CONTROL FREAKS WRIT LARGE
Modern Political literature
Patrick Morgan
Paperback, 260 pages, $32.95
AUGUST 2022 Release
ISBN 9781922815132
This book outlines the main features of political literature in
modern times from Dostoevsky to Saul Bellow. It compares political
literature from the USA and Western Europe with that from Russia and
Eastern Europe. In comparing them, we must keep in mind Dan Jacobsen’s
warning in The London Review of Books:
First, how foolish and dangerous it is, in thinking out the nature of
the Soviet system, to minimize the difference between our experience
and theirs, our opportunities and theirs, our ways and theirs, of
managing the relations between the state and the citizen. Secondly: how
foolish it would be to imagine that the desires and fears which help to
sustain their system, in all its reaches, are not perfectly recognizable
everywhere about us and within us.
In the battle over ideas over recent centuries, writers and their
product, literature, have been crucial. Many writers endured oppressive
regimes, which gave them little space to breathe, while others supported
them. Words were weaponized, becoming agents of mental coercion,
eventually taking over from torture as the authorities’ preferred
instrument of persuasion. Facile wordsmiths working in teams were
employed by regimes to suborn civilian populations by producing false
literature, ‘this string of ever ready words’ which Dostoevsky detested.
Patrick Morgan has produced a dozen books on areas where politics,
culture history intersect. He publishes regularly in Quadrant and other
journals. He was employed for three decades in English at Monash
University’s Clayton & Gippsland campuses, and has been a member of a
number of state and federal boards. He lives at Boolarra in Gippsland
with wife Ann.
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