A few years ago I was at a wedding in Delaware when the father of the bride, on learning that I lived in Austin, asked whether Texans still wore spurs and had guns holstered at their hips. I assumed he was joking: this successful businessman had to know that Texas is home to NASA, Dell computers and the oil-metropolis of Houston. But he was sincere. I assured him that in twenty-first-century Texas, nobody wear spurs to the mall. Perhaps, however, I got off lightly. As Lawrence Wright observes in God Save Texas: A journey into the future of America, “One can’t be from Texas and fail to have encountered the liberal loathing for Texanness, even among people who have never visited the place”. This is true also of some residents. I know people who arrived in Austin years ago, but have never ventured outside the city limits, through fear of what lies beyond: here be deplorables.
Tradition and the Individual Tyrant
The dictators of the 20th century were firm believers in the
power of the written word. Lenin had read the theories of Marx and the Russian
radical tradition but it was Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel What is to be Done? that caused him to abandon chess and other
"distractions" to dedicate himself full time to revolution. Stalin was
so impressed by Alexander Kazbegi's novel The
Patricide that he renamed himself "Koba" after its central
character, and used the pseudonym throughout his early career.
Transformed by these encounters, and obsessed by questions
of ideological purity, Lenin, Stalin et al. naturally demanded control over the
printing presses once in power. And they also anticipated that their own deep thoughts,
captured in print, would mould the minds of their subjects.
Massive print runs and critical acclaim for dictator books were
de rigeur regardless of ideology or
the particulars of each dictator's personality cult. Mein Kampf is the most notorious and Quotations from Chairman Mao was the most widely distributed, but
these works--sacred texts for regimes run by man-gods--represent the tip of a
very deep literary iceberg. From the obscure Stalinist Albanian despot Enver
Hoxha to the theocratic Ayatollah Khomeini, the tyrants of the 20th century
offered up their bibliographies as evidence of their genius.
Yet most (if not all) dictators realized that their subjects
could not live by their word alone. When
it came to affective forms of writing, others would have to write the novels,
screenplays and poems that stir the emotions. Stalin put it best: writers were "engineers
of the human soul," reworking the inner lives of the masses for the new
era. Let the dictator be the super genius of theory, but leave the
inspirational tear-jerkers about tractors and concrete-pouring to the
professionals.
But while many dictators did restrict themselves to grandiose
works of "theory" or collections of speeches, some felt compelled to
write novels, poetry and plays themselves.
Largely forgotten today, these writings represent a strange literary
detritus of the 20th century that, on occasion, provide insight into the inner
lives of their (would be) all-powerful authors.
Death Sentences
Daniel Kalder spent almost a decade reading the books of history's
worst tyrants so that you wouldn't have to. Here he selects some of his
favorite sentences written by dictators.
Colonel Gaddafi: "Freedom
of expression is the right of every natural person, even if a person chooses to
express his or her insanity."
Many dictators proclaimed their support for freedom of
expression. Of course, they were only interested in their own freedom; anyone
who deviated from the norms they established would be punished (this is not an
attitude restricted to dictators, needless to say). Gaddafi's articulation of
the principle, from his infamous Green
Book, is masterful--especially when
read as a statement of personal intent.
Mao Zedong: "It [materialist dialectics] holds
that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the
basis of change, and that external causes become operative through internal
causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no
temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different
basis."
This gobbledygook
comes from Chairman Mao's excrementally poor work of "philosophy" On Contradiction. It was reprinted in Quotations from Chairman Mao, the most
widely circulated book in history after The Bible. The mania surrounding Mao's quotations was
such that Chinese newspapers attributed miracles to them. Reciting Mao could
even heal the blind, according to state propaganda. I read On Contradiction while suffering from a fever. It made me feel
worse.
Saddam Hussein: "Even
an animal respects a man's desire, if it wants to copulate with him."
An Interview with Portugal's Expresso Newspaper
Was there anything in Salazar’s writings that
impressed/surprised you?
I
wouldn't say that anything "impressed" me, beyond that one of his
books, Doctrine and Action, was
published in the UK by Faber in 1939, the same house that published my first
two books 67 and 69 years later respectively--so he and I share something in
common.
In
the 1930s TS Eliot, the great Anglo-American poet was on Faber's board of
directors; he was an arch conservative and was interested in Salazar's
Portugal. Meanwhile, books by dictators were fashionable in the late '30s:
Mussolini's memoir, Hitler's Mein Kampf,
and collections of Stalin's writings were published in mass market editions in
the US & UK and beyond. Faber were clearly trying to grab a piece of the
action with a volume of Salazar's political thought. It can't have sold very
well, however, because sequels were not forthcoming.
Much
of what Salazar wrote passed through me leaving no trace. It was like walking
through mist. I can easily remember some of the worst bits of Stalin, Hitler,
Lenin, Mao... even Franco. Were you to hand me an edition of the writings of
any one of those dictators right now I could quickly find you something
outrageous, shocking or radically tedious. But Salazar's books lacked the
extremism or outright terribleness of his contemporaries' efforts. They were
quiet and restrained. They are forgettable.
I
was pleasantly surprised by the brevity of his anthology of aphorisms, Salazar, Prime Minister of Portugal Says.
I did not suffer much in reading it. The typeface was inoffensive. It was much less tedious than
"Quotations of Chairman Mao " which also collects the sayings of a
dictator, and which sold many more copies.
How does Salazar rank in the dictator’s dullness/boredom world
ranking?
Podcast: The Killer's Canon
There are a lot of very good, very long books out there: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote, the Neapolitan Novels. And then there are the very long books you probably won’t ever want to read, like Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs, Saddam Hussein’s hackneyed romance novels, or the Kim family’s film theory. This show is about that kind of very long book, and the man who decided to read all of them: Daniel Kalder, who joins us on the show to talk about his journey through The Infernal Library and what these books tell us about the dictatorial soul, assuming there is one.
Check out the podcast with The American Scholar.
Check out the podcast with The American Scholar.
10 Things I Learned From Reading Terrible Books Written by Dictators
The 20th century’s most infamous dictators were also authors, often prolific ones, complementing the atrocities they visited on humanity with crimes against literature. For his new book, The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy, Daniel Kalder read the significant works from this benighted subgenre, from the vast theoretical corpus of Lenin, through Stalin’s The Foundations of Leninism, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Mussolini’s My Life, and Mao’s Little Red Book. Here's what he found.
From Mussolini to Mao, many are the dictators who have inflicted atrocious books upon their subjects. Yet though these tomes are revered as sacred texts while their authors are alive, they vanish almost as soon as their regimes fall. Fascinated by this phenomenon, I set out to read my way through the dictatorial canon. I wanted to know what was really inside these diabolical books, and to understand what the poetry, political theory and (yes) romance novels of the world's worst tyrants could tell us about their authors and the relationship between the word and the world. The fruit of my suffering is called The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy. And here, for your reading pleasure, are just a few of the things I uncovered on my odyssey through the long dark night of the dictatorial soul.
1. Hitler knew he wasn't any good as a writer. Although generally not known for his modesty, and despite the fact that he forced two volumes of Mein Kampf on the German people (including a Braille edition and a luxury "wedding edition" for newlyweds), the Fuhrer seems to have suffered self-doubt regarding the quality of his magnum opus. Years after Mein Kampf was published he confessed to his lawyer that he would not have written the book had he known he would become chancellor. He also admitted, with startling frankness: "Ich bin kein Schriftsteller"-- "I am not a writer."
Daniel Kalder: The Nervous Breakdown Self-Interview
So, I hear you’ve written another book.
That’s right. It’s called The Infernal Library and it’s a study of dictator literature, that is to say books written by dictators, that is to say the worst books in the history of the world. I trace the development of the dictatorial tradition over the course of a century, starting with Lenin, then exploring the prose of Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, et al before arriving in the modern era where I analyze the texts of Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and assorted post-Soviet dictators (among others). It’s a bit like Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, only the books are terrible and many were written by mass murderers. It can also be read as an alternative cultural history of the 20th century, with implications for our own troubled times.
How did you manage to read so many execrable books without becoming a gibbering wreck?
Ask the Expert: Anti-Tourism
Daniel Kalder is
the author of two of my favorite books of the 21st Century: Lost
Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist and Strange
Telescopes: Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia. His
newest book, The
Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of
Literacy, will be released on March 6, 2018.
In our Q&A, Daniel discusses some of his experiences as
an anti-tourist, i.e. one whose duty is to “open up new zones of
experience. In our over-explored world these must of necessity be wastelands,
black holes, and grim urban blackspots: all the places which, ordinarily,
people choose to avoid.“
—MC
Q1: Which foreign land that you've visited so far was the most
impenetrable in your travels -- the one that had the most barriers to entry
e.g. physical distance, bureaucracy, cost, etc. ?
Lost Territories
I Soul
It is well-known that when Lenin died in 1924 his brain was extracted
from his skull and subsequently dissected by Soviet scientists who sought to
reveal the
source of his genius. Less well-known is that while his embalmers were excavating the rest of
his innards they found his soul dispersed throughout his torso. This is a
photograph of Lenin's soul.
On Russian Balconies
On a recent visit to Istanbul I stayed in an apartment looking out on the Bosphorus. Every morning I’d get up and see the sun sparkling on the surface of the water as birds circled languidly overhead. At night it was even better, as the thumping techno from the pleasure boats and the call of the Muezzin intermingled. It was very different from my usual mode of accommodation when I travel: cheap hotels, dirt, and the lingering possibility of sudden, violent death.
In many ways it was the culmination of a quest that began years ago in my hometown of Dunfermline in Scotland. Over there, you don’t see too many balconies. It’s too windy and wet. Yet I remember one house that had a huge balcony on the second floor. I used to walk past, wishing I lived there. I didn’t care that it was useless, that if I sat up there the wind would probably pick me up and drop me in the North Sea. I only saw the ideal of open living, close to the sky.
Kremlin Kids Gone Wild!
Life is not easy for the offspring of dictators. Look at Gaddafi’s kids, who are either dead, in prison or in exile. Bashar al-Assad would have been an ophthalmologist if his elder brother hadn’t died. But now he has to kill thousands or be killed himself. Even Kim Jong-un, allegedly the supreme overlord of 24 million North Koreans looks vaguely terrified by the awesome responsibility of carrying on the family tradition of EVIL.
It’s not always easier for children who don’t get near actual power. Consider the case of Russia in the 20th century. For seventy years the country was ruled by authoritarian strongmen; all of them bar Lenin had children, and many of those “Kremlin kids” led deeply unhappy lives.
Stalin’s eldest son Yakov was a
Movie Nights with Stalin
Stalin, like all murderous totalitarian tyrants, was big on secrecy. It’s therefore probably a safe bet to assume that he would not have been best pleased had he learned that one day his personal papers would be searchable from anywhere in the world on a machine called a “computer,” and that a bearded Scotsman working out of a garden shed in Texas would seize the opportunity to take a look at his old school report cards. But he’s dead, and I did, so that’s that.
How did this peculiar state of affairs come about? Well, a decade or so back, the Russian state declassified the vast bulk of Stalin’s papers. Yale University Press then used a lot of these documents in its fascinating Annals of Communism series. One thing led to another until one day somebody suggested “Hey, why not digitize all of Stalin’s papers and make the archive searchable?” Several years and half a million scanned documents later and lo! The Stalin Digital Archive was ready for business.
Review: Limonov by Emmanuel Carrere
In 1974, poet and dandy Edward Limonov left the Soviet Union to live in the United States. The bisexual, bespectacled son of a secret policeman was fond of the Ramones, fascinated by revolutionary violence, and, in his own words, a Russian punk — the antithesis of the bearded sage Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went into exile at the same time.
This punk wrote some scandalous memoirs and became a literary celebrity in France. Then Limonov’s life changed direction radically: After fighting for the Serb side in Bosnia in the early 1990s, he returned to Russia, where he formed the neofascist National Bolshevik party, acting as a creepy, silver-haired Pied Piper figure to gangs of alienated youths. Led by Limonov, these “Natsbols” marched through Russian cities chanting “Stalin, Beria, Gulag!” while waving a flag identical to that of the Nazis — only the swastika had been swapped for a black hammer and sickle.
Review: The Romanov Sisters
The extent to which readers will enjoy Helen Rappaport’s The Romanov Sisters will most likely depend on one or two important factors.
First, it will help if you haven’t spent much time reading about the Russian Revolution, or if you have, that you enjoy hearing familiar details retold. After all, the tale of the last imperial family of Russia and their murder in Yekaterinburg in 1918 has not exactly suffered from a lack of exposure. The Russian Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, and of course the “mad monk” Grigory Rasputin have been the subjects of countless books and numerous films.
First, it will help if you haven’t spent much time reading about the Russian Revolution, or if you have, that you enjoy hearing familiar details retold. After all, the tale of the last imperial family of Russia and their murder in Yekaterinburg in 1918 has not exactly suffered from a lack of exposure. The Russian Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, and of course the “mad monk” Grigory Rasputin have been the subjects of countless books and numerous films.
Review: The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book
Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, once noted a “remarkable feature” common to Soviet leaders: “their boundless, almost superstitious respect for poetry.”
Indeed, as Peter Finn, a former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post, and his co-author Petra Couvée point out in their new book The Zhivago Affair, in the Soviet Union a bad review could have lethal consequences. Some 1,500 writers were killed during the Stalin era.
Review: Foligatto by Nicolas de Crécy and Alexios Tjoyas
In fact, it’s quite possible that there’s only one: Foligatto, by writer Alexios Tjoyas and artist Nicolas de Crécy, which was recently published by Humanoids. As you might expect, Foligatto is an extremely unusual work. In fact, it’s so unusual that it
Dictator Lit: The Poetry of Ayatollah Khomeini
Perhaps the
most famous literary critic of the 20th century, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989) was renowned for his vehement loathing of the work of Salman
Rushdie. Indeed, the Ayatollah (or Imam, as he liked to be known) loathed the Satanic Verses so much that he
called for Rushdie’s execution. Now Rushdie may be
a bit smug, but I think we
can all agree that that was going a bit far. And as a British subject and lapsed Sunni Muslim,
Rushdie was not under the Iranian Shiite “Supreme Leader’s” jurisdiction by any
stretch of the imagination. Nor had the Ayatollah actually read the Satanic Verses. No surprise there of course- ignorance of the offending material is a sine qua non for those who would burn
books and kill their authors.
Incidents in the Night by David B.
Last year Uncivilized Books expanded our knowledge of the enigmatic oeuvre of French cartoonist David B. by releasingIncidents in the Night. Although it is the most recent of David B.’s books to be issued in English, Incidents was initially published as three volumes between 1999 and 2002 and is thus older than everything American readers have seen so far except Epileptic, which he worked on more or less simultaneously. Like that more famous book, and indeed all of David B.’s work,Incidents is rich, complex, funny, dark—and very difficult to describe.
The opening at least is straightforward. David B.’s cartoon alter-ego dreams he is in a bookshop looking at paperbacks. He stumbles upon two books, part of a series entitled Incidents in the Night, a collection of fantastic stories based on news snippets of the 19th and 20th centuries. But the set is incomplete: he picks up volumes two and three and then finds the 112th issue. Upon waking, David B. starts scouring the bookshops of Paris for copies, eventually landing in the bookshop of Mr. Lhôm, which he says functions “like an archaeological dig.”
Thus dream gives way to “reality,” but only briefly, as Mr. Lhôm’s bookshop is a fantastical place. One of David B.’s strategies as a cartoonist is to take a verbal image and illustrate it literally, rendering the commonplace weird, funny, mysterious, or jarringly alien.
The Curious Russian Afterlife of Steven Seagal
A Kalder klassik, to coincide with Seagal's announcement he plans to run for governor of Arizona
Long, long ago – for about 15 minutes – Steven Seagal was a big deal in Hollywood. His movie “Under Siege” made a lot of money. But that was pretty much it. Next came a string of big-budget flops followed by a lengthy and ongoing twilight spent in straight-to-video purgatory.
As for me, I don’t think I’ve ever made it all the way through a Seagal film. His stiff, tubby frame, extreme humorlessness and mystic posturing make it impossible for me to suspend disbelief. Here in the US he serves as a punch line, part of the flotsam and jetsam of trash culture. Steven Seagal – that’s the washed up ‘90s action movie guy who peddles an aftershave lotion named “Scent of Action,” right?
For Instant Christmas Spirit, Blow Here
A Seasonal Kalder Klassik:
Four years ago, I spent Christmas in Texas for the first time. Shortly beforehand I’d been driving around in the desert out West, and I have vivid memories of the return journey which, late at night, brought me through Johnson City, the birthplace of Lyndon B. Johnson.
I stopped the car to walk around and was immediately struck by the strangeness of thousands of lights representing icicles, snow, and snowmen in a place where it never snows.
In fact, I thought, it probably wasn’t snowing much in Bethlehem when Christ was born either. I could be wrong - the climate has changed a few times over the last 2,000 years, so maybe it was chillier in the Holy Land back then. Nevertheless, given the Eastern origins of Christianity, luminous representations of cacti and fig trees might be more appropriate this time of year.
Since it was my first American Christmas I
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