Authors

Nakamura Tadashi¹;  ¹ Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Japan

Discussion

        This presentation explores the relationship between humans and the world, including living things, machines, nature, and the universe, in films and literary works that follow patterns of the Stalinist-era aesthetic canon known as "Socialist Realism."         

    Katerina Clark, Andrei Sinyavsky and other critics list the following characteristics of "Socialist Realism": 1) a story type in which a positive protagonist engaged in revolution or socialist construction encounters resistance and obstruction along the way from class enemies, but fights with his comrades to overcome the obstacles and finally defeat the enemy (however, there are variations, such as a fight against the forces of nature instead of a fight with class enemies, or the death of the positive protagonist and his comrades carrying on his will, and so on); 2) integrity between humans and machines or animals, with the former being the superiority of the latter; 3) teleological tendency (purposiveness) in stories and plots, and therefore the primacy of linear, irreversible time.

The main objects of our analysis, Dovzhenko's film “The Earth” (1930) and Grossman's short story “Life” (1943), clearly have these characteristics. In “The Earth”, the main story follows the story type of 1), but its teleological and irreversible time and the cyclical time of the depictions of the nature, which are correlatively placed at the beginning and the end and take up almost 20% of the film's time, seem to be in conflict rather than harmonious, with the semantic superiority of the latter over the former. In Grossman's “Life”, which depicts the surviving Red Army soldiers and miners' battle against the Nazi army, the integral unity of destroyed man-made objects and the humans is praised at the lyrical depiction of the end, but it is the transcendental moonlight from the sky that guarantees this integrity.

        The main purpose of this report is to explore the elements that appear in these works but do not conform to patterns of "Socialist Realism", and to seek after their ideological or aesthetic origins.