Soviet

Socialist Realism
Monday, 3 August 2020 7:33 PM

Background

Soviet Union
• Socialist state in Northern Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991.
• It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party.
• The Soviet Union had its roots in the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the
Bolsheviks (a Marxist group), headed by Vladimir Lenin, began to fight against
the government. In 1922, they succeeded, and formed the Soviet Union
(comprised of 15 republics).

Social Realism
• Realism is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without
artificiality. Social Realism is an international art movement that draws
attention to the conditions of the working classes and the poor.

Socialist Realism
• It was an ideology enforced by the Soviet Union as the official standard for art
and literature, based on the principle that the arts should serve the political
and social ideals of communism.
• The primary theme of Socialist Realism is the building of socialism and
a classless society. In portraying this struggle, the writer could admit
imperfections but was expected to take a positive and optimistic view of
socialist society and to keep in mind its larger historical relevance.
• Socialist realism is characterized by the glorified depiction of communist
values, such as the liberation of the proletariat.

Major Points of the Text

• Socialist Realism can be defined as the Communist 'artistic method' of the
Soviet Union.
• The doctrines expounded by the Union of Soviet Writers appealed to certain
of Lenin's pre-Revolutionary statements.
• It addressed certain major questions about the evolution of literature, its
reflection of class relations and its function in society.
• When the Revolution of 1917 encouraged the Formalists to continue
developing a revolutionary theory of art, there emerged at the same time an
orthodox Communist view, which frowned upon formalism and regarded the
nineteenth-century tradition of Russian realism as the only suitable
foundation for the aesthetics of the new Communist society.
• The modernist revolutions in European art, music and literature which
occurred around 1910 (Picasso, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Joyce, Woolf, T. S.
Eliot) were to be regarded by Soviet critics as the decadent products of late
capitalist society.
• The combination of nineteenth-century aesthetics and revolutionary politics
remained the essential recipe of Soviet theory.

• The principle of partinost’ (commitment to the working-class cause of the

Party) is derived from Lenin’s essay ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’
(1905), in which Lenin argues that, while all writers were free to write what
they liked, they could not expect to be published in Party journals unless they
were committed to the Party’s political line. While this was a reasonable
demand to make in the circumstances of 1905, it took on a much more
despotic significance after the Revolution, when the Party controlled
publishing.

• The quality of narodnost’ (‘popularity’) is central to both the aesthetics and

the politics. A work of art of any period achieves this quality by expressing a
high level of social awareness, revealing a sense of the true social conditions
and feelings of a particular epoch. It will also possess a ‘progressive’ outlook,
glimpsing the developments of the future and giving a sense of the ideal
possibilities of social development from the point of view of the working
people.
• In the 1844 ‘Paris Manuscripts’, Marx argues that the capitalist division of
labor destroyed an earlier phase of human history in which artistic and
spiritual life were inseparable from the processes of material existence, and
craftsmen still worked with a sense of beauty. The separation of mental and
manual work dissolved the organic unity of spiritual and material activities,
with the result that the masses were forced to produce commodities without
the joy of creative engagement in their work. Only folk art survived as the
people’s art. The appreciation of high art was professionalized, dominated by
the market economy and limited to a privileged section of the ruling class.
The truly ‘popular’ art of socialist societies, argued Soviet critics, will be
accessible to the masses and will restore their lost wholeness of being.

• The theory of the class nature of art (klassovost’) is a complex one. In the
writings of Marx, Engels and the Soviet tradition, there is a double emphasis –
on the writer’s commitment or class interests on the one hand, and the social
realism of the writer’s work on the other. In his letter (1888) to Margaret
Harkness on her novel City Girl, Engels praises her for not writing an explicitly
socialist novel. He argues that Balzac, a reactionary supporter of the Bourbon
dynasty, provides a more penetrating account of French society in all its
economic details than ‘all the professed historians, economists and
statisticians of the period together’. Balzac’s insights into the downfall of the
nobility and the rise of the bourgeoisie compelled him to ‘go against his own
class sympathies and political prejudices’. Realism transcends class
sympathies. This argument was to have a powerful influence not only on the
theory of Socialist Realism but on later Marxist criticism.

Socialist Realism and Bourgeois Writers

What was Bourgeois Realism ?

• The aim of its practitioners was to produce work that had a direct impact on
social, political and moral realities.
• The Bourgeois Realists refrained from depicting the larger social and political
world and focused instead on village or peasant life and isolated individuals
cut off from world events.

• Socialist Realism was considered to be a continuation and development of

bourgeois realism at a higher level. Bourgeois writers are judged not
according to their class origins or explicit political commitment, but by the
extent to which their writings reveal insights into the social developments of
their time. The Soviet hostility to modernist novels can best be understood in
this context. Karl Radek’s contribution to the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934
posed the choice ‘James Joyce or Socialist Realism?’ During a discussion
Radek directed an attack against another Communist delegate, Herzfelde,
who had defended Joyce as a great writer. Radek states that Joyce’s
preoccupation with the inner life of a trivial individual indicates his profound
unawareness of the larger historical forces at work in modern times. He
concludes, ‘if I were to write novels, I would learn how to write them from
Tolstoy and Balzac, not from Joyce.’

• This admiration for nineteenth-century realism was understandable. Balzac,

Dickens, George Eliot, Stendhal and others developed a sophisticated literary
form which explores the individual’s involvement in the complex network of
social relations. Modernist writers abandoned this project and began to
reflect a more fragmented image of the world, which was often pessimistic
and introverted, exploring the alienated individual consciousness.

• Socialist realist writers stood against this form of writing, strongly believing
that literary works should be a reflection of the larger social forces present in
their society and this is clearly expressed in the statement that Andrey
Zhdanov expressed during the Soviet Writers' Congress that during times of
class struggle there cannot be a literature which is not class literature.