Abstract. The author addresses the issues of sources for the social realism theory, its place within the context of the 20th-century theory and philosophy of arts, the interrelations of an Author and a Hero in social realism, and the contemporary mythology of this artistic movement. The problem of a Hero within the practices of social realism is analysed on the example of the film art and particularly on the results of rather unexpected comparison of the two images from very different movies, namely the heroines of a social realism film The Shining Path (1940) and a Hollywood classics Gone with a Wind (1939).

Key words: the 20th-century art , theory of the 20th-century arts, arts movements, social realism, myth of social realism, an author and a hero in social realism, film art of the 1930es and the 1940es

Bogatyreva Elena Anatolievna,
Doctor in Philosophy, Leading Researcher
of the Department for Philosophical Issues of Culture 
of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research (Moscow)
e-mail: bogatyreva@ricur.ru