Avner Zis was a professor, a Doctor of Science in philosophy, and a Merited Scientist of the RSFSR, and this is a real book of philosophy. It runs to a hundred thousand words in English across five chapters — the nature of art, the image, content and form, the aesthetic categories, and creative method — and it argues. It cites Aristotle, Lessing, Hegel, Plekhanov, Leonardo, Chekhov, and, when it turns to opponents, it names them and gives page references: Jacques Maritain, Nicolai Hartmann, I. A. Richards, the Swiss aesthetician Robert Hainard in Dialectica for 1960, papers read at the Seventh International Congress of Aesthetics at Bucharest in 1972. A reader who comes to it expecting a pamphlet will be surprised. Much of it is the work of a man who has thought carefully about how music differs from painting and why a play is not a history textbook.
It is also the theory whose practice the other literary volumes in this series document — and the interesting thing about it is what a book called Foundations of Marxist Aesthetics turns out to found the doctrine on.
Start with the date, because for once there is nothing to unpick. Progress translations usually postdate the Russian by years and several volumes in this series carry a spine date that misdates the text by a decade. Not this one. The latest substantive sources Zis uses are Anatoli Yegorov's The Problems of Aesthetics (1974), a Moscow collection on musical semiotics of 1973, and the 1972 Bucharest congress; the 1975, 1976 and 1977 dates in the footnotes are all Progress editions of Marx and Engels used for quotation. This is a mid-1970s text published in English in 1977, and it should be read as one: a Brezhnev-era book, written in the settled middle of détente.
The Preface says what it is for, and it is worth taking at its word twice over. "In its present form it is addressed to readers abroad," Zis writes — an export commission, stated openly. And then something less usual: he warns that "while Soviet writers on aesthetics start out from basically similar premises, varying approaches to particular, as yet unresolved questions, are to be encountered." A footnote in the first chapter makes good on that, registering that some Soviet aestheticians reject his own view that art has a specific subject-matter. A book that admits its discipline contains open questions and internal disagreement is not a catechism, and the concession should be recorded before anything else is said.
Now the polemic, because that is what tells you who the book was written against. Zis names two opponents more often than he names anyone but Marx and Lenin: Ernst Fischer appears some forty times, Roger Garaudy some twenty-three. They are "former Marxists and Communists, who later were to emerge as the leaders of anti-Marxist and anti-Soviet trends in aesthetics." Fischer was an Austrian Communist and author of The Necessity of Art; Garaudy was for years the French Communist Party's chief philosopher and the author of D'un réalisme sans rivages — "realism without shores", the "limitless realism" Zis attacks by name. What Zis never mentions is why either man ceased to be a party member. Both broke with their parties over the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968: Fischer denounced it publicly and was expelled from the Austrian party, Garaudy opposed it and was expelled from the French party in 1970. Czechoslovakia occurs once in this book, and it is a note on a film about the assassination of Heydrich. The two men whose apostasy structures the book's final chapter apostatised over an event the book does not contain.
That is the shape of the argument. Now its foundation.
The question a book with this title has to answer is where socialist realism comes from. Zis puts the question himself, in the mouth of his enemies, and it is the sharpest sentence in the volume:
where and in which works did Marx, Engels and Lenin write that the creative method for socialist literature should be socialist realism?
He calls this the demagoguery of "turncoats" who "wallow in rhetorical questions". And then he answers it — and the answer is a concession.
They profess to search for the words "socialist realism" in the writings of our great teachers, but overlook, or choose not to notice, the fact that from the theoretical point of view socialist-realist method is vindicated by the whole philosophical structure of Marxist-Leninist theory.
Read that slowly. It concedes the search will fail. The words are not there; what is there is a whole philosophical structure from which they are said to follow. That is not a citation, it is an assurance, and a book of foundations that offers an assurance in place of a text has told you where the foundation is not.
A few pages earlier Zis has already told you where it is, and told you as a boast:
In the thirties large-scale work was undertaken to collect together and systematise passages devoted to aesthetic questions in the Marxist classics: the judgements and statements concerning art were thus assembled to constitute a well-ordered and integrated system of aesthetic principles.
The founders left scattered remarks — a letter about Balzac, a note on Greek art, an exchange with Lassalle about a play. In the 1930s those remarks were gathered and arranged into a system. Zis presents this as scholarship maturing. It is also an accurate description of a doctrine acquiring its foundations after it had acquired its authority, in the decade when the authority was at its most lethal.
There remains Lenin, and here the book does exactly what one expects and does it in the open:
The principle of commitment was elaborated for the first time in Lenin's well-known work "Party Organisation and Party Literature" (1905).
Lenin's article was written in November 1905, during the few weeks of a legal press, and it is about the publications of a political party — about whether a Social-Democratic newspaper may print anti-Social-Democratic material, and about the money that pays for it. Zis quotes it accurately and at length, and to his credit he quotes the restraining passage, the one that concedes that literature "is least of all subject to mechanical adjustment or levelling, to the rule of the majority over the minority" and that "greater scope must undoubtedly be allowed for personal initiative, individual inclination, thought and fantasy, form and content." He quotes the famous lines about the bourgeois writer's freedom being "masked (or hypocritically masked) dependence on the money-bag", and the prophecy of a literature that will serve "the millions and tens of millions of working people". None of this is falsified. What is done to it is a change of scope. Zis's own summary gives the join away: "Lenin pointed out that literature should be a part of the proletarian cause in general." Lenin was writing about the literary side of a party's work in a country where his party was illegal and had no state. Seventy years later the same sentences are made to license the guidance of every novelist, composer and film director in a state that has one. Zis does not argue for the expansion. He performs it, in a single transition, and moves on.
He knows the objection exists, because he answers a version of it — but only a version. "The West German Sovietologist" (the text gives the name as Jurgen Ruble; this is Jürgen Rühle, author of Literatur und Revolution) is reported as describing Lenin's article "as a manifesto for the enslavement of literature through politics". Having named the objection, Zis does not meet it. He classifies it: a "Marxologist" fabrication, coinciding with revisionism, clear for all to see. The strongest argument against the book's central move is admitted to the page and then dismissed by attribution rather than by reply.
So the doctrine is not founded on a text. Is it founded on the record?
Here the counts have to be reported, because they are the finding. In a hundred thousand words on the foundations of Marxist aesthetics, published by the Soviet state's export house in 1977:
Stalin: zero. Zhdanov: zero. Akhmatova: zero. Zoshchenko: zero. Zvezda: zero. RAPP: one passing mention, in a list, paired with "Proletcult", as movements that reduced art to "the proclamation of political slogans". The year 1934 does not appear. The First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, which in August 1934 wrote socialist realism into the statutes of a single compulsory Union, is not mentioned. The Central Committee decree of 23 April 1932 that dissolved the literary groupings is not mentioned. The Central Committee decree of 14 August 1946 against Zvezda and Leningrad is not mentioned. The Central Committee resolution of February 1948 on Muradeli's opera, which condemned Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Myaskovsky and Shebalin for formalism, is not mentioned.
The doctrine, in short, is founded on neither its texts nor its decrees. What it is founded on is an assertion, and Zis quotes the assertion from a witness. At a January 1965 plenum of the board of the Union of Writers of the USSR, Nikolai Tikhonov declared:
Socialist realism was not thought up or prescribed by anyone, it was evolved by all Soviet writers together, and by each one of us individually; it is the living flesh of our philosophical and artistic searchings and achievements over more than half a century.
Zis endorses this and elaborates it into several pages of intellectual history: in the 1920s critics searched for a name, Alexei Tolstoy proposed "monumental realism", others "proletarian realism", and the field converged. "This was the solution which Soviet aestheticians arrived at after long observation of the course of the artistic process and the development of aesthetic theory as such."
Not thought up or prescribed by anyone.
Set that against a book from the same publisher, seven years earlier, still in print on the same export list. In Soviet Literature: Problems and People (Progress, 1970), Kornely Zelinsky — a delegate to all the writers' congresses, a man who converted to socialist realism in the early thirties and never left — describes the meeting held in Gorky's house in October 1932:
I was present at that meeting and was one of the speakers there. It was then that Stalin gave the Soviet writers' artistic method the definition of socialist realism.
One Progress volume prints an eyewitness saying the general secretary named the doctrine at a private evening in a novelist's house. Another Progress volume, seven years later, prints an assurance that it was not prescribed by anyone. The house that published both did not notice, or did not mind. Zelinsky, who was in the room, hedges his own testimony immediately — "Actually he merely formulated what was already in the air" — and Zis's whole chapter is that hedge grown into a history.
There is a third account, and it was in print before either. Writing from exile on 18 June 1938, in the letter to Partisan Review published as "Art and Politics in Our Epoch", Trotsky wrote:
The style of present-day official Soviet painting is called "socialist realism." The name itself has evidently been invented by some high functionary in the department of the arts.
He was guessing, and guessed slightly low; Zelinsky supplies the functionary. But the structural claim was right, and Zis's book is the attempt, forty years on, to make it look wrong.
Trotsky's own book on this subject, Literature and Revolution (1923), is the great suppressed Soviet work on exactly the questions Zis's chapters take up — the relation of art to class, whether a proletarian culture is possible, what a party may and may not do to a writer. It was written by a member of the Politburo, published in Moscow, and then removed from Soviet intellectual life so completely that a Soviet professor could write the foundations of Marxist aesthetics in the 1970s without acknowledging that it existed. The name Trotsky does not occur in this book once. The absence is not even a polemic; there is nothing to argue with. What makes it precise rather than merely typical is the back of the volume: Progress's own advertisement for a forthcoming Barabash title promises an attack on "various 'leftist' conceptions of the Maoist and neo-Trotskyist sort". The house could print the word. It is the book that cannot use the book.
And there is one page where all of this stops being an argument about foundations and becomes a matter of a life.
Discussing how two artists can make different works from the same material, Zis turns to Shostakovich's opera on Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk — he calls it by the title of its revised version, Katerina Izmailova (the scan reads "hmailova"; the corruption is the scanner's). Leskov, he says, saw a merchant's wife who would stop at nothing. The composer saw something else:
In the conflict between Katerina Izmailova and the real world surrounding her Shostakovich is on the side of his heroine: he does not condemn or justify her, but shows how the terrible world, up against which she finds herself, crushes a passionate, full-blooded individual, who in other conditions might have found an outlet for unusually rich spiritual resources.
This is fine criticism, and it is worth saying so. It is also an account of the one Soviet opera that was destroyed by the doctrine Zis is founding. On 28 January 1936 Pravda printed an unsigned editorial, "Muddle Instead of Music", against that opera; it was withdrawn, and Shostakovich went for decades expecting arrest. The charge was formalism, and the standard invoked against him in 1948, when the Central Committee returned to the attack, was "alien to the principles of socialist realism" — as George Sanders reported at the time in "J. Stalin, Music Critic" (Fourth International, vol. 9 no. 2, March–April 1948), noting that the resolution condemning Shostakovich, Prokofiev and the rest "fails to criticize a single specific work by any of these figures". Zis praises the opera for refusing to condemn or justify its heroine, which is exactly the refusal the doctrine could not tolerate; and he does it without a syllable about what happened. (The companion volume in this series, Dmitry Shostakovich: About Himself and His Times, Progress 1981, prints the composer's own public account of 1936 and 1948, and should be read beside this page.)
The same pattern governs the rest of the cast. Meyerhold is named once, and not as a person: "the Meyerhold theatre had staged Vishnevsky's Last Decisive Battle", a venue on the road to socialist-realist drama. Meyerhold was arrested in 1939, tortured, and shot in February 1940. Fadeyev appears as the author of The Young Guard and as a source of practical advice to novices, never as the chairman of the Writers' Union who shot himself in May 1956. Tvardovsky is quoted twice on questions of form, never as the editor of Novy Mir — a journal Zis cites twice as a source. Mandelstam, Babel and Pilnyak are absent altogether.
Which brings the argument to the best chapter in the book, and to the place where the doctrine's cost is legible in the philosophy itself.
Zis's pages on the tragic are the strongest thing he wrote. He works through Aristotle's catharsis and Lessing's reading of it in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie; he distinguishes Hamlet's tragedy, the clash "between a historically necessary demand and the impossibility of its satisfaction", from Lear's, which stems from a "historical error"; he insists on the dialectic of the accidental and the necessary, and observes that "not every hero who perishes is tragic" — Iago and Claudius die, and their deaths are not tragedy. He is good on Hemingway and the lost generation, on De Santis and Fellini, and he quotes Chekhov to fine effect on the tragedy that needs no explosions: people "have their dinners, merely have their dinners and as they do so, their happiness is realised or their lives torn apart." He rejects the sentimental view that tragedy must be pessimistic. This is a serious critic writing about a serious category.
And then the chapter closes:
Of course all the tragic conflicts that in the past were born of the social antagonisms found in the erstwhile society are disappearing in socialist society. It provides no scope for tragedies resulting from the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters.
What sources of tragedy remain? Two are permitted: "man's struggle with Nature and the dramas of his personal life."
That is the no-conflict theory in a philosopher's clothes. It was set down more bluntly by the men who enforced it, and the Fourth International recorded it as it happened. Writing as Ernest Germain in "Purge of Soviet Culture" (Fourth International, vol. 10 no. 11, December 1949), Ernest Mandel listed the axioms then circulating in Soviet criticism: "The Soviet man does not know loneliness." "A Soviet citizen does not desert his wife." "There are no conflicts in a classless society." He gave the case that produced them: the editors of two periodicals removed for allowing Akhmatova to express "the emotion of loneliness ... foreign to Soviet literature". The periodicals were Zvezda and Leningrad, the report was Zhdanov's, and the resolution was of 14 August 1946. Zis has softened the axiom into something a philosopher can defend — tragedy survives, it merely relocates to nature and to private life — but the exclusion is the same exclusion, and the thing excluded is the state.
The measure of what that costs is Zis's own definition. He takes from Marx the finest available formula for the tragic: the collision between a historically necessary demand and the impossibility of its satisfaction. Apply it to the material his own book supplies. Meyerhold, whose theatre he names; Shostakovich, whose opera he admires; Fadeyev, whose advice to young writers he passes on. Each of them made a historically necessary demand of the revolution and found its satisfaction impossible, and one was shot, one lived under sentence, and one shot himself. Zis has the instrument in his hand and is not permitted to turn it around. He can define the tragic exactly and must not name a single Soviet instance of it.
None of which is a reason to dismiss the book, and it would be a poor reader who did.
The chapter on art and cognition is genuine philosophy and is still worth arguing with. Zis defends a real position — that art and science are two distinct forms of cognition, neither reducible to nor rankable against the other — and he defends it against opponents in both directions. Against Hainard, who held that "scientific objectivity and artistic objectivity move in opposite directions", he gives the correct reply and gives it crisply: "Naturally, Shakespeare's tragedies cannot and indeed do not provide the knowledge found in a history text-book. But, conversely the knowledge to be gleaned from Hamlet or King Lear could not be found in a history text-book." Against the intuitivists, who make art the only road to truth and science a bankruptcy, he is equally firm. He insists that "art apprehends and discovers things other than those which science apprehends" — a difference of object, not of rank — and he is willing to press the point into the hard cases, arguing that music too is cognitive, and that what it yields is knowledge of an emotional kind which is not thereby inferior. His formulation of what art does is better than most: "Art is always revelation: even when it comes to familiar aspects of our everyday lives it can spotlight facets of life which enable us to see the familiar in the unfamiliar and unfamiliar in the familiar." He is also right, against the vulgar sociologists he criticises by name, that art does not reflect the state of the productive forces directly and that treating technique as ideology wrecks the analysis.
The chapter on content and form is the other place the book earns its keep. The Shostakovich–Leskov comparison is one half of a well-made argument; the other is Gustaf Gründgens's Hamburg Faust, staged without cuts to Goethe's text and yet reversing its meaning, so that Mephistopheles wins — "a world in which the Mephistopheleses feel more at home than the Fausts." Identical material, opposed content. That is a real thesis about interpretation, argued from two well-chosen cases, and it does not depend on anything else in the book.
What the reader should not take from it is the theory of freedom in the final chapter, because there the book says plainly what it means. Zis is candid: "Absolute freedom for the individual cannot be, and indeed it will not be even under communism." Commitment is "the supreme expression of freedom". And: "In socialist society, Party guidance in matters of art means that the Party will encourage artists to create works that further the people's interests." He is honest enough to concede that dogmatists exist and do damage — that they "artificially divide a work of art into the ideological and political content on the one hand, and artistic form on the other", so that "political evaluation comes first" and art becomes "just another facet of political ideology, which in practice swallows it up". It is an accurate description of what was done to Shostakovich in 1948, offered as a warning against a tendency rather than a report of an event, and offered without a date, a decree or a name.
The reply is on record and it is specific. Trotsky's "Art and Politics in Our Epoch" (18 June 1938) is the text to set against this book, and not only for its verdict on the bureaucracy but for its rival theory of art: "a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work." Where Zis derives art from cognition and completes it with commitment, Trotsky derives it from need and unrest — a difference at the level of first principles, not of policy. From it follows the sentence that the whole of Zis's fifth chapter exists to deny: "a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of 'leading' and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power... Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them." For the institutional history Zis omits, chapter 7 of The Revolution Betrayed (1936) had already described the machinery — "a general compulsory organization, a kind of concentration camp of artistic literature", in which "the most eminent artists either commit suicide, or find their material in the remote past, or become silent", while "mediocre but 'right-thinking' storytellers like Serafimovich or Gladkov are inaugurated as classics." Both of those names are in Zis's canon of socialist realism, forty years later, exactly where Trotsky predicted they would be. For the Zhdanov years, Mandel's "Purge of Soviet Culture" (December 1949) and Sanders on the 1948 music resolution (March–April 1948) are the contemporaneous accounts.
Honesty requires adding that Trotsky in 1938 overreached in the same essay, writing that it was "impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust" and consigning the art of the Stalin period wholesale to the record of decline. That verdict does not survive the Fifth Symphony, or And Quiet Flows the Don, or the fact that Zis's own best pages are about a Soviet opera. A tradition that holds Progress Publishers to the standard of the evidence has to hold itself to it too.
What is this book, then?
It is the most respectable version of the case, and respectability is its subject. By 1977 socialist realism had to be presented to foreign readers as a doctrine arrived at by argument. Zis had the equipment for the job: he could read, he knew the Western literature, he could distinguish a good objection from a bad one, and he wrote about tragedy like someone who had felt it. What he did not have was a text to found the doctrine on, and he says so, in the act of denying it. The words are not in Marx, Engels or Lenin; there is instead a philosophical structure from which they are held to follow, a body of quotations assembled in the 1930s, an article of 1905 about party newspapers stretched to cover a state's whole artistic life, and the word of a functionary at a plenum that nobody prescribed anything. Everything that would settle the question — the decree of 1932, the Congress of 1934, the resolutions of 1946 and 1948, the men who wrote them and the artists they destroyed — is outside the book. Read it for the chapters on cognition and on form, which are good; read it, above all, for the page on Katerina Izmailova, where a Soviet professor writing in the mid-1970s praises an opera for showing how a terrible world crushes a passionate individual, and does not know, or cannot say, that he has described the fate of its composer.