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This paper discusses the drama Die Offerande ['The Sacrifice'] (1941) by Hester Cornelius, in which the Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism was grafted onto an Afrikaner cultural setting. To outline the context in which the play was created and performed, this contribution elaborates on the representation of Soviet socialism in the South African trade union periodical Klerewerker/Garment Worker, where the play was published. It aims to demonstrate that this propaganda play renders the socialist realist principle of narodnost (i. e. inclusion of a national folk element) by incorporating motifs characteristic of the Afrikaans farm novel, references to the historical events on which the Afrikanerdom founding myth is based, and characters representing 'typical' Afrikaners. Moreover, this article argues that the play's plot is reminiscent of the socialist realist novel master plot which illustrates the protagonist's transition from political immaturity to political awareness and his becoming the New Man. The important modification which Cornelius introduced was that she cast women in the main roles, so her play propagates the working-class New Woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the evolution of Romanian poetry after 1945. It mentions that the 1980s generation propose a anti-aestheticist program, attacking the so-called "tardomodernist purism", which in turn will influence strongly the country's contemporary poetry that proclaims itself even more "authentic" "tranzitive", and realist.

Since the 1920s the relationship between literature and science, more specifically between the modes of popularizing scientific ideas to a broader public, was a broadly discussed topic among writers, critics and scholars. In these debates the relation between educational goals, entertaining devices and visionary thought experiments was a contested issue. Moreover, their interrelationship led to the first efforts to define the Soviet version of science fiction, namely as "scientific‐fantastic literature" (nauchno‐fantasticheskaia literatura). As an alternative to this controversial term Maxim Gorkyi proposed and popularized the expression "scientific‐fictional literature" (nachno‐khudozhestvennaia literatura) as early as the 1930s. His formulation was meant to constitute a new kind of genre within the frames of Socialist Realism, as well as generate a new, uniquely Soviet understanding of scientific thinking itself, opposed to the bourgeois notion of supposedly objective scientific knowledge. But it was not until long after Gorky's death in the post‐war period that the term was finally established as a compulsory form of writing in the context of the "science wars" (Ethan Pollock) of late Stalinism. The article reconstructs these controversial discourses surrounding a new poetics of science and offers an exemplary reading of the work of one of the most prominent and influential writers in the field to highlight the ideological scope, but also the aesthetic limits of "scientific‐fictional literature.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maxim Gorky included his short story, "Pogrom," in the 1901 anthology, Aid to the Jews Suffering from Famine [ Pomoshch-evreiam postradavshim ot neurozhaia ]. The short piece is a first-person account of a pogrom that Gorky claims to have witnessed in the Volga region during the 1880s. Gorky, in the naturalistic tone of most of his short stories of that period, manages to describe vividly a pogrom from the perspective of one in the crowd of perpetrators. This new English translation of Gorky's 1901 story includes an introduction, which proposes that Gorky, with this story and his vocal concern for Russia's Jews, helped to usher in a modern Jewish literature in Russia, one that had a significant influence in Russia and beyond. It is impossible to fully appreciate the pogrom narratives of writers like Isaac Babel and Sholem Aleichem without a sense of the public debate that Gorky initiated with the publication of his story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper has been intended as an x-ray to the communist distorted perspective on the literary phenomenon during its period and to the socialist realism concept, thus attempting to clarify its coordinates and to accurately introduce and, respectively, define its players. The study would also underline the failure and the grotesque as specific marks of those crisis times for both literature and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores literary critical and historical discourses on resettlements after 1945; it also examines selected practices adopted by writers and reporters, with Franciszek Gil serving as an example. Before the war Gil had reported on issues pertaining to the peasant population, developing a range of metaphors for the Recovered Territories as a place of advancement - from the village to the city. His vision is naturally based on simplifications, but there is more to it. For instance, many of the metaphors to describe Szczecin in the Socialist-Realist register - such as the slogan ‘Szczecin - the world's port;' fish being referred to as ‘gold' and fishery as ‘gold-digging' - have entered the local vernacular. This language, which over time was recognised as an instance of Socialist Realist poetics, was supposed to validate these spaces and the people who had transformed illiteracy and poverty into education and work. Gil explored the mechanisms of that transformation. But while wrote that ‘social life is beginning to be coherent with itself,' his story suggests that this coherence was short-lived, for he sank into obscurity. It is his legend that lives on in the region. The present article discusses these mechanisms of attraction-repression-assimilation (of places, events, individuals). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the 1934 establishment of socialist realism as the main "method" to be applied in all spheres of Soviet artistic production, more particular discourses evolved addressing the issue of how the concept was to be interpreted and defined in the various fields of culture. Literary translation was no exception. At the First All-Union Conference of Translators in Moscow in 1936, some attempts were made to articulate what was required of translators in order to adhere to the new standards. It was not until the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, that the discourse took more concrete forms, notably in the efforts to establish "realist translation" as a guiding principle for Soviet translation in general. Drawing on archival and printed material from the period, this paper explores the significance of the discourse on socialist realism for Soviet translation practices and translation theory during late Stalinism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arkadii Gaidar (1904-1941) is one of the most popular Soviet children's writers and an undisputed part of the Soviet literary canon. The Pioneer organization used him as a symbol to mold young Soviet citizens, the characters from his books entered Soviet folklore, and generations of Soviet children have been brought up on his books. Nonetheless, his path from military commander to a classic of Soviet literature was far from ordinary. This paper reviews Gaidar's work, focusing especially on the analysis of his short story The Blue Cup as the most representative of his oeuvre and of the political and literary context of the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Boris Pilnyak's attempt to answer Commissar Mikoyan's "social mandate" for a work of Socialist Realist fiction that would glorify the achievements of the newly modernized Soviet meat industry in general and of the recently constructed Mikoyan meat-packing plant in particular. Pilnyak's Meat: A Novel (1936), which reads like a Soviet(ized) version of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1907), shows how under a socialist system the negative features of the tsarist-era meat business can be eliminated in Stalinist Russia without having to sacrifice industrial efficiency or worker productivity. The novel failed to please the Party leadership, however, because the author did not respond earnestly enough to Mikoyan's "social mandate." Pilnyak provided a parodic, tongue-in-cheek pastiche of a Socialist Realist novel rather than a genuine one. This article shows how Commissar Mikoyan's aspiration to have a literary monument erected to the Soviet meat industry, which he had worked so diligently to modernize and expand, culminated in the publication of The Book about Tasty and Healthy Food (1939), the famous cookbook and household guide, which projects numerous Socialist Realist images of material abundance, good taste, and scientific nutrition that were associated during the Stalin years with an ideal (and idealized) cuisine that never really existed in the USSR. The food commissar's abiding desire to produce a domestic version of the American hamburger was likewise realized through his creation of the "Mikoyan cutlet," which generated a veritable revolution in the system of public food service in his country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay on the influence of Jacques Stephen Alexis's 1956 Parisian manifesto "Realisme merveilleux des Haitiens" on the 2013 novel "Claire of the Sea Light" by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat is presented. Topics discussed include Alexis's synthesis of African and Caribbean cultural heritage touched by socialist realism, and Danticat's expansion of the awareness of Haitian reality and the proximity of birth and death. Also noted is the novel's quiet weaving of a realistic social tapestry.

A literary criticism of the trilogy "The Black Flame," by W. E. B. Du Bois is presented. It examines Du Bois's perceptions about the relation of history to thought, action and identity, the importance of the trilogy, the story of the novels in the trilogy, and the use of socialist realism to explain the key features of the novels.

Religious, in particularly Christian imagery, was ubiquitous in Leningrad samizdat poetry of the 1970s. This essay addresses two main questions that are closely related: is the term «religious verse» appropriate for this kind of poetry; how are we to define «religious» in this case? Secondly, what were the common denominators of religious verse in 1970s Leningrad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of children's literature by German author Franz Fühmann, including the poem "Lob des Ungehorsams" and the books "Vom Moritz, der kein Schmutzkind mehr sein wollte" and "Die Suche nach dem wunderbunten Vögelchen." Issues addressed include subtle political criticism contained in Fühmann's work, his interest in retelling classical mythology for young audiences, and his attitude toward Socialist Realism.

Copyright of Art / Umění is the property of Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Electronic Turkish Studies is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Valentin Kataev's fascination with the idea of a revolutionary temporality in his classic Socialist Realist novel, Vremia vpered! (Time, Forward!, 1932), allies him not only with literary colleagues such as Maiakovskii, but with European modernism in general. Yet time is not what this book is really about; neither is it about the equally prominent motif of labour as holy suffering. Instead, it is a third overarching theme that emerges as decisive in Vremia vpered! This is another typically modernist concern, that of the subjective perception of reality. The suffering of Kataev's worker-heroes, together with false perceptions of its significance, relate to the theme of distorted perception, through which they must struggle to learn the correct way of seeing. The metaphor of revolutionary time conveys the experience of those who have succeeded in this struggle, and view the new reality in its true dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to examine the relevance of language in both early and recent Anglophone Cameroonian poets. The argument of this article is built around the premise that Fonlon, Alembong and Besong are involved with what has become known as ‘literature of sensitization and commitment’. It is the contention of this article that their ideological commitments have not compromised their artistic sophistication. Guided by the new historicist critical theory and the aesthetics of socialist realism as enunciated by Maxim Gorky (1971) and Georg Lukacs (1963), this study reveals that these three poets are deeply sensitive and responsive to the realities and moods of moments of collective experience, especially crisis moments. Their poetry is, in fact, a summation of their social and political commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: This article seeks to establish a genealogy of the notion of modernism with respect to Platonov criticism in both the Soviet Union and the West. Noting the complexity of trying to account for the authorʼs idiosyncratic literary style, it suggests that modernism has functioned more as a term of subjective evaluation than of objective description (particularly in the West, where an institutional commitment to avant-garde poetics long served to differentiate scholarship from Soviet socialist realism). Whilst not denying Platonovʼs links to a number of modernist and avant-garde principles and practices, the article also argues that too exclusive an emphasis on modernism has led to a resistance to seeing Platonov in terms of a broadly conceptualised realist tradition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article focuses on Chinese children's picture books after the Cultural Revolution in 1996-1976. It says that it was vital to reissue books published before the Cultural Revolution which presented a literary expression of socialist realism, communist ideology, and in which the educational and political contents were politically correct. Moreover, Thomas A. Zaniello observed that most of the children's book during the revolution were realistic and there was a clear absence of fantasy.

The resistance of Polish writers against the postwar communist regime is presented in this article mainly as a way of collective manifestation of the attitude often called 'inner emigration'. The article focuses on the ambiguous stratagems of some ardent adepts of the communist ideology, who finally became political dissidents, but before that had chosen the sort of 'inner exile' or 'inner emigration', having created their own literary codes based on camouflage, allegory, and mystification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The images of Guo Quanhai, Zhao Yulin, Han Fengqi and others in Zhou Libo's Mighty Storm are largely based on real persons whose village life forms the setting of the story. They are all common people living in the villages of China's North-eastern region that are characterized by their own life philosophy and semiotic system. When entering the novel, the complicated real-life sources of the literary figures are re-adapted, re-categorized and re-organized according to the principles of socialist realism, thus being reconstructed as "self" and "other" carrying historical values. The functional structure between self and other provides new identity and value order for the rebellion of the disadvantaged at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses literary debates between the modernists and the realists, which contribute to the transition from the socialist realism of the late 1942 to modernism in Yugoslav and Serbian literature at the beginning of the mid-1950s.

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article employs Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs's theory of realism to analyse Alex La Guma's social realism in In the Fog of the Seasons' End, and to this end interrogates how far the novel leans towards socialist realism. I start with a survey of the critical commentary on the text and show why its reception in some quarters has differed so markedly from that of La Guma's early writings. Although In the Fog of the Seasons' End is clearly rooted in South African social realities, my analysis draws parallels between this text and Maxim Gorky's novel Mother with the aim of identifying the latter as La Guma's intertext. I ask whether La Guma's work can be read as a working-class novel and if, on this basis, La Guma himself should be called a working-class writer. My answer engages with theoretical debates on what really constitutes a working-class text and, perhaps by extension, a working-class author. I conclude that rather than referring to him as a working-class writer it might be safer to see La Guma as an 'organic intellectual' in the Gramscian sense, in which his contribution to the working class was embodied in both his cultural production and his political activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study focuses on how, after 1948, a "new" type of ideological patterns was politically imposed to literature by the Romanian communist regime. The very few valuable works escaping this ideological pattern were the result of a political compromise. This practice, to which I refer to as the "negotiation of the communist canon", has become common in the 1950s in the Romanian culture. The study focuses on Petru Dumitriu's case, by analysing both the literary history data and the author's post-communist statements. The analysis deals with the author's ambivalence, in the politically motivated literary choices, and his duplicity, during the 1950s general transformations inside the Romanian literary canon. Educated abroad and having aristocratic origins, the young writer P. Dumitriu made a radical turn in 1948 towards socialist realism and ideological articles. Besides his "exemplary" work as an agent of the regime, he also wrote some valuable works, acceptable in the aesthetic canon, works which he was allowed to publish only because of his political "faithfulness". The study focuses precisely on the mechanism of his (gradual) compromise and his negotiation of ideological boundaries from the posture of a privileged, powerful agent of the regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the quality of contemporaneity in Russian literature. It describes the use of the concept of contemporary that examines issues chronologically such as socialist realism, postmodernism, conceptualism, and skepticism. Moreover, it emphasizes that contemporary literature is an elastic condition, whereas topical literature highlights and shows discontinuity from the traditional literature.

The article discusses how the Soviet government influenced literature of Buryatia, Russia and used it to promote modernization and Soviet ideology and values. Buryat literature depicted the role of Buryats in the Russian Revolution, agricultural collectivization and World War II but did not investigate Buryat culture prior to its status as part of the Soviet Union. The lack of Buryat samizdat and the development of Socialist realism in Soviet literature are noted. The censorship of Buryat literature that deviated from government-approved content is discussed.

Copyright of Electronic Turkish Studies is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)