New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

NIKOLAI VUKOV
An important aspect of the specific representation of the body in
socialist monumental art is that it is a body shown as being in a state of
torture – tense and mobilized in its stature of protest, wounded and
mutilated, but nonetheless victorious. It is a body in a restless state; its
handsomeness and dignity lies precisely in its fearless opposition to death,
its ability to transcend death and its transfiguration by death. The wounded
and dying body was turned into a position of central significance in this
ideological and representative discourse. However, it was not a transi
body – a representation of the corpse in the process of decay as in the
typical representations of the effigy in the fifteenth century 15 – rather it
was a body mobilized and tense so as to provide firm grounds for the
metaphor of death overcome. Even when represented as ugly, crude, and
subject to fragmentation, the body of the dead was aestheticized within
the sphere of the metaphor and within the ideological coverage it aimed
to sustain. The totality and enormity of death and pain was mirrored by
the totality of the indestructible and incorruptible bodies in fight, by the
corporeal wholeness they managed to preserve in trials and in death.
This is why, the body of the victor in monuments of the socialist period
who literally survived death so often cannot be distinguished from the
body that died but scored victory over death through the legitimacy of
the ideas. They might stand together, line in line, forming one community
of intransient nature, or they might merge their statuses within figures, in
which commemorative and celebratory elements are closely intertwined.
The indestructible status of the dead bodies was perhaps the strongest
vehicle with which incorruptibility was delivered to the socialist idea
and the universalist dimension it claimed to possess in the post-war period.
At its core, this reflected on a well-outlined feature of the discourse of
the period – that of the utter unity of ideological and social systems
“modeled around bodily organization” (Hillman and Mazzio 1997:xiii).
As Mary Douglas points out, “the human body is always treated as an
image of society and … there can be no natural way of considering the
body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension” (cf.
Douglas 1982:70; Laqueur 1987:4). Socialist monumental art testifies to
a new discourse of the body that dominated the period, which, to use
Gallagher and Laqueur’s description of the nineteenth-century discourse,
“not only attributed a new set of social, political, and cultural meanings
to bodies but also placed them at the very center of social, political, and
cultural signification” (Gallagher and Laqueur 1987:vii). The body as
represented in monuments was one of the chief loci, where ideas about
269