Mythology forever. The universal/eternal and specifically historical in the Mythologism of the art of Socialist Realism

Abstract

Mythologicality, mythmaking is an attributive feature of any human consciousness inherent in it at all stages of human history. This characteristic is intrinsic to value and worldview-based forms of consciousness, particularly art. However, each phase of the history of culture and every cultural-and-historical type of consciousness generates its peculiar variants of mythology, an artistic one amongst others. The mythology of the art of socialist realism also had its foundations that gave birth to social-realistic mythology: ‘archetypal’ and ‘paradigmatic’ mythical heroes and storylines. The author singles out and comprehends three essential sociocultural foundations intrinsic to the mythologism of socialistic realism. First, it is modernist nature and ‘pathos’ of socialist realism expressed in the thirst of a young socialist society (especially at its early stages) for the radical redevelopment of the natural and cultural universe. Second, it is political and ideological dominant of the entire Soviet civilization and its public consciousness that created the mythology of the convergence of ideals and reality, the proper and all that exists, the mythology of eternal struggle of new world heroes with communism foes and the victory against them. It determined the ‘specificity’ of the value system that socialist realism ‘inherited’, for instance, particular (atheistic) religious commitment, statism, a priority of the public over the individual, voluntary self-alienation, a penchant for illusions and idealizations ( in defiance of the declared realism). Third, it is the shaped, historically and ideologically, specific features of Soviet people’ collective psychology. The paper highlights, notably, the internal incoherence of actual mass psychology: the unity of positive feelings and aspirations with ever-accelerating negative ones. Myths of socialistic realism became a way to sort out, illusively overcome this inconsistency. All this gave rise to a sustainable mythical system of socialist realism. The crisis of socialism and its spiritual ‘decadence’ led to gradual devalorization and elimination of this myth classic. That, however, did not eliminate mythologism of artistic consciousness as such but caused the alteration of mythological paradigms, legitimation of the novel artistic-and-mythological pluralism. The collection of Soviet and post-Soviet paintings in Yekaterinburg Art Gallery including those, mentioned in the paper, acts as proof of the above-said.