|
Throughthe1920s,arelatively broad range of literary groupings enjoyed official tolerance. This tolerance came to an end with the consolidation of power under Joseph Stalin and his decision to establish a planned economy and a collectivized, disciplined society. In 1932 the Communist government abolished all independent literary groupings and replaced them with a single, centralized Union of Soviet Writers. Independent journals and publishing houses also disappeared. At the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, socialist realism was introduced as the only approved artistic method. Socialist realism meant, in practice, the portrayal of Soviet reality from the viewpoint of the Communist Party. It remained the official method in all the arts for the next 50 years.
MaksimGorky,inhisnovel Mother in particular, was hailed as the founder of socialist realism, but officials also cited the works of other party-minded writers of the 1920s as examples of a correct socialist realist approach. Such works included Chapaev (1923; translated 1935) by Dmitry Furmanov, Tsement (1925; Cement, 1929) by Fyodor Gladkov, and Razgrom (1927; The Nineteen, 1929; also known as The Rout) by Aleksandr Fadeyev. The most notable of the works included in the canon of socialist realism was Tikhii Don (1928-1940) by Mikhail Sholokhov. This four-volume epic depicts life among people known as Cossacks from 1914 to the civil war. It was published in English in two volumes: And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) and The Don Flows Home to the Sea (1940). Sholokhov’s novel treats the civil war, in which the Cossacks fought against the Communist Red Army, with surprising impartiality. His later novel of agricultural collectivization, Podniataia tselina (1932-1960; Virgin Soil Upturned, 1935, and Harvest on the Don, 1960), conforms much more closely to Soviet political doctrine but is less successful as literature.
Theregime’sstrictenforcement of its literary guidelines led some established writers—including Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Olesha, and Babel—to turn to safer activities, such as translation or children’s literature, or to withdraw from literature altogether. The years during World War II saw some relaxation of controls. Although relatively little literature was produced, several significant novels and plays on patriotic themes appeared, including Dni i nochi (1943-1944; Days and Nights, 1945) by Konstantin Simonov and Molodaya gvardiya (1945; The Young Guard, 1958) by Aleksandr Fadeyev. After the war, however, the tenets of socialist realism were enforced even more strictly, and the period from 1946 to the death of Stalin in 1953 was the bleakest in Russian literature of the 20th century.
| 
