The Development of the Chinese Interpretation of Socialist Realism as a Principle for Creation (Part One)

DING Fan

Nanjing University

Page 067-079

Abstract: This essay traces the complex trajectory of socialist realism as both a creation principle and a critical framework in modern Chinese literary history. Beginning with the transmission of Soviet literary theory, particularly through the 1950s reception of Ivanov S. Pidakov’s An Introduction to Literary Theory, the paper examines how Chinese intellectuals struggled with the interpretive enigma of socialist realism, oscillating between its official programmatic definition and its contradictory literary practice. By revisiting the roles of Maxim Gorky, Andrei Zhdanov, and other Soviet writers and literary critics, the essay highlights the entanglement of realism, naturalism, and romanticism in shaping the aesthetic and ideological imperatives of Chinese literature. It argues that the genealogy of realism in China, stretching from naturalism and critical realism to socialist realism and beyond, cannot be understood without accounting for this transnational circulation of theory and its selective adaptation. Moreover, the study foregrounds the tensions between ideological prescription and artistic autonomy, demonstrating how socialist realism operated less as a stable method than as an “invisible code” structuring both creation and criticism. In doing so, it reconsiders the fate of naturalism in Chinese literary discourse and calls for a renewed dialectical approach to realism, romanticism, and their afterlives in the post-socialist era.

Keywords: socialist realism, Chinese literary history, Soviet literary theory, naturalism and realism, revolutionary romanticism

DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202502006

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