…Bourgeois manners for the Bolshevik masses? With the thaw of de-Stalinization, or at least thaw to them , came a new concern: government sanctioned ways of helping the Soviet citizen improve his mind and conduct himself more in accord with “Communist morality.” In the literary scramble that followed, Comrade Arkady Perventzev made hero status with a manual of manners called Let Us Speak of the Cultured Man. The entire edition of 160,000 copies sold out and the sequel, Our Discussion About the Cultured Man also sold out.
—Enver Mamedov (right), the chief editor of the USSR magazine (a Soviet magazine in English) presents his magazine on CBS (1957)—WIKI
Perventzev’s books reveal a strangely puritanical society with a set of Victorian morals and an almost pathetic eagerness to keep up with the Joneses. “Let us admit that there is no shame in learning from foreigners. Pride and conceit do not become a Soviet citizen…It is silly to be disfigured by outmoded factory-made clothing which gluts our markets with the greatest speed and is a heavy burden on the shoulders of the consumer, as well as on the economy of the country…Those who attack bourgeois culture must admit that a moderate following of the current styles in clothing does not constitute a plot to destroy socialism….The time is gone when the consumer accepts anything available. The famine is over. The Soviet citizen has raised his aesthetic requirements, and they should be satisfied.” …
Perventzev was a talentless hack writer, but it is indicative that even the most dismal Communists were acutely aware of their own inferiority with regard to basic hygiene, some semblance of manners….
“We must not forget that only forty years or less separate the contemporaries of space missiles and atomic energy from those of the wood torch, dark huts, coarse homespun, and wooden plow. The fact that were successful in learning how to build the most intricate machines should make us confident that we can also learn to deal with knives, forks, and spoons. In addition, because history has placed the Soviet nation at the head of the civilized world, the Soviet citizen has a deep desire to raise the level of his general culture.” …
—The first novel he published, in 1962, was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which chronicles his own experiences as a political prisoner in a work camp in Kazahkstan. The film of this work appeared the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Other versions have been filmed since then, but none took the risks director Caspar Wrede did by filming in the snow and cold of northern Norway and creating equally inhospitable sets for his players.—click image for source…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…During the Thaw, the period of destalinization under Nikita Khrushchev, reformist artists, critics and art historians within the official Soviet art establishment worked to rejuvenate and liberalize the practice and theory of socialist realism. By the early 1960s, some had so stretched the parameters of socialist realism as to have arguably abandoned it altogether. The dissertation examines the complex process of destalinization and remodernization in official painting, in the institutional structures that managed its production and consumption, and in the art critical discourse that mediated its reception in the period 1953 to 1963. It attempts to relate transformations in artistic practice and critical criteria to the political struggles of the Thaw and to the emergent ideology of khrushchevism. In the face of unabating conservative resistance, reformists sought a “contemporary style” of art. It was to be “contemporary” not only in its subject matter but in its means of representation, adequate to express the postwar experience of the Soviet Union as an advanced industrial nation, and capable of moving the hearts and minds of its increasingly sophisticated public. The search for a contemporary style was at once a delayed response to modernization, an attempt to restore specifically aesthetic criteria to the discourse of art, and to define a style for khrushchevism that clearly demarcated it from stalinism. Artistic progress was to be made on the basis of a recovery of aspects of the past suppressed under Stalin. It entailed rediscovering and revalidating early modernist Russian and West European art as models for contemporary practice and reinstating some central modernist devices and principles.Read More:http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9627994/
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