#petra rethmann

[dostoyevsky-official]

If it is true that one of the defining criteria of kitsch is not simply its perceived sentimentality but predictability, a predictability that constitutes itself as a ready-made emotional and aesthetic effect, then it seems not too fantastic to say that Lenin’s mummy has always been kitsch.

Socialist realist art does not confidently believe in the transparency of the visual as, for example, some of the Russian realist painters of the nineteenth century did. Rather, it assuredly seeks the manipulation of consciousness, using those aesthetic and political techniques that (almost) automatically secure specific emotional responses. Rather than continuously seeking an ideological and theoretical justification for this “collective mechanization of consciousness,” it functions as a magic force that programmatically arouses a certain predictable emotional and behavioral response, not in the Freudian or Jungian but in Pavlovian sense. It is this automatism that Milan Kundera (1991: 251) describes as kitsch’s tear: “The feeling induced by kitsch must be a be kitsch the multitudes can share. Kitsch [. . .] must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on grass, the motherland betrayed, first love. Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.” In the Lenin mummy, the tear is the sentimental response, of artifice and exaggeration, of larger-than-life grandeur and mythical historical representation that marks it as poshlyi and kitsch. The very choice and predominance of “predictable” colors –red and gold – in the mausoleum, the marble, and its soft light generate an excessive sentimentality, an elegiac image of Soviet life, a picturesque ruins of idyllic collectivity.

Petra Rethmann, “The Discreet Charm of Lenin,” Journal of Historical Sociology (2013), doi:10.1111/johs.12017    

[dostoyevsky-official]

Lenin’s body produced the ideological map of the country, transforming a once revolutionary rupture into a mythical present. It is also his body that became the blueprint for the official face of the Soviet Union as a country of beauty, optimism, and glee. In this country, of course, the spaces of terror, the camps, are hidden from view and erased from the maps.

Petra Rethmann, “The Discreet Charm of Lenin,” Journal of Historical Sociology (2013), doi:10.1111/johs.12017     

[dostoyevsky-official]

The kitsch of socialist realism, of course, is not only born of out of what in Russia is called meshchanstvo, the deal with the middle-class, but also the grand project of socialist realism. The Russian New Person is no longer the exemplary revolutionary but a more anonymous Soviet citizen mass-produced by bureaucratic and authoritarian de-individuation, a process that follows its own prescriptive rules and rules out creative choices.

[...] Although these interpretations of socialist realism are often not treated as the same and, in fact, follow their own academic division of labor, they come together in their understanding of socialist realism as an atrophy of critical judgment, a crisis in reflective thinking and thus an aesthetic as well as political failure. As Svetlana Boym (ibid.: 106) has argued, the putatively homogenous form of socialist realist culture did not offer a unity of style. Rather, it marks a kind of monstrous hybrid of various inconsistent aesthetic and political elements, borrowing from the right and the left, aristocratic, middle-class, and proletarian culture, to build up its own positive hero. Eschewing more traditional heroes such as Ivan the Fool, (and incapable of anticipating the critical hero of Khrushchev’s Thaw and the rebellious heroes of the 1980s), this who is created by the system, who is heroic because he follows the socialist cause but because he is patriotic, and is thus mainstream. The only thing that can be called consistent and unified about it is its dependence on Soviet power.

Petra Rethmann, “The Discreet Charm of Lenin,” Journal of Historical Sociology (2013), doi:10.1111/johs.12017     

[dostoyevsky-official]

Perhaps no other theorist of Soviet political culture than Vera Dunham (1990) has sought more persuasively to show that it was, ironically (and tragically for Nabokov), in Stalin’s time that banality and kitsch became a most integral part of Soviet culture. Arguing that especially after World War II a special pact, a “big deal” was made between the Stalinist government and “the people” (narod), a deal that acknowledges that in the mid-1940s almost everybody had become tired of the heroic asceticism of the revolutionary and war years, and that what almost everybody truly longed for were material possessions and homeyness, Dunham describes the “colored postcards that were tacked over beds, with views of Naples, Venice, and the sea,” and the way in which “embroider ed pillows were neatly arranged on the bed.” In this world, the crêpe-de-chinedresses, old fashioned dinnerware, and household decorations are no longer regarded as petit-bourgeois but are presented as legitimate awards for the heroes and heroines of labor, as well as the marching enthusiasts (at least officially) of the Stalinist order. Its most spectacular embodiment may be the Stalinist subway system– the ideal blueprint of Socialist realist culture, with neoclassical columns, mosaic portraits of great poets and great leaders, and plenty of exotic vegetation to adorn the Russian tropical utopia under the ground. This coziness, something that under the early Bolsheviks would have qualified as “domestic trash,” begins to compete with the persistent revolutionary rhetoric of political utopia and the aesthetic avant-garde.

Petra Rethmann, “The Discreet Charm of Lenin,” Journal of Historical Sociology (2013), doi:10.1111/johs.12017     

[dostoyevsky-official]

In Russia, – at least to some extent – kitsch finds its semantic twin in the word poshlost’, a complex term that encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and lack of spirituality. Poshlost’ comes from poshlo: something that has been, has occurred, or has past. Among the older meanings of the word are“traditional” and “ancient”: thus poshlyi people can refer to ancestors and a poshlyi route means an old thoroughfare. There are important connections between poshlost’ and kitsch: both are associated with vulgarity and questionable taste, the superficiality of mass culture and, accordingly, moral invective. [...] In identifying poshlost’ as one key analytical category in the understanding of both unoriginality and staleness, Nabokov, in similarity to Greenberg, identifies with one particular intellectual obsession – the fight against banality. Nabokov’s own humorous, passionate, and occasionally infuriating descriptions of poshlost’ are simultaneously directed at Russian imitations of Western European middle-class culture as well as at American ads. Drawing on one particular Russian intelligentsia obsession, namely Russia’s relation to the West and “progress” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example, used the term poshlyi to describe Russia’s Western-oriented youth), Nabokov turns poshlost’ into a perfect artifact of national criticism, yet without taking into consideration the kitsch of socialist realism and Stalin’s time. Conceptualized from the perspective of an émigré, the critique of poshlost’ is both a site and weapon in the struggle against banality.

Petra Rethmann, “The Discreet Charm of Lenin,” Journal of Historical Sociology (2013), doi:10.1111/johs.12017