One of the pivotal themes of the Soviet translation school in the 1930-1960s was the ‘false’ principals of formalism and literalism and the promotion of realistic translation. The article shows that this discussion was retrospectively “transposed” onto the 19th-century literary translation and entailed the ideologization of the translation history. As a result, the 19th-century translation practices were conceptualized as a confrontation of aesthetic (reactionist) and democratic (revolutionary) translation “camps” that were guided respectively by “false” and “correct” translation principles. Soviet studies on the history of Russian literary translations recognize this approach as the only true one, and relate the achievements of the Russian translation of this mid-19th century to the work of translators of the “revolutionary democratic camp” and the “democratic” translation criticism. Within the framework of this ideologically biased approach much effort was also put into finding the 19th century predecessors of realistic translation, a counterpart of socialist realism. According to this interpretation various 19th century translators were declared as the precursors of the Soviet “realistic translation”. This approach resulted in creating a model of the development of translation that follows the “classicism – romanticism – realism” pattern typically used in the Soviet literary criticism. Researchers offered various interpretations of the notions of “romantic” and “realistic” translation, and this opposition found meaning in the contrast between “false” and “correct” principles employed by translators from the democratic and aesthetic ideologies. It is shown in the article that this trend was consistent with the ideological paradigm of socialist literary theory and the interpretation of the history of art in general.