fellow traveler

Soviet literature

Also known as: poputchik

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fellow traveler, originally, a writer in the Soviet Union who was not against the Russian Revolution of 1917 but did not actively support it as a propagandist. The term was used in this sense by Leon Trotsky in Literature and the Revolution (1925) and was not meant to be pejorative. Implicit in the designation was the recognition of the artist’s need for intellectual freedom and his dependence on links with the cultural traditions of the past. Fellow travelers were given official sanction in the early Soviet regime; they were regarded somewhat as experts who were filling the literary gap until the eventual emergence of a true proletarian art—one by and for the proletariat that would be free of all bourgeois influence. In the 1920s some of the most gifted and popular Soviet writers, such as Osip Mandelshtam, Leonid Leonov, Boris Pilnyak, Isaak Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, and members of the Serapion Brothers, were fellow travelers. The period during which they dominated the literary scene is now regarded as the brilliant flowering of Soviet literature. They were bitterly opposed by champions of a new proletarian art, and by the end of the decade the term came to be practically synonymous with a counterrevolutionary.

Outside the Soviet Union the term fellow traveler was widely used in the Cold War era of the 1950s, especially in the United States, as a political label to refer to any person who, while not thought to be an actual “card-carrying” member of the Communist Party, was in sympathy with its aims and supported its doctrines.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Lorraine Murray.

Socialist Realism

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Socialist Realism

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Socialist Realism, officially sanctioned theory and method of literary composition prevalent in the Soviet Union from 1932 to the mid-1980s. For that period of history Socialist Realism was the sole criterion for measuring literary works. Defined and reinterpreted over years of polemics, it remains a vague term.

Socialist Realism follows the great tradition of 19th-century Russian realism in that it purports to be a faithful and objective mirror of life. It differs from earlier realism, however, in several important respects. The realism of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov inevitably conveyed a critical picture of the society it portrayed (hence the term critical realism). The primary theme of Socialist Realism is the building of socialism and a classless society. In portraying this struggle, the writer could admit imperfections but was expected to take a positive and optimistic view of socialist society and to keep in mind its larger historical relevance.

A requisite of Socialist Realism is the positive hero who perseveres against all odds or handicaps. Socialist Realism thus looks back to Romanticism in that it encourages a certain heightening and idealizing of heroes and events to mold the consciousness of the masses. Hundreds of positive heroes—usually engineers, inventors, or scientists—created to this specification were strikingly alike in their lack of lifelike credibility. Rarely, when the writer’s deeply felt experiences coincided with the official doctrine, the works were successful, as with the Soviet classic Kak zakalyalas stal (1932–34; How the Steel Was Tempered), written by Nikolay Ostrovsky, an invalid who died at 32. His hero, Pavel Korchagin, wounded in the October Revolution, overcomes his health handicap to become a writer who inspires the workers of the Reconstruction. The young novelist’s passionate sincerity and autobiographical involvement lends a poignant conviction to Pavel Korchagin that is lacking in most heroes of Socialist Realism.

Socialist Realism was also the officially sponsored Marxist aesthetic in the visual arts, which fulfilled the same propagandistic and ideological functions as did literature. Socialist Realist paintings and sculptures used naturalistic idealization to portray workers and farmers as dauntless, purposeful, well-muscled, and youthful. Socialist Realism remained the official aesthetic of the Soviet Union (and of its eastern European satellites) until the late 20th century, at which time the changes in Soviet society initiated by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev led to abandonment of the aesthetic.