THE REPRESENTATION OF THE NATIONAL ARTISTIC INTELLIGENSIA IN THE SOVIET ART OF THE 1950s - 1980s IN THE MARI LAND

*Elvira Kolcheva¹, Galina Boyarinova², Valentina Kutasova³ and Yuliya Tsykina^4
1Associate Prof., Ms., Mari State University, Russia, elviramk@mail.ru
²Associate Prof., Ms., Mari State University, Russia, marlit@marsu.ru
³Associate Prof., Ms., Mari State University, Russia, vkutasova@mail.ru
⁴Associate Prof., Ms., Mari State University, Russia, suleimani@mail.ru
*Corresponding author

Abstract
The Soviet period for many nations of the former Russian Empire was the time of laying down their own professional ethno-national culture. It was the consequence of the internal cultural development of the ethnic groups themselves having begun at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and the result of the Soviet national policy which proclaimed the objective of setting up culture "national in form and socialist in content" in the USSR. The post-war years played a special role in this process. The professional institutions of the artistic culture of the Mari people were being strengthened and the national intelligentsia was being formed in the Mari ASSR. The Mari Branch of the Union of Artists of the RSFSR was established in 1961.

The artists performed work commissioned by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic, their works being purchased by the Mari Museum of Local History now called Evseev National Museum of the Republic of Mari. Its repository and also one of the Republican Museum of Fine Arts, contain a well-stocked collection of paintings of artists of that period of time. The theme of the national creative intelligentsia was substantively reflected in the art of that time. If in the folklore the ethnic cultural a hero is a warrior hero, then in the Mari professional artistic culture of the Soviet period he, above all, is a national writer, a poet and a composer. The figures of culture and art are now thought to be genuine subjects of ethnic and national culture. Their deeds, their creativity were perceived as those personalities who promoted the Mari people culture on their way of development and recognition not only by the Soviet but also by the entire world community. A brilliant gallery of such images was created in the 1960s by Alexei Zarubin, the first Chairman of the Mari Branch of the Union of Artists. The works of Yuri Belkov, Alexei Butov, Anatoly Pushkov’s ones should also be mentioned here.

The portrait images of cultural professionals to be the contemporaries of their painters are characterised not only by formal similarity, but by liveliness, psychological depth, which at times, is completely outlying the official positive ideology, according to which the Soviet man knows no doubts and happily marches toward the communist future.

The genre of a collective portrait is being evolved which is implemented as a genre painting. People of art are depicted in the process of holding artistic discussions. Painters and sculptors turn to the biographies of the passed away “fathers” of the Mari professional culture. The founder of the Mari professional music, Ivan Klyuchnikov-Palantai (1886-1926) takes a notable space in the genre of a retrospective portrait.

The image of the founder of the Mari literature S.G. Chavain (1888-1937) was quite popular with the artists, several paintings being devoted to him. A. Butov portrayed the writer in the background of the rural landscape, on the bank of the Ilet River (“Chavain on the Ilet”, 1968). Thus, the artistic and cultural value of the works of the Soviet period in the history of the Mari fine arts was once again acknowledged.

Keywords: The Soviet fine arts of the 1950s - 1980s, the artistic culture of the Mari people, the portraits of Mari composers, the portraits of Mari Writers