Abstract:
The Soviet government needed to have its literature and art
compartmentalized to get help with strengthening its power and
spreading the ideas of the Communist Party among the masses.
However, there was no such phenomenon - such type of literature
did not exist at that time, which meant that the Soviet government
had to create one by itself. In order to have this form
of literature justify the hopes of the communists and fulfill its
goals, it should have been easily understood by the masses. To
specify, it had to be realistic, but not realistic in the traditional
sense (not similar to the one that was formed as a literary method
in the 19th century and that existed in the form of a realistic
flow in literature and art even before that, to precisely and
boldly describe the reality of life and apply the reality as a means
of expression, etc.) – it had to be something different. It was
supposed to be the socialist realism - the only acceptable method
for Soviet literature, which would be based on the socialist
concept of the human and the world in general, and would actively
engage in building communism, presenting and spreading
the ideals of socialism, strengthening the Soviet regime, and
educating Soviet people to develop loyalty to communist ideals,
etc. Before the creation of the Soviet Union, humanity had not
known such a phenomenon, such a creative method.
In 1934, the first convention of Soviet writers recognized the
socialist realism as the one and the only literary method and
announced the party principles and socialist ideology as its main
postulates. Thus, socialist realism completely subordinated
literature to politics and ideology. This is how the theoretical
postulates of socialist realism were formed. The next task was
to put the new literary form into practice: writers had to transfer
communist ideas into literature, and from literature they had to
transferred to the reader in order to obtain the final product - the new, Soviet person. To this end, the Soviet regime, along
with other means, resorted to human manipulation and social
engineering - the latter contributed to developing the literature
form of socialist realism as one of the most important tools of
the party ideology. This is clearly demonstrated in the wellknown
formula for the “communism-building society”: The writer
is the engineer of the human soul. This slogan, authored by the
writer I. K. Oleshaa (1899-1960), was embraced and repeated by
Stalin himself, thus making the socialist realism an important
tool of party ideology and propaganda. It was an epochal motto,
which perfectly expressed the spirit of the corresponding party
and was adopted by all relevant Soviet institutions. It is worth
noting that literary critics were also referred to as engineers of
the human soul, but in a narrower field of specialization. According
to the Soviet mindset, the writer was an engineer-builder,
engineer-constructor, and the critic was an engineer-consultant
and a product evaluator (V. Kirshon). This new definition of literary
critics implied that they as well were caught in the common
trap of social engineering and assigned to contribute to the creation
and sculpting of a new person.
