The "Leftist idea" in art: resistance or conformism?

The article presents a research project aimed to analyze the field of the Soviet art under Stalin in the circumstances of political domination in culture. The author analyses horizontal and vertical linkages in artistic environment, the impact of symbolic capital of the Western "leftist" community, the positions of artists and behavioral strategies that ensured success. The study is based on the comparison of strategies and discourses of the French leftist intellectuals and the Soviet writers who were embedded in the political project of the power. Comparative analysis aims to clarify the contradictory concepts of leftist discourse, such as right / left, avant-garde / conservative, folk / bourgeois, conformity / nonconformity, and the conversion that occurs when moving from one national literary field to another, as well as the description of creative practices and intellectual activities associated with those concepts. The author finds the similarities and differences of historical and cultural options for deploying of the Enlightenment project, in which the creator of art is marked by important social mission and symbolic power.