Socialist Realism

Socialist Realism, term applied, in all artistic fields, to the sober style that succeeded the wave of experiment following the Russian Revolution. As expounded by Lunacharsky, it was intended to make the theatre an instrument for the education of the masses in Communism. Apparently the term was first used in 1932, during a period of protest against the Formalism of such directors as Meyerhold and Taïrov, whose work at the time was considered too abstract for the new audiences, and useless as social propaganda. While admitting that a production must not be untrue, either to present-day facts or to knowledge of the past, it nevertheless entailed the depiction of the truth in terms that a worker-audience could understand, and the interpretation of the classics in the light of present-day trends. Everything in the theatre, even the writing of new plays, was therefore bound up with the approach to, or the exposition of, the upheavals which led to the Revolution of 1917. Although the criteria of Socialist Realism, of which Gorky (with The Mother and Enemies) is considered the founder and Mayakovsky the first brilliant exponent, have shifted with changing conditions over the years its basic policy on the problems of theatrical creation and interpretation apparently remains the same.