'Socialist Realism' after Stalin’s Death: Rethinking the Notion

• In Event: Liberation from Socialist Realism or Its Transformations?: Literature and Other Arts in the Late Soviet Period

Abstract

In my paper, I would like to trace the most crucial changes that the understanding of the notion “socialist realism” underwent after Stalin’s death. I will comment on the explicit statements of the significant Soviet writers and theorists of literature and art, focusing on the discussion at the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1954) and the some debates of the late Brezhnev period (1970s – 1980s).

Author

• Valery Vyugin, Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) RAS (Russia)