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Title of the article: |
ART CRITICISM WITHIN THE SYSTEM OF CULTURE IN THE USSR OF THE 1930S |
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Author(s): |
Alexander A. Goncharenko |
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Information about the author/authors |
Alexander A. Goncharenko — Postgraduate Student, S. Gerasimov All-Russian State University of Cinematography, Wilhelm Pieck St. 3, 129226 Moscow, Russia. E-mail: aleksgo@yandex.ru |
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Section |
History of Arts |
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Year |
2019 |
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Volume |
Vol. 51 |
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Pages |
pp. 267–276 |
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Received |
February 28, 2018 |
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Date of publication |
March 28, 2019 |
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Index UDK |
7.03 |
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Index BBK |
85 |
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Abstract |
The article examines the concentration of arts around literature, produced by the cultural policy of the USSR in the 1930s. Literary criticism played a key role in this process aiming, on a literary material, to produce universal criteria of assessment that could be applicable for any arts. Attempts at restructuring periodicals (proposed, e.g., at the V-th plenum of the RAPP by I. Makariev) came to be a crucial moment for this process: for this purpose all actions were aimed at changing or expanding the system of periodicals only regarding literature, while the rest of the arts were assigned to a significantly smaller number of publications. At the same time, periodicals system pertaining to literature implied differentiation of publications on various aspects of literary creativity, politics and criticism while such a specialization was not characteristic of publications on other forms of art. Which was partly due to a rarely articulated concept of literature as a prototype of other arts; therefore, for their critics, literary criticism schemes could be used. Such authors as Bor. Vaks, S. Korev, I. Matz, A. Fedorov-Davydov, tried to defend the originality of approaches to various arts, but unification along the literary pattern turned out more influential. In this context, cinematography would be an exemplary illustration — young and institutionally unstable art with no theoretical basis of its own. Understandably regrets about the lack of actual literature on cinema were not unusual. Critics and authors used to complain about the lack of uniform and transparent evaluation criteria, which often led to polar interpretations of the same works. At the same time, the quality of films was made directly dependent upon the quality of film criticism. |
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Keywords |
The USSR’s cultural policy, literary criticism, socialist realism, literary centrism. |
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References |
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