George Orwell
The Prevention of Literature
About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary
of Milton's
Aeropagitica
— a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defense of freedom of the
press. Milton's famous phrase about the sin of ‘killing’ a book was printed on the leaflets
advertising the meeting which had been circulated beforehand.
There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech which did deal
with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to India; another said, hesitantly, and in
very general terms, that liberty was a good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws
relating to obscenity in literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defense of the
Russian purges. Of the speeches from the body of the hall, some reverted to the question of
obscenity and the laws that deal with it, others were simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. Moral
liberty — the liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print — seemed to be generally
approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of several hundred
people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a
single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means
the freedom to criticize and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet
which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was there any mention of the various books
which have been ‘killed’ in England and the United States during the war. In its net effect the
meeting was a demonstration in favor of censorship.
There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is
under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of
totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy.
Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the
general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working
against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of
monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books,
making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the
encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council, which help the writer
to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war
atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape.
Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a
minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to
him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own
side; that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he's in the right. In
the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of
intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic — political, moral, religious, or aesthetic —
was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the
words of the Revivalist hymn:
Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known
To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a ‘Don't’ at the beginning of each line.
For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the
most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual
integrity. ‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous.
The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by vague economic forces, and at
the same time it is undermined by those who should be its defenders. It is with the second
process that I am concerned here.
Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth
bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing and debating knows them off
backwards. Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or
with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but
with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is
undesirable
and that
intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. Although other aspects of the question
are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at
bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is
the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the
ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers. In saying
this I may seem to be saying that straightforward ‘reportage’ is the only branch of literature
that matters: but I will try to show later that at every literary level, and probably in every one
of the arts, the same issue arises in more or less subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary
to strip away the irrelevancies in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline
versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the
background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his
opinions is always branded as a mere
egoist
. He is accused, that is, of either wanting to shut
himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or
of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege. The
Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest
and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that ‘the truth’ has already been revealed, and that
the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of ‘the truth’ and merely resists it out
of selfish motives. In Communist literature the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked
by oratory about ‘petty-bourgeois individualism’, ‘the illusions of nineteenth-century
liberalism’, etc., and backed up by words of abuse such as ‘romantic’ and ‘sentimental’,
which, since they do not have any agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In this way the
controversy is maneuvered away from its real issue. One can accept, and most enlightened
people would accept, the Communist thesis that pure freedom will only exist in a classless
society, and that one is most nearly free when one is working to bring such a society about.
But slipped in with this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist Party is itself
aiming at the establishment of the classless society, and that in the U.S.S.R. this aim is
actually on the way to being realized. If the first claim is allowed to entail the second, there is
almost no assault on common sense and common decency that cannot be justified. But
meanwhile, the real point has been dodged. Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to
report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts
and feelings. The familiar tirades against ‘escapism’ and ‘individualism’, ‘romanticism’, and
so forth, are merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of history
seem respectable.
Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it
against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent — for they were not of great
importance in England — against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists
and ‘fellow-travelers’. One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of the small English
Communist Party, but there can be no question about the poisonous effect of the Russian
mythos on English intellectual life. Because of it known facts are suppressed and distorted to
such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written.
Let me give just one instance out of the hundreds that could be cited. When Germany
collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet Russians — mostly, no doubt, from
non-political motives — had changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a small
but not negligible portion of the Russian prisoners and displaced persons refused to go back
to the U.S.S.R., and some of them, at least, were repatriated against their will. These facts,
known to many journalists on the spot, went almost unmentioned in the British press, while at
the same time Russophile publicists in England continued to justify the purges and
deportations of 1936-38 by claiming that the U.S.S.R. ‘had no quislings’. The fog of lies and
misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war,
Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any
writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R. — sympathetic, that is, in the
way the Russians themselves would want him to be — does have to acquiesce in deliberate
falsification on important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written
by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It
makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev, Kamenev,
and others. What could be the attitude of even the most intellectually scrupulous Communist
towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that it is an undesirable
document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it were decided to issue a garbled
version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, no
Communist who remained faithful to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this
have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but
that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from the left-wing
intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would
‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are
bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and
into the history books.
The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a
temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to
totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret
police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an
underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged
now
to deal
in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true facts and
will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that this is not the
case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who
believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as
a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created
rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to
keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible,
it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake
was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every
major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of
prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to
lead to outright falsification in societies where
only one opinion
is permissible at any given
moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the
long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of
totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable,
a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and
inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the
real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar
philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set
up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in
everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the
historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it
scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an
historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its
greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to
anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier
for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.
To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay: that
in England the
immediate
enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the
press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of
the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all. It
may seem that all this time I have been talking about the effects of censorship, not on
literature as a whole, but merely on one department of political journalism. Granted that
Soviet Russia constitutes a sort of forbidden area in the British press, granted that issues like
Poland, the Spanish civil war, the Russo-German pact, and so forth, are debarred from serious
discussion, and that if you possess information that conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy
you are expected to either distort it or keep quiet about it — granted all this, why should
literature in the wider sense be affected? Is every writer a politician, and is every book
necessarily a work of straightforward ‘reportage’? Even under the tightest dictatorship,
cannot the individual writer remain free inside his own mind and distill or disguise his
unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will be too stupid to recognize them? And
in any case, if the writer himself is in agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy, why should it
have a cramping effect on him? Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish in
societies in which there are no major conflicts of opinion and no sharp distinction between
the artist and his audience? Does one have to assume that every writer is a rebel, or even that
a writer as such is an exceptional person?
Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims of totalitarianism, one
meets with these arguments in one form or another. They are based on a complete
misunderstanding of what literature is, and how — one should perhaps say why — it comes
into being. They assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack who can
switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ grinder changing tunes.
But after all, how is it that books ever come to be written? Above a quite low level, literature
is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one's contemporaries by recording experience.
And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not much difference between a
mere journalist and the most ‘unpolitical’ imaginative writer. The journalist is unfree, and is
conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him
important news; the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective
feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order
to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he
cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves.
If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. Nor can he
solve the problem by keeping away from controversial topics. There is no such thing as a
genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds,
and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone's consciousness.
Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is
always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden
thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer,
though a poet, at any rate a lyric poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any
totalitarian society that survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that
prose literature, of the kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually
come to an end.
Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed
out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always
inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in
outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the
notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its
highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is
that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on
pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment's
notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one
another, which an English Communist or ‘fellow-traveler’ has had to adopt toward the war
between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a
continuous stew about ‘the horrors of Nazism’ and to twist everything he wrote into a
denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that
Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word ‘Nazi’, at least as far as print
went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news
bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism
was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make
such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at
exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else
suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas
refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch.
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together
like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To
write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one
cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an ‘age of faith’, when the prevailing
orthodoxy has long been established and is not taken too seriously. In that case it would be
possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one's mind to remain unaffected by what one
officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature almost disappeared
during the only age of faith that Europe has ever enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the
Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative prose literature and very little in the way of
historical writing; and the intellectual leaders of society expressed their most serious thoughts
in a dead language which barley altered during a thousand years.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of
schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial:
that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or
fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either
tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the
emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one
does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can
spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes.
Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens —
good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English
intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they
could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of
them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth
reading.
It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its
effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for
a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with,
bureaucrats and other ‘practical’ men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much
interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying — that is, what his poem
‘means’ if translated into prose — is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought
contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than
the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and
associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in
the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. It is therefore fairly
easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering heresies; and even
when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But above all, good verse, unlike good
prose, is not necessarily and individual product. Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or,
on the other hand, very artificial verse forms, can be composed co-operatively by groups of
people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads were originally produced by
individuals, or by the people at large, is disputed; but at any rate they are non-individual in
the sense that they constantly change in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two
versions of a ballad are ever quite the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse
communally. Someone begins to improvise, probably accompanying himself on a musical
instrument, somebody else chips in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down,
and so the process continues until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no
identifiable author.
In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any case,
has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement of being part of a group is actually an
aid to certain kinds of versification. Verse — and perhaps good verse of its own kind, though
it would not be the highest kind — might survive under even the most inquisitorial regime.
Even in a society where liberty and individuality had been extinguished, there would still be a
need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads celebrating victories, or for elaborate
exercises in flattery; and these are the kinds of poems that can be written to order, or
composed communally, without necessarily lacking artistic value. Prose is a different matter,
since the prose writer cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without killing his
inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people who have
adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of
literature. German literature almost disappeared during the Hitler regime, and the case was
not much better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as one can judge by translations, has
deteriorated markedly since the early days of the revolution, though some of the verse
appears to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian novels that it is possible to take
seriously have been translated for about fifteen years. In western Europe and America large
sections of the literary intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or have
been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has produced
extraordinarily few books worth reading. Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems to have a
crushing effect upon certain literary forms, especially the novel. During a period of three
hundred years, how many people have been at once good novelists and good Catholics? The
fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one
ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition. Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age,
and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the
prose writer would have no choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we know it is
the product of rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the
destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian,
the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the future it is possible that a new kind of
literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may arise, but no such
thing is at present imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal culture that we have
lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it.
Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of
reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably
continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is
doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the
need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as
much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and
stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of
low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that
reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of
mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and
propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are
produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically
and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features
are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are
dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped
into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets
commissioned by government departments. Even more machine-like is the production of
short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer
abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a
few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences
of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you
can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and
situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories
automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society
would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even
consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books
would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands
that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of
the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but
anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving
literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.
Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still,
broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against
economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a
secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in
a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the
conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public
do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the
heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too
stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency
comes from the intellectuals themselves.
It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that particular
myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same kind. But at any rate the Russian
myth is there, and the corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly educated men
looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more,
their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical
admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no
importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a
large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers and,
consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects
such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers, on the other hand, are
viciously persecuted. It is true that literary prostitutes like Ilya Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy
are paid huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of any value to the writer as such
— his freedom of expression — is taken away from him. Some, at least, of the English
scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities to be enjoyed by scientists in
Russia are capable of understanding this. But their reflection appears to be: ‘Writers are
persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer.’ They do not see that any attack on
intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every
department of thought.
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in Nazi
Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German scientific
community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most
autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of the lingering-on
of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical
reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you are,
for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist has his function, and can
even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later, when the totalitarian
state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of science, it is
his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a
matter of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers
systematically falsified.
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and architecture, it
is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who
adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of
reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against
‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality
is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a
bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary
creation is impossible, and language itself becomes something totally different from what it is
now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know
only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or
journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union
contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.