Can you give me another source than the "100 questions and answers"? Anything pulled from that book hardly qualifies as statistics. Take, for instance, the sentence you quoted: " According to UNESCO, Soviet Union published 5 times as much translated literature as United Kingdom". Five times as much -- of what? Translated titles, or books printed?
I don't see how the numbers that you gave showed that Western literature was exotic.
I didn't say it was exotic. It was simply perceived as such, because the number of titles was very small, especially compared to the present situation.
So while some people may have preferred books of Western authors, because they were Western, that was their personal problem and certainly didn't indicate that those books were "exotic". Also, I can't see how that is a fault of the Soviet Union.
It was one of the quirks of the situation -- if you're locked in, everything that comes from the outside world seems good to you. This seems to be universal, not unique only to the Soviet Union.
it appears that the literary quality of works of most authors was questionable
This doesn't make it OK to ban them.
that many of them actively worked against the Soviet Union
Examples, please? (I find my knowledge lacking in this area)
So if this list is any indication, it demonstrates that censorship didn't have a noticeable negative effect on availability of good books.
Ironically, I reached the same conclusion last night. Not entirely the same, but still quite close: "Good literature" is culture-dependant. There is no universal list of immortal works. Many of the books that are now considered classics were once considered crap, and vice versa. So, if the Soviet culture defines what is good literature and what isn't, and the same culture defines what is censored and what isn't, then it's not surprising that the two coincide greatly.
Another thing that you -- and the rest of the Slashdot audience -- seem to forget is that there's a lot more to literature than only good literature (or the kind of literature that your literature teacher tells you is good). Bad literature also exists, and good literature is impossible without bad literature.
But my point is that the number of prohibited books were relatively small, that the practice of banning books is common in most countries and that overall the number of great books published in Soviet Union in all languages was very large, that people read a lot and that the government supported reading by any means possible.
Your first point is impossible to argue because there aren't, to my knowledge, any reliable statistics, as officially, there was no censorship in the Soviet Union, meaning that there was no reason to keep official records of it. Research has been made into the subject of censorship in the Soviet Union, but I can't look it up until Monday. I've never denied your second point; I just didn't consider it relevant to the discussion. Your third point, about the number of great books published in the Soviet Union being very large, depends of your definition of a great book. That number was, without a doubt, quite large, but the same stands for the rest of the world as well. As for the last two, then right now, I'm in no position to argue with these. I'll have to think about it.
Yes, Orwell's and Bulgakov's books are good, but I don't see how not publishing them was such a tragedy.
As fascinating as that culture is to me, the ends don't justify the means.
We can't have a retional fact-based discussion if you aren't prepared to participate.
Frankly, it's not because I'm not prepared to participate -- it's because I don't really see the point. I already know what you stand for, you seem to have developed some sort of a conception of what I stand for, and it seems that neither of us are willing to adapt...Actually, come to think of it, I may have been a bit too harsh in what I said. So, before I continue, let it be said that I don't think the Soviet Union was an empire of Evil or something like that. Neither was it an egalitarian utopia, though. Not all people were equal. Not all schools were equal -- and not all people had an equal chance to be accepted to a school. Unfortunately, I don't have any evidence at hand (and in some cases, it can be quite difficult to find, because AFAIK, sociology as such was one of the things that were banned), so I don't think I can persuade you. But I do believe I could find a reccommend you a few books for reference:7
By the way, I'd like to thank you for this discussion. While it doesn't appear to have led anywhere so far, I have made several interesting findings (yay for the Internet).
Anyway:
May be in Estonia, among some crazy nationalists, but normal people enjoyed reading good literature regardless of the nationality of the author.
Heh. No, they weren't crazy nationalists. These were normal people. But the reason why they had such an attitude towards Western authors was because everything Western was exotic. It was exotic because there was very little of it available (I can even give you some numbers here, that is, the official quotas for translated literature: 45% Russian, 15% languges of other Soviet republics, 13% languages of the rest of the Eastern Bloque, 27% the rest of the world. I can't remember the number of books published each year, but translated literature was roughly 1/3 of all literature. I can't really remember the ratio of ficton to non-fiction, either, but I could look it up in the library).
Ok, now to the part about censorship: Anyway, you don't seem to have any evidence that the number of books was significant.
No, I don't. I only have at hand this list of authors, most of them Russian, who were "nepodcenzurnye" at some point or to some extent.
Which brings me back to the beginning. You said: We can't have a retional fact-based discussion if you aren't prepared to participate. Well, I don't think it's so much about me not willing to participate but about us two quite clearly having different ideas of what the Soviet Union was. This is at least partly because of my having lived in another Soviet republic -- things were different here. It also seems that time is a factor as well, as the conditions were not the same all the time. If I say that Orwell's books were banned, you could always argue that they could be published in the end of 1980's, or that Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" was published in 1968, so it wasn't banned. Or something like that. Like I said in the beginning of this post, things were more complicated than I made them seem.
Do you have any data contradicting what I said or do you think that unrelated anecdotes (which, I suspect didn't even happen in Soviet Union, as I don't remember books being sold with uncut pages there) are enough?
Unfortunately, no, I don't have any data at hand. But I have a nagging suspicion that neither do you.
And no, books weren't sold with uncut pages, at least not in the seventies, but quite often, the pages had been cut open so sloppily that some of them (or, in the case of my Estonian translation of "The Idiot", a few dozen of them) had the upper edge uncut.
Which Western authors are you talking about? In my recollection only the best authors had their books translated and published in the Soviet Union. I certainly don't remember seeing all the crap that flooded bookstands now.
I never said they were crap. I said that people bought them because they were Western. Had the "crap that floods bookstands now" been published in the Soviet Union, the people would have been just as eager to buy it as they are now.
That a few good books were not available is more than compensated by the thousands of great books that were.
I'd say that "a few good books..." is an understatement at best (I wouldn't call it an outright lie, though, because you actually seem to believe in what you say). Of course everything I say stands for Soviet Estonia -- it might have been different in Russia.
What you are saying is ridiculous.
The brilliance of your rebuttal completely overwhelmed me. Clearly, my intellect is no match to your infinite wisdom.
I'd say the picture you paint of the Soviet system is awfully idealistic -- so much so, in fact, that you fail to see the reality behind it. The reality where literary classics were bought mostly because of the prestige that came with owning these books (I bought my copy of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" second-hand; it seems to have stood unopened on someone's bookshelf for thirty years because some of the pages were uncut). Where modern Western authors enjoyed great popularity only because they were Western. "All works of art were for everyone" -- and yet the ones that somehow disagreed with the official ideology were hidden away in special depositories. The state only cared about improving the litearcy and cultural levels because educated people are much easier to govern than uneducated masses (or "miseducated" people). Of course I'm simplifying the matters quite a bit because the system didn't really work that well (even a totalitarian state can't control everything).
The system was an egalitarian one only in theory. In practice, there was an elite. There were "elite" schools, schools that were considered better than others; not everyone was admitted to these schools.
And yes, I did create this account just to reply to your comment:7
Slashdot Mirror
Can you give me another source than the "100 questions and answers"? Anything pulled from that book hardly qualifies as statistics. Take, for instance, the sentence you quoted: " According to UNESCO, Soviet Union published 5 times as much translated literature as United Kingdom". Five times as much -- of what? Translated titles, or books printed?
I don't see how the numbers that you gave showed that Western literature was exotic.
I didn't say it was exotic. It was simply perceived as such, because the number of titles was very small, especially compared to the present situation.
So while some people may have preferred books of Western authors, because they were Western, that was their personal problem and certainly didn't indicate that those books were "exotic". Also, I can't see how that is a fault of the Soviet Union.
It was one of the quirks of the situation -- if you're locked in, everything that comes from the outside world seems good to you. This seems to be universal, not unique only to the Soviet Union.
it appears that the literary quality of works of most authors was questionable
This doesn't make it OK to ban them.
that many of them actively worked against the Soviet Union
Examples, please? (I find my knowledge lacking in this area)
So if this list is any indication, it demonstrates that censorship didn't have a noticeable negative effect on availability of good books.
Ironically, I reached the same conclusion last night. Not entirely the same, but still quite close: "Good literature" is culture-dependant. There is no universal list of immortal works. Many of the books that are now considered classics were once considered crap, and vice versa. So, if the Soviet culture defines what is good literature and what isn't, and the same culture defines what is censored and what isn't, then it's not surprising that the two coincide greatly.
Another thing that you -- and the rest of the Slashdot audience -- seem to forget is that there's a lot more to literature than only good literature (or the kind of literature that your literature teacher tells you is good). Bad literature also exists, and good literature is impossible without bad literature.
But my point is that the number of prohibited books were relatively small, that the practice of banning books is common in most countries and that overall the number of great books published in Soviet Union in all languages was very large, that people read a lot and that the government supported reading by any means possible.
Your first point is impossible to argue because there aren't, to my knowledge, any reliable statistics, as officially, there was no censorship in the Soviet Union, meaning that there was no reason to keep official records of it. Research has been made into the subject of censorship in the Soviet Union, but I can't look it up until Monday. I've never denied your second point; I just didn't consider it relevant to the discussion. Your third point, about the number of great books published in the Soviet Union being very large, depends of your definition of a great book. That number was, without a doubt, quite large, but the same stands for the rest of the world as well. As for the last two, then right now, I'm in no position to argue with these. I'll have to think about it.
Yes, Orwell's and Bulgakov's books are good, but I don't see how not publishing them was such a tragedy.
As fascinating as that culture is to me, the ends don't justify the means.
We can't have a retional fact-based discussion if you aren't prepared to participate.
Frankly, it's not because I'm not prepared to participate -- it's because I don't really see the point. I already know what you stand for, you seem to have developed some sort of a conception of what I stand for, and it seems that neither of us are willing to adapt...Actually, come to think of it, I may have been a bit too harsh in what I said. So, before I continue, let it be said that I don't think the Soviet Union was an empire of Evil or something like that. Neither was it an egalitarian utopia, though. Not all people were equal. Not all schools were equal -- and not all people had an equal chance to be accepted to a school. Unfortunately, I don't have any evidence at hand (and in some cases, it can be quite difficult to find, because AFAIK, sociology as such was one of the things that were banned), so I don't think I can persuade you. But I do believe I could find a reccommend you a few books for reference :7
By the way, I'd like to thank you for this discussion. While it doesn't appear to have led anywhere so far, I have made several interesting findings (yay for the Internet).
Anyway: May be in Estonia, among some crazy nationalists, but normal people enjoyed reading good literature regardless of the nationality of the author.
Heh. No, they weren't crazy nationalists. These were normal people. But the reason why they had such an attitude towards Western authors was because everything Western was exotic. It was exotic because there was very little of it available (I can even give you some numbers here, that is, the official quotas for translated literature: 45% Russian, 15% languges of other Soviet republics, 13% languages of the rest of the Eastern Bloque, 27% the rest of the world. I can't remember the number of books published each year, but translated literature was roughly 1/3 of all literature. I can't really remember the ratio of ficton to non-fiction, either, but I could look it up in the library).
Ok, now to the part about censorship: Anyway, you don't seem to have any evidence that the number of books was significant.
No, I don't. I only have at hand this list of authors, most of them Russian, who were "nepodcenzurnye" at some point or to some extent.
Which brings me back to the beginning. You said: We can't have a retional fact-based discussion if you aren't prepared to participate. Well, I don't think it's so much about me not willing to participate but about us two quite clearly having different ideas of what the Soviet Union was. This is at least partly because of my having lived in another Soviet republic -- things were different here. It also seems that time is a factor as well, as the conditions were not the same all the time. If I say that Orwell's books were banned, you could always argue that they could be published in the end of 1980's, or that Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" was published in 1968, so it wasn't banned. Or something like that. Like I said in the beginning of this post, things were more complicated than I made them seem.
Unfortunately, no, I don't have any data at hand. But I have a nagging suspicion that neither do you.
And no, books weren't sold with uncut pages, at least not in the seventies, but quite often, the pages had been cut open so sloppily that some of them (or, in the case of my Estonian translation of "The Idiot", a few dozen of them) had the upper edge uncut.
Which Western authors are you talking about? In my recollection only the best authors had their books translated and published in the Soviet Union. I certainly don't remember seeing all the crap that flooded bookstands now.
I never said they were crap. I said that people bought them because they were Western. Had the "crap that floods bookstands now" been published in the Soviet Union, the people would have been just as eager to buy it as they are now.
That a few good books were not available is more than compensated by the thousands of great books that were.
I'd say that "a few good books..." is an understatement at best (I wouldn't call it an outright lie, though, because you actually seem to believe in what you say). Of course everything I say stands for Soviet Estonia -- it might have been different in Russia.
What you are saying is ridiculous.
The brilliance of your rebuttal completely overwhelmed me. Clearly, my intellect is no match to your infinite wisdom.
The system was an egalitarian one only in theory. In practice, there was an elite. There were "elite" schools, schools that were considered better than others; not everyone was admitted to these schools.
And yes, I did create this account just to reply to your comment :7