Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Petrified Utopia
- Part One Utopics
- 1 A Joyful Soviet Childhood: Licensed Happiness for Little Ones
- 2 Utopian Naturalism: The Epic Poem of Kolkhoz Happiness
- 3 Luxuriating in Lack: Plentitude and Consuming Happiness in Soviet Paintings and Posters, 1920s–1953
- 4 Tasty and Healthy: Soviet Happiness in One Book
- Part Two Realities
- Part Three Locations
- Notes
- Index
3 - Luxuriating in Lack: Plentitude and Consuming Happiness in Soviet Paintings and Posters, 1920s–1953
from Part One - Utopics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Petrified Utopia
- Part One Utopics
- 1 A Joyful Soviet Childhood: Licensed Happiness for Little Ones
- 2 Utopian Naturalism: The Epic Poem of Kolkhoz Happiness
- 3 Luxuriating in Lack: Plentitude and Consuming Happiness in Soviet Paintings and Posters, 1920s–1953
- 4 Tasty and Healthy: Soviet Happiness in One Book
- Part Two Realities
- Part Three Locations
- Notes
- Index
Summary
‘Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.’ [‘Let them eat cake.’]
— Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV‘Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.‘
— Samuel Johnson, 17582‘All art is advertising. […] Advertising art is
truly social, collective; truly art for the masses,
it is the only such art that exists today.’
– G. F. Hartllaub, ‘Art as Advertising’ (1928)Fantasy Feasts; or, The Divine Irreference of Images
In a review essay published several years ago in the London Review of Books, Sheila Fitzpatrick, the premier historian specialising in Stalinism, declared, ‘While the Soviet regime may be said to have discouraged consumerism by keeping goods scarce, it was not ideologically on the side of asceticism. On the contrary, future socialism was always conceived in terms of plenty; according to the regime's Socialist Realist perception of the world, the meager supply of goods in the present was only a harbinger of the abundance to come.’ Like the Utopia of universal egalitarian happiness, however, abundance remained in the ever-receding radiant future, rendering imposed asceticism an empirical reality for the overwhelming majority throughout the Soviet era. That prolonged deferral is eloquently signaled by the ubiquitous slogan K kommunizmu! as well as by K izobiliiu! (‘Towards Abundance!’), the title of the introduction to the 1953 edition of A Book of Tasty and Healthy Food/Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche, and countless other instances of ‘K + x’, which all invoked the Soviet rhetoric of ‘en route to’, ‘moving towards’, and similar circumlocutions that for more than six decades promised without delivering.
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- Information
- Petrified UtopiaHappiness Soviet Style, pp. 53 - 78Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009
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