The Fate of the New Man by Claire McCallum

Author:Claire McCallum [McCallum, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Social Science, Men's Studies
ISBN: 9781609092399
Google: xq68DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-07-03T01:11:07+00:00

LOST FATHERS

Of course not every father returned from the War, and issues surrounding homecoming and reintegration were incongruent with the experience of many Soviet families. As one would expect, with the prevailing mood of the Zhdanovshchina—an era of cultural production based on the philosophy of “conflictlessness”—and the emphasis on normalization, the representation of the long-term impact of the War, in either emotional or material terms, had no place in postwar visual culture. And yet, there were a number of works produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s that omitted the father from domestic scenes and which seemed to hint at a restructuring of the family hierarchy in line with this absence. In addition to these works, this period saw a significant number of images—paintings and photographs alike—that not only lacked the presence of the biological father but included the presence of the national father in the guise of Stalin or, less frequently, Lenin. Both of these developments would seem to suggest that, at the very least, the demographic impact of the War was an inherent part of visual culture during the final years of Stalinism.

Aside from political and aesthetic constraints, one of the most problematic factors in deciphering whether one is in fact dealing with a permanent paternal absence in these images lies in the nature of fatherhood itself; after all, the ideal father who provides for his family must be by extension often away from the home. However, there is no such problem of interpretation in Tikhon Semenov’s 1948 painting Sad News (A Letter from the Front) (Vesti s fronta),56 which was deemed “particularly noteworthy” by the authors of a brief survey of recent art from the RSFSR published in Ogonek in April 1949.57 In retrospect, Semenov’s painting was much more than noteworthy, it was entirely unique: it was one of only a handful of works that dealt openly with the issue of loss in the years before 1953 and was the only one from this period that placed the bereaved within the domestic space. Highlighting the indiscriminate nature of death, the family is depicted receiving the news of their loss at the breakfast table; among the trappings of a normal morning, the letter from the front in the young woman’s hand is transformed into an alien object, out of kilter with the domesticity of the scene. Reminiscent of the device used by Kostetskii to highlight the father-child bond in his work, the wife of the fallen soldier in Semenov’s canvas is shown with her face covered by a handkerchief. Through this, it is the man’s children who provide the focus of the piece, in particular the young woman, letter in hand, whose body fills the foreground and whose black dress contrasts greatly with the lightness of the domestic interior. The son, who is himself in uniform, is presented as in a state of reserved shock but is compositionally overshadowed by his mother and sister, thus reinforcing the premise that grieving was predominantly a female occupation, an association

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