The Aesthetics of Socialism

Abstract

This study compares socialist realism, understood as a state-mandated aesthetic system, with György Lukács’s Marxist aesthetics. Socialist realism was the term used for representative cultural products commissioned by the political center within the framework of Soviet large-scale industrial cultural production. Despite this, it cannot be defined in fixed terms, as its prescribed formal characteristics constantly shifted in accordance with the regime’s biopolitical aims and geopolitical interests. These works were not autonomous or monadic, inscrutable “artwork-individualities” in the manner of modern art, but rather served specific purposes—as symbolic instruments of legitimizing power. Their function was to render the reality of the Soviet Union visually and ideologically comprehensible.