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An international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism

Table of Contents

Introduction / Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko 1
Socialist Realism in Search of Its Shores: Some Historical Remarks on the "Historically Open Aesthetic System of the Truthful Representation of Life / Thomas Lahusen 5
Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero / Katerina Clark 27
A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic Categories / Leonid Heller 51
A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism / Boris Groys 76
Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question / Greg Castillo 91
Paradoxes of Unified Culture: From Stalin's Fairy Tale to Molotov's Lacquer Box / Svetlana Boym 120
The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, or, Who "Invented" Socialist Realism? / Evgeny Dobrenko 135
Censorship as the Triumph of Life / Mikhail Iampolski 165
Wise Father Stalin and His Family in Soviet Cinema / Hans Günther 178
Son of the Regiment: Deus ex Machina / Sergei Zimovets 191
Soft-Porn, Kitsch, and Post-Fascist Bodies: The East German Novel of Arrival / Julia Hell 203
"Why is the Soviet Painting Hidden From Us?" Zhdanov Art and Its International Relations and Fallout, 1947–53 / Antoine Baudin 227
W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism: The Black Flame as Socialist Realism / Lily Wiatrowski Phillips 257
The Power of Rewriting: Postrevolutionary Discourse on Chinese Socialist Realism / Xudong Zhang 282
Primitive Communism and the Other Way Around / Yuri Slezkine 310
The Past as a Dustbin, or, The Phantoms of Socialist Realism / Régine Robin 337
Index 357
Notes on Contributors 367

About the Author

Thomas Lahusen is Associate Professor of Russian and Literature at Duke University and the editor of Late Soviet Culture, also published by Duke University Press. Evgeny Dobrenko is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at Duke University.