Main categories of early Soviet art

Abstract

The article considers the main categoriesof early Soviet art. Those include “life-building” (N. Chuzhak), “production” (N. Chuzhak), “socialization of aesthetics” (B. Arvatov), “art and production” (B. Arvatov), “proletarian artist” (O. Brik), “proletarian art” and others. Addressing those categories precedes outlining the context of the production art emergence in the USSR, which is characterized by the aestheticization of the industrial theme and the connection with the general competitive attitude. As part of the appeal to the latter, the article deals with the phenomenon of acceleration in the Soviet project, namely, attempts to manage time. The author emphasizes the growth and aggravation of the reflection of “collective immersion in the temporal” in the Soviet culture of the 20–30s. The famous refrain of the “poet of the revolution” V. Mayakovsky “Time, forward!” is considered as a gesture of radical denial of the old and at the same time the assertion of a new view of art and aesthetics undertaken in early Soviet Russia. According to the author’s intuition, all such attempts are ultimately connected with a new project of a person in a new state, which had to exist in a new way and reflect these ways of being in art in a new way.