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Tue 05 May 2010Vivid account of labours of Soviet writers
BOOK OF THE DAY: CARLA KINGreviews Engineers of the Soul: In the Footsteps of Stalin’s WritersBy Frank Westerman Translated by Sam Garrett Harvill Secker, 306 pp, £14.99
ON THE evening of October 26th, 1932, 40 of Russia’s leading writers were summoned to Maxim Gorky’s Moscow mansion. The meeting, attended by Stalin and several other Politburo members, marked in effect the official inauguration of “socialist realism” in literature.
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