Kandinsky and the Russian Soul
From "The soul of Russian types of Realism"
by Ilaria Bignotti
The reproduction of life is the general characteristic of art, what constitutes its essence
Beauty is life... in fact we observe life only in real living beings, while abstract and general ideas remain outside the reign of life (Nikolai Cernyshevsky, 1828-1889).
Perhaps these short phrases, taken from the graduation thesis of a young student who lived during the epoch of Alexander II (1855-1889), might suffice to show that the strength and conviction of Russian Realism in the 119th century was not just, or rather, not so much a useful way for formulating an objective formulation of reality, but above all an explorative and critical approach to the relationship between art and reality.
In literature it was Dostoevsky who spoke of the realism of real life, of a language and intellectual sensibility capable of digging deeply into the nature of man until all the contradictions, anxieties, fears, and hopes of everyday life emerged.
It might be difficult today to understand how much the artists and intellectuals of 19th century Russia held themselves responsible for their own society and people, in the conviction that
The final end of all the thought and activity of every honest man is, in every case, in definitively solving the problem of hungry and destitute man; apart from this nothing exists which is worthwhile worrying about, meditating on and being involved with... (Dmitry Pisarev, 1840-1868)
Feeling themselves vouchsafed a genuine social and spiritual mission, the artists of the 19th century held that only realism could have a precise and basic role and become the expression and instrument of populism, of agrarian socialism, of the fight against injustice and intimidation, but also against academic dogmatism and official art. This can be seen in the case of the Fourteen group, students who, in 1943, rebelled against the rules of the St. Petersburg fine arts school and claimed their own autonomy, and in the better known Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions, started in 1870, which was then to give its name to the group of Peredvizhniki, critically realist itinerant painters.
Many of the Peredvizhniki came from humble backgrounds: peasants, the lower middle classes, low-grade officials of the public education service all of whom knew the painful problems of their people, having had direct experience of them. One of the tasks the Itinerants had set themselves was the spread of art, above all in the cultural outskirts to which they considered it necessary to go, not just to instruct the people, but also to discover and use as their own the simplicity and beauty of rural life. To tell the truth about life: this was the slogan and law of the Itinerants who declared absolute faith in realism, populism, and nation specificity.
These words were destined to be exploited and transformed into a dogma by the cultural politics of Stalin's Russia who, decades later, decided to recuperate and take to extremes the themes and principles of 19th century realism.
Social realist art was created, not by the people, but in its name by a group of writers and artists led by a single guide: Stalin. In order to elaborate the new system of symbols and images of the regime, they were 'invited' to live the life of the people and to represent it in a simple and, above all, direct way comprehensible to the masses. The selected artists were invited cyclically to genuinely creative missions: they had to observe the places of the Leninist cult, the fields which had seen the great battles, but also the enormous factories, the co-operatives, and the collective farms. Having returned from these visits, with their eyes and minds full of images of people at work and of a society in construction, the artists met together in the so-called 'houses of creativity' where they could concentrate, discuss, and create the works needed by the cultural machine.
It was precisely the link between socialist realism and that of the 19th century, above all of the Peredvizhniki, that was the strong point of Stalinist art criticism which aimed at demonstrating how close Soviet neo-realism was to
...the itinerant artists of the second half of the 19th century, who had to fight so hard in order to profess their love for the real world and to bring art to the people... (Maria Gibellino Krascenninikowa)
Besides this, extreme nationalism, which was inevitably linked to a sharp disavowal of all that was Western, was the other prop used by Stalinist criticism in order to justify the links and analogies of Soviet realism with 19th century realism.
The basis of Stalinist aesthetics was the prevailing dictate that the past could only exist insofar as its aim was the present day, just as the future was simplistically represented as a kind of better present, strengthened and even more glorious. Over history there loomed the figure of Stalin, represented hagiographically in his most typical moments from childhood to maturity, mythologically shored up by battles and epoch-making events, and accompanied by an exultant and festive populace destined to live on through the deformations of a regime-orientated art expert at hiding the cruel reality of the barracks of the Kolchoz and communal housing.
It is for these aesthetic choices that frequently Soviet Realism artworks present a metaphysical atmosphere and a sense of detachment from reality, a symbolic, transcendent, and mystic air that slips into unreality.
Both types of realism, that of the 19th century and that of the age of Stalin, were, then, also ideologies, philosophies, and political choices for confrontation or for backing the regime: in both cases, quite apart from the accusations or praises bestowed by history, the artist knew how to accept the challenge of an art committed to its own people and its own nation. In other words, an art that was also the soul of its own land.