Automatic for the Masses : The Death of the Author and the Birth of Socialist Realism

In __Automatic for the Masses__, Petre M. Petrov offers a novel, theoretically informed account of the transition from modernism to Socialist Realism, tracing their connections through Modernist notions of agency and authorship.

At the end of the 1920s, the Modernist and avant-garde artistic programmes of the early Soviet Union were swept away by the rise of Stalinism and the dictates of Socialist Realism. Did this aesthetic transition also constitute a conceptual break, or were there unseen continuities between these two movements? In Automatic for the Masses, Petre M. Petrov offers a novel, theoretically informed account of that transition, tracing those connections through Modernist notions of agency and authorship.

Reading the statements and manifestos of the Formalists, Constructivists, and other Soviet avant-garde artists, Petrov argues that Socialist Realism perpetuated in a new form the Modernist “death of the author.” In interpreting this symbolic demise, he shows how the official culture of the 1930s can be seen as a perverted realization of modernism’s unrealizable project. An insightful and challenging interpretation of the era, Automatic for the Masses will be required reading for those interested in understanding early Soviet culture.

Contents 7 Introduction 9 Part One 45 Chapter 1. The Imperative of Form 45 Chapter 2. The Imperative of Content 63 Chapter 3. Knowledge Become Practice 78 Chapter 4. The Organization of Things 98 Chapter 5. The Organization of Minds 118 Part Two 139 Chapter 6. The Anonymous Centre of Style 139 Chapter 7. The Unbearable Light of Being 162 Chapter 8. Ideology as Authentication 181 Chapter 9. The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 202 Chapter 10. Life Happens 228 Notes 243 Works Cited 289 Index 309