Marietta Shaginian’s Soviet production novel, Hydrocentral (Gidrotsentral’), represents a case of canonical limbo. Without exception, the novel is listed as a Soviet literary classic in reference works and compendia of Russian literature since the time of its publication in 1931 up to the present day, and yet is not considered an official exemplar of Socialist Realism. This dissertation attempts to explain the reasons for the novel’s “in-between” status. Part I of this dissertation offers a structural explanation, demonstrating how the principle of multiplicity undergirds the novel’s architecture at every level. Shaginian uses two types of multiplicity, conventional, as in artistic, not true-to-life (uslovnaia) and real, everyday (bytovaia) multiplicity, combining them in a way that achieves Shaginian’s to achieve unique vision of objective reality (bytie) as unceasing dialectical development. Part II of the dissertation demonstrates how the nature of this objective reality (bytie) has its philosophical underpinnings in German Idealism as espoused by Hegel and Goethe, as well as in the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx. At the phenomenological level, Hydrocentral is a Marxist, materialist philosophical overlay that conceals deeper Idealist – and even Modernist – epistemological undercurrents.