Anti-Formalism Campaign

Definition: from aesthetic to political category

Formalism originally belonged to aesthetic discussion of the form and technique of artworks. In the anti-formalism campaign the word gradually lost that aesthetic meaning and came to be used exclusively to discredit artists and movements that did not conform to official doctrine. The standard of denunciation was the party's demand that art be assessed by ideinost, the primacy of ideological content: the approved idea was to matter more than the form, and that principle is what made a work identifiable as formalist.

The standard was not confined to aesthetic judgement. The 1948 resolution defined the alleged formalist music as including the cult of atonality, the rejection of melody and enthusiasm for confused, neuropathological combinations, and tied this to the modernistic, bourgeois music of Europe and America, reflecting the decay of bourgeois culture.

History

Prehistory in the 1920s. Debates about formalism existed from the 1920s, when avant-garde formalists were still equal participants in the post-revolutionary artistic experiment. Trotsky's 1923 Pravda article, The Formal School of Poetry and Marxism, set a precedent for the state's expansive reading of formalism. Anatoly Lunacharsky's tenure at Narkompros until 1929 helped preserve a degree of creative freedom; from 1929, the year of the great turning point, the situation changed.

The institutional turn of 1932. On 23 April 1932 the Politburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) adopted the resolution On the Restructuring of Literary and Artistic Organizations, liquidating RAPP and VOAPP and merging writers into a single Union of Soviet Writers, with analogous changes for the visual arts, music and architecture; the Union of Soviet Composers' board was elected the same year. Stalin's remarks of 20 October 1932 stressed the unification of loyal creative forces, not struggle against formalism. The term socialist realism was chosen by Stalin at Gronsky's proposal and first printed in Literaturnaya Gazeta on 23 May 1932.

Painting, 1932-33. In painting, the discussions about the portrait and about formalism became large-scale purges of artists in an atmosphere of public denunciation, and artists publicly repented of formalism and naturalism. Osip Beskin acted as chief accuser and collected the materials as Formalism in Painting (1933). Those who held out, among them Tyshler, Tatlin, Sterenberg and Favorsky, were later punished. Formalism became a term of abuse in the 1930s.

The writers' congress of 1934. At the First Congress of Soviet Writers, opened on 17 August 1934, neither Zhdanov's nor Gorky's main report mentioned formalism. The phenomenon was nonetheless discussed by Kulik, Ehrenburg, Kirshon, Jabbarly, Bukharin, Stetsky and others, and Bukharin formulated the distinction between formalism in art, which must be rejected, and analysis of formal moments of art, which is not formalism. Neither Gorky's closing speech nor the congress resolutions reserved any place for formalism, and the Union's statute proclaimed that socialist realism ensures the possibility of diverse forms, styles and genres.

The turn of 1936. Until 1936 no Soviet composer had been questioned about formalism. The only earlier incident, the ban of Gavriil Popov's First Symphony in Leningrad in late March 1935, was reviewed in Krasnaya Zvezda rather than Pravda, justified the ban as the work reflecting the ideology of hostile classes, and was not part of the anti-formalism campaign. The campaign proper began with Pravda's article Muddle Instead of Music of 28 January 1936, which condemned Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as formalist, bourgeois, coarse and vulgar; it was followed on 6 February 1936 by Ballet Falsehood, an attack on his ballet The Limpid Stream. The editorial appeared unsigned and was widely attributed to Stalin, though this is considered unlikely; archival research in personal papers has led to David Zaslavsky being accepted as the author. Performances dwindled and the opera was banned after 11 March 1936; Shostakovich lost income and commissions, withdrew his Fourth Symphony under pressure, and was formally restored to favour with the Fifth Symphony in November 1937.

The Zhdanovist phase, 1946-47. The 1946 Central Committee resolution On the Journals Zvezda and Leningrad attacked those periodicals for publishing allegedly apolitical, bourgeois, individualistic works by Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova. A campaign against cosmopolitanism formed part of Zhdanovism and emphasized native Russian achievements.

The decree of 10 February 1948. The Central Committee declared Muradeli's opera The Great Friendship (1947) a vicious and inartistic work, criticizing its music as feeble, inexpressive and built on complicated dissonances, and its plot as historically false. The decree identified the fullest expression of the formalistic tendency in Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Shebalin, Popov, Miaskovsky and others, and criticized the Moscow Conservatory, whose director was Shebalin, for making formalism dominant in composers' training and Soviet music criticism for serving the formalists. It resolved to condemn the formalistic tendency in Soviet music as against the people and as leading actually to the liquidation of music, and directed the Central Committee's Administration of Propaganda and Agitation and the Committee on the Arts to correct the situation and ensure development in the direction of realism. The public decree was published in Pravda on 11 February 1948. Organizational measures in the secret version included the dismissal of Mikhail Khrapchenko, chairman of the Committee on the Arts; the dissolution of the Organizing Committee of the Union of Soviet Composers and its presidium, accused as a hotbed of the formalist, anti-popular tendency; the removal of Khachaturian, Muradeli and Atovmyan from the union's leadership; and the appointment of Boris Asafyev as chairman of a new organizing committee with Tikhon Khrennikov as general secretary.

The congress of April 1948 and forced repentance. The decree was followed by a special congress of the Composers' Union in April 1948, at which many of those attacked were forced publicly to repent. The accused composers, Shostakovich among them, were summoned to make public apologies before the committee; most of his works were banned, his family's privileges were withdrawn, and he was among those dismissed from the Conservatory. He then composed in three categories: film music to pay the rent, official works aimed at securing rehabilitation, and serious works for the desk drawer, including the First Violin Concerto and From Jewish Folk Poetry. Restrictions eased in 1949 when Stalin decided he should attend the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York.

The correction of 1958. The Central Committee resolution of 28 May 1958, On the Correction of Errors in the Evaluation of the Operas The Great Friendship, Bogdan Khmelnitsky and From All My Heart, stated that the 1948 resolution as a whole played a positive role in the development of Soviet musical art while admitting that its evaluations of individual composers were in a number of cases unfounded. It held that the defects of Muradeli's opera deserved businesslike criticism but did not justify declaring it an example of formalism; that talented composers had been indiscriminately labelled representatives of an anti-popular formalist tendency; that the resolution had, contrary to historical facts, artificially counterposed some North Caucasus peoples to others; and that some incorrect evaluations reflected Stalin's subjective approach.

Relations

The anti-formalism campaign is treated as part of the broader Zhdanov Doctrine, named after Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov, a Soviet cultural policy under which artists and writers had to conform to the party line. Formulated in 1946, it was based on the maxim that the only conflict possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best; non-compliance risked persecution, and it remained in force until Stalin's death in 1953. The anti-cosmopolitan campaign is listed as a related phenomenon, and the 1948 decree on music is sometimes described as marking the beginning of the anti-formalism campaign. On 10 February 1948 a conference of Soviet music figures was held under Zhdanov's chairmanship, at which he called Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk crude, primitive and vulgar and compared works of Prokofiev and Khachaturian to the sounds of a dentist's drill and a musical gas chamber. Muradeli, Myaskovsky, Popov and Shebalin were also criticized, a resolution on the struggle against formalism was adopted, and the works of the formalist composers went unperformed for a long time. There was also an East European extension: at a congress in Wrocław in mid-1948 Fadeyev, president of the Soviet Writers' Union, laid the basis for socialist realism outside the USSR, and the policy was directed at Soviet-leaning Western intellectuals and at artists and intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Soviet-occupied Germany.

Distinctions

The most important distinction is that between formalism and the analysis of form. The line Bukharin drew in 1934 was that formalism in art, which must be decisively rejected, and formalism in literary scholarship, equally unacceptable, are distinct from analysis of formal moments of art, which is useful and necessary. A delegate at the congress warned that under the pretext of struggling with formalism a cult of the most reactionary artistic form was often conducted. Eisenstein made the same point about conflating interest in form with formalism.

Anti-formalism and anti-cosmopolitanism were distinct but interlocking. Soviet sources and scholarly categories treat them together, as the struggle with formalism and rootless cosmopolitanism, and the decree's charge that formalist music reeked of the contemporary, modernistic, bourgeois music of Europe and America shows the anti-Western, anti-cosmopolitan content inside the formalism charge. In practice this overlapped with the postwar anti-Semitic campaign. One account records that socialist realism turned rapidly into an instrument of totalitarian propaganda and the struggle against formalism into a means of suppressing everything that did not match the tastes of the leaders, while other scholarship holds that the artists' style was not what determined targeting in the purges, since some formalists remained prominent. The tension is stated rather than resolved.

Examples

The discussions about the portrait and about formalism in painting in 1932-33 became large-scale purges of Soviet artists in an atmosphere of public denunciation, and those who held out, among them Tyshler, Tatlin, Sterenberg and Favorsky, were later punished. The exhibition marking fifteen years of October, Artists of the RSFSR for 15 Years, opened in Leningrad at the Russian Museum on 13 November 1932 but was substantially cut when it moved to Moscow, opening at the Historical Museum on 27 June 1933, because displaying formalist directions in expanded form was deemed inexpedient.

Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony is the model response the campaign produced. Premiered in Leningrad on 21 November 1937 under Mravinsky, it was a phenomenal success that returned him to good standing, and a newspaper article under his name characterized it as a Soviet artist's creative response to just criticism. A later satirical work addresses the meetings that followed the Zhdanov decree: Shostakovich's Antiformalist Rayok quotes Zhdanov's January 1948 speech and Shepilov's 1957 speech; accounts of its composition conflict, dating it from 1948 with revisions in 1957 and a finale in 1965-1968, and it was not publicly performed in his lifetime, receiving its premiere abroad in 1989.

Testimonial evidence records the human impact. The decree's consequences were harsh, with an atmosphere of suspicion in which colleagues accused each other of writing or performing anti-proletarian music. Yuri Lyubimov's account has Shostakovich waiting at night on the landing by the lift for his possible arrest so that his family would not be disturbed. The sculptor Vera Mukhina testified to the flood of grey, boring, anti-artistic though technically competent works that followed the struggle against formalism and cosmopolitanism.