Siniavsky Andrei

Siniavsky, Andrei, On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis (New York Pantheon Books, i960). 

Andrei Siniavsky, one of the first who managed to tell the truth about Socialist Realism (and ended up in a prison camp for doing so), called it h.aXi-classicist half-art, which is none too socialist and is not realism at all . We have seen what there was of classicism in this pseudo-classicism, and how little there was of art in this half-art. Now let us try to understand what was socialist about it, and what it contained in the way of realism. 

Andrei Siniavsky in his essay What Is Socialist Realism (1959) notes the classical nature of Socialist Realism, but does not elaborate precisely in what sense. Arguably, though the paradigmatic Socialist Realist text was a novel, it was in mode epic, like many works of the classical era. Epic is a contested concept, and the borders between it and other genres are far from clear. But there were distinct parallels between the Socialist Realist novel and the classical epic, particularly during the High Stalinist phase... 

---