‘I object to rain that is cheerless’: landscape art and the Stalinist aesthetic imagination

Abstract

This essay considers discourses around nature and landscape in the Soviet art criticism of the Stalin period. Rather than being a genre that was neglected or in some way subordinated to the themes of industrial construction and socialist transformation, the depiction of nature was a major preoccupation of Socialist Realism. Indeed, it became progressively stronger as the Stalinist period developed from the 1930s to the early 1950s. There was a common belief that the most important Soviet political and social values could be conveyed through the imagery of the natural landscape, and there was much discussion in the literature as to how the ideological messages could best be articulated. An examination of this discourse reveals, however, that the semantic potentials of landscape art ran in very different directions. Thus while Stalinist art was eminently successful in ‘politicizing’ the representation of the natural world, it was manifestly unable to remove the ambiguous and even contradictory nature of the messages that resulted.