Socialist realism

Official doctrine proclaimed at the 1934 congress of Soviet writers, socialist realism imposed a programme on the novel: to show reality in its revolutionary development, that is, as it ought to become. Hence positive heroes tempered like steel, building sites, factories, Cossacks won over, and a plain language aimed at a new readership. The model was the pre-revolutionary Gorky; enforcement lay with the Writers' Union. These books, printed in millions of copies, also tell what the state expected of literature.

works 5

• NarrativeMy ChildhoodДетствоMaxim Gorky · 1914First part of the author's autobiographical trilogy, serialised in 1913-1914: a childhood in the house of a dyer grandfather.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelChapayevЧапаевDmitry Furmanov · 1923A novel drawn from the notebooks of a political commissar sent in 1919 to the commander Chapayev.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelCementЦементFyodor Gladkov · 1925A novel of 1925 about a demobilised soldier who sets out to restart a cement works at a standstill, in the aftermath of the fighting.Literature
• NovelHow the Steel Was TemperedКак закалялась стальNikolai Ostrovsky · 1934A novel from 1934: a young Ukrainian worker, won over to the Bolsheviks, lives through the civil war and then the labour of the early Soviet years.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelQuiet Flows the DonТихий ДонMikhail Sholokhov · 1940A sweeping novel in four books, written from 1926 to 1940: a Don Cossack family swept up by the world war, then by the struggles between Reds and Whites.Literature