Distressingly appropriate for the present
5 stars
An analysis of the ways in which academics, members of the intelligensia, and particularly writers came to acquiesce and gave themselves over to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Written in the early 1950s, this English edition is a text first published in 1981 I think.
The early chapters relate the kind of double-think (he doesn't use the word, but draws from other sources) required to believe yourself a free thinker, poet, and explorer of boundaries, and yet live your life, and ultimately constrain your own thinking and action, without the strictures of the totalitarian state.
The middle sections provides four case studies of particular individuals whose lives are briefly outlined before the Second World War (when they were rebellious or at least free thinking) and after, as they found different ways to bend their own personal philosophical and religious thinking to fit the requirements of living under …
An analysis of the ways in which academics, members of the intelligensia, and particularly writers came to acquiesce and gave themselves over to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Written in the early 1950s, this English edition is a text first published in 1981 I think.
The early chapters relate the kind of double-think (he doesn't use the word, but draws from other sources) required to believe yourself a free thinker, poet, and explorer of boundaries, and yet live your life, and ultimately constrain your own thinking and action, without the strictures of the totalitarian state.
The middle sections provides four case studies of particular individuals whose lives are briefly outlined before the Second World War (when they were rebellious or at least free thinking) and after, as they found different ways to bend their own personal philosophical and religious thinking to fit the requirements of living under Stalinism.
Everything here is relevant to the world we live in now, including the explicit discussion in the final chapters on the rejection of the humanity of others that this kind of acquiescence involves, and the exploitative, inhuman, and destructive colonialism that it enables.
Perhaps most sharply defined is the author's analysis of how important the Soviet apparatus found it to control and manipulate literature and the humanities, not just the process of industrial production, because it is from literature, theatre, film, and radio, that people are given the resources to imagine and empathise.