Socialist Realism Quotes

I originally came from Dresden, where Socialist Realism prevailed. Konrad Lueg and I came up with it, for the most part ironically, since I now live in capitalism. It was certainly 'realism', but in another form - the capitalist form, as it were. It wasn't meant that seriously. It was more a slogan for that particular Happening at a furniture store.

I am a Communist. My painting is Communist painting.

The culture and values of many former Soviet republics really do differ from what prevails in the West.

In the past there were too many portraits of Chairman Mao in China. They were hung everywhere. That was not proper and it didn't really show respect for Chairman Mao.

When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the '50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.

The external appearance of any construction projects that are created during the time of the National Socialist Reich must take on the sensibility of our time.

The situation of the Old Left was the theory of Socialist Realism, etc. It seemed pointless to argue. We stayed carefully away from people who wrote for the New Masses.

Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten.

A Marxist has never written a good novel.

Commies love concrete.

I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics.

I suspect in Lenin's works there's everything, if you search well.

Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.

Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?

However, that old mode of Polish filmmaking virtually disappeared.

I'm very proud of Soviet aesthetics.

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.

There's always been this strand of filmmaking in Britain which is like socialist neo-realism. That's always been there. I've never been part of that, really; I've been much closer to fantasy.

Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

The communists saw what we did in the arts as the only product of socialism that was known in the West, so they tolerated it.

There was no such thing as a solo career in East Germany. You had to get the best orchestra job that you could.

I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.

I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This is not just true of the innumerable unread books in the socialist realist tradition, but also of novels that carry the burden of conservative ideologies, like Guerrillas, Naipaul's worst book, where the author's disgust for a certain kind of black activist and white liberal is overpowering.