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Socialist Realism «Post-Mortem»
(Late Soviet Aesthetics: Art Practices and Theory, Institutions, Cultural Contexts. 1970s — 1980s)
The conference «Postmortem Socialist Realism (Late Soviet Aesthetics)» will be held at the Institute of Russian Literature of Russian Academy of Sciences (Pushkin House) on November 2-3, 2024.
The metaphor “post-mortem,” referring to the genre of post-mortem photography popular in the second half of the 19th century, which captured the recently deceased as if they were alive, characterizes quite accurately what was happening to the doctrine of socialist realism in the 1970s and 1980s. The term “socialist realism,” coined in 1932, already began to lose its position in the mid-1950s. Yet it remained one of the key terms in official discourse until the end of the Soviet era. Figures in late Soviet culture participated in a “game” where one could either orient oneself toward the canon, adapting it to the changed conditions, resist, or ignore it. However, the “strategy of ignoring” implied neglecting certain forms of art, specifically socialist realism. How did Soviet aesthetics of the 1970s-1980s continue the “socialist realist” aesthetic of its heyday in the 1930s-1950s, in which respects and to what extent was it disconnected from it, and how did it evolve in this respect? These are the main questions that are proposed to be discussed at the conference.
November 2–3, 2024,
St. Petersburg, The Institute of Russian Literature of Russian Academy of Sciences (Pushkin House).