ABSTRACT
In England -and it is to the English scene that the expression usually refers -the Pink Decade opened with the Depression and closed just before the outbreak of World War II, with the signing of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union in August, 1939. What the Pink Decade really accepted was the rather vague conception of 'art for the sake of life', which they were aware had guided the major nineteenth century Russian writers, and which was not easily distinguishable from the English tradition of the humanitarian novel. As the writers of the Pink Decade looked back from 1939 upon their activities, they may have pondered Christopher Caudwell's analysis, in Illusion and Reality, of the artist in times of change. It is a clear-cut lucid pattern, because images best serve ideas by being so disposed within it as to muffle all their associations except the one required.
