Socialist historical self-consciousness – an innovative aesthetic principle of socialist realism

Even Marx and Engels believed that the "future" proletarian literature would appear as an organic "complete fusion of great depth, conscious historical meaning" with Shakespearean liveliness and effectiveness" of artistic depiction. This is how they imagined the essence of proletarian verbal art, which for several decades now we have been calling the literature of socialist realism. In fact, through these and similar formulations, the founders of Marxist aesthetics noted two main features of proletarian literary art: first, its deeper and qualitatively new historicity in comparison with the art of past societies and second, its ability and historical obligation to start in its artistic searches from the highest ("Shakespearean") creative achievements of the universal human genius.