The academic consensus is that socialist realism, introduced in the 1930s, negated the bold formal experiments that characterized Soviet avant-garde aesthetics. The present collection proposes to complicate, correct, or perhaps even rewrite this dominant narrative through a kind of archaeological exploration in the fields of music, cinema, theater, and literature. Rather than focusing on mainstream trends, the book's authors turn to the work of little-known outsiders whose work deviated, either intentionally or by accident, from the dominant artistic method. The collection focuses on the significance of these outsiders in shaping cultural tradition, as well as the plasticity of socialist realism as an aesthetic method, its susceptibility to foreign aesthetic admixtures, and the uncertainty of its boundaries. In order to articulate a more multifaceted understanding of this period, the authors bring to the fore precisely the inconsistencies and internal contradictions of this method.