ABSTRACT
In summer 1958, aesthetician Nina Dmitrieva published an essay ‘On the Question of the Contemporary Style’ in the relatively liberal art journal of the USSR Artists’ Union, Tvorchestvo.1 The Contemporary Style (sovremennyi stil’) as she presented it was a new period style embracing all aspects of Soviet culture and embodying the spirit of the present age. Not only in its iconography but, most significantly, in its formal structures, it would express the vast transformations that had taken place in the Soviet Union since the Revolution and the rapid pace of progress in the present. A contemporary artist must have a heightened awareness of these momentous changes, and this would inevitably find expression precisely in stylistic change. The hallmarks of the Contemporary Style according to Dmitrieva and others were generalization, lapidariness, expression and monumentality.
