Edebi Eleştiri Dergisi

Öz

The sources of Socialist realism, which started to be shaped with the 1917 October Revolution and basically based on Marxism, diversified in its sources due to the fact that at least some of its determinants were non-Marxist social democrats, and some of them were aware of the influence of literature on society and considered the enlightening, directive discourse coming from 19th century Russian literature as necessary for the consolidation of the regime. Thus, besides Marxism, the movement was fed by 19th century Russian literature and the Bolshevik movement. The main divergence between the socialist realism movement and the Marxist aesthetic has been about the task of literature. The Marxist doctrine accepted that social change and transformation is determined by economic relations, which are called the substructure, and therefore superstructure elements such as religion, morality, law, philosophy and literature are shaped according to the nature of these economic relations. Consequently, literature, as one of the superstructural elements, becomes a product of the ideology that shapes the substructure, acquiring a sociological data quality that reflects the current state or transformation of the substructure. The socialist realism movement, on the other hand, was aware of the permeability between the social substructure and superstructure and instrumentalized literature to change and transform society. This difference in mentality also manifested itself in the understanding of reality and the view of political discourse.