SOCIALIST REALISM

On April 23, 1932, the Party Central Committee of the USSR adopted socialist realism (SR) as the official artistic mandate for Soviet literature (de facto for art, music, film, and architecture as well), a practice that, theoretically, governed the production of any work of art until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. While most frequently associated with literature (especially since the adoption of SR occurred practically simultaneously with the dissolution of all literary groups and their subjugation into one Union of Writers), socialist realism provided the guidelines according to which any artist should craft his work.

Yet the very concept of socialist realism problematizes the process of definition. Over the course of its implementation socialist realism's practitioners and critics have referred to it as a method, doctrine, framework, or style. Precisely the inability to definitively label it points to its inherent contradictions. Indeed, the best label for socialist realism could well be critic Yevgeny Dobrenko's term—an aesthetic system. This moniker implies that socialist realism dictated far more than the form of an artistic work; in addition, socialist realism strove to control how an artist worked and how an audience received and perceived any work of art. Just as events in the Soviet Union unfolded, so, too, did socialist realism adjust to the new demands of changing times. Consequently, socialist realism was realized as a totalizing system that would inculcate Soviet citizens into the new ideological system, the result of the Bolshevik revolution, and the emergence of Stalinism.

Andrei Zhdanov, then Leningrad Party boss and frequent spokesman for Party policy, delineated the program of SR at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Increasingly critics identify the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky as the true instigator behind the movement given his active role in establishing journals (such as Nashi Dostizheniya [Our Achievements]) and literary series (such as The History of Factories and Plants), as well as his editorship of volumes such as The History of the Construction of the Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal. Indeed many of Gorky's polemical and didactic articles of the time delineate how writers were called to document, applaud, and encourage the building of the new Soviet state, especially vis-à-vis the first two Five-Year Plans, even though Gorky himself produced no original works of literature during this final period of his career. In addition, as had been proposed most vociferously by RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) in the 1920s, common workers should emerge as the chief arbiters of artistic production. It was believed that if properly trained, any worker could become a Soviet writer or artist, especially because, ideologically speaking, only workers had the appropriate class pedigree.

Not surprisingly, although attempts were made to reforge (a common metaphor of the early 1930s) workers into masterful artists, much of this activity was in vain. As readers in the early 1930s were quick to point out, badly written or executed SR art was neither appealing nor inspiring. Indeed, recently some critics have noted that the reading and viewing public of the early 1930s played a much larger role in determining what kind of art would be produced, thanks to their active response to any artistic production that did not meet with their aesthetic sensibilities or did not conform to their conception of a typical work of Soviet art. This did not imply, however, that subsequent works of socialist realist art had uniformly high quality and were superior works of art; most were not.

Hence, mounting pressure was applied to members of the various artistic establishments to embrace the new aesthetic model of socialist realism. In the literary arena some writers, most notably Mikhail Bulgakov, Osip Mandelshtam, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Anna Akhmatova to name but a few, consistently resisted the pressure to produce Party-mandated art; consequently they found it essentially impossible to have their work published. Others such as Mikhail Zoshchenko, Viktor Shklovsky, and Valentin Katayev attempted to find a compromise position that enabled them to continue to be published while maintaining a modicum of personal artistic style and integrity. Yet others, among them Alexander Fadeyev, Alexei Tolstoy and Vera Inber, subscribed completely to the Party mandate by producing literary works that strove to comply as closely as possible with socialist realism. Here, too, the issue of artistic quality emerged as a concern.

Yet the outline above should not suggest that the divisions among artists were black and white categories that did not allow for subversions of the socialist realist canon or deviations from the "Party line" within an artist's oeuvre. Consequently, it is not uncommon to find musical comedies in the 1930s, which, while celebrating the heightened class consciousness and loyalty of Soviet citizens, also featured musical production numbers, slapstick comedy, and lighthearted romance (e.g., Volga, Volga, The Jolly Fellows, Circus ). In addition, in literature the early "canonical" works of socialist realism, which were posited as models for future works, predated the adoption of the socialist realist aesthetic. These include Gorky's novel Mat (Mother, 1906), Fyodor Gladkov's post-Civil war story Tsement (Cement, 1925), Dmitry Furmanov's Civil War epic Chapayev (1923), and Alexander Fadeyev's Bolshevik drama Razgrom (The Rout, 1927) all of which presented the struggle for socialism from authors who understood how to present Soviet reality in its revolutionary development. As these examples illustrate, in literature the socialist realist genre of choice was the novel. Similarly, in music the symphony reigned supreme, while in tactile art, sculpture, and architecture massive, grandiloquent, and neoclassical exemplars managed to concretize the physical manifestations of socialist realism.

Indeed, in one respect socialist realism's lineage harkened back to the nineteenth century since its foundation rested on the aesthetic principles of realism and its purported ability to truthfully depict life as it was happening. Moreover, the populist movements of the second half of the nineteenth century, which greatly appealed to Bolshevik ideologists, including Vladimir Lenin, provided the prototypes not only for the appropriate psychological makeup of a character. In addition, these populist models served to situate socialist realist aesthetics in a revolutionary context that applauded the development of socialism.

In addition, some critics have traced socialist realism's genealogy through early twentieth-century Russian symbolism, a development that thereby enabled the Russian artistic and political avantgarde movements to share the notion of a perfect future life. The artistic avant-garde drew on the work of the Russian symbolist philosopher Vladimir Soloviev as the basis of its doctrine, while the political avant-garde followed Marxist ideology on its path to create a new Soviet society. Both avantgarde projects shared many of the same ideas, metaphors, and terminology in describing the "new world" they hoped to create. For example, while Soloviev espoused the idea that art was an instrument for creating the future, Marxists maintained that art was an instrument for transforming life, a process that, by its very nature, would create new men and women. Indeed, the Left Front Futurist theorist Nikolai Chuzhak links Solovievian symbolist principles with Marxist ideology, thereby creating a Marxist aesthetic that blended the theurgic impulse of Solovievian thinking with Marxist dialectics. Chuzhak labels this end product "ultrarealism," a construct that "would express the dialectical collision between 'what is' and 'what will be'" (Gutkin, 1999, p. 46). According to this interpretation, the artistic and political avant-garde movements already had sown the seeds of socialist realism long before its actual adoption.

Similarly, the critic Boris Groys has argued, among other notions, that socialist realism was more avant-garde than the avant-garde itself. Whereas the avant-garde provided numerous theoretical models, mandates, and pronouncements for how the future world should be, they were neither willing nor able to completely replace or even destroy the traditions that preceded and produced them. In fact this futuristic vision could never fully be realized, precisely because the avant-garde sought to construct it on the existing cultural structure. Conversely, socialist realism was, according to Groys, able to achieve that which the avant-garde never could—to reject traditional cultural structures and in their place to construct a new system of artistic production that reflected the new society that was supposedly being created in the Soviet Union.

Critics such as Herman Ermolaev and C. Vaughan James have argued that the basis for socialist realism rests firmly on Communist Party ideology and its desire to control cultural production to serve its ideological and propagandistic needs. Finally, the writer and literary critic Andrei Sinyavsky has proposed that the aesthetic system after which socialist realism was modeled harkened back not to nineteenth-century realism, but rather to the neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century. As Sinyavsky notes, the necessity to produce state-mandated art; the directive to applaud the glory, power, and vision of the State, especially vis-à-vis its own citizens and other cultures; the proclivity to build, write, paint, or compose works of art that were massive in structure, grandiose in their praise, and fraught with visions of how life should be, not as it actually was—these elements paralleled the demands put to socialist realism.

Clearly the development and historical precedents in Russian cultural history for socialist realism are richer and more complicated than originally thought. In fact, even the proposed elements that had to be included in an artistic production to make it truly socialist realist were reconfigured and reemphasized as this aesthetic system continued through successive eras in the development of the Soviet Union.

Initially a number of characteristics were required of a work of socialist realism. First, it had to depict Soviet life not as it was, but as it should be. Hence, any work of socialist realist art would exemplify for its reader or viewer a behavior, event, or image that captured an "ideal" rather than reality. As stated in Literaturnaya gazeta (September 3, 1934), "Socialist realism, being the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism, demands from the artist the truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating the working people in the spirit of socialism." While this statement specifically refers to literature, the parameters it sets forth were applicable to any artistic production.

In essence, any work of socialist realism should depict the bright future that Soviet public rhetoric continually promised its citizens, provided that they followed the socialist realist model. The epitome of this model was the "new Soviet man/woman" who through his or her Party-mindedness, intensive labor, class identity, and singlemindedness achieved great feats that resulted in a happy ending and that glorified the Soviet Union, thereby demonstrating the correctness of its ideology. In literature these new Soviet men and women were created by Soviet writers, the "engineers of human souls," as Josef Stalin called them. Hence, almost from its inception Socialist realism was redolent with industrial metaphors and images. Writers, indeed all artists, were engineers charged with "reforging" or reconstructing characters, images, words, and deeds into manifestations of Party policy and Soviet power.

Originally a work of socialist realism should contain four key elements. The first was ideinost —the work must be anchored in and resonate with Soviet ideology, i.e. Marxism-Leninism. Second, the work must convey klassovost —class-consciousness. The socialist realist heroes and heroines must personify their class heritage. Preferably they were to be members of the working class or, more rarely, enlightened peasants or intellectuals, who embraced the new ideology and demonstrated through their lives and work their allegiance to their class, and, ultimately, to the Soviet Union. Third, a socialist realist work must contain partynost —Party-mindedness. This meant that the firm, guiding hand of the Communist Party of the USSR constantly exerted its presence in a work of socialist realism, either in the character of an ideal Party member in a work of literature, or through the visual or aural presentation of a theme or motif that exuded strength, decisiveness, and grandiosity. Finally, works of socialist realism should have narodnost —the content of a work of art should represent the interests and viewpoint of the people (narod ) rendered in an intelligible, approachable manner.

Throughout the 1930s the aforementioned guidelines were strictly applied to artistic production. Whereas in the early 1930s collective heroism and collective labor (consonant with the goals of the first two five-year plans) were glorified and promoted, in the latter half of the 1930s up to the advent of World War II, individual heroes, from Stalin to polar explorers, from collective farm workers to Stakhanovites, were extolled. As the war years unfolded, the official enforcement of socialist realist imperatives lessened but definitely did not disappear. The slight flexibility, afforded writers in particular, to depict the brutality of battle during World War II (but not any mistakes of Stalin or his military commanders) was counterbalanced by the heroic music, art work, and films that understandably lauded the honest heroism displayed by common Soviet citizens in the face of the war.

Nonetheless, when the war concluded, a redoubling of efforts to enforce strict principles of socialist realism emerged. Primary responsibility for this enforcement fell, once again, to Andrei Zhdanov, then chair of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Zhdanov's most virulent wrath fell on poet Anna Akhmatova and writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose work Zhdanov aggressively attacked in the press. Consequently, the canonical elements of socialist realism reemerged and prevailed until the so-called Thaw in the late 1950s.

This period (1953–1963) witnessed another lessening of the paradigmatic strictures that defined socialist realism. During this period relatively greater flexibility marked artistic endeavors. In particular, literary works were permitted to explore previously untouchable topics—the Soviet concentration camps, the difficulties of life in the countryside, the trauma of the post-war years—in a more humanely artistic, less formulaic way. This did not mean that Party supervision of artistic production diminished completely, nor were all works of literature written at this time permitted to be published (e.g., Lidia Chukovskaya's Sofia Petrovna, Solzhenitsyn's First Circle ). Rather, a slight lessening of the controls enabled some artists to produce works that stretched the boundaries of socialist realism.

This short-lived easing of control over artistic production ended with a further tightening of the parameters that defined socialist realism. While these parameters never approached the strictness of the early years of Soviet power, they persisted nonetheless. Ironically during this ensuing period—called Stagnation (1964–1985)—a number of interesting, original films, works of literature, art, and music appeared either through official channels or through the burgeoning artistic underground. This underground phenomenon permitted a host of officially censored or unacceptable works to be circulated among appreciative audiences through samizdat (self-publication) or tamizdat (publication abroad). Consequently, with each passing year, the hold that the socialist realist aesthetic exerted on Soviet culture gradually lessened until it dissolved into the period of glasnost in the mid-1980s. Nonetheless, the village and urban prose movements of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that socialist realism's elasticity was greater than one might have imagined. Indeed, the traditional view that the artistic value of any work of socialist realism was compromised by virtue of the fact that it was Party-mandated, has lost some of its urgency. While not all works of socialist realism deserve attention and appreciation, many do. When coupled with the non–socialist realist works of this period, most notably Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, we are left with a rich, variegated artistic legacy.

Moreover, the fundamental fact that socialist realism changed with the ideological and political demands of a particular time period argues for an inherent organicity that infused the system since its inception. Our understanding and, perhaps, even appreciation of socialist realism has grown thanks not only to the post-glasnost flood of archival texts and documents, but also thanks to the broader vision that hindsight provides.

See also: bulgakov, mikhail afanasievich; gorky, maxim; motion pictures; russian association of proletarian writers; samizdat; silver age; soloviev, vladimir sergeyevich; thaw, the; zhdanov, andrei alexandrovich

bibliography

Brooks, Jeffrey. (1994). "Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All About It." Slavic Review 53 (4):973–991.

Carleton, Greg. (1994). "Genre in Socialist Realism." Slavic Review 53 (4):992–1009.

Clark, Katerina. (1978). "Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Literature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan." In Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Clark, Katerina. (1985). The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dobrenko, Evgeny. (1997). The Making of the Soviet Reader. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Dobrenko, Evgeny. (2001). The Making of the Soviet Writer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Ermolaev, Herman. (1963). Soviet Literary Theories, 1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism. University of California Publications in Modern Philology, no. 69. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Golomshtock, Igor. (1990). Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People's Republic of China, tr. Robert Chandler. London: Collins Harvill.

Groys, Boris. (1992). The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles Rougle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gunther, Hans, ed. (1990). The Culture of the Stalin Period. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Gutkin, Irina. (1999). The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890–1934. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

James, C. Vaughan. (1973). Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Lahusen, Thomas. (1997). How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lahusen, Thomas, and Dobrenko, Evgeny, eds. (1997). Socialist Realism without Shores. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Reid, Susan E. (2001). "Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935–1941." Russian Review 60:153–184.

Robin, Regine. (1992). Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, tr. Catherine Porter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Tertz, Abram [Andrei Sinyavsky]. (1982). The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism, tr. Max Hayward and George Dennis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cynthia A. Ruder

Socialist Realism. The name of the officially approved type of art in Soviet Russia and other Communist countries, involving in theory a faithful and objective reflection of real life to educate and inspire the masses, and in practice the compulsory and uncritical glorification of the State. Socialist Realism was an aspect of the dictatorship of Stalin, who was leader of the Soviet Union from the death of Lenin in 1924 until his own death in 1953. Alan Bird (A History of Russian Painting, 1987) writes that ‘He saw all aspects of avant-garde culture, including painting, as subversive infiltrations of the purity of Soviet life’ and that his minister Andrey Zhdanov (1896–1948) ‘made himself responsible for imposing an iron control on artistic expression'. The principles of Socialist Realism began to take shape in the late 1920s and were proclaimed in the 1932 decree ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations’ (before this, the term ‘Heroic Realism’ had often been used, but ‘Socialist Realism’ now became the official label). Socialist Realism was never defined specifically in terms of style, but increasingly it became associated with stereotyped images painted in a conventional academic manner.

In the 1930s there were four main types of Socialist Realist paintings: domestic scenes, portraits (see GERASIMOV), industrial and urban landscapes, and scenes on collective farms (see PLASTOV). During the Second World War, patriotic scenes from Russian history were added to the list, following the success of Sergei Eisenstein's famous film Alexander Nevsky (released 1938, withdrawn at the time of the German-Soviet pact in 1939, and shown again after the German invasion of Russia in 1941). In sculpture, the most typical products of Socialist Realism were heroic statues, the leading artists in this field including Sergei Merkurov and Vera Mukhina. After the death of Stalin there was some relaxation of strictures, but the system still remained stifling to creativity, and any form of experiment remained extremely difficult (see UNOFFICIAL ART). In the West, Socialist Realism remained synonymous with repression, and its products were generally regarded as morally tragic and aesthetically comic (although the merits of many of the artists are now being recognized). The titles alone of some pictures are crushingly dispiriting, for example Comrade Stalin together with the Leading Workers of the Party and Government Inspect the Work of a Soviet Tractor of the New Type.

Socialist Realism spread to the remotest parts of the Soviet Union, one of the most praised painters of the Stalin era being Semyon Chuikov (1902–80), who worked in Kirgizia in the extreme south of the country, near the Chinese border. His most famous work is A Daughter of Soviet Kirgizia (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1948, and other versions), showing a schoolgirl, book in hand, walking proudly through a vast landscape: ‘She embodies in her resolute progress across the expanse of her native land, the future hopes of a small, once backward nation, now offered—under Soviet power—the benefits of a modern educational programme’ ( Mathew Cullerne Bown, Art Under Stalin, 1991).

Socialist Realism had an equally powerful grip on Russian literature and even music. In 1934 the constitution of the Union of Writers stated that Socialist Realism ‘demands from the artist a true and historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development … combined with the task of educating workers in the spirit of Communism', and in 1948 several leading Soviet composers (including the two greatest, Prokofiev and Shostakovich) were censured for formalism and had to make a grovelling public apology. They wrote a joint letter to ‘Dear Comrade Stalin’ in which they said: ‘We are tremendously grateful … for the severe but profoundly just criticism of the present state of Soviet music … We shall bend every effort to apply our knowledge and our artistic mastery to produce vivid realistic music reflecting the life and struggles of the Soviet people.’ See also SOTS ART and TOTALITARIAN ART.

Socialist Realism. The name of the officially approved type of art in Soviet Russia and other Communist countries, involving in theory a faithful and objective reflection of real life to educate and inspire the masses, and in practice the compulsory and uncritical glorification of the state. Socialist Realism was an aspect of the dictatorship of Stalin, who was leader of the Soviet Union from the death of Lenin in 1924 until his own death in 1953. Alan Bird (A History of Russian Painting, 1987) writes that ‘He saw all aspects of avant-garde culture, including painting, as subversive infiltrations of the purity of Soviet life’ and that his minister Andrei Zhdanov ‘made himself responsible for imposing an iron control on artistic expression’.

The principles of Socialist Realism began to take shape in the late 1920s and were proclaimed in the 1932 decree ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations’ (before this, the term ‘Heroic Realism’ had often been used, but ‘Socialist Realism’ now became the official label). It was never defined specifically in terms of style and in its early days it saw expression in some outstanding works, notably the paintings of Alexander Deineka (1899–1969), which are remarkable for their formal vigour as well as their humanity (The Defence of Petrograd, 1927, Tretyakov Gal., Moscow). However, Socialist Realism became increasingly associated with stereotyped images painted in a conventional academic manner. In the 1930s these paintings were of four main types: domestic scenes, portraits, industrial and urban landscapes, and scenes on collective farms. During the Second World War, patriotic scenes from Russian history were added to the list. After the death of Stalin there was some relaxation of strictures, but the system still remained stifling to creativity, and any form of experiment remained extremely difficult. In the West, Socialist Realism remained synonymous with repression, and its products were generally regarded as morally tragic and aesthetically comic, although the merits of painters such as Arkady Plastov (1893–1972), a specialist in farm scenes, are now being recognized.

Socialist Realism had an equally powerful grip on Russian literature and even music. In 1934 the constitution of the Union of Writers stated that Socialist Realism ‘demands from the artist a true and historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development…combined with the task of educating workers in the spirit of Communism’, and in 1948 several leading Soviet composers (including the two greatest, Prokofiev and Shostakovich) were censured for formalism and had to make a grovelling public apology. They wrote a joint letter to ‘Dear Comrade Stalin’ in which they said: ‘We are tremendously grateful…for the severe but profoundly just criticism of the present state of Soviet music…We shall bend every effort to apply our knowledge and our artistic mastery to produce vivid realistic music reflecting the life and struggles of the Soviet people.’ For Socialist Realism in China, see Xu Beihong.

Socialist Realism The name of the officially approved type of art in Soviet Russia and other Communist countries, involving in theory a faithful and objective reflection of real life to educate and inspire the masses, and in practice the compulsory and uncritical glorification of the State. Socialist Realism was an aspect of the dictatorship of Stalin, who was leader of the Soviet Union from the death of Lenin in 1924 until his own death in 1953. Alan Bird (A History of Russian Painting, 1987) writes that ‘He saw all aspects of avant-garde culture, including painting, as subversive infiltrations of the purity of Soviet life’ and that his minister Andrei Zhdanov ‘made himself responsible for imposing an iron control on artistic expression’. The principles of Socialist Realism began to take shape in the late 1920s and were proclaimed in the 1932 decree ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations’ (before this, the term ‘Heroic Realism’ had often been used, but ‘Socialist Realism’ now became the official label). It was never defined specifically in terms of style and in its early days it saw expression in some outstanding works, notably the paintings of Alexander Deineka (1899–1969); however, it became increasingly associated with stereotyped images painted in a conventional academic manner. In the 1930s there were four main types of Socialist Realist paintings: domestic scenes, portraits, industrial and urban landscapes, and scenes on collective farms. During the Second World War, patriotic scenes from Russian history were added to the list. After the death of Stalin there was some relaxation of strictures, but the system still remained stifling to creativity, and any form of experiment remained extremely difficult. In the West, Socialist Realism remained synonymous with repression, and its products were generally regarded as morally tragic and aesthetically comic, although the merits of painters such as Arkady Plastov (1893–1972), a specialist in farm scenes, are now being recognized.

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.

socialist realism Soviet artistic and literary doctrine. The role of literature and art in Soviet society was redefined in 1932 when the newly created Union of Soviet Writers proclaimed socialist realism as compulsory literary practice. As conceived by Stalin, Zhdanov, and Gorky, socialist realism prescribed a generally optimistic picture of socialist reality and of the development of the Communist revolution. Its purpose was education in the spirit of socialism. Its practice is marked by strict adherence to party doctrine and to conventional techniques of realism. Socialist realism has been widely condemned as stifling to artistic values. After the death of Stalin in 1953 some relaxation of strictures was evident, although socialist realism continued as the official doctrine. A similar approach to the creation of art and literature was also enforced for a time in the People's Republic of China.

Bibliography: See studies by A. Tertz (tr. 1961) and C. V. James (1973); M. Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature (rev. ed. 1967).

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).

socialist realism State policy on the arts, promoted by the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1980s. It asserted that all the arts should appeal to ordinary workers, and should be inspiring and optimistic in spirit. Art that did not fulfill these precepts was effectively banned, and most serious writers, artists and composers were forced underground or into exile.

Socialist Realism. Offically approved styles of art, architecture, literature, etc., in the former Soviet Union and some other Communist countries. In architecture it usually involved a type of coarse stripped Classicism.

Bibliography

CoE (1995);
Jane Turner (1996)

socialist realism the theory of art, literature, and music officially sanctioned by the state in some Communist countries (especially in the Soviet Union under Stalin), by which artistic work was supposed to reflect and promote the ideals of a socialist society.