ABSTRACT
Andre Gide and Romain Rolland had in the pre-war period announced their admiration for the USSR without modifying their 'bourgeois' writing. For the first decade after 1945, Marxist aesthetics was dominated by the monolithic orthodoxy of Zhdanov's version of socialist realism, whose denunciatory tone was sharpened by the general atmosphere of the Cold War. By the 1930s the insurrectionary fervour of the Turin years had been supplanted by the concept of a 'war of position' during which the Marxist party would need to struggle to establish a proletarian 'hegemony' of culture and consciousness over the ruling class. In discussing this struggle, Gramsci emphasised three things: its universal character, its presence in philosophical theory and the 'common sense' ideas of everyday life alike; and the contradictory nature of much popular thought and belief, so that elements of 'common sense' ideologies could be detached and re-placed in a hegemonic ideology.
