Page "Socialist realism" Paragraph 28

The political doctrine behind socialist realism also underlay the pervasive censorship of Communist societies.

Apart from obvious political considerations that saw works such as those of George Orwell being banned, access to foreign art and literature was also restricted on aesthetic grounds.

Bourgeois art and all forms of experimentalism and formalism were denounced as decadent, degenerate and pessimistic, and therefore anti-Communist in principle.

The works of James Joyce were particularly harshly condemned.

The net effect was that it was not until the 1980s that the general public in the Communist countries were able to freely access many works of Western art and literature.