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

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.