The present article contains a description of the evolution of the research on the socialist realism. The author’s survey lead to the conclusion that the research on this problem evolved through the following three stages: 1) the attitude consisting in providing this research with a distanced and objectified nature, 2) the realisation that the above mentioned phenomenon can be treated as a literary current, and a fundamental description of its aesthetics and poetics, and finally, 3) the pointing out to the implications of the socialist realism for the literary history, and its being used to construct a synthetic vision of the literary process of the epoch in question.