The Case Against Foreign Lit

On April 18, 1800, one year before his death at the hands of conspirators, Emperor Paul I issued the following decree:

As various books being brought from abroad have served to pervert faith, civil laws, and proper behavior, henceforth, until otherwise ordered, we command that the admittance of any sort of book into our state, whatever language it may be in, be prohibited, as well as music.

The French revolution was over, but the Russian emperor understood that its ideas lived on. He was terrified of the West’s “pernicious influence,” and he had banned not only foreign books, but all foreign music, lest his subjects start singing “La Marseillaise.”

After Paul’s assassination, the new emperor, his son Alexander I, immediately gave Russian readers back their European books. Alexander himself was an enlightened man, and during the first years of his reign he established several universities in Russia and allowed an expansion of book publishing. Russian journals began featuring news from abroad. Translations from other languages also began to appear.

A quarter century later, Alexander’s reign, which had initially seemed to promise reform, reached an inglorious conclusion. A group of high-minded officers (now known as the Decembrists) tried to thwart his successor, Nicholas I, from ascending the throne. At their trial, the rebels were portrayed as out-of-touch with their native land, having been led astray by Western books. When, during their interrogations, the rebellion’s perpetrators started to wax poetic about the importance of freedom, one inquisitor would respond: “You read everything – Destutt de Tracy, Benjamin Constant, and Bentham, and look where it got you. I spent my life reading holy scripture, and look what I have earned” (he then pointed to the two rows of stars that adorned his chest).

Even today, almost two hundred years later, anyone trying to discredit the Decembrists brings up the fact that they spoke imperfect Russian (preferring French), that some of them had studied under Jesuits, and generally dismisses them as not knowing the Russian people at all.

During the reign of Nicholas I, the idea that only scoundrels who had let foreign books fill their heads could oppose the sovereign became even more pervasive. Count Uvarov, Nicholas’s brilliant, enlightened, and well-read Minister of Education, came up with the famous slogan: “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality.” Uvarov believed that these values should form the foundation of education.

Soon after the Polish uprising of 1830-1831 was suppressed, Nicholas I paid a visit to Warsaw. He responded with rude arrogance to the welcoming speeches made by representatives of the city. He gave the Poles a stark choice: live in peace (what we would today call “stability”) in the bosom of the Russian Empire or turn to Europe, with its revolutionary storms and misfortunes. Just in case the Poles got it into their heads that they actually had a choice, he reminded them that Russian cannons stood at the ready in the Warsaw Citadel.

Foreign books were not banned under Nicholas I, but there were certainly limitations on importing them. (There were also restrictions put on Nicholas’s subjects’ ability to leave the country; in theory, they could travel to ideologically corrupt Europe, but they first had to obtain permission from their local authorities.) The regime’s top priority, however, was inculcating the correct attitude toward alien countries and alien ideologies in the younger generation. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Count Uvarov put his heart and soul into developing Russian education. The number of gymnasiums (elite schools preparing students for university) increased in Russian cities, and university professors were allowed to further their own educations by traveling abroad to study Europe’s scientific advances.

At the same time, however, these same gymnasiums and universities were deprived of their autonomy and put under strict state control. The humanities were discouraged (who knows what nonsense students might fill their heads with!), but practical disciplines such as mining, forestry, and engineering flourished.

Since there was great interest in European philosophy in Russia at the time, we can only imagine what Nicholas thought of all those “salon chatterboxes.” Why were Russians again falling under the sway of idiotic foreign books? These intellectual pursuits caused problems for Nicholas’s political police. The Third Section, which was supposed to sniff out subversion, relied heavily on servants to spy on the intelligentsia and nobility. As eager as these menials may have been to convey what their masters were discussing, they were simply incapable of describing what the gentleman and lady of the house were talking about with their guests. Some Schelling fellow with something about nature, some Hegel or other – incomprehensible gibberish!

When Europe was roiled by revolution in 1848, Nicholas I was probably quite proud of himself. He was obviously doing something right, since there was revolution in France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Czech lands, but in Russia, all was peace and tranquility – the fruits of an effective educational system! Just in case, however, measures were taken. After 1848, censorship – already tight – was made even more severe. What’s more, a special commission was set up to oversee the censors and make sure they didn’t let anything steeped in Western thinking slip through.

Even the devoted Uvarov expressed reservations about the program. He tried to intercede on behalf of universities, some of which were under such attack you might have thought that they were revolutionary hotbeds, with Parisians straight from the barricades delivering lectures. In an article about universities the enraged tsar wrote: “They must submit and keep their thoughts to themselves.” Uvarov was sent into retirement.

This all ended badly. Russia’s crushing defeat in the Crimean War was so shameful, it was rumored to have driven Nicholas to suicide (it has never been proven that his death shortly before the war’s conclusion was of anything other than illness).

The next tsar, Alexander II, recognized the need for reform and introduced numerous changes, the most consequential of which was the emancipation of the serfs. Another reform instituted in the 1860s was the abolition of prior censorship. This was not exactly freedom of expression, but at least a step in that direction. Now, Russians could read as many books as they liked, whether Russian or foreign. Dozens and later hundreds of young Russian women rushed to enroll in the universities of Europe, where they faced fewer obstacles to getting a higher education. Young men were also heading west, leaving Russia for political reasons. And in Russia, translating the increasingly popular foreign books became one of the best ways for an impoverished student to earn some money.

But the idea persisted that Europeans couldn’t possibly fathom the Russian soul and that revolutionaries didn’t know the Russian people. It gained particular currency after Alexander was assassinated by terrorists in 1881. His son, Alexander III, cancelled most of his father’s reforms, greatly increased the role of the Orthodox Church in the country, and limited the rights of imperial subjects who practiced other religions. This was part of the overall belief that Russia’s Orthodox population was fundamentally different from people in the West, and that there was no reason to muddle their thinking with ideas about a constitution or parliament.

In 1884, Alexander oversaw the first (although far from the last) purging of Russian libraries. As part of the struggle against the growing revolutionary movement, a decision was made to conduct a careful review of books in print: 133 of them were deemed “scandalous.” Special auditors were sent to inspect all of the empire’s libraries, check their collections, and remove – and burn – the newly banned books.

Alexander III’s son, Nicholas II, was cast from the same mold as his father and used every means at his disposal to oppose political reforms, vehemently asserting that he could not squander the legacy of autocratic power that had been handed down by his forefathers.

During the final decades of the nineteenth century, an accelerating influx of Western ideas collided violently with the autocracy’s increasingly adamant belief that these ideas could do nothing but harm.

And so it was then, on April 22, 1870, in the Volga town of Simbirsk (now known as Ulyanovsk), that little Volodya Ulyanov was born, destined to play a pivotal role in bringing down the Russian Empire and ending the Romanov dynasty. Today he is primarily known by his pseudonym, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Certainly, Vladimir Ilyich did not consider all foreign books to be harmful, but he did share his autocratic predecessors’ zeal in dealing with ideological foes and members of an “alien” (in his case, bourgeois) culture. Among the devices he deployed was the Philosopher’s Ship. In 1922, these German ships (there were actually two) carried into exile about 150 of the leading lights of the scholarly and artistic intelligentsia, including the great philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov, the famous sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, and many others. For decades to come, their books, along with the works of other émigrés, would be banned within the Soviet Union.

After the revolution, Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, oversaw the effort to build a new library system designed to serve the country’s ideological agenda. Not only did she expand the number of libraries and promote literacy, she also oversaw the effort to purge Soviet libraries of “ideologically harmful” books. It was her signature at the bottom of a 1929 letter sent to all libraries in the country concerning “A review of the book collections of libraries for the masses” calling for the removal and destruction of all “old bibliographies, and, especially, old sociopolitical encyclopedias” along with “all old prerevolutionary magazines,” “all old calendars,” and “all books with religious content, without exception.”

Later, Soviet libraries would undergo regular purges. You might have thought that they would eventually achieve the goal of eradicating all offending literature, but you would be wrong. Throughout the 1930s, it was a huge job to keep up with the removal of books by the Enemies of the People swept up in Stalin’s Terror. In the 1940s, the focus was on books from the West (librarians wanted to be sure to avoid charges of “rootless cosmopolitanism”). Later, under Brezhnev, collections had to be cleansed of anyone who had managed to emigrate or, worse yet, defect from the country or engage in dissidence.

The case of foreign literature as a class was rather complicated. At first, some foreign books were brought into the country: a rather generous influx in the 1920s, an increasingly meager one in the 1930s. Paradoxically, the restrictions made way for foreign classics: collections of works by Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo adorned the bookshelves of many an educated household.

Once the Cold War got underway, in the 1940s and 1950s, foreign authors were hardly published at all. Bookstore shelves held just a few authors famous for their “progressive” views and, preferably, membership in the communist parties of their own country, such as Howard Fast or Theodore Dreiser. Otherwise, Soviet readers did not have the slightest idea what was happening in the world of literature beyond the Iron Curtain.

During Khrushchev’s Thaw (1956-1964), Ernest Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque, two “permitted” foreign writers, made a big impression on a new generation of Soviet readers. They stood out so strikingly amid the dreary Soviet books of the Stalin era or the books that had been allowed in past decades (mainly focused on the suffering of the working class or American lynch mobs) that they seemed like the greatest, most brilliant writers in the world, which is a bit of an exaggeration. Still, they brought a whiff of freedom that was not soon forgotten. Hemingway’s and Remarque’s austere and solitary heroes, who would walk into a bar (a bar? – now what is that?), knock back a glass of calvados or whisky, and generally behave unlike any literary figures we had ever encountered, seemed absolutely extraordinary. People tried to rise to their level, to imitate them. The popularity of beards in the sixties reflects, in part, attempts to look like “Papa.”

In the sixties, seventies, and eighties, many translations of foreign books were published. The state publishers Progress and Raduga even brought out books in foreign languages (for the few Russians who could read them and as a form of outreach to the rest of the world). Getting a subscription to «Иностранная литература» (Foreign Literature) or procuring books from the series «Роман ХХ века» (The Twentieth Century Novel), which published Faulkner, Márquez, and Cortázar, was a dream come true for some. Moscow’s foreign-language library was a real cultural hotspot.

For many years, the Soviet Union was not a signatory to the Universal Copyright Convention and, as uncomfortable it is to admit it, this was a boon for the sixties generation: many translations would never have come out if Soviet publishers had had to pay for them. On the other hand, there was very little rhyme or reason as to what was published and what was not. The number of permitted books was inarguably growing, compared with the Stalin or even Khrushchev era, but the Soviet public was still cut off from a huge stratum of foreign publications. To this day, there is one deprivation I have trouble forgiving the Soviet authorities for: why was there no Hobbit or Lord of the Rings when I was growing up? Maybe this was because the Soviet Union did eventually join the copyright convention, or it could have been because of Tolkien’s suspect religiosity. It still hurts. The quantity of good, well-translated children’s literature filling Russian bookstores today drives me mad with envy. Then again, we did have Astrid Lindgren’s Karlsson-on-the-Roof.

Then came perestroika. And here, too, books, including foreign books, played a symbolic role. At the April 20, 1985, Communist Party Plenum, Gorbachev began to talk about the need to accelerate the country’s development, about perestroika (restructuring) of the economy, but also about a “new thinking,” which meant a total revamping of domestic policies. Suddenly it turned out that proletarian internationalism was not the only human value Soviet people were allowed to care about. The focus shifted from the never-ending battle between “socialist” and “capitalist” countries to the fight for peace, something the Soviet Union and the United States could actually work together to achieve.

Where there is diplomatic openness, there is intellectual and cultural openness. First, we began to see works by long banned and forgotten Russian writers. Some people truly began to believe that genuine change was underway not when Gorbachev gave his speech to the April 1985 plenum, and not when he met with President Reagan, but when, on April 19, 1986, the popular magazine Ogonyok published some poems by Nikolai Gumilyov, a poet shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921.

The fact that a Soviet magazine could print poetry by a dead, formerly banned, and supposedly forgotten poet was an unbelievable event that was followed by a slew of analogously amazing resurrections: two executed authors, Mandelstam and Babel; another two that had been relegated to insignificance, Platonov and Bulgakov; and émigrés, such as Bunin (whose Cursed Days became a huge sensation) and, finally, Solzhenitsyn, with the publication of Gulag Archipelago, and Shalamov, whose Kolyma Tales were finally published.

On top of these riches, Soviet readers were treated to a cascade of foreign political, philosophical, historical, and literary books. It became suddenly clear the extent to which we had been ignorant of developments in world culture, had missed the great writers of the twentieth century. We now knew that such influential currents as existentialism had passed us by, that we had been deprived of access to great poets. Suddenly, names like Orwell and Huxley, T.S. Eliot and Auden were all around us.

I will not go so far as to say that the Soviet Union collapsed because its people were exposed to these books, but I will say that the people who gained access to them were changed, and life as they knew it was changed. Of this I have no doubt.

Today, Russian bookstores abound in books translated from virtually all the world’s languages. We now have access to translations of every conceivable mystery, romance, philosophical and political treatise, works by Nobel and Man Booker Prize laureates, travel books – you name it. The translations of these books often leave something to be desired, but that is also a sign of the times: publishers have been so eager to get translations into print that they hire today’s equivalent of those impoverished nineteenth-century students to knock them out as quickly as possible.

Any major bookstore now carries publications in foreign languages: classics, bestsellers, mysteries, philosophy. And, thanks to the internet, we can get our hands on any book that is available in digital form or on Amazon.

This may sound as if the story that began with Paul I’s ban on foreign books has reached a happy conclusion, thanks to newfound freedoms and technologies.

But that is not the full story. There is still talk of Russia’s “special path,” that the country has no need for Western-style democracy and human rights, that international law should not take precedence over Russian law. We regularly hear speeches by education officials arguing that Russian schoolchildren have no need to study foreign languages. And really, what good are they? Only a small percentage of Russians have international passports offering the ability to travel to other countries. Most Russians don’t feel the need to travel abroad or can’t afford to.

And what are we to make of warnings that a regulated internet based on the Chinese model will be introduced in Russia? And what of access to books? Will that also be curtailed in this looming world of restricted online access – both Russian books and those imported from all corners of the world? Will we still be able to read whatever we want? Or will books again be accused of perverting faith, civil laws, and proper behavior?

Only time will tell. There is one cause for hope: books don’t give in so easily, nor do their readers.