The British journalist Daniel Kalder’s new
book The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote,
and Other Catastrophes of Literacy, deals with something rather
odd: the writings of despots and mass murderers.
While living in Moscow, he set himself the
task of reviewing an extensive selection of works penned by the
dictators of the 20th and early 21st centuries. (The British
title of the book is Dictator Literature.)
Kalder argues that Vladimir Lenin should be
viewed as the father of this literary genre. Even before he had
studied Marx, the young Lenin had read Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s
1863 novel What is to be Done?
It inspired Lenin to
dedicate himself fully to revolution. Deeply
impressed, Lenin gave the same title to one of his own books, of
which there were many. His collected works runs to 55 volumes.
While exiled by the tsarist government in
Siberia, Lenin produced what Kalder calls “the first major book
by the father of 20th-century dictator literature.” Over its 500
pages, The Development of Capitalism in Russia argued that the
country was now industrialised rather than agricultural and so
ready for rule by the urban proletariat.
Joseph Stalin, his successor as Soviet
leader, as a trained seminarian collected and commented on and
refocused Lenin’s writings. And, of course, he too wrote dozens
of books of his own – turgid, boring nonsense.
Stalin was so
impressed by Alexander Kazbegi’s novel The Patricide, written
in 1882, that he renamed himself “Koba” after its central
character, and used the pseudonym throughout his early career.
To bolster his claim to be a theorist; his
works were published. His own
ambitious history of the Bolshevik revolution, known as the
Short Course, was not only printed in the tens of millions of
copies, but also became an object of study by the Soviet masses.
Yet, Kalder tells us, as a young man even
Stalin penned some not insignificant poetry in his native
Georgian.
Mao Zedong first encountered Marxism while
working in a library, “the ideal location for a cash-strapped
nascent megalomaniac in need of easy access to inspirational bad
ideas,” writes Kalder. He devoured the texts that would provide
his ideological cover for the cruel regime he later imposed on
China.
His infamous “Little Red Book,” Quotations of
Chairman Mao Zedong, was waved by millions of addled
revolutionaries around the world during the years of the
Cultural Revolution.
It was read out in factories, the way sacred
texts are in monasteries. It was also credited with the ability
to improve table-tennis skills and cure cancer.
These Communists had intellectual pretentions
and their “works” became an important part of the promotion of
their cults.
The Italian fascist Benito Mussolini immersed
himself in the reading of classic texts. He was later a
professional journalist, and highly successful newspaper editor,
so it’s no surprise Il Duce went on to write poems and plays,
including a historical drama
based on Napoleon’s last days.
He published a biography of Jan Hus, the
early proto-Protestant reformer, and even wrote a romance novel,
The Cardinal’s Mistress.
Fellow fascist General Francisco Franco of
Spain wrote the screenplay-novel
Raza at the end of 1940 and start of 1941. The Caudillo’s
narrative is set during the just-concluded Spanish Civil War.
As for the most notorious piece of “dictator
literature,” that prize must go, hands down, to Adolf Hitler’s
Mein Kampf. If ever we needed proof, Kalder contends, that in
some cases “books and reading can cause immense harm,” this one
is it.
More recently, Libya’s Colonel Moammar Gaddafi’s
Green Book achieved a certain notoriety, while Saddam
Hussein, even when busy slaughtering Iraqis, found time to
publish the historical romance Zabiba and the King, after
falling in love with the twenty-four-year-old daughter of one
of his advisers.
More books emerged: He
finished Get Out You Damned One!, a direct rebuke to the
invading American forces, right before the Battle of Baghdad
in 2003.
Kalder mocks those Western intellectuals
whose anti-Western dogmas made them susceptible to any old
nonsense. Jean-Paul Sartre sold Maoist newspapers in Paris, and
the actions of the vicious Red Guards were lauded on the left as
models of revolution. Michel Foucault managed to admire both Mao
and Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran.
Kalder sums up by noting that most of these
works are full of “tedium,
megalomania, banality, mendacity, vanity and inadvertent
self-revelations.” But, he observes, each dictator “has what
every author can only dream of: a captive audience.”
No comments:
Post a Comment