In
this brilliant account of the literary war within the Cold War, novelists and
poets become embroiled in a dangerous game of betrayal, espionage, and
conspiracy at the heart of the vicious conflict fought between the Soviet Union
and the West
During the Cold War, literature was
both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds
of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They
could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their
authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services
of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and
established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the
battles were personal, too: friends turned on one another, lovers were split by
political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And
while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged
for a gun, the bookstore for the battlefield.
In
Cold Warriors, Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was
waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George
Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
John le Carré, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris
Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel. Here, too, are the spies,
government officials, military officers, publishers, politicians, and critics
who helped turn words into weapons at a time when the stakes could not have
been higher.
Drawing
upon years of archival research and the latest declassified intelligence, Cold Warriors is both a gripping saga of prose and
politics, and a welcome reminder that--at a moment when ignorance is all too
frequently celebrated and reading is seen as increasingly irrelevant--writers
and books can change the world.
“One reason the Cold War was won without becoming hot is that some books were as explosive as bombs. Duncan White tells the thrilling story of how some engaged intellectuals sent words into worthy battles.”
