Towards Humanism and Stylistic Diversity: The “Open System” of Socialist Realism in Latvian Artwriting of the Stagnation Era
Towards Humanism and Stylistic Diversity: The “Open System” of Socialist Realism in Latvian Artwriting of the Stagnation Era

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to analyze the “open” phase of Socialist Realism in Latvian artwriting. This phase largely originated from the Russian literary scholar Dmitrij Markov’s mid-1970s statements about the “historically open system of the truthful representation of life”. The opposition between “open” and “closed” systems is possibly related to Austrian biologist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general systems theory. Historian of aesthetics Pēteris Zeile was the most prolific writer who Latvianized this “open” phase, combining topical Soviet viewpoints with Latvian cultural examples. Other authors (art historians Rasma Lāce and Skaidrīte Cielava, painter Pēteris Postažs) also reflected on the diversity of this doctrine along with the preservation of Marxist worldview and foundations of fine arts. Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak’s version of Soviet official rituals focuses on performative reproduction rather than literal meanings, thus emphasizing that unpredictable meanings lead to a system’s disintegration. Soviet art theory too can be likened to such ritualized acts. Modernized thinking on art, launched by the Thaw, was tamed and integrated into the official discourse in the 1970s; the progressing openness, however, fell into ever sharper contradiction to its obligatory status, finally removed only by the collapse of the political system and its associated ideology in 1991.

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