Decorative Art of the Latvian SSR, Searching the Way Between Party-mindedness and National-mindedness
Decorative Art of the Latvian SSR, Searching the Way Between Party-mindedness and National-mindedness

Summary/Abstract: Socialist realism was a method of artistic creation determined by the official ideology in the Soviet Union in the 1930s–1980s and in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe after World War II. The theoretical principles of the method were formulated in 1932. For the most part, this method was theoretically formulated and applied in literature, dramaturgy and theater art. The first sources dealing with this method are a series of publications, including A. Lunacharsky's lecture "О социалистическом реализме в связи с задачами советской драмурагии" (1933). (Луначарский 1933) Unexpectedly, after this talk, a broad theoretical discussion was started, which surprised even the author of the idea, who was cought completely unprepared to develop it. Later, the Central Committee of the CPSU took over the baton and put forth the slogan of socialist realism. Lunacharsky initially could not define if socialist realism was a direction, type, method or an art style. “I would strongly be against it that the slogan of socialist realism would be recognized as a determinant of style”, he wrote. Two years later, at the Congress of Soviet Writers, the main principles of socialist realism were officially defined and strictly followed by all artists of the Soviet Union. From that moment on, socialist realism became the only artistic creative method in the USSR for many years. In the Baltic states, these new ideological trends in artistic life emerged only after the occupation carried out by the USSR in 1940. It is impossible to assert that the creative intelligentsia in Latvia was not informed about these processes. Literary magazines published relatively accurate references of meetings and congresses in the USSR. This is obvious, because some Latvian writers (though, a small part of them) had remained in Soviet Russia and there were also writers living in Latvia who had sympathies for leftist ideas (Upītis 1928b). Writer Andrejs Upīts was active in this field, and in the Soviet time, he became the most important theoretician and adherent of socialist realism in Latvia (Upītis 1928a).

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