Fractures and ruptures in soviet aesthetics: the collection “Against Formalism, Naturalism, and Simplification in Art” (1936)

The relevance of the article. After 2014, several Ukrainian art and activist initiatives emerged that engaged critically with Soviet architectural, artistic, and ideological heritage. In response to the adoption of decommunization laws, which threatened the very existence of the Ukrainian Soviet legacy, activists founded in 2015 the self-organized initiative DE NE DE. One of the initiative’s key research methods involved artistic interventions into museum exhibitions created during the Soviet era, inviting contemporary artists to reinterpret and challenge the established narratives That same year, Lada Nakonechna and Kateryna Badianova founded the experimental educational and cultural organization MethodFund. One of its central focuses was the studying of socialist realism in its multiple dimensions. Over several years, MethodFund has collaborated with the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum and, since 2017, with the National Art Museum of Ukraine. Their work aimed, on the one hand, to examine how museum collections and archives describe, interpret, and display socialist realism as an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon of the Soviet era and, on the other hand, to explore the social and cultural roles of the museum in contemporary society. The methodology. We applied the third strategy of the American researcher James Elkins — replacing the modernist interest in a work’s visual qualities with the study of institutional contexts, market forces, and economic frameworks (Elkins, 2021, p. 127). The analysis of socio-economic contexts turns the researcher’s attention from modernist criteria of value and quality to rethink the aesthetic properties of works of art as products of economic contexts. The economic context of the existence of Soviet art is an economy devoid of private property. The results. The article examines how position papers (such as newspaper articles or speeches that condemned formalism and promoted socialist realism as the only legitimate artistic method) contributed to shaping discussions on socialist realism through their reprints and translations into Ukrainian (Haievskyi, 1936). The scientific novelty. The article highlights the theoretical contradictions and complexities surrounding socialist realism, emphasizing its connection to both the economic (Chukhrov) and philosophical (Lifshits, Lukács) contexts during the transition from capitalism to socialism. The practical significance. Ukrainian Soviet art preserved in museums suffers from a lack of research and public display. At the same time, monumental art located in public spaces is especially vulnerable to destruction due to war, urban development, and other external factors. The growing number of public events, initiatives, and newly published books and articles dedicated to socialist realism reflects an effort to preserve the endangered national artistic heritage of the 20th century. Conclusions. This text examines the variability and instability of the concept and methodology of socialist realism, as reflected in the texts of 1936. The definition of the socialist realist method shifts from a truthful reflection of reality to the reproduction of its dissimilarity, which ultimately becomes the core of the method itself.