Comment by hkt
3 months ago
Really not true.
If you take China to be a totalitarian society, we could name Ciu Lixin.
If you took the Soviet union to be a totalitarian society, we could name Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem, etc.
These are just examples I know without so much as looking at my bookshelf to jog my memory. Not to mention the great works of literature produced by residents of 19th century European empires whose attitudes to free speech were mixed at best.
> If you took the Soviet union to be a totalitarian society, we could name Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem, etc.
Bulgakov was driven into poverty, despair and early death at age 48 by relentless harassment by Soviet authorities. Many of his works, including the masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, didn't get published until decades after his death. He himself burned the first version of the manuscript, fearing execution if anyone found it. He later rewrote the manuscript from memory, coining the famous catchphrase "Manuscripts don't burn".
Harassment and censorship of talented writers was the standard and not exception. The USSR did not produce these works, but failed to fully suppress them. They were like flowers that kept penetrating the asphalt even under the most hostile conditions.
Yet eg. Chinese cultural output is largely insipid and lacking that je ne sais quoi that's appreciated in many other countries' outputs.
These seem to be more bugs than features of the totalitarian regime. A couple of illustrative points from Lem's Wikipedia page:
After the 1939 Soviet occupation of western Ukraine and Belarus, he was not allowed to study at Lwow Polytechnic as he wished because of his "bourgeois origin"
"During the era of Stalinism in Poland, which had begun in the late 1940s, all published works had to be directly approved by the state.[23] Thus The Astronauts was not, in fact, the first novel Lem finished, just the first that made it past the state censors"
"most of Lem's works published in the 1950s also contain various elements of socialist realism as well as of the "glorious future of communism" forced upon him by the censors and editors. Lem later criticized several of his early pieces as compromised by the ideological pressure"
"Lem became truly productive after 1956, when the de-Stalinization period in the Soviet Union led to the "Polish October", when Poland experienced an increase in freedom of speech"