Page 195 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 195
The Functions of Socialist Realism: Translation of Genre Fiction in Communist Romania 195
science-fiction literature. Incorporated into the program and supported by
the system, including through the then-highly popular ‘Colecția Povestiri
științifico-fantastice,’ [The Science-fiction Stories Series], SF was one of the
most efficient instruments for promotion of science and ideological educa-
tion of the 1950s (Iovănel 2014, 165–166).
Conclusions
Despite clouding genre differences in the essentialist view on the role of
literature (Carleton 1994), socialist realism was also built on translations
of genre fiction, a fact most often neglected in socialist realism studies.
While creating an artificial dominant canon, as Sinyavsky shows, in a
way similar to how highbrow literature builds itself as the dominant can-
on in modernist cultures, socialist realism often attributed to this elit-
ist literature the same role that popular fiction and genre fiction enjoyed,
seeking to market them both as mass-oriented culture. While homoge-
nizing ideologies and genres of the local novelistic production, socialist
realism diversified through translations. It is for this reason that the anal-
ysis of functions of genre literature within socialist realism plays an im-
portant role in mapping the development of fiction in Eastern European
cultures. In Gleb Tsipursky’s words, “the party-state intended state-spon-
sored popular culture to help build a socialist, alternative version of mo-
dernity” (2016, 221). This alternate modernity could only be construed by
reevaluating modernity’s highbrow expectation itself, and the lowering of
the literary bar may be perceived as reduction of literature to pragmatic
functions, divorced from any abstract aspiration and any magnanimous
attitude. Socialist realism was unrestrained by highbrow aspirations, and
the high Soviet canon was projected as mass addressed, too. Since the So-
viet propaganda literature has proved to be more obsolescent than gen-
re literature, we should assume that socialist realism helped genre fiction
more than it changed highbrow literature. This is how socialist realism
created an ‘alternate modernity’ in literature (Tsipursky 2016), pleading,
in fact, for a ‘non-modernity’ (Brennan 2017, 274) – one that was as ec-
lectic as its antithetical projection, and even diverse in terms of subgen-
res, since it always aimed to prove that its ideology pre-exists the diversi-
ty of topoi.
Works Cited
Baghiu, Ștefan. 2018. “Strong Domination and Subtle Dispersion: A Distant
Reading of Novel Translation in Communist Romania (1944–1989).”
In The Culture of Translation in Romania/ Übersetzungskultur und Lit-
science-fiction literature. Incorporated into the program and supported by
the system, including through the then-highly popular ‘Colecția Povestiri
științifico-fantastice,’ [The Science-fiction Stories Series], SF was one of the
most efficient instruments for promotion of science and ideological educa-
tion of the 1950s (Iovănel 2014, 165–166).
Conclusions
Despite clouding genre differences in the essentialist view on the role of
literature (Carleton 1994), socialist realism was also built on translations
of genre fiction, a fact most often neglected in socialist realism studies.
While creating an artificial dominant canon, as Sinyavsky shows, in a
way similar to how highbrow literature builds itself as the dominant can-
on in modernist cultures, socialist realism often attributed to this elit-
ist literature the same role that popular fiction and genre fiction enjoyed,
seeking to market them both as mass-oriented culture. While homoge-
nizing ideologies and genres of the local novelistic production, socialist
realism diversified through translations. It is for this reason that the anal-
ysis of functions of genre literature within socialist realism plays an im-
portant role in mapping the development of fiction in Eastern European
cultures. In Gleb Tsipursky’s words, “the party-state intended state-spon-
sored popular culture to help build a socialist, alternative version of mo-
dernity” (2016, 221). This alternate modernity could only be construed by
reevaluating modernity’s highbrow expectation itself, and the lowering of
the literary bar may be perceived as reduction of literature to pragmatic
functions, divorced from any abstract aspiration and any magnanimous
attitude. Socialist realism was unrestrained by highbrow aspirations, and
the high Soviet canon was projected as mass addressed, too. Since the So-
viet propaganda literature has proved to be more obsolescent than gen-
re literature, we should assume that socialist realism helped genre fiction
more than it changed highbrow literature. This is how socialist realism
created an ‘alternate modernity’ in literature (Tsipursky 2016), pleading,
in fact, for a ‘non-modernity’ (Brennan 2017, 274) – one that was as ec-
lectic as its antithetical projection, and even diverse in terms of subgen-
res, since it always aimed to prove that its ideology pre-exists the diversi-
ty of topoi.
Works Cited
Baghiu, Ștefan. 2018. “Strong Domination and Subtle Dispersion: A Distant
Reading of Novel Translation in Communist Romania (1944–1989).”
In The Culture of Translation in Romania/ Übersetzungskultur und Lit-
