under the control of the self-proclaimed proletarians, artists found that to sell their work, they must submit to humiliating review by critics with low aesthetic but high political standards. Often these standards were arbitrary and depended on which administrator was in charge. Many artists eventually found it impossible to make a living. The unions and socialist realism regularised commissions and standards of review, and guaranteed payment for artistic work. While the life of a creative artist was very tenuous at the outset of the 1930s, life for a successful artist was extremely profitable by the end of the decade, placing artists among the wealthiest citizens in the land of socialism. Few seemed bothered by the silencing, imprisonment or even death of artists. For the consumers of culture, who had suffered through a long period in which few new movies or books emerged, the policies boded an outburst of culture for popular tastes. Though a good deal of the work labelled socialist realism was mediocre, the decade witnessed a steady stream of literature, movies and popular songs that are read, viewed and sung with great pleasure even today. And since a watchword of the aesthetic was accessibility, all of it was perfectly understandable and enjoyable for the mass consumer.
Socialist realism, first formulated by writers and promulgated by the Writers' Union, was very much a literary principle. It called for clarity of language and narrative, simplicity and steadfastness of character, and a forthright political stance. For a brief few years in the middle of the 1930s, the seeming impracticality of the method gave artists great latitude, particularly in popular music and the cinema. The film industry, restructured into a new organisation called Soiuzkino and headed by Boris Shumiatskii, took as its goal the creation of a popular, self-financing film industry. Shumiatskii felt that the aesthetically ambitious films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kuleshov, as well as the younger Aleksandr Dovzhenko, had alienated the common Soviet spectator. The box office bore him out to a degree. Shumiatskii demanded films that were 'accessible', enjoyable and entertaining. Although political fidelity was still a must, it soon became clear that politics would yield to fun as the primary mission.[36]
Two films of 1934 carried the banner of the new cinema. The first bore the name of Furmanov's 1923 novel Chapaev. The novel depicted Chapaev as a simple soldier, brave and charismatic but politically untutored. Under the guidance ofhis commissar, he gradually understands the cause he instinctively supports, and teaches his undisciplined troops the primacy of the cause over the individual. On the silver screen, Chapaev's rough-cut personality, full of grand gestures and petty foibles, became the main draw. The second hit of 1934 was Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows (Veselye rebiata), directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. Travelling to Hollywood in 1930-2 as Eisenstein's assistant director, Aleksandrov had seen how the musical film could exploit the new talking medium and win a mass audience. He set about creating the Soviet musical, and selected Leonid Utesov as his lead man. Renowned for his performance of the slangy songs of his native Odessa, with a strong admixture of jazz, Utesov played a simple shepherd in the movie. Living in the Crimean village of Abrau, his singing talent is discovered by vacationing Muscovites. He is whisked away to the capital, and soon finds himself leading a jazz band. Anybody, it seemed, could be a star in Soviet Russia.
Music for the film was written by Isaak Dunaevskii, a mainstay of the Soviet song-writing industry. Soviet popular music betrayed the significant influence of jazz, an influence that had not been fully digested when the Cultural Revolution rendered it politically suspect. Soviet audiences lovedjazz, both the foreign jazz they heard on records and the native jazz played by Russian bands. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s jazz was rarely heard in officially recognised musical forums, but Utesov's performance in Fellows relegitimised jazz in its heavily Russified form. Soviet-Russian jazz was more melodic than rhythmic and it abstained from the improvisation that is problematic in a heavily censored culture. Soviet jazz borrowed its melodic influences from sources ranging from American jazz to Russian folk music. What made it 'jazz' to its Soviet audiences was the use of unfamiliar instruments such as the saxophone and trombone, the unfamiliar rhythms, and the exuberant performance style alien to classical music. Dunaevskii was the composer who most successfully combined these influences; and because of his willingness to write his music for the heavily politicised lyrics of Mikhail Isakovskii and Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, among other lyricists, he fared well with cultural watchdogs. Other composers, such as the Pokrass Brothers, Matvei Blanter, or A. V Aleksandrov (founder of the Red Army Chorus) created a more distinctly Soviet style ofmusic in which the march was the favoured genre. The presence of ideological music did not eclipse more traditional musical concerns, and the love song was still the most popular genre of the decade, with the young lyricist Evgenii Dolmatovskii scoring his first successes. As for performers, the Red Army Chorus made its first tours at this time, yet the overwhelming audience favourites remained jazz players like Utesov and Aleksandr Tsfasman, or vocalists such as Izabella Iur' eva, Konstantin Sokol ' skii, and Vadim Kozin, who ignored politics and who harkened back to the great torch singers of pre-revolutionary years.
34
Katerina Clark,
35
A. Kemp-Welch,
36
Richard Taylor and Derek Spring (eds.),