ABSTRACT
Boris Grays views Socialist Realism as an extreme expression of avantgarde utopianism and sees in Sots-Art not the continuation of the avant-garde impulse but rather its "removal." Thus, for example, in analyzing the poetics of Komar and Melarnid he demonstrates that they not only do not "unmask" the Stalinist myth but rather "remythologize" it, penetrating through the Socialist Realist structure into the "Soviet unconscious," where Soviet myths fall into an associative network that unites them with other mythologies:
The avant-garde claim to express the inexpressible, to realize the utopian project, to overcome the power of tradition is inverted by the return of that very avant-garde project to the context of world mythologies and eternal archetypes, that is, a return to the most traditional of traditions. According to Grays, the result of this turnabout is "to regard with indifference such questions as whether or not the thinking of the individual can be completely manipulated . . . whether this thinking is authentic, whether there is any distinction between a simulacrum and reality, and so on" (ibid., 110). This state he characterizes as "postutopian."
