Abstract
‘Socialist realism’ works in a different way from the so-called ‘critical realism’ of the past. It is true that Soviet writers study and imitate Pushkin, Goncharov, Turgenev and Tolstoy. The Puritan imagination failed to realize more than a single theme, the individual’s quest of salvation, so that all its works seem variants rich and poor of The Pilgrim’s Progress. In much the same way, but more disastrously, Soviet literature has imposed its own scheme on experience. The Soviet writer, listening intently to the ‘social command’, becomes deaf to the muse. Soviet literature mixes sincerity with a cynicism that it may often fail to recognize—the cynicism that puts forward expediency in the place of truth, without pausing to distinguish them.
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