Abstract

In the wake of Stalin’s death and the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s early fictions, Georg Lukács claimed to discern a revivification of socialist realism, the officially-sanctioned school of Soviet literature. A furtherance of that process was integral to the “renaissance of Marxism” and vitalization of socialist democracy that he hoped would restore the faith in socialism shaken by the Stalinist era. Although he dared not admit it, he envisioned a socialist realism cast in the image of bourgeois “critical realism.”