Introduction

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Socialistinis Realizmas; Sovietinė literatūra; Kultūra; Sovietmetis; Socialist realism; Soviet literature; Culture; Soviet era.

ENWestern scholars analyzed literature written in the Soviet Union up until its collapse. The analysis was usually a part of the more general regime of Soviet studies because literature, like culture as a whole, was a means of ideological education as well as a tool of political conflict in the Soviet Union and other Communist bloc countries. The analysis of Soviet literature was one of the ways to showcase the mechanism of ideological indoctrination and to recognize the "real" socialism, that is, its utopian idea. Later, in the post-Soviet era, Evgeny Dobrenko asserted that Socialist Realism was not so concerned with producing literature as an aesthetic phenomenon as it was with producing reality itself; Socialist Realism was and remains the only material reality of socialism. Studies of Socialist Realism, literature, and culture of the Stalinist era were plentiful both in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. They provide the most varied interpretations of the phenomenon - from the impossibly aesthetic to the transference of aesthetic principles to reality, from the transformation of history into a mythical narrative in a Socialist Realist novel to an interpretation of Socialist Realism as discourse that uses narrative to produce sublimated socialist reality. [...]. [Extract, p. 8