Socialist Realism in Soviet Literature

In the first few years after the 1917 October Revolution, more than three million Russians were beyond the rapidly diminishing geographical borders of the Russian Empire. There were those who were simply swept along by the wind of the proletarian revolution, but in the main the exodus comprised the intelligentsia and the officer class - the potential readership of the literature of the Russian emigration. Thus a new mass readership came spontaneously into being, with an abundance of writers and works on which to feast. The diaspora contained representatives of the most diverse styles and trends: among the realists were Ivan Bunin, Aleksei Tolstoi, and Ivan Shmelev; the modernists included Andrei Belyi (temporarily) and Aleksei Remizov, and were later joined by Evgenii Zamiatin; the Symbolists were represented by Konstantin Bal’mont, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Zinaida Hippius, and Viacheslav Ivanov - the latter subsequently becoming head of the Vatican library in Rome; of the Acmeists there were Georgii Ivanov and Nikolai Otsup; the Futurist contingent comprised Igor’ Severianin and 50 David Burliuk; others included the writers of popular fiction Ivan Nazhivin and Aleksandr Artsybashev, and important figures such as Leonid Andreev, Irina Odoevtseva, Boris Zaitsev, Aleksandr Kuprin, and many other lesser names. In emigration they shared the general politicization of their environment, a nostalgia for a vanished world, and the desire to come to a new understanding of their sharply altered literary status. Many of them considered it their duty to combine their literary pursuits with political engagement by exposing the vices of the Soviet regime and continually drawing world attention to what they saw as its evils. Among these artistically weak, but publicistically powerful, works can be included Ivan Bunin’s Okaiannye dni [ The Cursed Days] (1935), Ivan Shmelev’s Solntse mertvykh [The Sun of the Dead] (1926), Aleksei Remizov’s Vzvikhrennaia Rus’ [Russia in the Whirlwind] (1927), and Mikhail Osorgin’s Sivtsev Vrazhek ( Quiet Street ) 1928.