The Influence of Socialist Realism on the Writings of Folklorists in the Mid-20th Century. Case Study: Mariana Kahane
The Influence of Socialist Realism on the Writings of Folklorists in the Mid-20th Century. Case Study: Mariana Kahane

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents a case from the Institute of Folklore in Bucharest in the early 1950s, when a state directive had to produce a work presenting the “new genre” that emerged in traditional music after 1944. The task fell to folklorists Mariana Kahane and Paula Carp. In the Archive of the Constantin Brăiloiu Institute of Ethnography and Folklore I found the volume written by the two (which was never published), titled Contribuții la studierea noii creații de cântece populare din R.P.R. [Contributions to the Study of the New Creation of Folk Songs from the R.P.R.], in which information captured in a research in the village of Bătrâni, Prahova county, carried out in several stages was reproduced. Finally, the paper will concern two other documents found in the above-mentioned archive, showing different versions of a study written by Mariana Kahane in 1956 and 1957. While in the first, written for the West, the author overlooks the ideas imposed by the politics of the time, in the second, written for Moscow, she takes up again the notions she had launched two years before, with Paula Carp. The two studies thus show the different ways in which the author treats the subject, influenced by their intended audience: Western versus Soviet.

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