David Caute's wide-ranging study examines how outstanding
novelists of the Cold War era conveyed the major issues of
contemporary politics and history. In the United States and Western
Europe the political novel flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, the
crisis years of economic depression, fascism, the Spanish Civil
War, the consolidation of Stalinism, and the Second World War.
Starting with the high hopes generated by the Spanish Civil War,
Caute then explores the "god that failed" pessimism that overtook
the Western political novel in the 1940s. The writers under
scrutiny include Hemingway, Dos Passos, Orwell, Koestler, Malraux,
Serge, Greene, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Strikingly diff erent
approaches to the burning issues of the time are found among
orthodox Soviet novelists such as Sholokhov, Fadeyev, Kochetov, and
Pavlenko. Soviet official culture continued to choke on modernism,
formalism, satire, and allegory.
In Russia and Eastern Europe dissident novelists offered
contesting voices as they engaged in the fraught re-telling of life
under Stalinism. Studies of Pasternak, Grossman, Chukovskaya, Wolf,
Johnson, Kundera, and Vladimov lead on to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
viewed as a uniquely gifted critic of the Soviet system. A sequence
of thematic commentaries compare Western and Soviet fictional
responses to the Moscow trials, terror, forced labor, and the
nature of totalitarianism. The figures of Stalin and Lenin are
shown to have fascinated novelists.
The emergence of the New Left in the 1960s generated a new wave
of fiction challenging America's global stance. Mailer, Doctorow,
and Coover brought fresh literary sensibilities to bear on such
iconic events as the 1967 siege of the Pentagon and the execution
of the Rosenbergs.
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