Work

From Aesthetic to National Competition

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This insight explores the literary scene in Soviet Armenia during the 1920s–1930s from the perspective of “competition”. It also examines the broader implications within Soviet literary policy, particularly how the 1934 All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers became a threshold between comparatively free and state-controlled literary and art processes. This contribution argues that the change in political policies, from “permanent revolution” to “constructing socialism in one country”, also changed the forms of literary competition in the Soviet Union. Writers who lost their agency to choose their aesthetic preferences and were required to adhere strictly to the “socialist realism” style were expected to compete only as representatives of their nations.

Source: Articulations

DOI: 10.60949/v43f-xz87

Author: Mnatsakanyan, Sona

Institution: Freie Universität Berlin

Language: English

Topic: Soviet and Russian History

Subfield: Political Science and International Relations

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Award: EXC 2020: Temporal Communities. Literatur als Praxis in globaler Perspektive