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create, as in the works of Salman RUSHDIE, post-
modern cultural hybrids through his characters;
rather, Seth’s works can be said to be deliberately
straightforward and direct without undermining
the lyricism of his language. He does not compli-
cate human nature but frankly and compassion-
ately tries to communicate it. In An Equal Music
(1998), which is set in England, the imminent sep-
aration of the lovers is an outcome destined by
music and is not a result of a larger social or polit-
ical cause. In this novel, the theme of love is con-
tained within the context of the feelings the couple
have for each other. The romantic intimacy be-
tween individuals in a drama devoid of politics
places this work in a modernist framework.
Seth’s difference from contemporary Indian
writers of English can be found in a descriptive
style that is as uncomplicated in form as it is in
content. This, however, does not mean that he has
not written on political issues: The poem “A Doc-
tor’s Journal Entry for August 6, 1945,” from All
You Who Sleep Tonight (1990), is a vivid exposi-
tion of a doctor’s reaction to the atomic bomb at
the moment of its fall into Hiroshima. Caught be-
tween saving himself and needing to do his duty to
others as a doctor, the narrator realizes that silence
and death are his only options.
Seth’s first literary venture was not, as he in-
tended, a novel. Golden Gate (1986) is written
completely in rhyme and won him the Common-
wealth Poetry Prize in 1986. Golden Gate follows
the formal tradition of older poetry and is a satire
of cosmopolitanism in sonnet form. It was in-
spired by the vibrancy of San Francisco and the
lives of the youth who eke out a living there. Seth’s
second novel, A Suitable Boy (1993), is set in
postindependent India in the 1950s. While a
mother performs an exacting search for a perfect
husband for her daughter, ethnic violence between
Hindus and Muslims divides a nation. A Suitable
Boy is the longest novel ever written in English. Be-
cause of its length and scope, covering the lives of
four extended families, Seth was hailed as a “lat-
ter-day Tolstoy” by international critics when it
was released.
Seth also studied classical Chinese poetry at
Nanjing University (China) and has written about
his travels in China and Tibet. Seth’s travelogues
uncover traces of India, found even in the remotest
mountain in Tibet. After his studies in China, Seth
published a collection of Chinese poems that he
translated into English.
Seth has proven to be a truly versatile writer.
Just as uncomplicated in form as he is in content,
he has written in almost every literary genre. He
has often said that rather than trying to combine
different genres at one time, he prefers to pick a
different form for a different theme. He has written
six books of poetry, three novels, and a libretto,
Arion and the Dolphin (1999), for an opera by
British composer Alec Roth. His attention to form
has twice placed him in the Guinness Book of
Records: for Golden Gate, the first novel in English
written entirely in sonnet form, and for A Suitable
Boy.
Other Works by Vikram Seth
Arion and Dolphins. New York: Penguin Putnam,
1999.
From Heaven Lake. New York: Vintage Books, 1987.
Works about Vikram Seth
A. L. McLeod, ed. “The Gate and the Banyan: Vikram
Seth’s Two Identities,” The Literature of the Indian
Diaspora. Delhi, India: Sterling, 2000.
Atkins, Angela. Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy”: A
Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum Interna-
tional Inc., 2002.
Pandurang, Mala. Vikram Seth: Multiple Locations,
Multiple Affiliation. New Delhi: Rawat, 2001.
Shalamov, Varlam (1907–1982) poet,
essayist
The son of a priest, Varlam Tihonovich Shalamov
was born in Vologda, Russia. As a young man, Sha-
lamov joined the communist cause and actively
participated in the Russian Revolution. Between
1926 and 1929, Shalamov studied law at the
Moscow University. In 1929, he was arrested for
398 Shalamov, Varlam
distribution of the so-called “Lenin’s Will,” a doc-
ument that stated that Lenin opposed the appoint-
ment of Joseph Stalin to the leadership of the
Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Shalamov
was released in 1932 but was arrested once again in
1937 at the height of the period of Stalin’s political
repressions.
Shalamov spend the next 17 years in a labor
camp in Kolyma, a remote location in Siberia.
After he returned in 1952, he began to publish
poems in various journals. In the meantime, he
secretly worked on Kolyma Tales, which appeared
in dissident circles around Moscow in 1966.
Kolyma Tales describes Shalamov’s experiences in
Stalin’s labor camps. The stories were officially
published in London in 1977. After the London
publication, the collection caused a scandal for the
Soviet government, and Shalamov was forced to
renounce his work publicly. He died alone in a
nursing home five years before Kolyma Tales was
officially published in the Soviet Union.
Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales is considered
by many to be a centerpiece of dissident fiction in
Russia. His tales had a direct political impact in the
Soviet Union, as they exposed the scandalous
treatment of political prisoners in the Soviet
Union and the injustices of the Soviet judicial sys-
tem. Today, Shalamov is admired by many, and his
work continues to bear relevance to the treatment
of political prisoners by various totalitarian gov-
ernments around the world.
Another Work by Varlam Shalamov
Graphite. Translated by John Glad. New York: Nor-
ton, 1981.
Shiga Naoya (1883–1971) novelist, short-
story writer, essayist
Shiga Naoya was born in Ishimaki, Miyagi Prefec-
ture, Japan, to Shiga Naoharu and Gin. When he
was still very young, his grandparents took him to
their residence in Tokyo. A member of an affluent
and influential family, Shiga entered the elitist
Gakushu¯in, a school established to educate the
imperial family. He became interested in Chris-
tianity and joined a Christian study group while
in middle school, and in 1906, he entered the Eng-
lish literature department of the Tokyo Imperial
University. In 1914, Shiga married Sadako Kade-
noko¯ji. His father disapproved of the marriage,
and Shiga responded by renouncing his inheri-
tance, thus severing his ties with his family.
Shiga’s formal literary career began with his
publication of the short story “The Little Girl and
the Rapeseed Flower” (1904) while he was still in
high school. In 1910, Shiga and a group of friends
from Gakushu¯in started a literary magazine as an
outlet for their writing, and Shiga regularly con-
tributed short stories. In 1912, he published O
¯
tsu
Junkichi, his first long work. While critics called the
novella uneven, its honesty of emotion ranks it
highly among Japan’s literary works. Five years
later, while recovering from having been hit by a
train, Shiga wrote his masterpiece “At Kinosaki,” a
reverie over the deaths of small animals. Shiga ex-
celled in the arena of short stories, but he struggled
with novel writing. Despite other attempts, he
wrote only one full-length novel—A Dark Night’s
Passing—over a 16-year period, from 1921 to 1937.
In the last 20 years of his life, Shiga entered into
semiretirement, periodically writing personal es-
says based on his observations.
Shiga is regarded as the supreme stylist of his
day. Using an economy of words, he depicted vivid
vignettes based closely on his personal experiences.
His literary power stems from his objectivity and
honesty in portraying his characters’ emotions. In
1949, he received the Order for Cultural Merit.
Other Works by Shiga Naoya
Morning Glories. Translated by Allen Say and David
Meltzer. Berkeley, Calif.: Oyez, 1976.
The Paper Door and Other Stories. Translated by Lane
Dunlop. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987.
Works about Shiga Naoya
Mathy, Frances. Shiga Naoya. Boston: Twayne, 1974.
Starrs, Roy. An Artless Art: The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga
Naoya. Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 1998.
Shiga Naoya 399
Shiina Minako
See ¯OBA MINAKO.
Sholokhov, Mikhail (1905–1984) novelist,
short-story writer
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov was born in a
small village of Kruzhlinin, Russia. Sholokhov’s fa-
ther engaged in a number of farm-related trades;
his mother was an illiterate Ukrainian peasant who
learned to read and write late in her life to corre-
spond with her son. Sholokhov was educated in
several schools but left his educational pursuits to
join the army in 1918. He fought on the Bolshevik
side during the Russian civil war. He took part in
the suppression of an anti-Bolshevik rebellion by
the Don Cossacks (a semiautonomous group who
was granted limited local independence by the
czar, often in exchange for services in the military).
Indeed, almost all of Sholokhov’s prose is based
on this experience during the war.
At the end of the war, Sholokhov relocated to
Moscow where, between 1922 and 1924, he worked
as a stonemason and an accountant. He occasion-
ally participated in writers’seminars and published
his first story, The Birthmark, in 1924. The same
year, he decided to dedicate himself completely to
writing; only a year later, he published his first col-
lection of short stories, Tales of the Don, which de-
picted the bitter transformation of village life
during the civil war.
Sholokhov’s fame as a novelist came with the
serialized publication of And Quiet Flows the Don
(1928–40). Although the novel won the Stalin
Prize in 1941, it was initially criticized for its ob-
jectivity in depicting the civil war. The work traces
the tragic life of Cossack Grigory Melekhov and his
ill-fated love. Along with the spiritual destruction
of the protagonist, Sholokhov also depicts the
downfall of traditional Cossack communities. His
other major work, Virgin Soil Uplifted (1932–60),
describes the agricultural collectivization in the
Soviet Union. Although now recognized by many
critics as mediocre at best, the novel received the
Lenin Prize in 1960.
Sholokhov achieved high rank in the Commu-
nist Party. He accompanied the Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev on a trip to Europe and the
United States in 1959, and in 1961, he was elected
as a member of the Central Committee. Many
writers have criticized Sholokhov’s work for its un-
scrupulousness in following official doctrines; still
others questioned the authorship of Tikhiy Don.
Despite these troubles, Sholokhov was the first of-
ficially sanctioned Soviet writer to receive the
Nobel Prize in literature in 1965. By Sholokhov’s
death in 1984, more than 79 million copies of his
work were published in 84 languages.
A Work about Mikhail Aleksandrovich
Sholokhov
Ermolaev, Herman. Mikhail Sholokhov and His Art.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982.
Shu Qingchun
See LAO SHE.
Sienkiewicz, Henryk (1846–1916) novelist,
short-story writer
Henryk Sienkiewicz was born in Wola Okrzejska,
part of the Russian area of Poland. His father’s
family were revolutionaries who fought for Polish
independence, and his mother’s family included
scholars of history.
Sienkiewicz’s talent for writing emerged at a
young age. His earliest works were satirical
sketches on social consciousness. In 1876, he vis-
ited America, publishing his travel accounts in Pol-
ish newspapers and gaining material for future
works.
Returning to Poland, Sienkiewicz turned to
historical studies, writing a trilogy about 17th-
century Poland, which included With Fire and
Sword (1884), The Deluge (1886), and Pan Michael
(1888). A prolific writer, he followed these works
in rapid succession with novels on a variety of
contemporary subjects. Without Dogma (1891)
was a psychological study of decadence, while
400 Shiina Minako
Children of the Soil (1894) focused on the lives of
peasants.
In 1896 Sienkiewicz published Quo Vadis. This
novel, for which he is most widely recognized in-
ternationally, told of the persecution of Christians
at the time of Nero. He returned to historical sub-
jects in Krzyzacy (1900), recounting the Poles’ vic-
tory over the Teutonic knights in the Middle Ages,
and On the Field of Glory (1906), a sequel to his
previous trilogy. His final works, Whirlpools (1910)
and In Desert and Wilderness (1912), again deal
with contemporary issues.
In 1905, Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel
Prize in literature for his “outstanding merits as an
epic writer” (Nobel Lectures). Living in a time of
cultural oppression, Sienkiewicz encouraged patri-
otism through his writing. Evidence of his success
can be found in reports of Polish citizens pinning
pages of his books to their clothing as a reminder
of the fight for freedom. Sienkiewicz also wrote
open letters to his people addressing political in-
justice, and in 1901, he helped to expose the per-
secution of Polish schoolchildren by the Prussians.
He did not live to see the success of all he had
fought to attain. He died two years before Poland’s
boundaries were restored.
Other Works by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Charcoal Sketches and Other Tales. Translated by
Adam Zamoyski. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour
Editions, 1990.
The Little Trilogy. Translated by Miroslaw Lipinski.
New York: Hippocrene Books, 1995.
Works about Henryk Sienkiewicz
Giergielewicz, Mieczyslaw. Henryk Sienkiewicz: A Bi-
ography. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1991.
Kryanowski, Jerzy, ed. The Trilogy Companion: A
Reader’s Guide to the Trilogy of Henryk Sienkiewicz.
New York: Hippocrene Books, 1992.
Simenon, Georges (1903–1989) novelist
Best known as a skilled writer of highly literate de-
tective fiction, Georges Simenon was born in Liège,
Belgium. The son of an accountant, he was forced
to quit school because of his father’s poor health.
His mother died in 1921, and he worked for a time
as a baker and a bookseller before launching his
writing career with an apprenticeship at a local
newspaper, Gazette de Liège.
Simenon began publishing when he was only 17
years old. He joined with a group of painters, writ-
ers, and artists who called themselves The Cask.
This group spent the majority of their time drink-
ing, experimenting with drugs, and having deep
philosophical discussions. He recounts his experi-
ences with this group in his novel Le Pendu de
Saint Pholier (1931).
In 1922, Simenon moved to Paris, where he
published numerous short stories and novels
under a variety of pennames. Between 1922 and
1939, he produced more than 200 works of pulp
fiction. The first work published under his real
name was The Strange Case of Peter Lett (1931), in
which Simenon introduces the character of In-
spector Maigret, the Paris police detective about
whom he would ultimately pen 84 mysteries, 18 of
them written in the early 1930s. Simenon left the
character behind for an eight-year hiatus at the
start of World War II.
During the German invasion of France,
Simenon moved to Fontenay, where he wrote suc-
cessfully for the film business. After the war, under
suspicion of having been a Nazi collaborator, he
moved to the United States, where he wrote several
mysteries with American settings, including Belle
(1954) and The Hitchhiker (1955).
Simenon returned to Europe to live in Switzer-
land in 1955. Several of the Maigret novels enjoyed
success as films. He announced his retirement in
1973, just after the publication of one last Maigret
work, Maigret et Monsieur Charles (1972). He con-
tinued to write some nonfiction, including Lettre
à ma mère (1974), which focuses on his relation-
ship with his mother. Simenon died on September
4, leaving instructions that his body be cremated
without ceremony. His legacy to literature lives on
in the psychological depth he brought to the genre
of detective fiction.
Simenon, Georges 401
Other Works by Georges Simenon
Maigret Loses His Temper. Translated by Robert Egles-
field. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jo-
vanovich, 1993.
The Rules of the Game. Translated by Howard Curtis.
San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1988.
Works about Georges Simenon
Assouline, Pierre. Simenon: A Biography. Translated
by Jon Rothschild. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Becker, Lucille. Georges Simenon Revisited. Boston:
Twayne, 1999.
Simon, Claude (1913– ) novelist
Closely associated with the emergence of the NEW
NOVEL in the 1950s, Claude Simon was born in Tana-
narive, in the then French colony of Madagascar.
His father was killed during World War II, leaving
Simon to be raised by his mother and her family in
Perpignan, a French city near the Spanish border.
Simon studied for a career in the navy but was
ultimately dismissed and left to study art at both
Oxford and Cambridge Universities. In the early
1930s, he visited the Soviet Union. Upon his re-
turn, he served with the French army. During
World War II, he was captured by the Germans but
managed to escape and join the Resistance.
It was not until after the end of World War II
that Simon began his career as a writer. His first
novel, Le tricheur (The Cheat, 1945), was followed
by the autobiographical novel La corde raide (The
Tightrope, 1947). These two works and Simon’s
two subsequent novels are traditional in structure,
with easily identifiable plots and characters. Simon
gained international recognition, however, with his
“new novel”–styled Le Vent (The Wind, 1959).
Here Simon began to develop a style in which the
plot is really just one event viewed from several
perspectives.
In L’herbe (1958) Simon began to emphasize vi-
sual perceptions. Nothing much happens in the
novel, even though it is set in France in 1940, the
tumultuous year of the German invasion. An old
woman, Marie, is dying; her recollections, mainly
of houses and gardens, form the substance of the
book. A sequel, La route des Flandres (1960), is
about Marie’s nephew Georges, juxtaposing his
wartime experiences with his present postwar real-
ity. Much of Simon’s work is largely biographical
or historical in origin. Stylistically, he grew to favor
a stream-of-consciousness style that was often de-
void of regular punctuation and used parentheses
excessively. For his works and contribution to the
field of literature, Simon was awarded the Nobel
Prize in literature in 1985.
Other Works by Claude Simon
The Georgics. Translated by Beryl and John Fletcher.
New York: Riverrun Press, 1991.
The Invitation. Translated by Jim Cross. Normal, Ill.:
Dalkey Archive Press, 1991.
The Jardin des Plantes. Translated by Jordan Stump.
Evanston, Ill.: Illinois University Press, 2001.
The Trolley. Translated by Richard Howard. New
York: New Press, 2002.
A Work about Claude Simon
Brewer, Maria Minich. Claude Simon: Narratives
Without Narrative. Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 1995.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis (Icek-Hersz
Zynger)
(1904–1991) novelist, short-story
writer
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Radzymin,
Poland. Singer’s father was a Hasidic rabbi, and his
mother came from a family of rabbis. When he was
four, he moved with his family to Warsaw where he
received a traditionally Jewish education, combin-
ing academics with the study of Jewish law in He-
brew and Aramaic texts. An avid reader, he was
also influenced by the works of Spinoza, GOGOL,
DOSTOEVSKY, and TOLSTOY. Singer entered the
Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary in 1920 but ulti-
mately gave up this vocation to become a writer.
He began his writing career as a journalist in
Warsaw, where he worked as a proofreader for
402 Simon, Claude
Literarische Bleter, a newspaper edited by his eld-
est brother Joshua Singer, who was more politically
active than his brother and highly disillusioned
with the Soviet political system. This disillusion-
ment affected the younger Singer’s awareness of
the continuous sociopolitical and cultural up-
heaval in Poland.
Singer’s chief subject was Jewish life, history,
and tradition, centered primarily on the period be-
fore the Holocaust. He examines the importance of
the Jewish faith through the lives of his characters.
Singer’s earliest fictional works were short sto-
ries and novellas. His first novel, Satan in Goray
(1932), was published in Poland. It addresses the
theme of the power of the 17th-century false mes-
siah Shabbatai Zvi. Written in a linguistic style
similar to the medieval Yiddish book of chronicles,
the novel is set in the 17th century during the time
of the Cossaks and is based on the mass murder of
Jews, peasants, and artisans. The characters are
often at the mercy of circumstance but are also the
victims of passion. The story examines the danger
of messianic fever or overzealous prophet-wor-
ship. The destructive nature of passion and obses-
sion are common themes in Singer’s work.
Fearing Nazi persecution, Singer became a for-
eign correspondent and emigrated to the United
States just after the publication of his first novel.
He left behind his first wife, Rachel, and their son
Israel. Settling in New York, he obtained employ-
ment with the Yiddish newspaper Jewish Daily For-
ward. In 1940 he married Alma Haimann, a
German émigré, and was granted American citi-
zenship in 1943.
His first collection of stories that was published
in English was Gimpel the Fool (1957). He also
published numerous stories in the Jewish Daily
Forward, which were later collected in In My Fa-
ther’s Court (1966) and More Stories from My Fa-
ther’s Court (2000). The latter collection was
published posthumously. In these stories, Singer
depicts his own childhood in the overpopulated
poor Jewish quarters of Warsaw before and during
World War I. Singer’s father is depicted as a pious
man who studies the Talmud with great fervor; his
mother is pictured as more practical, focusing on
everyday problems.
The Family Moskat (1950) was Singer’s first
novel to be published in English. It forms the first
volume of a trilogy along with The Manor (1967)
and The Estate (1969). These novels describe how
families are destroyed by the changing demands of
society and a decline in religious faith.
Although Singer wrote all of his works in Yid-
dish, he collaborated with a number of well-
known literary figures in the translation of his
work, among them Saul Bellow and, most fre-
quently, Cecil Hemley. He often published fiction
under the penname Isaac Bashevis and journalism
under Warshofsky.
In 1978, Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in
literature. In 1984, his short story “Yentil the
Yeshiva Boy”was made into the popular film Yentl.
The 1989 film Enemies, a Love Story was also based
on one of his novels. Singer died in Surfside,
Florida, on July 24, 1991.
Other Works by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Reaches of Heaven. New York: Farrar Strauss, 1980.
Scum. Translated by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz.
New York: Farrar Straus, 1991.
The Penitent. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1983.
The Slave. Translated by the author and Cecil Hemley.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1962.
Works about Isaac Bashevis Singer
Friedman, Lawrence. Understanding Isaac Bashevis
Singer. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1988.
Hadda, Janet. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
v
Skvoreck
’
y, Jozef (1924– ) novelist
Jozef
v
Skvoreck
´
y was born in 1924 in Náchod, Bo-
hemia, Czeckoslovakia. He received his Ph.D. from
Charles University in Prague.
v
Skvoreck
´
y was fired
from his job when his first novel, The Cowards
(1958; translated 1970), was published; the novel
S
ˇ
kvoreck
’
y, Jozef 403
was banned in Czechoslovakia soon after its pub-
lication for its ironic portrayal of the everyday lives
of people living under communist rule. Un-
daunted,
v
Skvoreck
´
y began freelancing, writing
novels, film scripts, and nonfiction.
In response to the defeat of the Czech reform
movement,
v
Skvoreck
´
y left Czechoslovakia to settle
in Canada in 1969. With his wife, he founded a
Czechoslovakian publishing house in Toronto,
where he began to build a solid reputation as a nov-
elist. During a 20-year period, he developed a repu-
tation as one of Canada’s finest novelists, receiving
the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1984.
All of
v
Skvoreck
´
y’s novels have some basis in his
experiences in Czechoslovakia and are often semi-
autobiographical. Some of his works also focus on
the problems of romantic love in a harsh sociopo-
litical climate. The Engineer of Human Souls (1984)
is a comic novel that tells the tragic tale of novelist
Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant living in
Canada. The Bride of Texas (1995) is a historical
novel about Czechoslovakian immigrants during
the American Civil War who fought alongside the
Union army.
v
Skvoreck
´
y taught at the University of Toronto
from 1971 to 1991. Retired from teaching, he con-
tinues to write. His most recent novel, Dead Man
on Campus (2000), is an autobiographical novel
merged with a murder mystery.
Other Works by Jozef
v
Skvoreck ’y
Dvorák in Love: Alight-Hearted Dream. New York:
Norton, 1988.
The Bass Saxophone: Two Novellas. New York: Ecco
Press, 1994.
A Work about Jozef
v
Skvoreck ’y
Solecki, Sam. Prague Blues: The Fiction of Josef
v
Skvoreck´y. New York: Ecco Press, 1990.
So Ch ¯ong-ju (Midang) (1915–2001) poet
So Ch¯ong-ju was born in Sonuna village in Korea’s
North Cholla province. After receiving a high
school education without graduating, he entered
the monastery but soon left to pursue a career in
writing.
So Ch¯ong-ju, who was influenced by the West-
ern writers Friedrich
NIETZSCHE and Charles
BAUDELAIRE, is considered one of Korea’s first mod-
ern poets. He made a ripple in the Korean literary
community by being the first writer to invoke sex-
ual imagery, as in the poem “The Snake” (1938).
Poems such as these marked his early sensual pe-
riod.
So Ch¯ong-ju also masterfully chronicled ordi-
nary life. In the 1950s and 1960s, he drew on his
Buddhist training and entered a Zen stage. Writ-
ing under his Buddhist name, Midang, he wrote of
epiphany and Zen insight in “Legendary Karma
Song” (1960) and “Beside a Chrysanthemum”
(1955). He also focused on aesthetics and the nat-
ural world, both areas of Buddhist scholarship.
Eventually, as So Ch¯ong-ju aged, he returned to
more personal poetry, reflecting upon his life and
experiences and confronting the specter of his own
mortality. “In Looking at Winter Orchids” (1976),
for example, the narrator draws a parallel between
his own mortality and flowers past bloom.
So Ch¯ong-ju is one of the best-loved poets of
modern Korea. He also achieved renown in the in-
ternational community, which culminated in his
nomination for the Nobel Prize in 1994, becom-
ing the first Korean writer to receive this honor. A
respected scholar, So Ch¯ong-ju was a professor at
Buddhist University and Dongguk University in
Seoul. When he died on December 24, at the age
of 85, the country mourned his death as a premier
man of letters.
Another Work by So Ch¯ong-ju
Poems of a Wanderer: Selected Poems of Midang So
Ch¯ong-ju. Translated by Kevin O’Rourke. Dublin:
Dedalus Press, 1995.
socialist realism
Socialist realism was first recognized as an emerg-
ing literary movement in the Soviet Union in re-
sponse to a May 1932 article in the Literary
404 So Ch¯ong-ju
Gazette. The article stated that, in response to
modern times and a general trend toward embrac-
ing socialist doctrine, “The masses demand of an
artist honesty, truthfulness, and a revolutionary,
socialist realism in the representation of the prole-
tarian revolution.” This article was followed shortly
thereafter by a 1933 article by Maxim GORKY,“On
Socialist Realism,” which emphasized the impor-
tance of artists taking “a new direction essential to
us—socialist realism, which can be created only
from the data of socialist experience.” However, so-
cialist realism was not officially defined as a literary
and political term until 1934 when, at the First All-
Union Congress of Soviet writers, it was officially
adopted as the accepted standard for art and liter-
ature. In a speech at the congress, Gorky called on
writers to “make labor the principal hero of our
books.”
Socialist realism was based on the principle that
the arts should serve the purposes of communism
and communist ideologies, both by glorifying
worker heroes and by educating readers about the
benefits of communist life. A first generation of so-
cialist realists, including Maxim Gorky and Andrey
Platonov (1899–1951), were not under state con-
trol and created works that portrayed the suffer-
ing of the poor and oppressed. However, socialist
realism under Stalin persecuted writers who did
not adhere to the party line. Writers, as well as vi-
sual and performing artists, were required to join
the state-controlled Union of Soviet Artists and,
as a condition of membership, were required to
agree to abide by the union’s restrictions. The
movement began and spread quickly alongside the
growth and expansion of communist ideology and
government, becoming a dominant form of artis-
tic expression in much of Eastern and Central Eu-
rope, but it also included writers from the United
States, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Many writers and visual artists living under
Communist governments found the demands of
socialist realism stifling, so they emigrated to other
countries. Others, such as the Polish writer Sla-
womir
MROZ
•
EK, without leaving, found ways to
keep their creativity alive through the use of indi-
rect satire. The first collection of Mrozek’s works,
Slon (1957; The Elephant, 1967), was an anthology
of very short stories that satirized various aspects
of Polish communism in the 1950s. It was imme-
diately successful with both critics and the general
public but was not favored by strict socialists.
Stalin’s death in 1953 led to some relaxation of
government control of the arts, but socialist real-
ism continued as the official accepted literary and
artistic practice into the 1980s.
Socialist realism is no longer a major move-
ment, and very few works, if any at all, written
today would fall under this category. It seems that
socialist realism dissolved well before the collapse
of the Soviet Union, and very few works of social-
ist realism, with the major exception of the first
wave, are either read or appreciated today.
Socialist Realism in China
The growth of communism in the 1920s intro-
duced socialist realism to China. A lack of mass
awareness was discussed by writers, and quasi-so-
cialist associations, such as the League of Left-
Wing Writers (1930), were founded. But socialist
realism did not materialize as an explicit literary
and political directive in China until 1942, when
Mao Zedong’s talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and
Literature gave the movement its foundation. By
circumscribing the role of literature in a socialist
society, Mao Zedong shaped communist literature
for the remainder of the century. He drew heavily
upon Soviet influence, and his primary tenet was
the service of literature to revolutionary thought
and politics.
Mao Zedong believed writers should not criti-
cize the revolution but should emphasize the pos-
itive. Another main point at the Yenan talks was
that literature must serve the masses. However,
Mao Zedong also indicated that literature should
not “lower” itself culturally to simple propaganda
but should rise to a new artistic standard that con-
currently served the revolutionary cause and urged
the study of folk traditions.
Socialist realism was best served by writers in-
digenous to the movement. However, there were
socialist realism 405
many writers who had been working for years who
converted to communism, such as DING Ling and
BA Jin. Adaptation to the newly stringent require-
ments of socialist realism was difficult. Some writ-
ers, including Ding Ling, Ba Jin, and the
unfortunate scapegoat Wang Shiwei, were eventu-
ally purged by the party for a lack of mass aware-
ness and other literary “crimes.” The new writers
were untrained students of revolution, such as Hao
Ran, who wrote party-line fiction such as the
three-volume novel Bright Sunny Skies (1965).
Held up as a hallmark of literature for and by the
masses, the novel follows three players—a land-
lord, a party secretary, and a fallen party mem-
ber—in the difficult task of collectivizing their
local economy.
Socialist realist works were to depict the revolu-
tionary journey accurately. However, they also
needed to portray revolutionary heroes or hero-
ines, focus on the masses, and glorify the work of
the revolution, such as industrialization, the mili-
tia of the People’s Liberation Army, and agrarian
reforms. The novels tended to be long and pre-
dictable, with idealistic young heroes, such as Yang
Mo’s romantic and revolutionary Song of Youth
(1958). The military was the most popular topic, as
in Chin Ching-mai’s The Song of Ou-Yang Hai
(1966), about a real-life People’s Liberation Army
soldier who acted selflessly. Ts’ao Ming’s The Mo-
tive Force (1949) told the story of the rehabilitation
of a destroyed hydroelectric plant and glorified in-
dustrial reconstruction in Manchuria.
The Communist Party had to launch periodic
campaigns against forces that they deemed threat-
ening to socialist realist literature. Two of the most
infamous were the criticisms and purgings of Ding
Ling and Hu Feng in 1955. Ding Ling, who was
once lauded for her 1949 socialist-realist novel on
land reform, The Sun Shines Over Sanggan River,
was sent to labor reform for explicit and immoral
writings and for her urgings for literary openness.
Hu Feng was imprisoned for his criticisms of
thought reform and the dogmatic views of party
leaders regarding literature. Some writers, like
Wang Shiwei, were even executed.
A brief respite against such persecution oc-
curred from April 1956 to May 1957 in a period of
tentative liberalization called the Hundred Flow-
ers. In Literature of the Hundred Flowers, Mao Ze-
dong said,“In the arts, let a hundred flowers bloom
and in scholarship, let a hundred schools of
thought contend.” Here, Ding Ling and other writ-
ers who had been working under the demands of
socialist realism for nearly a decade took the ills of
the movement to task. Among the issues they
raised were whether all literature had to be overtly
political and whether poetry could be lyrical. The
flowering was immediately followed by a purging
anti-Rightist campaign.
The Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 and
was led by Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, pro-
duced a high volume of works of propaganda that
were of dubious artistic quality. Many cultural
relics were destroyed; intellectuals, writers, and
other artists were sent to labor reform camps; self-
criticisms were forced; and mass persecutions were
common.
After the Cultural Revolution, socialist realism
had some mending to do. The first wave of writ-
ings from “rehabilitated”writers, such as Ding Ling
and Ba Jin, were known as “scar literature” and re-
vealed the wounds that resulted from the oppres-
sive dictates of Chinese socialist-realist literature.
Socialist realism persists in some form today, but
with the changing face of Communist China it is
hardly recognizable. Writers such as
MO YAN docu-
ment stories of ordinary life under communism
with darkness and humor.
Works about Socialist Realism
Bisztray, George. Marxist Models of Literary Realism.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
Herdan, Innes. The Pen and the Sword: Literature and
Revolution in Modern China. London: Zed Books
Ltd., 1992.
Kemp-Welch, A. Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia,
1928–39. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
Lahusen, Thomas. How Life Writes the Book: Real So-
cialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia. New
York: Cornell University Press, 1997.
406 socialist realism
Mao Zedong. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. New
York: Pergamon Press, 1977.
Robin, Régine. Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aes-
thetic. Translated by Catherine Porter; foreword by
Léon Robel. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1991.
Yang Lan. Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1998.
Södergran, Edith (1892–1923) poet
Edith Södergran was born in St. Petersburg, Rus-
sia, to Finnish–Swedish parents. Her father, Matts
Södergran, was a mechanic and engineer who
worked for Alfred Nobel for a time. Her mother,
Helena Lovisa, was the daughter of a wealthy
Swedish ironmaster. Södergran was educated at a
German school in St. Petersburg and spent her
summers at Raivola, Russia. As a teenager, she
wrote poems in German, Swedish, French, and
Russian. Södergran battled tuberculosis through-
out her adolescence and spent several years in san-
itariums in Switzerland and Finland.
An unhappy love affair with a Russian physician
inspired Södergran’s first collection of poetry
Dikter (Poems, 1916). Her verse blended numerous
influences, including Heinrich
HEINE, Else LASKER-
SCHÜLER, Walt Whitman, and Russian
SYMBOLISM.
Södergran’s collection Septemberlyran (September
Lyric, 1918), written after her wealth was erased
by the Russian Revolution, was partially about the
Finnish civil war. Her friendship with critic Hagar
Olsson inspired the verse in Rosenaltaret (The Rose
Alter, 1919). After Södergran adopted Rudolf
Steiner’s anthroposophy doctrines and Christian-
ity, she ceased writing poetry until her final days.
She died after long bouts with illness and malnu-
trition.
Södergran developed a cult following after her
death. Young poets made pilgrimages to her
Raivola home until it was destroyed in World War
II. Södergran’s works have been translated into
French and German. Her poems combine childlike
humor, frankness, and a passion for beauty, and
she is credited with liberating Nordic verse from
the restrictions of traditional rhyme, rhythm, and
imagery. George Schoolfield’s biography Edith
Södergran (1984) contains a quote from Swedish
poet Gunnar Ekelöf in a letter to W. H. Auden, de-
scribing Södergran as “a very great poet ...brave
and loving as your Emily Brontë.”
Another Work by Edith Södergran
Love and Solitude: Selected Poems, 1916–1923. Trans-
lated by Stina Katchadourian. Seattle: Fjord Press,
1985.
A Work about Edith Södergran
Schoolfield, George C. Edith Södergran: Modernist
Poet in Finland. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1984.
Solovyov, Vladimir (1853–1900) philoso-
pher, poet, translator
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was born in
Moscow, Russia. His father, S. M. Solovyov, was a
famous historian. Solovyov received an excellent
education while growing up and attended the
Moscow University, where he received a doctoral
degree in philosophy. Afterward, he became a pro-
fessor at the Moscow University until 1881, when
he was forced to resign after publicly criticizing the
death sentence passed on the assassins of Czar
Aleksandr II.
Solovyov’s poetry was closely connected with
his philosophical and scholarly works, for which
he is primarily remembered today. Deeply influ-
enced by Plato, he adopted many of the Platonic
ideals in the development of his own philosophy
in conjunction with the beliefs of the Russian
Orthodox Church. Although Solovyov was hardly
a liberal in his political beliefs, he supported land
reforms and other democratic reforms to ease the
suffering of the Russian masses. His views became
more and more reactionary as the Russian
antigovernmental opposition became more and
more violent.
Although initially sympathetic to the demo-
cratic cause and socialism, Solovyov’s philosophy
Solovyov, Vladimir 407