The russia we acquired russian classics, the stalinist cinema, and the past from the revolutionary perspective

It is about time that we acknowledged that any work that interprets the past "from the revolutionary perspective" can legitimately be considered socialist realism, and that, for instance, Iakov Protazanov's Without a Dowry [Bespri- dannitsa] is as much an exemplar of Stalinist art as Ivan Pyr'ev's The Swineherdess and the Shepherd [Svinarka i pastukh]. However, in attributing a given text to that canon, it is the source document that gives us trouble. It is hard for us to accept that we started out with Pushkin (Gogol', Chekhov, Tolstoy) and ended up with & socialist realism. Yet, the master craftsmen of the Soviet cinema had no difficulty at all with this. © 2001, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.