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The article explores British author Doris Lessing's view about the novel of ideas, as well as the academic hostility to the novel of ideas. Topics discussed include Lessing's view that the British reading public does not know how to read a novel of ideas thus misreading "The Golden Notebook," literary critic Sianne Ngai's argument that novels of ideas fail as novels because they do not include ready-made ideas into the text, and Lessings' letters which presented her attraction to communism.

In his 1953 novel of ideas, The Outsider, Richard Wright ominously predicted that industrial capitalist society would inexorably result in "the total and absolute in modern life." Wright did not mean that Soviet communism would prevail, capturing the hearts and minds of Americans. His point was that the West's capitalist democracy was just as capable of slouching toward a dystopian, totalitarian future as the Soviet Union. How might Wright's prescient thoughts on the death of liberal democracy inform our attempts to save ourselves from the "totalitarian danger" looming in the United States? As multiracial American democracy, voting rights, and the rule of law are under assault from the U.S. far right, it is abundantly clear that anti‐Black racism animates the enemies of democracy and those who would establish and support autocratic rule. These reflections seek to historicize the assault on democracy in the US and the epochal events of 2020, including: the global protests following the murder of George Floyd by police; the death of hundreds of thousands in the US during the global Coronavirus pandemic; and concerted efforts by Trump and the far‐right to destroy multiracial democracy before and after the 2020 election, culminating in the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the books "The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River" by Ding Ling, "The Hurricane" by Zhou Libo, and the writing of Chinese author Zhang Ailing is presented. It discusses how these books portray land reform in China during the reign of Chairman Mao Zedong. Other topics include literary criticisms of Communism in China, how the policies of Mao shape the literature, and the Chinese revolution in literature.

The article discusses the 1940 American novel "Native Son," by Richard Wright, as well as its 2019 adaptation for HBO directed by Rashid Johnson. Topics explores include its social criticisms such as systemic racism, especially against African Americans, and the injustices wrought by capitalism. Topics include oppression, a critique of communism, and incongruity in literature.

This article argues for China Miéville's The City & The City (2009) as a gothic Marxist fiction that articulates new modalities of communist expression which productively 'haunt' the work of the 'Idea of Communism' conferences. Firstly, the essay establishes a relationship between Marx and the gothic tradition, showing how Marx has long been concerned with the gothic mode as a vital explanatory framework for representing capital. Secondly, the essay enacts a comparative presentation between Miéville's novel and the recent contributions of communist intellectual Alain Badiou. Through this process, Miéville's novel becomes a powerful symbolic engagement with selected aspects of twenty-first century communism, unearthing new and productive relations with radical left thought while refusing to fully banish, conquer, or forget the history of the twentieth-century effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are not only threatened by the Sixth Extinction, but also haunted. Coming back from the future, the Ghosts of History — some para-Benjaminian creatures—try to tell us how serious the threat is. In this essay, I claim with Derrida that we need to listen to these ghosts, the ghosts of ourselves, of humankind in the company of those succumbing to the ongoing ecocide. Having anchored existence's ghostly dimension in Heidegger's claim according to which Dasein is always already its end, that is to say always already a spectre, I'll sketch out a political ecology of revenants that could envision the justice that is at risk of being impossible in the future. After Dupuy's 'enlightened catastrophism,' we need a spectral communism turning our hopelessness into the necessity of a radical politics, a paradoxical kind of justice both proactive and after the fact since its watchwords come from the sacrificed generations that the future will produce. Instead of letting our melancholic relation to the future paralyze us, let's personify our own ghosts before it's too late, now—in extremis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her novel Fantoma din moara, or The Ghost in the Mill, and in her other prolific output, Doina Rusti has helped in the process of preserving history, specifically that of communist Romania. A village in the Romanian countryside, populated by people whose stories had been discounted, or never even told, acts as the perfect microcosm to isolate the Romanian identity while examining its multifaceted elements from disparate perspectives that all reify within the frame narrator. Rusti synchronously experiences both past and present, negating a traditional trajectory along a temporal axis. This is indicative of the act of remembering that is intricately tied to the mechanism of forgetting. Memories are brought into question and Rusti uses her novels to join the chorus of those solidifying the Romanian past, even if not always harmoniously. Rusti's dependence on previously documented events that serve as parameters for her novel challenge the power that gives authority to authorship. She cannot freely create her narratives, but can only carefully navigate the restrictions of their respective situations. Defining a culture and its people is no small task, but as the book closes, Rusti unapologetically paints an unromanticized picture producing a sophisticated understanding of an entire nation as it turns to spirituality during very tumultuous times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an analysis of Humphrey Slater's 1947 novel "The Conspirator" which is considered as the first in the hallowed genre of Cold War spy novels. Slater had been an ardent Stalinist in the 1930s. Through the novel, Slater warned about the dangers of Stalinism and the intrigues the Soviet Union was pursuing to undermine the West. The novel portrays a cunning Soviet spy who had attained a highly sensitive post in the British Foreign Office.

The poet Yoshimoto Takaaki's career as a critical thinker took off in the 1950s, notably through a widely remarked essay on ideological conversion in which he established an equivalence between converts and non-converts. We argue that his thoughts on ideological conversion were rooted in the polemic work he engaged in - along with Takei Teruo - on the war responsibility of progressive writers. We seek to identify the originality of Yoshimoto's approach by discussing and presenting the development of this controversy as well as its actors, implications and general intellectual context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the way in which Mykola Khvyl'ovyi, one of the most outstanding Ukrainian writers and yet one of the most controversial figures of early Soviet history, was assessed in national and diaspora historiography It is argued that the self-referential character of Khvyl'ovyi's short stories along with the scarcity and unreliability of primary sources have contributed to creating a narrative of an ambivalent writer and communist Mykola Khvyl'ovyi. A simplistic approach to place the writer's political and aesthetic agendas in an "either - or" paradigm, artificially fitting his convictions into a communist or a nationalistic framework, is contested by the author. The aim of this examination is, thus, to make more understandable the choices of those national intellectuals of the 1920s for whom being both Ukrainians and communists did not seem contradictory. This brings the discussion of the ideological development of Khvyl'ovyi into a broader context, namely what it meant to be a national intellectual and what choices one was faced with, not in Moscow, but in a border republic, where any application of a national sentiment was seen as a threat to the revolutionary legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares novels written in the mid-1960s, but published only during glasnost: Aleksandr Bek's New Appointment and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. The latter has not been analysed in terms of its illness imagery, nor compared with Bek's less-studied but strikingly similar work, in terms of the illness imagery in the texts and their reception by Soviet readers. Medical humanities approaches are used to trace both novels' treatment of mental and physical illness. Both texts prompt a reconsideration of cancer as a political metaphor and Soviet illness rhetoric, used to convey more polyvalent and moderate critique than is usually assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The autobiography, essays, chronic, documentary and media images of Havana, become complex the place of fiction in La fiesta vigilada (2007), of Antonio José Ponte, in which the narrative is constructed as a large device archiving. However, beyond the material collection of historical and literary documents in La fiesta vigilada the speeches placed by Ponte emerging due to a similar act of documenting: (1) museification of the past and the consecration of the wreck, as a result of the opening international tourism, and (2) documents of surveillance and spy novels written during the Cold War. At this point, the recovery of that narrative allows the author to reflect on the achievements of other archive policy, which is less valuable conservation untouched document or ability to verify the identity or reality that its performative ability to translate, falsify, recode and, if necessary, to rationalize the historical data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper will discuss the critical grounds that preceded the translation of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's diaries into Romanian, published by Univers Publishing House in 1974 and 1975-1976 respectively, focusing on the Prefaces written by Ion Ianoşi. Relying on both historical studies and relevant documents of the 1947-1989 period, I will start by generally describing, on the one hand, the process of the Russian and Soviet translations into post-War Romania and, on the other hand, the Communist regime's views and practices in translating and publishing autobiographical literature. Leftist intellectual who fulfilled his academic education in USSR and worked in the Central Committee for almost nine years, Ion Ianoşi is a key-figure in analyzing the incipient reception perspective of the two Diaries; collating the 70s Prefaces with their post-Communism republications and Ianoşi's Memoirs, I will dwell on the position the scholar takes in the foreignization-domestication binary, as discussed by Sean Cotter following two of Lawrence Venuti's concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel by Radu Tuculescu cannot be grasped fully unless the reader imagines the five stave lines of music notations and the corresponding intervening spaces. His highest aspiration is the attainment of a symphony of novel-writing. The raven Dodo in his novel Mierla neagra(The Blackbird) seems to be there for the entertainment of high-school teenage students nicknamed "the crickets". The raven imitates voices and it repeats utterances. Later on in the novel, the same bird reveals as a sort of conscience. The raven exposes guilt and vindication. Raven Dodo is the bird of memory in this novel. Through it, the three chapters are placed as different age chapters. Tuculescu believes that his writing should explore the fissures of realness. The world of adolescence moves within the inner rhythms that bear the ethical misery of their epoch. Music is for the adolescents of the novel the perfect antidote. Sometimes the music in this fiction becomes a soteriology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship has often ascribed to the third generation of East German writers associated with the Prenzlauer Berg scene (1979-89) a monolithic attitude of dissociation from the 'really existing socialist state'. The present study reevaluates Prenzlauer Berg literary production in the light of its engagement with the transnational aesthetic and political projects of the avantgardes from before and after the Second World War, which continued to be thematised in the literature and culture of unified Germany after the fall of the Wall. A continuous engagement with the avantgardes can be discerned in two texts by the erstwhile Prenzlauer Berg poet and contemporary novelist Jan Faktor: first, in the serial poem 'Georgs Sorgen um die Zukunft' (1982), and second, in the novel Georgs Sorgen um die Vergangenheit (2010). The poem, I argue, criticises the advanced state of ideological decay in the GDR in the 1980s but also generates possibilities for an aesthetic renewal. The post-'Wende' novel narrates the history of state-sponsored socialism in Czechoslovakia from a transnational standpoint that fosters the formation of an entangled past among countries of the former Eastern bloc. The novel's reflection on the disintegration of architectural projects once meant to organise life for a socialist future, however, commemorates the utopian spirit of the Russian Constructivist avantgarde and its productivist aesthetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere, the threat of communism and the institutional anxiety it engenders is played out through a series of symbolic associations between communism, crime, and contagion. Ellroy's figuration of communism as a form of criminal contagion takes up underlying tensions involved with the discourse of typology that runs through the detective genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author looks at author Jorge Semprun to debate with the problematic condition of literature in an anti-capitalist project. Topics discussed include militant Communist Semprun who an advocate of committed literature that avoids the polarized terms, he imagines all literature as Marxist even when its practitioners might have different political and aesthetic allegiances, and his book "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" challenges the fundamental convictions of Communist reader.

The article discusses the work of African American novelist Ralph Ellison during the 1930s, focusing on how Ellison's writing fit into the African American Communist discourse of the time period. Other topics include Ellison's ideas about the role of blacks in the lumpenproletariat, how Ellison's 1933 trip from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama influenced his social, political, and institutional ideas of Communism, and the role of the lumpenproetariat in a revolution.

This article explores the prominent role played by visual tropes in Andrei Platonov's Turkmen novella, Dzhan (Soul). While acknowledging Platonov's literary inventiveness, it seeks to identify the equal importance of the gaze as a means of emotional and ideological cognition, thereby arguing that the shift in emphasis in his prose in the mid-1930s entailed not just a move away from explicitly linguistic experimentation but also a greater embrace of visual imagery. With reference to both Dzhan and the author's letters and notebooks, this essay examines how the geographical relocation to Central Asia is accompanied by a heightened engagement with the world through the gaze, which functions principally in terms of gender and national identity. It concludes with a consideration of how the gaze is integral to a theory of Platonov's understanding of language, arguing that the "situatedness" of the individual is predicated on his or her being seen in a visual context by an interlocutor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the center of this article lies the idea of creating the New Man, a formative idea in any authoritarian regime. I claim that, in their drive to create the New Man by any means necessary, decision-makers of Communist regimes strove to transform those who did not adhere to their ideal into non-persons. To illustrate this, I focus on Eginald Schlattner's autobiographical novel, Rote Handschuhe (2001), which depicts the process by which the Securitate (Communist Romania's secret police) re-educates the first-person narrator of Transylvanian-Saxon ethnicity and bourgeois origins and trains him to be a loyal Communist. The nameless narrator succumbs to the violent pressure exerted by the Securitate and becomes a witness for the prosecution in a trial against fellow ethnic German writers in Romania in the late 1950s. Yet he finds that the very system that required his re-education as a means to ensure its absolute control excludes him from full membership after he has served his purpose. In so doing, however, the regime undermines its own tactics and opens up the possibility of the individual's survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A criticism of the book "Memoirs of a Revolutionary: 1901-1941" by Victor Serge is presented. It discusses the life of Russian radical Victor Serge, focusing on his revolutionary, anarchist actions throughout Europe. It also looks at the influence of communism in the 20th century, the Russian Revolution in 1917, and Serge's association with European radicals including Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Grigory Zinoviev.

Espionage, surveillance and clandestine operations by secret agencies and governments were something of an East-We st obsession in the second h a lf of the twentieth century, a fact refected in literature and film. In the twenty-first century, concerns of the Cold War and the threat of Communism have been rearticulated in the wake of 9 /1 1 . Under the rubric of 'terror' attacks, the discourses of security and surveillance are now framed within an increasingly global context. A s this article illustrates, surveillance fiction written for young people engages with the cultural and political tropes that reflect a new social order that is different from the Cold War era, with its emphasis on spies, counter espionage, brainwashing and psychological warfare. While these tropes are still evident in much recent literature, advances in technology have transformed the means of tracking, profiling and accumulating data on individuals' daily activities. Little Brother, The Hunger Games and Article 5 rflect the complex relationship between the real and the imaginary in the world of surveillance and, as this paper discusses, raise moral and ethical issues that are important questionsfor young people in our age of security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the world knows Ian Fleming's fictional character James Bond through the 12 novels, 2 collections of short stories, and 23 films over the past 50 years which have been made of him. However, very few realize that the character began 60 years ago as a pulp hero standing up for Western values against a morally corrupt, vindictive, and spreading communist empire. Ian Fleming created a hero that embodied the West and its ideals of individualism, perseverance, and greatness, and in order to understand the popularity of James Bond, one must understand just what the character represents to the world. In this concise article, a textual and philosophic consideration of the character of James Bond is undertaken by examining Fleming's original novels, stories, and writings on the subject. It becomes apparent that Fleming's creation was to stand strongly opposed to the collectivist Soviet Union and its values, as well as be a tribute to Western spies who sacrifice their own happiness in the name of protecting democracy. The continued popularity of James Bond is found in the idea that the character represents the West against those who seek to destroy it and its values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]