Critical realism in literature and its basic creative principles were formed in a society whose class structure was in a classical-bourgeois form. In those conditions, only this one social form really existed. The people's ideas about a certain “classless” society were purely theoretical. And under these conditions, belonging, the fact of a person’s attachment to a certain social environment, was an indispensable regularity, becoming a spiritual and artistic way of perceiving and mastering life.
At the same time, social-class certainty did not come to critical realism in the form of the usual reproduction of one or another social type. Its appearance was not an independent process. Critical realism reflected a creative synthesis of this determinism with an interested, socially active attitude towards life.
This synthesis is clearly visible in the historical connection of the individual with its social-class structure. Critical realism characterizes this relationship as a hostile personality, fettering the possibilities and aspirations of man. The dominant environment existed, suppressing, disfiguring, destroying human generic qualities. Critical realism is a reflection of the suffering and extreme poverty of the working population.
The created paintings truly characterize the social peculiarity of that reality, which was isolation and hostility towards a holistic and free human life. This principle was the basis of critical realism. The perception of life, mastering the class system, which was hostile not only to its movements, but also to the following times, was faithfully reproduced in art.
Critical realism does not establish an objective, but a subjective connection between narrowly social types and social development. This connection is manifested in the form of a study of social circumstances, as well as in the form of a person’s internal desire for ordinary, free, not affected by society interaction with other people.
Most often in the literature of that time, this desire was expressed in the form of love - a feeling that does not recognize any social classifications and demarcations. It could have arisen between people who have different views and occupy different positions. At the same time, the desire could be expressed in asserting oneself in the sphere of activity useful to society. Moreover, the individual in some cases tried to strengthen the principle of disinterested, extrasocial, free human relations as normal communication of people with each other.
At the same time, the literature of critical realism, all human attempts to live “humanly”, with pure feelings and selfless aspirations, leads to a conflict with the system existing around him. Everywhere the emphasis is on exclusively positive human qualities: the honesty of the peasant, the decency of the bourgeois, the virtue of the intellectual, the nobility of the nobleman.
The formation of the art of critical realism took place in close connection with the general democratic movements of the peoples of Europe. It should also be noted that the French confrontation against the Bourbon monarchy, and subsequently against the desire of the big bourgeois for various forms of political and economic domination. At the same time there was a struggle of the English people for democracy in the state, against the same bourgeois domination. It should be said about more than a century of resistance of the German nation and its struggle for bourgeois-democratic reforms. In Russia, an anti-feudal movement was formed at the beginning of the 19th century, which included the revolutionary nobility, and subsequently other social strata - workers, peasants, raznoshintsev, the bourgeoisie.