Duncan White (1)

A look at the Cold War through the eyes of writers and the books they wrote. American and the Soviets governments spend a lot of money to get there side heard during the Cold War and the varies purges in Russia during its early years. While one thinks of the Cold war as build ups in weapons, defense spending and the space race there was also a race to influence to influence readers about their side of the story. It is interesting to see how books played as role in this battle.. A battle for ideas played out in writing through articles, journals, magazines, books, and literary conferences on both side of the Atlantic.… (meer)

So last year an uncorrected proof of this book arrived from the publisher and I had no idea why. I didn't request it and when I called the number on the return label to find out which source had it sent (I request books from different sites) so I could post the review the guy I got said he was a warehouse and just shipped whatever book to whatever address he's told to. The book I had requested took a couple more months, which worked out in my favor because I got a full printed copy of that one. Anyway, none of my resources listed this up for offer so I shelved it to eventually get to, as the subject did look interesting. Then, back in August, I picked it up. Yes, August. It's a dense text and I kept setting it aside for other books.

White has put together a sweeping case for the pen being mightier than the sword (though we all know that the mutually assured destruction had more than a bit to do with the end of the so-called Cold War...) He admits that there is no real way to measure how effective literature was in affecting the readers of both sides, but as he lays out over his 700 pages the US and Soviet Union both took it seriously.

I was fascinated at all of the various spying some prominent and less prominent but no less influential novelists did. The NKVD really got it claws into quite a few. And the incredible resources applied to combating the two political paradigms is boggling. Long before Putin set his sights on using social media to bring about his desired outcome for an election, the Soviet Union was backing peace conferences in the West - lion and lamb metaphors are implied. And the US intelligence agencies funded their own anti-Soviet conferences and publications. The Soviets were quicker out of the box, though and the West had some catching up to do, slow to realize that they were already infiltrated.

McCarthy's rabid zeal for trapping communist sympathies was at least mostly public. The Soviet writers, and composers (Shostakovitch really comes to mind) and other artists, had it worse than a blacklist. When Isaac Babel was arrested by the NKVD in 1939, they sealed his study after removing everything written from it and then began pulling his books from libraries. "The man had been arrested; the writer was being erased." Nikolai Yezhov, perpetrator of so many horrors before becoming a victim of his own machine said, "We are launching an attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you cop wood, chips fly." The number of flying chips is to this day numbing.

Some writers profiled here - that's rather an understatement; chronicled, illuminated, ... revealed/unveiled, is more accurate - are widely known of by the masses (example: Orwell). Some less so, and some quite a bit less so as they've fallen into the great melting pot of history. And White has captured a lot of history. A lot. This was a dismal time for many, and for the Soviets, tragic, caught up in Purges and more.

The text reads well, and at times like a thriller. As with most histories, an author can only know so much (if really at all) and must necessarily fill in. Skilled historians do so with insight, non-historian hacks like Martin Dugard and his co-"writer" make up stuff. White is skilled.

One small note I flagged I'll shared here. White quoted FDR:

Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know books are weapons.

So... inspiration for Bradbury?… (meer)

Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War by Duncan White is popular history at its best. Historians or the average reader who stayed on top of the political situation for the past fifty years or so may be impatient with White's careful explanations (perestroika and glasnost defined, for example), but for those of us who were not paying attention at the time, this book sweeps us along with clarity. Even experts may find much to enjoy because White gets at his subject through a focus on the writers on both sides of the conflict.
Beginning with the Spanish Civil War, journalists and writers of fiction were not merely observers and reporters but often spies too. We follow Orwell and Koestler, Stephen Spender and Hemingway, Graham Greene and Mary McCarthy with much the same eagerness that a good spy novel generates. We also follow Isaac Babel and Andrei Sinyavsky and Anna Akhmatova in the earlier years, and then branch out to see McCarthy in North Vietnam and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. Literature mattered. These authors used their craft to persuade and were also used by their governments. White closes his book by considering changes in culture that have weakened literature as a weapon in our current cold war but not destroyed the power of writers who live and write truth.
Thanks to Early Reviewers for my galley copy of this good book. I'll probably buy a copy eventually so that I can have it with an index.… (meer)