ABSTRACT
Scores of books and academic articles have been devoted to the subject of socialist realism in the Soviet Union. Socialist realism as a concept and term was first introduced at the First Writers' Congress of the Soviet Union in 1934. It has since been regarded as a set of doctrines imposed on writers, artists and performers of the Soviet Union in order to market the goals of the state. In the literary world, the ideology morphed into a ‘literary system that operated with distinct evaluative criteria.’ 1 It required writers and artists to devote themselves to focusing audiences on the bright future of the state and on man's superiority over the past and nature, while turning a blind eye to the system's dire realities, policies and shortcomings. In sum, in an overt effort to paint an unrealistic world as it ought to be and not as it really was, socialist realism demanded strict self-censorship from writers and other engineers of culture before being further scrutinised by institutions across the Soviet Union, such as by Writers' Unions.
