Socialist Realism was the (only) art officially sponsored in the Soviet Union. This chapter traces how it emerged, developed and faded away along with the Soviet regime. Socialist Realism was specific and unique, as never before had an artistic movement became a focus of state and bureaucratic activity. The political servility, explicit propagandistic aims and aesthetic inferiority of this populist art gave Socialist Realism both originality and novelty. This chapter analyses the main functions of Socialist Realism, from the normalisation and de-realisation of Soviet reality and its transformation into socialism, to the legitimisation of the regime and the wider aims of historisation, mobilisation and interiorisation. It also explores the movement’s institutional dimensions and characteristic features, which included a propensity for superficial verisimilitude, a craving for melodrama, an evenness of style, and linguistic and structural conventionality.

The final chapter considers how Ilf and Petrov responded to the cultural crackdown, show trials, and purges that confronted them when they returned to the Soviet Union. In the travelogue’s penultimate chapter, “Anxious Life,” the anxiety that the writers attributed to capitalism provided an ambivalent and ironic framework for their explicit and implicit comparisons. Emphasizing the “anxiety” caused by the Stalinist purges, the chapter considers a range of possible readings of Ilf and Petrov’s claim that Soviet people were calmer and happier than Americans. The chapter concludes with an analysis of American and Soviet reviewers’ varied responses to the travelogue and asks: To what extent did Ilf and Petrov’s epic American road trip confirm their presuppositions? Did it allow them to glimpse the United States, the Soviet Union, and perhaps themselves anew?

Chapter 7 details the American novelist John Dos Passos’s interactions with the Soviet authors as a guide, writer of letters of introduction, and literary model. At the time of their visit, Dos Passos was at the center of an important literary debate on the recently articulated socialist realism. By the time they returned, Soviet cultural authorities had turned decisively against Dos Passos’s so-called formalism. Excised from the 1937 Russian edition of Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue, Dos Passos nonetheless profoundly influenced their account. The Dos Passos connection allows us to understand the genre-defying Odnoetazhnaia Amerika as not only a travelogue, a satire, and picaresque but also as a valedictory intervention in the debate on the possibility of socialist realism with a modernist sensibility.

In their published work, Ilf and Petrov equated low culture – trashy movies, wrestling, burlesque – with American culture. At the other end of the spectrum, they endeavored to show that American high culture consisted entirely of high-priced European imports that wealthy patrons appreciated only as luxury commodities, not art. Nothing, Ilf and Petrov emphasized, could be further from the situation in the Soviet Union, where the state-supported opera houses and concert halls made high culture available to all. Recovering the encounters with middlebrow culture that Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue largely ignored, Chapter 12 argues that Soviet and American cultural producers shared some of the same aims and challenges – even as they operated under different constraints.

Chapter 5 situates Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue in the context of earlier Russian American travelogues. Like the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Soviet novelist Boris Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov drew on the tradition established by Maxim Gorky of depicting a journey to America as a descent into hell. Nonetheless, the Soviet funnymen had a far lighter touch than their predecessors. The chapter argues that the travelogue can also be read as an adventure story in the vein of director Lev Kuleshov’s 1924 hit comedy "The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks." Lighthearted ethnographers, Ilf and Petrov lingered over the “extra-ideological realities” of the American landscape and made gentle fun of themselves as eager adventurers and participant observers.

This chapter is a synchronic snapshot of the way that poems, speeches, sociability, and bureaucracy coalesced at Stalinist literary occasions. Here, literary representatives made their claims to representative authority and, on that basis, lent legitimacy to the multinational state and the international revolutionary project. The chapter follows the Iranian émigré poet Abu al-Qasim Lahuti through his performances at three multinational and international events over the course of 1934–1935: the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow; the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris; and Stalin’s Kremlin meeting with Tajik and Turkmen collective farmers at which the multinational “friendship of peoples” was declared. Lahuti’s exchanges at these events with writers such as Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and André Gide contributed to the articulation of the role of the Eastern literary representative and the ceremonial of authoritarian mass politics in the Soviet Union and beyond. As Persianate forms left their traditional contexts and entered this Russocentric world literature system, their utility as rhetorical tools for negotiating patron–poet power relations collapsed, and they came to be read in translation as simple flattery. This chapter thus presents Soviet multinational socialist realism as an illustrative early instantiation of institutionalized world literature.

Some of the most celebrated writers of the 1930s generation dabbled with Marxist politics, but later renounced their earlier political commitments. A Cold War critical consensus emerged that saw Communism and its socialist realist theory of art as deadening forces, that were incompatible with good writing. Shifting the focus to some less canonical figures, the chapter sees the relationship between Communism and literature in the 1930s as a more productive one. The chapter focuses on three ‘conversion narratives’, whose protagonists move from false consciousness to political commitment: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. These novels have complicated relationships to socialist realism. They want to cut through ideological fog and to see ‘reality as it is’ and ‘whither it is moving’ (in Radek’s phrase), but they use modernist literary techniques to this end, and grapple with epistemological doubt. They also complicate the traditional Marxist emphasis on class by putting it into dialogue with gender, sexuality, race, national identity, and rural identity.

Bakhtin's work is difficult to interpret because it amalgamates so many different intellectual strains and influences.His early interest in Neo-Kantian philosophy and phenomenology, the first largely mediated through his friend M. I. Kagan, structured his ideas permanently. His interest in and commitment to Christian thought, and Russian Orthodox thought specifically, was important but is often over-emphasised. Bakhtin's further intellectual development was spurred by encounters with Russian Formalism, linguistics (particularly early versions of sociolinguistics), and the Marxist literary debates of his time. Far from maintaining a saintly distance from the diputes around him, Bakhtin was fully engaged by and tried to participate in debates about the role of style in literary writing and the idea of realism and the positive hero.

This chapter connects Asian American literature to the revolutionary cultural and political networks associated with the Popular Front and Soviet Union of the interwar years. The chapter begins by noting the relative absence of Asian Americans from these networks through a discussion of Carlos Bulosan, whose writings were forced to navigate constraining Popular Front representations of Asia and Asians. The chapter then turns to the author and actor H. T. Tsiang, whose combinations of realism and exoticism are shown to echo both Soviet socialist realism and Karl Marx’s notion of the “Asiatic Mode of Production.” The latter emerges as a tool used by Tsiang to nuance Marxist revolution: to think beyond the linear revolutionary scheme disastrously applied to China by the Soviet-led Comintern; and beyond the limits of Popular Front literary norms. The result is a flexible, inclusive vision of the interwar international left, one attendant to vernacular histories and traditions.

This chapter examines Brecht’s complicated relationship with the German Democratic Republic and its leaders.In 1948, after the end of World War II, Brecht returned to Germany and ultimately settled in East Berlin in the GDR, where he became the artistic leader of the famous Berliner Ensemble, the most influential postwar theater group in the world. However, because of his revolutionary approach to drama and aesthetics, Brecht quickly ran into conflict with East German leaders and had to endure a series of criticisms and accusations against himself and his artistic collaborators. Brecht also sought to democratize and liberalize the artistic and cultural sphere of the GDR. Ultimately, Brecht’s relationship with socialist leaders in the GDR represented a push-pull and give-and-take. Each side had to compromise, and each side received something in return. Brecht received his own theater and the ability to perform plays as he wished, while the leaders of the GDR were able to bathe in the glory of Brecht’s international artistic success.

This chapter examines the Berliner Ensemble, the theater company Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel founded in East Berlin in 1949. It considers Brecht’s desire to create an ensemble to help realize the theoretical positions he had drafted while in exile and the difficulties the Berliner Ensemble faced in its infancy. These included a lack of theater space for a new company in the wake of the devastation of World War II and intense ideological hostility from the ruling party. At times, the problems encountered posed a direct threat to the BE’s very existence, yet it was the quality of its work that ultimately saved it and allowed it to thrive on the international stage.

This chapter considers how a range of U.S. southern writers with varying political views responded to the Depression and New Deal. It stresses that even when competing visions of and for the South were articulated by different “fronts” in the period’s “cultural wars,” such visions were not always reducible to left versus right, communism versus capitalism, or “Agrarian versus Industrial.” William Faulkner’s short fiction between 1941 and 1943 reveals complex, contradictory attitudes toward the New Deal, especially the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The writing of Zora Neale Hurston, including texts produced for the WPA’s Federal Writers Project, includes a critique of Jim Crow labor exploitation comparable to the work of her supposed antagonist (and fellow FWP author) Richard Wright. Arna Bontemps’s historical novels, especially Black Thunder (1936), approach Depression-era social upheaval allegorically by depicting earlier black laborers revolting against slavery in the U.S. South and the Caribbean.

Chapter 3, ‘Behind the Iron Curtain: Female Composers in the Soviet Bloc’, turns to the specific situation of women composers working within the Soviet Bloc, where despite the public advocation of gender equality by state-socialist regimes, more traditional constructs of gender difference actually tended to be propagated. With a particular focus on the careers of Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina in the USSR, Ruth Zechlin in the GDR, and Grażyna Bacewicz in Poland, Elaine Kelly probes the possibilities open to female composers working under state socialism.

Revolution has long been regarded as generative for modernism, with several scholars noting the frequent, often troubled alignment of artistic and political vanguards. A key case in point from the new modernist studies is Martin Puchner’s Poetry of the Revolution (2006), which presents the Communist Manifesto as a model for world literature – in particular, for avant-garde manifestos throughout the twentieth century. This article expands Puchner’s framework by applying it to the 1934 Soviet Writers Congress and Mao Zedong’s 1942 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, events which marked the subordination of artists and writers to the political vanguard. However, reading the documents from these events as manifestos makes it possible to blur the boundary between modernism and (socialist) realism and, in the process, to expand the reach of global modernism to realms typically closed off from it – Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China.

Despite mixed reactions to the first performance of Carmen on the Russian stage in 1878 in Saint-Petersburg, it rapidly became an indispensable part of the country’s operatic repertoire.

After the Revolution, the popularity of Carmen transcended the stage, lending its name to new perfumes and the Toreador’s tune to the ‘March of the Working-Peasants Army’. In theatre, meanwhile, new trends were aligning the opera with the tastes of proletarian audiences. Seemingly embodying the ideological triangle of realism, narodnost (closeness to the ‘people’) and – by some selective argumentation – optimism, Carmen provided a benchmark for new Soviet opera.

With Carmen’s popularity came the abstraction of the heroine from the operatic context. Borrowing from Shakespeare studies and the concept of ‘Hamletism’, this chapter will coin the term ‘Carmenism’ to refer to the tendency to interpret Carmen as a symbol, which in turn influences the interpretation of Carmen the opera, and thus keeps the music and its source alive for the appropriating nation or era. Through the prism of ‘Carmenism’ and using representative case studies, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how the various Russian/Soviet adaptations not only reflected the socio-political context of the country but also had a role in forming that culture.

This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of operetta in Russia, starting with performances and reception of German and French operettas from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and exploring home-grown, Soviet operetta. It will show that operetta was big business in tsarist Russia, and later in the Soviet Union, and demonstrate that it was a valuable resource, a laughter therapy, for the Soviet authorities with which to anaesthetize the masses to the realities of life. The works by German and French composers dominated Russian operetta stages, with the most popular composers being Suppé, Offenbach, Planquette, Hervé and Lecocq, until Soviet composers began to create operettas according to the new, official socialist realism style. This chapter will briefly introduce significant operetta composers – Dunayevsky, Strelnikov, Aleksandrov and Milyutin – and discuss contributions to the genre from such well-known composers as Shostakovich and Kabalevsky. It also gives a brief account of how operetta was instrumental to boosting the morale of the population ravaged by World War II, especially in blockaded Leningrad, and shows that operetta (both European and Soviet) is still popular in today’s Russia.

The October Revolution in 1917 profoundly shocked the cultural ecosystem. The new authorities recast notions of freedom, of the arts, and of the public. Links between and among audiences at different levels that had thrived in the prerevolutionary cultural market were dismantled. Over time the government imposed strictures on culture requiring alignment with political directives. By 1934, the official policy of Socialist Realism was mandatory and compliance enforced by rewards and terror. The early years of revolutionary ferment yielded aesthetic innovation of the highest order, yet the mounting pressures took their toll on creativity. Writers, artists, and performers responded variously. Some took cover in works employing irony and in the (somewhat) safer terrain of children’s literature. By seeding children’s literature with values counter to those practiced by Soviet officialdom, selected writers and artists spread counter-values to a new generation. They worked with the guile of the fox, the flight of the firebird, and, perhaps, the recklessness of the Fool. By keeping alive Russian stories of wise Fools, sentient animals, and magical powers, their creators carried forward folkloric traditions barred from the reigning Socialist Realism. In doing so, they protected limited public space for artistic innovation.