Chapter One. Born in the Crucible of War Chapaev and His Socialist Realist Comrades

Abstract

When Maxim Gorky published his novel Mother in 1906, it became a prototype for future socialist realist novels. Over a quarter of a century later, when in 1934 the method of socialist realist writing was codifi ed, Mother was listed as an offi cially approved exemplar. Sitting at an estate in the Adirondacks,1 Gorky had written the novel in the wake of devastating events in Russia: the humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the convulsions of the 1905 revolution that failed to bring the tsarist state down. Th is must have seemed to Gorky like a “plastic juncture,” to use John Dewey’s term, though that assessment turned out to be premature. His novel Mother was in its own way a war novel that confronted the working class problems of Russia and heralded the coming Revolutions. Aft er a brief discussion of Mother, we look in this chapter at two of its progeny, two of the most signifi cant novels to emerge in the immediate aft ermath of the Revolution and Civil War. Dmitry Furmanov’s Chapaev appeared in 1923, and Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement was published two years later. 2 Vasily Chapaev is pictured in the heat of the Civil War, while Gladkov’s Gleb Chumalov has returned home to a destroyed and abandoned factory aft er his time