Juan Diego Marroquin, “Socialist Realism and Art’s Transformative Power”, Outside reading # 4, entry 14.

A number of years ago for a class, I read a work of Soviet socialist realism called Cement. Cement was the story of a young proletarian soldier named Gleb who had just returned from the front fighting in the Russian Civil War. He returns home to find his town run down, and he vows to revitalize his town with a youthful socialist energy and heavily industrialize. The book was clearly meant to be a propaganda piece designed to bolster the profile of the new Soviet regime. Yet it also underscored an important point about art’s transformative power and how people’s aesthetic values can change over time. It was very clear to me that this book was attempting to reengineer popular conceptions of beauty. Cement attempted to glorify industrialization and lampoon peasant life. To this end, imagery of peasants and livestock were often described with thoroughly negative language, with the peasants “screeching” and “cawing” rather than “talking” and conversing. Conversely, all imagery of industry, of factory was glorified, with one description comparing the hum of a factory to the singing of children. Regardless of whether the Soviet regime was successful in actually reengineering citizens’ perceptions of beauty is beside the point: what matters is that the possibility is real. I’ve already discussed how people’s perception landscapes and the wild have changed over the centuries. I wonder, had the Soviet Union endured, could they have been able to successfully transform their society’s conception of beauty? Could socialist realism have actually become so embedded in the popular consciousness that it actually would affect our taste on such a broad scale. That idea is certainly terrifying, and the fact that they even attempted it, is even more mystifying,