O „živom obraze“. K intermediálnej podstate socialistického realizmu
„The tableau vivant“. The intermedia basis of Socialist Realism

Summary/Abstract: This study focuses on the intermedia basis involved in the issues surrounding Socialist Realism. The motivation for this approach to the problem was on the one hand intermedia studies focusing on the issue of the integrity of production and text reception in the broadest sense, while on the other hand the inspiration was also research into Socialist Realism and art in the early days of socialism, which indicated the canonical and doctrinal basis (K. Clark), and the emphasis on expressive integrity (B. Groys), while signalling the monstrosity involved (B. Groys) and the associated socialist “everyday rituals” and socialist-realist thematizations, particularly by means of the transmedially transferred narrative core (R. Bílik). It is the narrative construct — the idea of the inevitable movement of history towards Communism — that showed itself to be an invariant element which is necessarily present in the structure of both “small” (everyday) and large festivities (rituals) celebrating the existence of a “new world” of socialism even in the structure of the aesthetically based thematization of this “central idea”, and of literary, artistic and musical thematizations. At the same time it turned out that these thematizations are constructed on the principle of the “living dream”, the “realized dream”, with the stress on the synaesthetically based accumulation of expressive qualities, particularly in a literary text, and especially qualities producing “auditory” and “olfactory” imaginings. However, the expressive richness in these cases is paradoxically associated with semantic precision, linearity and one-dimensionality, which enables us to designate the principal behind Socialist Realist imagination with the terms “centripetal connotativeness” and “controlled imagery”. It was also shown that the image experience produced by Socialist Realist images, phenomena and scenes is inseparably bound in with “concepts of the world outside”, i.e. with text (or a narrative construct) which organizes their reception and sense production in the awareness of the recipient. Hence these are managed like the “technical images” analysed by V. Flusser. It is this link to the “central text” and the associated controlled imagery that the author of the study believes form inter alia the basic difference between the principle of “freedom of association”, characterizing the historical artistic avant-garde and the centripetal connotativeness of Socialist Realist imagery.

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