For decades Stalinist literature, film, and art was almost exclusively deemed political propaganda imposed from on high, devoid of any aesthetic significance. In this book, Evgeny Dobrenko suggests an entirely new view: socialism did not produce Socialist Realism to "prettify reality"; rather, Socialist Realism itself produced socialism by elevating socialism to reality status, giving it material form. Without art, socialism could not have materialized. Bringing together the Soviet historical experience and Stalin-era art-novels, films, poems, songs, painting, photography, architecture, and...

In Soviet culture, the reader was never a "consumer of books" in the Western sense. According to the aesthetic doctrine at the heart of Socialist Realism, the reader was a subject of education, to be reforged and molded. Because of this, Soviet culture cannot be examined properly without taking into account the reading masses. This book is a history of the shaping of the reader of Soviet literature, a history of the "State appropriation of the reader." The entire history of the formation and transformation of the institution of literature in the revolutionary and Soviet eras bears witness to...

This book completes the author's study of the sociology of the literary process in Soviet Russia, begun in The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, 1997). The history of the literary process of the Soviet era, understood as the living process of the clash of political and ideological aspirations and the interests and psychology of cultural elites, allows one to understand the social origins and cultural aims of Stalinist art in an entirely new way. Previous scholarship has concentrated largely on Sovietological...