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The Curtainless Stage and the Procrustean Bed: Socialist Realism and Stalinist Theatrical Eminence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Extract

With the advent of the 1917 Revolution, “the whole of the Russian cultural world [became] an icon.” Soviet power retroactively encoded revolutionary imminence and immanence in history and fetishized the revolutionary historical moment as the pregnant body of past, present and future. Leon Trotsky wrote: “If the symbol is a concentrated image, then the revolution is the supreme maker of symbols, since it presents all phenomena and relations in concentrated form.” Lenin's belief that “a communist [proletarian] culture must embody the entire store of knowledge accumulated in the pre-revolutionary past” could not, however, fully predict the Soviets' gross and wholesale advertisement of self-made objects inscribed with ideological desire. This owed more to what Renato Poggioli called the “pronounced tendency of the Russian critical spirit to translate artistic and cultural facts into religious or political myths.” This tendency was exploited by Joseph Stalin, who recognized that “Totalitarianism is … its own Utopia.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1991

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