De l’esthétisme socialiste
On Socialist Aestheticism

Summary/Abstract: In the late 1960s, after the break from Moscow and the relative “liberalization” of culture, the aesthetic criterion was officially accepted as a benchmark of literary and artistic value. Despite some moments of ideological backlash, writers gradually acquired some autonomy from the Party directives. Many of them practiced escapism and oneiric fantasy, out of a genuine belief that art should be divested of any moral or political purpose or that it could alleviate the pressures and constraints of social life. What emerged, under communist totalitarianism, was a paradoxical fundamentalism that I have called socialist aestheticism, a sort of ad hoc response to socialist realism.

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