Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Transliteration and Mongolian Names
- Introduction
- 1 Prefiguring 1921
- 2 Staging a Revolution
- 3 Landscape Re-Envisioned
- 4 Leftward Together
- 5 Society in Flux
- 6 Negotiating Faith
- 7 Life and its Value
- 8 The Great Opportunistic Repression
- 9 A Closer Union
- Appendix: Brief Biographies of Writers
- Index
9 - A Closer Union
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Transliteration and Mongolian Names
- Introduction
- 1 Prefiguring 1921
- 2 Staging a Revolution
- 3 Landscape Re-Envisioned
- 4 Leftward Together
- 5 Society in Flux
- 6 Negotiating Faith
- 7 Life and its Value
- 8 The Great Opportunistic Repression
- 9 A Closer Union
- Appendix: Brief Biographies of Writers
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The Great Repression left Mongolian letters without many of its leading voices, but this also enabled the Party to revive literature in a way more favorable to its ideological trajectory. The first Congress of Mongolian Writers, held in the spring of 1948, was the culmination of a decade's political development in which writers were encouraged to write about the benefit of labor (D. Sengee's ‘The Shock Workers’ [Udarnik, 1941] and Ts. Damdinsüren's ‘How Soli Changed’ [Soli solison ni, 1945]) and so develop a Mongolian Socialist Realism. Through a closer connection with Soviet policy, helped by Mongolia's moral and practical support of the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War, the Writers’ Congress helped to define the ideological basis for Mongolian literature for the next three decades.
Keywords: personality cult, Choibalsan, Stalin, Socialist Realism, Great Patriotic War, war literature, Writers’ Congress
The shock resolution of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party on 23 April 1932, which disbanded all pre-existing literary organizations and established in their place the Union of Soviet Writers, led also to the demand that the Union's members adhere to Socialist Realism. The initial wave of debate as to what exactly Socialist Realism constituted soon hardened into a form of radical conservatism that rejected the various approaches to literature represented by the now disbanded literary groups. The formal and official definition of Socialist Realism was given in the Union's bylaws issued on 6 May 1934 and confirmed on 25 June of the same year:
Socialist realism, being the basic method of Soviet imaginative literature and literary criticism, demands from the artist a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time this truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of the ideological molding and education of the working people in the spirit of socialism.
The lack of specifics in this statement allowed for the disciplining of individual writers, as and when the censors2 saw it necessary, for any perceived contravention. But the idea of ‘reality’, as Ermolaev points out, was founded almost entirely upon Stalin's own understanding of the term.
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- Politics and Literature in Mongolia (1921–1948) , pp. 291 - 320Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020