Socialist Realism

Socialist Realism was the official artistic and literary doctrine of the Soviet Union, promulgated in 1934 at the First Congress of Soviet Writers with the encouragement of the dictator Stalin and of Gorky, whose early novel The Mother (1906–7) was held up as a model. The doctrine condemned Modernist works such as those of Joyce or Kafka as symptoms of decadent bourgeois pessimism, and required writers to affirm the struggle for socialism by portraying positive, heroic actions. These principles were condemned by major Marxist critics and writers (Brecht, Lukács, Trotsky) for propagandist optimism and aesthetic conservatism, and many writers sympathetic to communism found them an embarrassment. Under Stalin's tyranny, the doctrine was employed as a pretext for the persecution and silencing of non-conformist writers ( Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak). Hardly any work of significant value conformed to the official line, except by retrospective adoption, as with Sholokov's Virgin Soil Upturned (1932).