/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18141722]

do people only give a shit about writers like orwell and solzhenitsyn because of politics or are they actually good? also were there shitty writers on the soviet side that everyone had to learn in school for the message of "other side bad"?

[Anonymous No.18141778]

>>18141722
Learn 2 google

[Anonymous No.18141809]

>>18141778
theres no relatively pressure free social interaction in googling

[Anonymous No.18142163]

No. Soviet banned Pasternak and Zamyatin... the discussion of bad side of communism also banned until late 80s

[Anonymous No.18142314]

>>18141722
Orwell was pretty based but Solzhenitsyn,um somewhat based.
The only people who seemed to have nailed it was Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Jung ,Frankl and Chomsky.

[Anonymous No.18142334]

It wasn't really the case, not in communist Poland at least.

[Anonymous No.18142417]

Solzhenitsyn is an ok novelist just make sure to take anything he says about real world events with a massive grain of salt

[Anonymous No.18142804]

>>18141722
Yes obviously some people like Solzhenitsyn because of politics but even more hate him out of opposing politics. Western academics of his time had an absurdly idealized picture of the Soviet state which Solzhenitsyn proceeded to take a massive dump on, the butthurt of which produced still hasn't fully faded today.

[Anonymous No.18142821]

>>18141722
Obviously there were writers who wrote how shitty America was. But there is big difference: Soviet citizens couldn’t leave the country so no one knew what was happening outside. Basically any propaganda worked because there was no alternative. Most of the writers who wrote about the glorious communism and horrible capitalism are long lost to history, their books weren’t interesting enough. Everyone tried to get books which provided an alternative to the Soviet worldview, even if those were expensive or hard to get. Source: my grandma had more than 2000 books at her home, many of which were really rare

[Anonymous No.18142856]

>>18141722
Orwell is pretty good, although he's a simple read (at least for me). he writes in a very cohesive and understandable manner and reading him is very comfy. Solzhenitsyn's stuff is pretty good - it has that aura of intellectualism combined with literature, very common amongsts interbellum inteligentsia who ever often part-scientists, part-poets. writing-wise he's pretty good, although he definitely represents the Russian style of writing.

[Anonymous No.18142868]

Orwell is a good writer and also writes good nonfiction. He's not as far above some of his contemporaries as his reputation would make it seem but he's still well worth your time. Solzhenitsyn is a good author and Cancer Ward is a great book. He is definitely not read because of that though.

[Anonymous No.18142886]

>>18141722
Orwell is a great writer and is very readable and relatable even though he was writing in a time increasingly removed from modern day. If you haven't read any of his works, you should.

[Anonymous No.18142927]

>>18141722
Orwell's essays are interesting if you read them chronologically and see how the guy is getting massively blackpilled over time.
>also were there shitty writers on the soviet side that everyone had to learn in school for the message of "other side bad"?
There were some, but often they were more explicit on this, for instance you could've had a subject like "political economy" where the teacher would convincingly explain you why does every sign on earth show that capitalism will fall soon. That was the tune in 1960's and 1980's alive

As for other side bad stuff there was a lot of so called socialist realism. You can figure out what that was yourself.

[Anonymous No.18142953]

>>18141722
>Black Ops cold war
>Entire game is spent in a single room staring at transmissions from Russia wondering if they're going to attack us

[Anonymous No.18142956]

>>18141722
What classes are we all running then?

was abusing the AK74u for a while, now beasting the Fara/LC10 combo. not enjoying it much atm desu

[Anonymous No.18143350]

>>18141722
Gulag Archipelago is a phenomenal phrase.

[Jasper No.18143449]

>15 replies
>1 poster

[Anonymous No.18143486]

>>18142804
>Western academics of his time had an absurdly idealized picture of the Soviet state
lol what

[Anonymous No.18143501]

>>18141722
Ivan Denisovich is a good read. Gulag Archipelago is completely lacking in any sort of rigor and should be taken as a piece of fiction.

[Anonymous No.18143545]

>>18141722
>also were there shitty writers on the soviet side that everyone had to learn in school for the message of "other side bad"?
No. The USSR never claimed that the USA was "bad", only that the poor working class and minorities were being abused by the 1%.

[Anonymous No.18144823]

I was a big Orwell reader as a teenager and liked his essays more than his novels since he'd go into obscure debates happening at the time, and his essays about journalistic cliches are very good. "Politics and the English Language" is excellent for understanding how to spot hack work across the political spectrum, and also recognizing that good art can be produced from people across the political spectrum (unless the writer is just insane), since it can be hard to break out of one's own ideological blinders. Like "oh I'm not going to read this because this person is a reactionary / communist / liberal / conservative" or whatever, which is dumb.

Some of his essays can be very funny. He wrote one article about the experience of being a book reviewer and how awful it is. He'd get a stack of books in the mail and have to review them on a deadline, and procrastinate for days while his ashtray fills up and the books are generally terrible, but then leaped into action the day before and churned out a bunch of cliche-ridden articles just to make his editor happy. I think his descriptions of Newspeak are also good and I see this tendency to compress words together into negatives in political debates all the time like chud radlib ancap SJW idpol.

But I came around to not liking his politics or him, because he was the world's worst socialist and came from British gentry and it shows. In "Down and Out" he does the standard poverty LARP and repeatedly lies about where his money is actually coming from. There's also weird homophobic meanderings, his racist beliefs sorted by hierarchy in one helpful anecdote, and then at the end he breaks the fourth wall and has a tirade about restaurants for a full chapter. It's also the only Orwell I've read where he actually attempts to confront his own beliefs, before even the pretend poverty is too much for him and he presumably vows to never be around a normal person ever again sometime after Catalonia.

He also wrote a lot about how middle-class Brit intellectuals were hypocritical about being pacifists one second and then glorifying Spanish soldiers fighting on the side of the Republicans. But this is like "well... so much for the tolerant left." It's not surprising though because I think Britain's political culture can be very stifling. I think they would've saw Spanish workers and peasants as refreshing because they didn't give a fuck about respecting their rulers. It'd be like the Chinese or something:

https://youtu.be/G0ydjJYPAy4

During his tenure at BBC he was investigated and surveilled by MI5 without his knowledge. You couldn't work for BBC without MI5 approval and and this was a secret for decades. His investigator concluded that he should be left alone because he was socialist in name only. That paid dividends when Orwell wrote up a list of suspected socialists and ruined their careers. I have to figure with the trajectory he was on he'd be another Trotsky-to-neocon convert like Irving Kristol.

[Anonymous No.18145056]

>>18144823
I'd say he was the most likely to end up being English James Bunrham.