Introduction: Socialist World Literature

Abstract

Introduction:Socialist World Literature Yanli He (bio) and Daniel W. Pratt (bio) This special issue of The Journal of Narrative Theory, "Socialist World Literature," opens a window onto World Literature from the socialist perspective, through a focus on Socialist Realism broadly considered.1 Socialist Realism as a genre has largely been pilloried in Western scholarship, with a few notable exceptions, such as in the work of Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko. Clark herself describes the reaction when she would tell someone that her research was "on the Soviet Soviet novel, on those hundreds of unreadable texts that serve as examples of Socialist Realism": there would be a "dreadful pause," presumably of disbelief that such works could be seriously studied (Clark ix). Clark describes Socialist Realism as a taboo topic in Western scholarship (ix), and this situation is still true to a certain degree to this day. However, such a dismissive approach to Socialist Realism belies the power that it had throughout the twentieth century, and not just as the official genre of Soviet literature from 1933 to 1988. Socialist Realism, along with the Soviet project more generally, represented an alternative to Western European cultural hegemony for much of the world. If Russia had been "belated," as it was so often described, then the Bolshevik Revolution and the new Proletarian art transformed it into a leader on the world-historical stage. Socialist Realism went hand in hand with anti-colonial movements, liberation struggles, and the voices of ignored and oppressed literati all over the world. This led to a construction of World Literature centered on Moscow instead of the West, with Socialist Realism being the foundational form radiating from the new center. [End Page 267] In the Socialist countries, reimagining World Literature started in the 1930s, as a method of battling rising nationalism and fascist movements. During the First Soviet Writers' Congress of 1934 in Moscow, the German/Soviet critic and Socialist activist Karl Radek delivered a lengthy address, "Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art." According to Radek, there were three important historical events in the twentieth century that formed the criteria of how to evaluate the progress of World Literature: "the World War, the October Revolution and the fascists' advent to power in a number of countries" (74). Radek criticized the content of World Literature during World War I because it "sang songs in praise of war," with only a few exceptions, such as Maxim Gorky and Martin Andersen Nexø, but he claimed that the February Revolutions started to "turn world literature against the wars" of imperialism and colonial oppression (78). Radek specifically announced a new line of Socialist World Literature in his speech. According to him, the October Revolution began to change the landscape of World Literature, at first only in the negative way, because bourgeois literature became "an object of libel" for treating the October Revolution as "a mutiny of slaves engineered by scoundrels" and "the progeny of hell" (86). The development of an alternative to the hegemonic culture, according to Radek, "disturbed the minds of the more reflective representatives of world literature far more than did the events of October 1917" (91). The rise of the Soviet Union contributed to the "split in world literature" into two forms: "the literature of decaying capitalism, inevitably evolving towards fascism, [and] the new proletarian literature" with Moscow at its center (94). Bourgeois literature lost its "monopoly in world literature," and "proletarian literature was beginning to spring up in all countries" (95). Writers from all over the world were turning to Moscow for inspiration, and not just any authors, but already world-famous writers, such as Theodore Dreiser, Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, future Nobel laureate André Gide, and others. Radek understood Socialist World Literature and Socialist Realism in particular as part of the battle against fascism. Anyone who had remained with bourgeois literature was now forced to "side with [fascists]," and "write from the viewpoint of [fascist] philosophy" or join the proletariat (109). Thus, only one month after German fascists came to power on January 30, 1933, they lit a bonfire of German and World Literature near the [End Page 268] square of the University of Berlin. The...