This will maybe only be interesting to people that like literature, but I’ll try to make it accessible to everyone because I found it really fascinating.
The old Russian teacher was telling me her life story the other day, which she does every time she sees me. This time she decided to tell me about how she studied English literature when she was in college 30 years ago, under the soviets. I thought that was super interesting so I asked her what authors she studied. She proceeded to give me the strangest list of books and authors I’ve ever heard. I studied English Lit in college – I have a BA in it. And I had not heard of ¾ of these books. The Farsyte Saga, The Thorn Birds, and An American Tragedy, among many others. She was shocked to hear that I hadn’t read them because she insisted that they had told the students that these were books that exemplified American literature. But there was no Steinbeck, no Hemmingway, no Faulkner.
I looked up each of the books she mentioned and read up on them. Turns out, under the soviets, when someone studied English lit, it appears that they were only allowed to study books that, in my opinion and the opinion of a lot of literary critics, are nice stories told with authorial skill, of course, but none of them have any underlying meaning as far as dynamic characters go. They are mostly tragedies in which someone who loves someone that they are not supposed to love ends up dead. Doamna Tamara, the old Russian teacher, loved them all and insisted that they are beautiful stories, which I’m sure they are.
I think two things were going on – firstly that the themes of the books were not allowed to have anything deviating from this central idea of a tragic story that maybe teaches you to follow the rules but beyond that doesn’t really teach anything.
Secondly, these books were all at least 100 years old when she was studying them. Nothing from the 20th century was studied, which, of course, would partially be due to the fact that the Soviets were pretty anti-America during most of the 20th century and thus probably would not have been translating a lot of our literature for their citizens to read. But it also is because so many of the works of the 20th century – 1984, Brave New World, Ginsberg, Faulkner, Joyce – they all represent either blatant rejection of the status quo, (or they show a dismal dystopian future as a result of sticking with this totalitarian status quo,) or they are written in the modernist and post-modernist styles that played with meaninglessness and stream of consciousness. If I were a soviet cultural censor and I was deciding what the people should read, I probably wouldn’t have let them read anything written in stream of consciousness style because it would be the first step in a terrible self-awareness that could compromise their whole system. First you acknowledge that there are different ways to tell a story, which means that you have to accept that there are different points of view, which leads to thinking of people as individuals, and then it’s all over. In addition to this, stream of consciousness as a style is meant to exemplify the process of the working brain observing and working through ideas. Why would you let your citizens think about the way their brains work when you are trying to make them think nto individually but as a single unit? Ouch.
This is largely speculation but I think it’s pretty accurate. Now I just need to get some Romanian or Russian translations of Hemmingway and get them to Doamna Tamara because if she thinks the Gone With The Wind is the epitome of American Literature then she is seriously under estimating American English Literature.
Noapte Buna!
