Of Pulp fiction and James Bond

Mar 17th 2014, 17:39 by A.C.B.

OLGA SOBOLEV is an academic at the London School of Economics who specialises in various aspects of Russian culture, including comparative studies of anglophone and Soviet literature during the cold war. She is the author of “The Only Hope of the World: George Bernard Shaw and Russia” (2012).

Were there similarities between the literature on both sides of the Iron Curtain?

Definitely. And the phrase itself is an interesting place to start. It is commonly assumed that the term was first used by Winston Churchill in a speech in Fulton, Missouri on March 5th 1946, but in Patrick Wright’s book “Iron Curtain” (2009) he traces the origin to 18th-century theatre. The iron curtain was a safety curtain that came down between the stage and the audience in case of fire. It was the divide between stage and audience and the whole political rhetoric of cold-war literature and its narrative discourse was marked by this profound opposition between self and other, good and evil, democracy and tyranny.

The idea of theatricality was the very essence of cold-war literature and discourse—the manipulation of language and information, the difference between appearance and reality, and the way the information was projected to the audience didn’t necessarily have roots in reality.

How did Soviet novels reflect this?

After the beginning of the cold war, under Stalin, the task of propaganda literature was to introduce into the consciousness of the masses that the USSR’s former allies, the US, Britain and France were now its enemies. This wasn’t easy as a couple of years earlier the allies had fought a common war against Germany, but it was successfully implemented by Nikolai Shpanov, whose novels “Warmongers” (1950) and “Plotters” (1952) suggested that British, French and American villains helped Hitler’s rise to power. These were mammoth volumes, 1,900 pages each, and because everything in the USSR was state-controlled people read them. In the US the notion of Soviet Communism was presented as a spreading disease, an idea that worked to justify increasing the defence budget and third-world interventionism.

But neither idea produced great literature?

It’s odd. The response to the first world war was great literature like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but after the second world war the response was mostly pulp fiction, thrillers and spy novels. The novel is very much based on an individual view of the world, but, because there was such strong propaganda against Communism, there was a group-consciousness response based on stereotypes that fitted into this genre of formula fiction of spy novels and thrillers.

So readers on both sides of the Iron Curtain were consuming these ideological patterns and stereotypes?

Yes, but in slightly different ways. In the Soviet Union it came from the top down, but in the West the propaganda was regulated by economic means. Left-wing writers were removed from the shelves (Howard Fast, Dalton Trumbo and even Frank Baum, author of “The Wizard of Oz”) though never actually censored. They were not in demand because of media propaganda, so what was in demand was the thrillers and spy fiction. Interestingly, apart from Richard Condon’s “The Manchurian Candidate” (1953), which was American, the novels were mostly British. There was Ian Fleming’s Bond, of course, and then, later, John Le Carré, a more literary writer than Fleming. Smiley is human where Bond is not. “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1963) was a huge success because Kim Philby defected in 1963, and 1961 had seen the Maclean and Burgess defections, so Le Carré was on the wave of these huge political incidents. Then there was “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1974), and “Smiley’s People” (1979) when the Anthony Blunt affair was in the headlines.

But the Americans did write cold-war thrillers?

By the 1980s, yes. There was Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park” (1981) and Tom Clancy’s  “The Hunt for Red October” (1984) which sold 6m copies. It was personally endorsed by Ronald Reagan.

What happened in the USSR after Shpanov?

After Stalin’s death there was the so-called thaw. Khrushchev himself authorised the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962). Because of this glimpse of liberalisation, the young generation of dissident writers began to provide a different kind of cold-war response to the earlier pulp-fiction one. These were Vasily Aksionov, Lev Kopelev, Vladimir Voinovich and others. However in 1966, when the thaw froze over, dissident authors Andrei Siniavsky and Yuli Daniel got five and eight years in the labour camps for the Western liberal views of the characters in their books. The promotion of Western liberal values, of course, came not from knowledge of the West but from opposition to the Soviet Union. This idea of embracing Western democracy as opposition to the USSR meant that the reality of life in the West came as a disappointment to many writers. Edward Limonov’s “It’s Me, Eddie” (1979) contains criticism of the West after he realised that things weren’t as black-and-white as they had all thought. Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote “Uriah Heep” about the similarities of workers all over the world and Aksionov published a travelogue, “Non-Stop Round the Clock”, about his time at a US university, concluding that the lives of academics are more or less the same in America and the USSR.

And did the West get more literary and less pulpy too?

In the West the landmark moment was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. A novelistic response to the Cold War started after that, alongside the more simplistic thrillers. Before this there was an idea of apocalyptic nuclear disaster but it was very descriptive—William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies” (1954) and Neville Shute’s “On the Beach” (1957) were both on the border between descriptive and reflective. But the Cuban Missile Crisis marked a huge push in this reflective trend, an attempt to explain the metaphysical basis of mankind. There was Kurt Vonnegut’s  “Cat’s Cradle” (1963) and “Slaughterhouse-Five” (1969), and John Barth’s “Giles Goat Boy” (1966), an elaborate cold-war allegory set in a university campus. The US was in a very different position from the Soviet Union at that time because the Soviet Union never used the bomb and so lacked that sense of guilt and responsibility.

And what about after the cold war? How did it end in terms of literature?

There wasn’t a definitive "end of cold war" response in Soviet literature because the dissident literature, samizdat (self-published) and tamizdat (published over there), proliferated gradually. In the 1980s the Western spy novels all featured good guys from the West and bad guys from the East and they were still very popular. Margaret Thatcher read Frederick Forsyth’s “The Fourth Protocol” (1984) four times. But by this time there was also a huge influx of "real" fiction, serious literature reflecting on the reasons for the cold war and near nuclear disaster, the metaphysical opposition of East and West—post-modernism. This was a natural response to the cold-war situation, given the manipulation of language and the pervading atmosphere of counter-intelligence.