Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. CONTENTS v
3. Introduction 1
4. Socialist Realism in Search of Its Shores: Some Historical Remarks on the "Historically Open Aesthetic System of the Truthful Representation of Life" 5
5. Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero 27
6. A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic Categories 51
7. A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism 76
8. Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question 91
9. Paradoxes of Unified Culture: From Stalin's Fairy Tale to Molotov's Lacquer Box 120
10. The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, or, Who "Invented" Socialist Realism? 135
11. Censorship as the Triumph of Life 165
12. Wise Father Stalin and His Family in Soviet Cinema 178
13. Son of the Regiment: Deus ex Machi 191
14. Soft-Porn, Kitsch, and Post-Fascist Bodies: The East German Novel of Arrival 203
15. "Why is Soviet Painting Hidden from Us?" Zhdanov Art and Its International Relations and Fallout, 1947-53 227
16. W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism: The Black Flame as Socialist Realism 257
17. The Power of Rewriting: Postrevolutionary Discourse on Chinese Socialist Realism 282
18. Primitive Communism and the Other Way Around 310
19. The Past as a Dustbin, or, The Phantoms of Socialist Realism 337
20. Index 357
21. Notes on Contributors 367