Socialist Realism

SOCIALIST REALISM WAS the aesthetic doctrine in the Soviet Union that was deemed compulsory practice for all revolutionary writers and artists during the mid-1930s. Because its proponents were mostly Soviet Stalinist intellectuals, socialist realism is associated with totalitarian art and has been condemned as stifling the artists' creative potential. Yet, the precepts of socialist realism and their concrete literary and artistic realizations did not always overlap as the practice often enriched the theory.

In his report to a committee that Communist Party leaders instructed in 1932 to form a writers' union and that was subsequently reprinted in International Literature, Valeri Kirpotin defined socialist realism as the artistic reflection of a society in its revolutionary development: “By socialist realism we mean the reflection in art of the external world in all its essential circumstances and with the aid of essential and typical characterization. We mean the faithful description of life in all its aspects, with the victorious principle of the forces of the socialist revolution. We set socialist realism against idealism, subjectivism, the literature of illusion in any form whatsoever, as an untrue and distorted reflection of reality.”

Socialist realism was officially approved as the Communist Party's aesthetic doctrine in 1934 at the first All Union Congress of Soviet Writers, which took place from August 17 to September 1. Just before the congress, Pravda, the party's official newspaper, gave a definition of socialist realism that echoed and completed Kirpotin's, but which, in a move that is symptomatic of the political climate of the period, was attributed to Josef Stalin: “Socialist realism, the basic method of Soviet artistic literature and literary criticism, demands truthfulness from the artist and an historically concrete portrayal of reality in its revolutionary development. Under these conditions, truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic portrayal ought to be combined with the task of the ideological remaking and education of laboring people in the spirit of socialism.”

Since the Congress of Soviet Writers took place between the 17th Party Congress in January 1934, at which opposition to Stalin emerged, and the assassination of Sergei Kirov followed by the purges of many political opponents in December of the same year, it is only natural that pressure was put on writers to toe the party line. Both the domestic and the international situations were far from favorable for the Soviets. Millions of rural people had died in the famine that plagued the countryside for three years (1930–33) and urban living standards fell. Soviet foreign policy also resulted in evident failures. Communist revolutionaries were defeated in China, while Soviet directives to German communists only helped Adolf Hitler destroy the German Communist Party. In the face of national and international disasters, Stalin felt the need for writers to educate the masses about communism and to become engineers of the human soul.

Underlying the theory of socialist realism was the status of the artist not as a loner, but as a revolutionary militant, whose works gave voice to his social class and who advanced his party's vision of society through art and literature. This is the concept of partisanship, which built on an essay by Vladimir Lenin called “Party Organization and Party Literature” (1905). Lenin argued that, to revolutionaries, literature could not be a private matter, but “must become a component of organized, planned and integrated Social-Democratic Party work.” Yet, he also recognized that writers must retain “personal initiative, individual inclination, thought and fantasy, form and content” as literature “is least of all subject to mechanical adjustment or leveling to the rule of the majority over the minority.” According to socialist realism, artists should combine reflection [Page 406]and revolutionary praxis. The Statutes of the Writers' Union stressed the importance of combining the “veracity and historical concreteness of artistic portrayals,” which derived from Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels's commentaries on the typical, with “the tasks of the ideological remolding and education of toiling people in the spirit of Socialism.”

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