ABSTRACT
If naturalism was a rigidification of realism, then socialist realism is a rigidification of what is retrospectively called the ‘critical realism’ of certain nineteenth-century novelists, particularly Tolstoy. By ‘critical realism’ is meant a depiction of contemporary reality which is not aloof and neutral, like Flaubert’s, but informed by some moral belief. The realist, with his critical detachment, places what is a significant, specifically modern experience in a wider context, giving it only the emphasis it deserves as part of a greater objective whole. Socialist realism reassumes the austere attitude approved by Plato in his Republic, rationalized as part of a modern political theory and enforced by an authority which believes this to be unchallengeable. Georg Lukacs rejects the synonym ‘revolutionary romanticism’, but the phrase of Maxim Gorky’s is a useful reminder that far from being dispassionately or even critically objective, socialist realism is in fact intensely idealist in its assumptions.
