The other volumes on aesthetics in this series argue about literature. This one is about painting, and that changes the ground under the whole argument. When Vladislav Zimenko writes about "the humanism of art" he means, in the first place, pictures — Deyneka's parachutists and steel-workers, Plastov's villages, Saryan's Armenia, Korzhev's severe faces — and the doctrine he is defending, socialist realism, was imposed on Soviet painters at a cost that is different from the literary one and, if anything, sharper. The book is the work of an insider. Its own front matter identifies Zimenko (born 1919) as "an eminent Soviet art critic" and, more to the point, "Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Iskusstvo (Art)" — the flagship journal of the Union of Artists' establishment. This is not a scholar working at the margins under constraint. It is a man near the centre of the apparatus that decided what Soviet painting was allowed to be, writing the case for the defence, in English, for readers abroad.
Start with the date, because it is close to honest. The imprint is genuinely Progress — "Translation into English. Progress Publishers 1976. First printing 1976" stands verbatim on the copyright page, which several volumes in this series cannot say — and the lag behind the Russian is short. The latest datable Soviet matter inside the book is a pair of paintings by Tetyana Yablonskaya, Nameless Heights (1970) and Youth (1971); an article in Iskusstvo No. 5 for 1973; and a Brezhnev speech collected in Following Lenin's Course (Moscow, 1972). The 1975 and 1976 dates in the footnotes are all Progress editions of Marx, Engels and Lenin used for quotation, not sources. This is a manuscript closed around 1972–73 and issued in English in 1976: a book of the settled middle of détente, when the USSR wanted to present its official culture to the West as a mature humanism rather than a set of orders. That is exactly how it presents it.
Take the argument seriously first, because there is a real one here and the criticism that follows is worth nothing if it is not conceded. Zimenko's genuine target is not a phantom. It is the modernist elevation of the difficult, the private and the illegible over the human and the shared — and against that he makes a case with a long and respectable history, one that is not only Soviet. He quotes Ortega y Gasset's The Dehumanisation of Art accurately and fights it on its merits: Ortega's book is "spearheaded against realist art, against art with social content, art as an instrument of cognition," and rejects "the idea of art as a mass medium." Zimenko thinks art that turns its back on the mass of human beings, and on the possibility of being understood by them, has given something up that matters. John Berger, writing from an entirely different politics in the same decade, thought so too; so did much of the figurative tradition. When Zimenko insists that "art spoke of man, expressing affection and respect for him," and traces "a long line of bequests of the legacy of active social humanism" through Egyptian sculpture, the Renaissance, Rembrandt, Repin and Delacroix, he is not merely reciting. He reads pictures with attention and sometimes with feeling — he is good on Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple, good on Deyneka's The Parachutist (1939) against the later Ace Pilot Shot Down, one all "lightness and abandon," the other "pervaded with the despair of the doomed man." A reader who dismisses the whole book because of its politics will miss a critic who could look.
Notice, too, what the book does not do, because it is to Zimenko's credit and it distinguishes him from his neighbour on the same list. Avner Zis's Foundations of Marxist Aesthetics (Progress, 1977) grounds socialist realism on Lenin's 1905 article "Party Organisation and Party Literature," completes it with "commitment" and "Party guidance," and is candid that "Party guidance in matters of art" is the point. Zimenko does almost none of this. The word partiinost does not occur; the phrases Party guidance and Party leadership do not occur; even commitment appears only twice and not as a slogan. He roots the doctrine instead in Gorky — "the founder and first brilliant exponent of socialist realism" — and in the humanist continuum of world art. He cites Lenin's 1905 article once, and when he does, he reaches not for the disciplinary sentences about the writer as "a cog and a screw" but for the emancipatory promise: "It will be a free literature, because the idea of socialism and sympathy with the working people, and not greed or careerism, will bring ever new forces to its ranks." This is the humane face of the doctrine, and Zimenko means it. The trouble is not that he is lying about what he wants. The trouble is everything the book has to leave outside its covers to let him want it in good conscience.
Because this is a book about painting, the suppressed history is the history of the destruction of Russian painting, and it is almost entirely absent. Consider the roll of names. Kazimir Malevich: zero. Vladimir Tatlin: zero. Alexander Rodchenko: zero. Marc Chagall: zero. Pavel Filonov, who was hounded into obscurity through the 1930s and starved to death in besieged Leningrad in 1941: zero. Suprematism: zero. The one member of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde Zimenko does name is Wassily Kandinsky — once, and the mention is itself a small act of dispossession. Discussing whether distorted images are "abstract," he writes that "such paintings as Kandinsky's Landscape with Cottages or Composition Two are not abstract paintings, but the usual forms have been so changed and distorted as to be unrecognisable." Kandinsky, a Russian who taught in Soviet art institutions before emigrating in 1921, appears not as one of his country's lost painters but as a specimen of Western eeriness, filed under the enemy.
The rest of the avant-garde is present only as a corrected error. Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism appear — the Constructivists "grouped around the magazine Lef and especially Vyeshch" are credited with "a definite influence" — but always as "formalist currents" that the real Soviet artists "passed through" and "overcame." The emblematic case is Alexander Deyneka, whom Zimenko admires without reserve and quotes at length in the artist's own voice: "Even when we resorted to abstract art forms, we were convinced that we were doing something useful, socially necessary (which made it all the easier for us to abandon it when we realised its complete absurdity)." That parenthesis is the whole operation in a breath. The abandonment of experiment is narrated as free intellectual maturing — the scales fell from our eyes, we saw the absurdity, we walked away — with no suggestion that anyone made the walking compulsory. It is the rule this series keeps meeting, in its purest visual form: error is admissible, the category is not. An artist may have been young and wrong; the method that replaced his youth is never in the dock, because everything done under coercion is retrospectively reclassified as something the artist chose.
And in the very next sentence of that same quotation stands the book's sharpest unmarked grave. Deyneka goes on: "The militant vanguard of Soviet art — Mayakovsky, Eisenstein and Meyerhold — possessed our minds and were a model we strove to follow." Vsevolod Meyerhold, named here with affection as a model of the revolutionary vanguard, was arrested in 1939, tortured into signing a confession, and shot in February 1940; his wife was murdered in their flat. He is in this book exactly once, as a fond memory, and the book does not know — or cannot say — what became of him. It is the Zis pattern precisely. There Zis praised Shostakovich's Katerina Izmailova for showing "how the terrible world … crushes a passionate, full-blooded individual," without a syllable about what the terrible world did to its composer. Here Zimenko lets Meyerhold be quoted as an inspiration and does not turn the page to the cellar.
Now the enforcement machinery, which is the other half of the finding and which is not there at all. In a book on Soviet painting published by the Soviet state, the words Stalin, Zhdanov and Khrushchev each occur zero times. The Manège Affair — the emblematic event, when on 1 December 1962 Khrushchev toured the Manège exhibition and abused the abstract painters to their faces, ending the visual thaw — is absent; Manège zero, 1962 zero. The Central Committee decree of 23 April 1932 that dissolved the independent art groups and cleared the way for a single compulsory Union: absent. The Union of Artists itself, the instrument that administered every Soviet painter's career, is never named as such — the phrase does not occur — and surfaces only as a source of self-praise, in the report that "at their Third All-Union Congress, Soviet artists said that their art belongs wholly to the people." Alexander Gerasimov, the painter who presided over official Soviet art under Stalin as first president of the Academy of Arts and the foremost image-maker of the leader cult on canvas, is absent — the checker flags a "Gerasimov" in the text, but it is Sergei Gerasimov, a gentle landscapist, discussed for a small canvas of field flowers; the Gerasimov who mattered institutionally is a genuine silence. The doctrine is founded on Gorky and the humanist tradition, and its actual founders, the men who wrote the decrees and destroyed the painters, are outside the frame.
The elision is at its most delicate around 1961. Zimenko writes that "the period since the All-Union Exhibition of 1961 … represents an especially important and interesting stage in our artistic advance, the results of which have yet to be summed up." That exhibition was one of the high points of the visual thaw. What happened next — the Manège crackdown of December 1962, the campaign against abstract art through 1963, the return of ideological discipline to the studios — is precisely what he declines to sum up. The stage is named; its ending is left as an unfinished sentence.
There is one more parallel to Zis, and it is almost verbatim. Zis's book was structured against two former Communists, Fischer and Garaudy, both expelled from their parties over the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, an event his book does not contain. Zimenko's version is smaller but identical in shape. Among his opponents he lists "people who once called themselves Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse and Ivan Svitak," and adds of the second: "The latter left socialist Czechoslovakia and found a nook among the active anti-communists of the Russian Institute at Columbia University." Ivan Sviták was a Czech Marxist philosopher and a voice of the Prague Spring; he "left socialist Czechoslovakia" because the Warsaw Pact crushed the Prague Spring in August 1968. Czechoslovakia occurs once in this book, in that sneer, and the reason a man had to leave it is the one thing the sentence withholds. The apostasy is used and the cause of the apostasy is suppressed, in a single clause.
This is where the reflexivity test cuts, and it cuts unusually deep in a book with this title. The Humanism of Art proposes a standard: art in the service of the human, against everything that impoverishes, "eviscerates and mutilates" the human. Turn that standard on the state that commissioned the book. Filonov starved; Meyerhold was shot; Malevich was harassed into silence and painted his last canvases in a forced return to figuration; the Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents, whose 1923 portrait Zimenko reads with real tenderness for its "great repressed pain," died in an NKVD prison in 1937. Soviet art was disciplined, and Soviet artists were destroyed, precisely in the name of a humane and legible art of the people — the name on the cover of this book. A volume that could turn its own title on that history would be a great and terrible document. This one cannot. The humanist standard is aimed outward without exception, at Ortega, at Marcuse, at the "desert of the city" of Western modernism, and never once at the concentration camp of Soviet art. Zimenko has the instrument in his hand — he defines the humanism of art with care — and is not permitted to point it homeward.
Its political vocabulary confirms the direction of aim. The deviation words this series measures elsewhere are simply not Zimenko's: opportunism and revisionism occur zero times each. His policing vocabulary is aesthetic — formalism and modernism, the crimes of the studio, not the crimes of the faction — which fits a book that wants to fight on the ground of taste and humane feeling rather than of Party discipline. It is the most respectable register available, and the respectability is the point.
The reply is older than the book and was, on this exact subject, unusually specific. Writing to Partisan Review on 18 June 1938, in "Art and Politics in Our Epoch," Trotsky wrote a sentence that could serve as the epigraph this book most needs and least wants: "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." His essay is not about literature in general; it is about painting, about painters ordered to draw "with their brushes the crude lines of what they themselves realize is an historical falsification." From it he drew the first principle that the whole of Zimenko's book exists to deny: "Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them." And its rival account of where art comes from — not from cognition completed by commitment, but from need and unrest: "a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with rebellion." The institutional description had come two years earlier, in chapter 7 of The Revolution Betrayed (1936): "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." That is the Union Zimenko will not name, described before it had finished its work.
For the Zhdanov years the contemporaneous account is Ernest Mandel's, writing as Ernest Germain in "Purge of Soviet Culture" (Fourth International, vol. 10 no. 11, December 1949). Mandel recorded the 1948 formalism campaign in music — "Shostakovich, Prokofieff, Khatchaturian, Miaskovsky, Shebalin and Popov were severely criticised for having written 'formalistic' works" and removed from their posts — and Zhdanov's 1946 report condemning Akhmatova for "the emotion of loneliness … foreign to Soviet literature." Formalism was not, in the world Zimenko is defending, a term of art criticism; it was a charge, and the charge ended careers. And for the visual thaw and its reversal, our own tradition scored the hit inside the decade: George Saunders, in "Fifty Years of Soviet Literature" (International Socialist Review, vol. 30 no. 1, January–February 1969), described "a campaign, in 1963, allegedly against abstract art, which was broadened in the following years into a drive against all 'bourgeois ideological influences.'" That campaign is the sequel to the exhibition of 1961 whose results Zimenko says "have yet to be summed up." Saunders summed them up seven years before Zimenko declined to. (The Manège confrontation itself of December 1962 has no contemporaneous account in the corpora this series holds; the archives begin, for continuous coverage, in 1968. What we can cite is the campaign it launched, and the principle it violated.)
Trotsky's own book on these questions, Literature and Revolution (1923), is the great suppressed Soviet work on exactly the ground Zimenko's chapters cover — what a party may and may not do to an artist, whether a class can be handed a method, what the relation of art to revolution actually is. It was written by a member of the Politburo and published in Moscow, and it had been out of Soviet intellectual life for half a century by the time Zimenko wrote. Trotsky does not occur in this book once; the argument he began is conducted, as in Suchkov and Zis, in a vocabulary he shaped, against an absence where his name should be.
Honesty requires the same discipline turned on our own side. Trotsky in that 1938 essay also overreached, writing that it was "impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust" and consigning the whole art of the Stalin period to the record of decline. That verdict does not survive Deyneka's parachutist, or Saryan's Armenia, or Plastov's villages, and it does not survive the plain fact that Zimenko — writing in the doctrine's defence — could still see and describe good pictures. A tradition that holds Progress Publishers to the evidence has to hold itself to it. The case against this book is not that Soviet painting produced nothing; it manifestly did. The case is that the doctrine was enforced by the state upon the painters, that the enforcement destroyed some of the best of them, and that a book calling itself the humanism of art cannot afford to remember any of it.
What is this volume, then? It is the most humane version of the case, written by a man who could look at a canvas and who believed, sincerely, that art belongs to the people and should speak to them of themselves. Everything he affirms about legibility, about art's refusal to abandon man, about the poverty of an "anti-art" that rejects "the very nature of art," has a real argument behind it and deserves an answer rather than a sneer. But the humanism is purchased by amputation. To found socialist realism on the love of man, Zimenko must not mention the Union that administered it, the decrees that armed it, the exhibition it crushed in 1962, or the painters it silenced, exiled and starved. He praises a Meyerhold he cannot bury and a 1961 he cannot finish. Read the book for its eye, which is real; read it, above all, for the sentence in which a Soviet critic lets Meyerhold be named as a model of the revolutionary vanguard and turns the page — because that turning page is the whole method, and it is the fate of the man on it.