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Socialist realism

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coaste...@yahoo.com

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Jun 3, 2003, 7:03:54 PM6/3/03
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łCuriously, although he was the founder of Socialist Realism, Maxim
Gorky produced nothing from an artistic point of view--apart from the
novel ŚMotherą--to set a new direction. He contributed a series of
mottoes, his own image, and a number of examples of new behavior for
writers--no more. For artistic discoveries the young literature went to
Lev Tolstoy and, oddly enough, to Gogol--a writer of very distant
ideology, to put it mildly. Beginning with Sholokhov and Fadeev, no
author could paint a łcanvas˛ without resorting to one or another
Tolstoyan intonation. Our contenmpoary classics, including Konstantin
Simonov and even the exile whose name* one does not take in vain (in the
hypostasis in which, as an artist, he is socially realistic), are
powered by Tolstoyąs steam. In the era of greatest fact-varnishing, even
this epic tone became too objective. Others then resorted to a Gogolian
tone, but specifically and solely the romantic one. Open the antique
ŚHero of the Golden Starą (1949), and youąll be rocked on the Dneprąs
wave: łMarvelous is the Dnepr. . .˛ Pathos! Great pathos! Greater yet:
ŚDonąt you think I know what they pay me for? Pathos!ą a man who is now
a major emigre figure confessed to me, with sorrow, at the Central
Literary Club. łBoth abroad,˛ he added, łand here.˛

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* (probably Nabokov)


HW

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