Dodging the Censors
Since direct political discussion was prohibited, all literature tended to become a criticism of Russian life, and literary criticism itself but another form of social critism in the second degree. If the censor forbade explicit statement, he was skillfully eluded by indirection- by innocent-seeming tales of other lands or times, by complicated parables, animal fables, double meanings, overtones, by investing apparently trivial events with the pent-up energies possessing the writer, so that the reader was compelled to dwell on them until their hidden meanings became manifest. Men found means of conveying a criticism of the regime through the study of a sovereign four centuries dead, the review of a Norwgian play, the analysis of some evil in the Prussian or some virtue in the British state. There developed that peculiar "Aesop language" which would enable Lenin to fight Russian imperialism in wartime by a statistical, theoretical analysis of the German variety. Still later Bukharin was to employ the same decvice to circumvent a more vigilant and ruthless censorship, in which his criticisms of Loyola and the "corpselike obedience" and discipline of the Jesuits implied his criticism of the Stalinist regime.
Onward to the Next!
Quote from Three Who Made a Revolution, by Bertram D. Wolfe.
Copyright 1983, Stein and Day Publications.
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