How the Gramophone plays the World Revolution

Literature is a matter of attitude. You start writing when all you have to share simply don't let you sleep, is like a permanent tick in your head - probably the sound of ideas talking with themselves. After writing, it comes the evaluation: they are good books, bad books, isharing nteresting or nil ideas. In some of them you could guess is the outcome more of a creative writing than of creative thinking.

As is already said thousands of time, people with ideas "from the other side of the Iron Curtain" faced censorship, needed to distort reality, to write about dictatorships and proletarians etc. Czeslaw Milosz in the "Captive Mind" outlined that the intellectuals developed the strategy of "Ketman" (a Persian term, brought to the attention of Western Europe by ArthurGobineau, in his quality of former French diplomat in Tehran, in "Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia") as a cryptic language to express their real thoughts in a covert way.

From the stylistic point of view, the question is how you can address those unhealthy years, without diminishing the weight, avoiding the kitsch and a pathetic tone. One successful solution is black suprarealist humour. Bora Cosic's My Family's Role in the World Revolution is the story of the first years of the Titoist Yougoslavia and the overwhelming success the author wasn't publised for a good couple of years. The world is described through the eyes of a kid and you could give him the advantage of naivity. But it is a grotesque naivity of the naive paintings. One of his colleagues in school is said counted him: "In Russia all they build communist laughing" (Also a remark about Russia : "I've heard in Russia everybody are writing poetry. Thereafter, some of them are killed"). And rarely you could stop laughing and laughing. And you know they were people killed, destinies destroyed, but you cannot stop laughing because everything was so absurd and lacking any logical explanation that you continue your nervous laughing by the end of the book. It's an after game. Dictators are always afraid of laughs.