The culture of the West of the twentieth century went through two main stages. The first corresponds to late imperialism, the era of mass conveyor belt production and totalitarian consciousness. This is the first half of the century, the years 1918-1945, the time when, as a result of the scientific and technological revolution, new forms of culture arose – radio and cinema, which supplanted literature in the minds of people. The second stage is the period after 1945, when it becomes obvious that bourgeois society, despite the gloomy forecasts of Marx and Nietzsche, is viable, and a deep internal restructuring is taking place in it: modern systems of radical democracy are emerging, a “consumer society” is taking shape, processes of globalization of the world economy. The information revolution at the end of the twentieth century generally changes the attitude of a person to the printed word, books are increasingly read from display screens, and in the developed countries of the West, the role of literature in public consciousness is steadily declining with the ever-increasing competition from cinema and rock music.

Literary development in the twentieth century is accelerating; the generally recognized unit of division of the literary process is no longer a period of time a century long, as it was before, but a decade. Each decade of the twentieth century gave rise to new trends in literature, loud manifestos were created, new schools were proclaimed. Under this stormy surface, behind the very intensity of searches, it is not always easy to discern the inner meaning and patterns of the change in literary trends.

Realism in the twentieth century is represented by many names of famous writers at one time, but today it is clear that, whatever their lifetime popularity, the realistic novel in the twentieth century existed mainly due to inertia. Realism as an aspiration for a scientific analysis of the world and man proceeds from confidence in the knowability of the world, from an optimistic conviction that a word is an ideal and objective instrument for cognizing reality, that social vices revealed in a word are subject to correction. We have seen that all these postulates of realism have already been called into question by Konrad. The catastrophic reality of the twentieth century finally undermined the worldview basis of realism – historical optimism and faith in progress, therefore, although the forms of realistic narration were preserved, they were perceived by the aesthetically advanced reader as a relic of the past.

Only when realist writers came into contact with other directions, their works became true events.

The forms of realistic storytelling have found application in a new phenomenon of 20th century literature – in mass literature. This is literature, created with a view to the general reader according to clear recipes, unpretentious in the artistic sense, ideologically aimed at maintaining the existing world order. This is a literary product that obeys all the laws of the market, targeted at different categories of consumers. For example, different series of romance novels may target young girls, young women in a career, older women, and so on. The genres of mass literature – detective, sentimental novel, thriller, fantasy, science fiction – quantitatively prevail in the literature of the twentieth century, but due to their frankly commercial nature, entertainment function and a high degree of predictability, “formulaic”, they come to the attention of critics rather as phenomena from the field of sociology of literature. Nobody seriously talks about the artistry of these one-day works, their reading does not require work of the mind and heart, but gives rest after a monotonous working day, becomes a form of relaxation. All genres of conformist mass literature glide on the surface of modern life, the characters in them are created according to long-tested formulas, the emphasized reliability of details, an indispensable moral lesson and much more are borrowed from the realistic novel. However, the very specific weight of mass literature has turned into a factor that has an opposite effect on “high” literature. Serious writers of the twentieth century more and more often used plotting techniques and stylistic clichés of mass literature in their works, of course, completely rethinking them in line with their own tasks. One way or another, mass literature plays an ever-increasing role in the culture of the twentieth century.