Abstract
Although still understudied in scholarship, the global spread of left-wing writing during the Cold War is central to any understanding of the period’s literature. Building on Michael Denning’s notion of a ‘novelists’ international’, this chapter examines the remarkable output of ‘committed’ literature worldwide. While the work could vary significantly between national and regional contexts, authors revealed a set of common concerns, including capitalist exploitation, the shortcomings of social democracy, the betrayal of revolutionary principles and the continuation of racial, ethnic and sexual inequality in countries struggling under ‘actually existing socialism’. Taking issue with Western propagandists’ dismissal of left-wing literature, the chapter argues that its authors offered some of the most dynamic and insightful analyses of Cold War history.
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Notes
- 1.
Smith, ‘Towards a Global History of Communism’, in Smith, ed., The History of Communism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 2; Kowalski, European Communism 1848–1991 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 7.
- 2.
Quoted in E. San Juan, Jr., From the Masses, to the Masses: Third World Literature and Revolution (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1994), pp. 105, 13, 16.
- 3.
Dépestre, ‘Black Nationalism and Imperialism’, Ikon, 6 (1968), p. 30.
- 4.
Mark Sandle, Communism (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006), p. 38.
- 5.
Although the Third International, or Comintern, helped to create around 80 communist parties between 1919 and 1943, it had little impact on governmental systems and, apart from the Bolshevik takeover of Mongolia, produced only limited or failed uprisings in Germany, Slovakia, Italy, Austria and Hungary.
- 6.
The USSR never progressed beyond this stage. In the words of the 1986 Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the nation was still moving towards ‘a society in which public self-government will be established’ (quoted in Stephen White, Communism and Its Collapse (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 3).
- 7.
See Leslie Holmes, Communism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 14.
- 8.
In the closed circle of Western propaganda, social democratic principles were equated with communism which in turn was equated with Stalinism ‘and so were to be rejected and attacked as oppressive ideologies which enslaved people’ (Sandle, Communism, p. 5).
- 9.
Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996), p. 446.
- 10.
Caute, Politics and the Novel during the Cold War (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2010), p. 354.
- 11.
Wald, ‘Revising the Barricades: Scholarship about the U.S. Cultural Left in the Post-Cold War Era’, in Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker, eds, Socialist Cultures East and West: A Post-Cold War Reassessment (Westport and London: Praeger, 2002), pp. 113, 115.
- 12.
Booker, ‘Writing for the Wretched of the Earth: Frantz Fanon and the Radical African Novel’, in Dubravka Juraga and Booker, eds, Rereading Global Socialist Cultures After the Cold War: The Reassessment of a Tradition (Westport and London: Praeger, 2002), p. 148.
- 13.
Andrei Zhdanov quoted in Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. by Catherine Porter (1987; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 61, 56; David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2009), p. 141.
- 14.
For an example of each of these in turn, see Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Golden Miles (1948), Judah Waten’s Shares in Murder (1957), Ivan Efremov’s Tumannost’ Andromedy (Andromeda, 1957), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Ding Ling’s Yige xiaohongjun de gushi (The Story of a Little Red Soldier, 1956), Anna Seghers’s Überfahrt (Crossing, 1971), Ousmane Sembène’s Le dernier de L’Empire (The Last of the Empire, 1981), Yánnis Rítsos’s Petrinos hronos (Petrified Time, 1974), Bertolt Brecht’s Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1948) and Mona Brand’s Enough Blue Sky (1995).
- 15.
Croft, ‘Authors Take Sides: Writers and the Communist Party 1920–56’, in Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan, eds, Opening the Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of British Communism (London and Boulder: Pluto Press, 1995), p. 83.
- 16.
Further indicating their importance in the period, a number of left-wing writers assumed roles in political life, as illustrated by Marcelino dos Santos (Mozambique), Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), António Agostinho Neto (Angola), Amílcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau), Mao Dun (China), Johannes Becher (East Germany), Han Sŏrya (North Korea), Ferdinand Oyono (Cameroon) and Alberto Moravia (Italy).
- 17.
Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London and New York: Verso, 2004), p. 53.
- 18.
Dalton, ‘On Headaches’, quoted in San Juan, From the Masses, p. 11; Hikmet, ‘The Strangest Creature on Earth’, in Hikmet, Poems of Nazim Hikmet, trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk Blasing (New York: Persea Books, 1994), p. 122.
- 19.
See Denning, Culture, pp. 65–9.
- 20.
San Juan, From the Masses, p. 20.
- 21.
For example, see Gabre-Medhin’s Yekermo Sew (The Seasoned, 1966), Oyono’s Une vie de boy (Houseboy, 1956), Abrahams’s Mine Boy (1946), Pepetela’s Mayombe (1980) and Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Elsewhere, left-wing anti-imperialism appeared in Simin Daneshvar’s Suwasun (A Persian Requiem, 1969), Ghassan Kanafani’s A’id Ila Hayfa (Return to Haifa, 1970), Juan Cabreros Laya’s His Native Soil (1941) and Mahidhara Ramamohanarao’s Kollayi Gattitenemi (Swarajyam, 1965).
- 22.
As poets expressed it, ‘Capitalism will pass away […] / Just as sure as spring follows winter’ and ‘a new order, a new world, a new age’ will be established in which ‘the finite system of our oppressor / will be dust’ (Ernesto Cardenal, Cosmic Canticle, trans. by John Lyons (1989, Willimantic: Curbstone Press, 1993), p. 71; Bareq-Shafi‘i quoted in Wali Ahmadi, ‘Endangered Nation: The Literature of Soviet-Occupied Afghanistan’, in Andrew Hammond, ed., Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), p. 62; Fawaz Turki quoted in San Juan, From the Masses, p. 65).
- 23.
Luxemburg, ‘Our Program and the Political Situation’, in Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), p. 368; quoted in Sandra Dijkstra, Flora Tristan: Feminism in the Age of George Sand, new edn (1984; London and New York: Verso, 2019), p. 163.
- 24.
Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There (London: Sinclair Browne, 1982), p. 24.
- 25.
Pablo Neruda, ‘They Receive Instructions against Chile’, in Carolyn Forché, ed., Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1993), p. 578.
- 26.
Marcia Phillips McGowan, ‘The Poetry of Claribel Alegría: A Testament of Hope’, Latin American Literary Review, 32: 64 (2004), p. 6.
- 27.
Alegría, ‘Personal Creed’, in Alegría, Luisa in Realityland, trans. by Darwin J. Flakoll (Willimantic: Curbstone Press, 1987), p. 135; Alegría, ‘Malinche’, in ibid., p. 76; Alegría, ‘Operation Herod’, in ibid., p. 35.
- 28.
Alegría, ‘From the Bridge’, in ibid., pp. 139–40.
- 29.
Alegría, ‘Seeds of Liberty’, in ibid., p. 119; Alegría, ‘Operation Herod’, in ibid., p. 35; Alegría, ‘Personal Creed’, in ibid., p. 135.
- 30.
Quoted in Marjorie Agosín, ‘Foreword’ to Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Marcia Phillips McGowan, eds, Claribel Alegría and Central American Literature: Critical Essays (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1994), p. xi.
- 31.
Neruda, ‘Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, in Caracas’, in Forché, ed., Against Forgetting, p. 575; Castillo, ‘Apolitical Intellectuals’, in ibid., p. 607. As a further statement on committed literature, Ding Ling proclaimed that ‘[h]appiness is to take up the struggle in the midst of the raging storm and not to pluck the lute in the moonlight’ (Ding, ‘Thoughts on March 8 (Women’s Day)’, reprinted in Gregor Benton and Alan Hunter, eds, Wild Lily, Prairie Fire: Yan’an to Tian’anmen, 1942–1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 81).
- 32.
Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), p. 10.
- 33.
Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 4.
- 34.
Quoted in Ronald Kowalski, European Communism 1848–1991 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 187.
- 35.
Quoted in Sandle, Communism, p. 120.
- 36.
Ngũgĩ and Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ, I Will Marry When I Want, trans. by Ngũgĩ and Ngũgĩ (1980; London: Heinemann, 1982), p. 13.
- 37.
Ibid., pp. 33, 37.
- 38.
Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 61, 354.
- 39.
Its accessibility to ordinary people is likely to have encouraged the KANU government to imprison its author, using an old British law against the unlicensed gathering of more than five people to prohibit the play after only nine performances and later to raze the Kamĩrĩĩthũ centre to the ground.
- 40.
Helen Nabasuta Mugambi, ‘Speaking in Song: Power, Subversion and the Postcolonial Text’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 32: 3–4 (2005), p. 423; Oliver Lovesey, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000), p. 94.
- 41.
Ngũgĩ and Ngũgĩ, I Will Marry, p. 115 (italics in original).
- 42.
La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird, new edn (1979; Oxford: Heinemann, 1987), p. 47; Iyayi, Violence, new edn (1979; Harlow: Longman, 1987), p. 185.
- 43.
Quoted in Callinicos, Revenge of History, p. 14.
- 44.
Sassoon, One Hundred Years, p. 112.
- 45.
See ibid., p. 767.
- 46.
Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, ed. and trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 55.
- 47.
John T. Connor, ‘Jack Lindsay, Socialist Humanism and the Communist Historical Novel’, The Review of English Studies, 66: 274 (2015), p. 343.
- 48.
Lindsay, The Moment of Choice (London: The Bodley Head, 1955), p. 336; Lindsay, Betrayed Spring (London: The Bodley Head, 1953), p. 309.
- 49.
Lindsay, Rising Tide (London: The Bodley Head, 1953), p. 178.
- 50.
Lindsay, After the ’Thirties: The Novel in Britain, and Its Future (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956), p. 46.
- 51.
For some literary responses to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, see Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968), Nanni Balestrini’s Vogliamo tutto (We Want Everything, 1971), E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), John Berger’s G. (1972), Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Nada (1972) and Heinrich Böll’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, 1974).
- 52.
Wald, ‘Marxist Literary Resistance to the Cold War’, Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, 20 (1995), p. 488.
- 53.
Noonuccal, ‘No More Boomerang’, in Noonuccal [Kath Walker], The Dawn Is at Hand: Selected Poems, new edn (1991; London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1992), pp. 54, 55, 54.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 56.
Noonuccal, ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’, in Noonuccal [Kath Walker], Dawn Is at Hand, p. 60.
- 57.
Quoted in Mark Harrison, ‘Communism and Economic Modernization’, in Smith, ed., History of Communism, p. 388.
- 58.
Anna Belogurova, ‘Communism in South East Asia’, in Smith, ed., History of Communism, p. 236.
- 59.
Aïtmatov, Jamilia, trans. by James Riordan (1957; London: Telegram, 2007), p. 9.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 58.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 68.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 62.
- 63.
Ibid., pp. 74, 72.
- 64.
Ibid., pp. 95, 93.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 95.
- 66.
Quoted in Donna Harsch, ‘Communism and Women’, in Smith, ed., History of Communism, p. 490.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 490.
- 68.
Wang, ‘“State Feminism”? Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist China’, Feminist Studies, 31: 3 (2005), p. 520.
- 69.
Wang, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 151.
- 70.
See Rosemary A. Roberts, ‘Images of Women in the Fiction of Zhang Jie and Zhang Xinxin’, The China Quarterly, 120 (1989), p. 811.
- 71.
‘In this respect Confucius was truly great’, one character thinks: ‘His feudal precepts still held sway in China’ (Zhang, Leaden Wings, trans. by Gladys Yang (1980; London: Virago Press, 1987), p. 103).
- 72.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 73.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 74.
Ibid., p. 111.
- 75.
Chen, ‘Reading Mother’s Tale: Reconstructing Women’s Space in Amy Tan and Zhang Jie’, Chinese Literature, 16 (1994), p. 119; Wang, Personal Matters, p. 165.
- 76.
Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. by Deborah Furet (1995; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. x.
- 77.
Rushdie, ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’, Granta, 31 (1990), p. 109.
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Hammond, A. (2020). Beyond Containment: The Left-Wing Movement in Literature, 1945–1989. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_7
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