Boundaries of Creative Freedom in Social Realist Mourning Poetry: Threnodies on Stalin’s Death Published in Polish Press
Boundaries of Creative Freedom in Social Realist Mourning Poetry: Threnodies on Stalin’s Death Published in Polish Press

Summary/Abstract: The doctrine of Socialist Realism challenged poets to define the boundaries of both their creative individuality and servility to the communist regime. Poems written after Stalin’s death and published in Polish press as tributes to his memory are a special case in point, shedding light on modes of negotiating these boundaries. In this paper, I analyse the relations between Socialist Realism in literature, principles of traditional mourning poetry, and the courtly nature of poems commissioned by the mighty patron of enslaved culture – the Communist Party. The central questions I seek to address is how did poets justify to themselves the shifting boundaries of their creative freedom; how did they try to protect the sense of value of their work when they were writing to order; finally, did they manage to preserve the originality of their poetics, modelling the contents of their poetry after the propagandist voice of the Communist ideology? These questions are addressed with reference to the theory of reception aesthetics, research into twentieth-century Classicism, and contemporary intertextual studies.

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