Every humanist theme and subject was prohibited. According to the communists, literature and other branches of the arts have only one task, to build communism by convincing and agitating the people. This intent was adequately expressed by the schematic characters in communist fiction. The chief characters were:
1. A class-conscious communist who conquers every handicap and convinces the people of the truth of the ideology. This figure is quite like the hero of the cowboy movies. He can fight against all odds and win even so. The only difference is that the communist does not wear a ten-gallon hat but a set of rumpled coveralls.
2. A non-class-conscious but honest worker or poor peasant who finally becomes convinced by the results and truths of communism.
3. A nefarious class enemy who used to be a hired assassin or saboteur and who, as in the fairy tales, finally gets his much deserved punishment.
It was customary in these stories for the "non-class-conscious but honest man," caught in the net of the class enemy, to become enlightened by the "class-conscious communist" and unmask the enemy.
These themes very soon became hackneyed and commonplace, boring the readers, but authors under the direct control of the Communist Party couldn't do anything about it. During his period of creativity, stop lights flash in the author's mind's eye warning him not to stray from the path marked out by the almighty Party. Such authors had an audience, of course, because it was compulsory for us to study the cliches they wrote, but they had no followers. Indeed, all branches of communist art lose themselves in a blind alley. Art is a decaying skeleton, kept from complete disintegration only by the power of the state.