From Aesthetic to National Competition

This insight explores the literary scene in Soviet Armenia during the 1920s–1930s from the perspective of “competition”. It also examines the broader implications within Soviet literary policy, particularly how the 1934 All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers became a threshold between comparatively free and state-controlled literary and art processes. This contribution argues that the change in political policies, from “permanent revolution” to “constructing socialism in one country”, also changed the forms of literary competition in the Soviet Union. Writers who lost their agency to choose their aesthetic preferences and were required to adhere strictly to the “socialist realism” style were expected to compete only as representatives of their nations.