Cold Warriors: Writers who waged the Literary Cold War ~ Duncan White (67 of 2024)

If the Cold War had not been selected as the theme for our July Cochin Book Club meet up, I would never have come across this utterly engrossing book recommendedand read by Abraham Varghese Sir. Even those of us who are familiar with these authors and have read their books  will be amazed at how much more we can learn about those years and the parts they played as authors, spies, propagandists. Their very human frailties   courage and weaknesses are revealed.

 "In this brilliant account of the literary war within the Cold War, novelists and poets become embroiled in a dangerous game of betrayal, espionage, and conspiracy at the heart of the vicious conflict fought between the Soviet Union and the West

During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turned on one another, lovers were split by political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged for a gun, the bookstore for the battlefield.

In Cold Warriors, Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel. Here, too, are the spies, government officials, military officers, publishers, politicians, and critics who helped turn words into weapons at a time when the stakes could not have been higher. Thus Besides the obvious names like le Carre , Orwell, these are some of the other writers who were part of the Cold War, willingly , unwillingly and in some cases unwittingly. No writer could avoid been involved.

Vaclav Havel

Boris Pasternak

Stephen Spender,  Graham Greene

Arthur Koestler

Mary McCarthy

Anna Akhmatova

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Andrei Sinyavsky

John Steinbeck

Ernest Hemingway

Roald Dahl

The narrative is mostly chronological, and White shifts focus, chapter by chapter, to various writers and the political realities that they had to face—and endure. He also shows how governments tried to influence (or silence) their own writers and how they tried to use literature both as a weapon and a shield. “The issue of complicity is at the center of this book,” he writes. “Every writer in these pages had to grapple with it in one form or another—such was the price to be paid for writing at a time when, to paraphrase historian Giles Scott-Smith, to be apolitical was itself a form of politics.” White delivers tales of astonishing courage—e.g., the Czech playwright Václav Havel emerging from persecution and prosecution to become his country’s president, Solzhenitsyn sticking firmly to his determination to tell his stories—and of duplicity and betrayal: The story of Kim Philby, the English traitor, is prominent. Many readers will be surprised by the connections among these writers, which White ably highlights: Orwell and Hemingway, Koestler and McCarthy, and so many others."

Drawing upon years of archival research and the latest declassified intelligence, Cold Warriors is both a gripping saga of prose and politics, and a welcome reminder that--at a moment when ignorance is all too frequently celebrated and reading is seen as increasingly irrelevant--writers and books can change the world."

Duncan White has written a book that manages to be both academically rich while reading like a thriller. In the hands of a lesser writer this effort might not have worked, but the prose deftly conveys the complexity of things like the internally twisted logic of Soviet ideology while keeping the reader wanting to read more. Starting with Orwell, Koestler and Spender's experiences during the Spanish Civil War, the book relies on the intimacy of biography to reveal larger trends in the ideological battle that was the Cold War. This approach works. Instead of simply detailing the myriad ways in which the KGB and CIA leveraged the work of writers (and used them as pawns), White's intimate portraits show these writers to be active, thinking subjects who make choices within the historical contexts in which they lived. The result is a narrative that exposes both sides: the power of institutions and humanity of people that confrent them.

"...

The Cold War may have been a conflict of ideas, but imposing those ideas on the enemy through military means was not an option. As Kenneth Osgood writes in Total Cold War, the existence of nuclear weapons meant that “the Cold War, more than any other conflict in human history, was channeled into nonmilitary modes of combat, particularly ideological and symbolic ones.”Each side therefore used various forms of propaganda and disinformation "as a way to undermine the way its enemy organized its own society. Some of this propaganda was crude and, as such, ineffective. But literature was another matter, for it had a more sophisticated power to persuade. In reading Animal Farm, with its allegory of a revolution gone awry, exploited by corrupt and self-serving leaders interested only in consolidating their own power, Polish citizens might begin to question the received truths of their rulers."

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