ABSTRACT
When the French Marxist Roger Garaudy published his theory of “realism without bounds” (D’un réalisme sans rivages) in 1963, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) vociferously denounced him for revisionism and placed his heretical book on the blacklist. 1 Even to the last days of the Soviet Union, conservative aestheticians and art functionaries continued to resist any attempt to revise the conception of socialist realism or to sanction an ecumenical concept of what they disparagingly called “realism as a rubber sack.” 2 Yet already by 1963 the Soviet art establishment was split into conservative or hard line and reformist, liberalizing, or modernizing camps committed to a new, “contemporary style” of realism. 3 A more radical fringe had also emerged. Condemned at the notorious Manège Affair at the end of 1962, it formed the new margin of permitted Soviet art, coming to be known (in the West) as the nonconformist or underground art world. 4 Indeed much of what Garaudy proposed was already under debate among reform-minded artists and critics in the Moscow art world since 1956. Against the jeremiads of the conservatives, modernizers sought a rejuvenated and elastically defined realism, a public art that could move and persuade and say something to contemporary people about the present day in a “contemporary” style. This article will consider the ways in which, beginning in the Khrushchev Thaw (c. 1953–62), the Soviet conception of socialist realism was challenged, fractured, and expanded thanks in part to encounters with art and artists of the “socialist countries” (Sotsstran) and, more broadly, to increased Soviet exposure to international socialist art, including that of postcolonial countries.
