The horror of dictator literature

The horror of dictator literature

Posted on September 9th, 2009 by Daniel Kalder

From Vladimir Lenin to Adolph Hitler, from Enver Hoxha to Saparmurat Turkmenbashi, many a tyrant has picked up the pen to share his thoughts with us, resulting in a peculiar category of books which for brevity’s sake I shall call Dic Lit. Of course just as all tyrants are individuals, so these tomes vary wildly in their content. Some are theoretical works, others spiritual manifestos, while still others are memoirs. Kim Jong Il of North Korea has even tried his hand at opera criticism.

I am fascinated by this genre. Tyrants experience incredible things, and are eyewitnesses to events of which other authors only feign understanding. They hold the power of life and death in their hands and frequently live like small gods — for as long as they can get away with it, anyway. With all this power and unique knowledge the dictator of even a relatively rubbish country should thus be in a position to write an excellent or at least interesting book. And yet the results are almost always pitiful. Indeed, Dic Lit is usually impossible to read unless some form of compulsion is involved (and it always is). To understand why, it is perhaps best to turn to Bukowski who in his otherwise rotten book Women offered the following insight:

‘There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium number of copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold very few copies, the writer thought he was great. If what the writer wrote was never published and he didn’t have the money to publish it himself, then he thought he was truly great.’

Hitch that type of delusional egotism to the megalomania and lack of self-knowledge required to act like God Almighty, and then disconnect it from any restraints editors, critics or even an audience might place upon you. The result? The horror that is Dic Lit.

The phenomenon of the dictator-author raises a lot of questions. Why do these tyrants, who already have armies of crawlers and arse-lickers hanging on their every utterance, feel the need to inflict their dire prose on their subjects also? Is it not enough that they control the destinies of millions? Evidently not. What then is the purpose of these books? An expression of the needs of a monstrous, insatiable ego of truly metaphysical proportions? Fulfilling the frustrated aesthetic dreams of youth? A need to compete with his predecessors (‘Lenin was a universal genius, so I’d better be one too…’) A serious urge to enlighten mankind? A crying out in the existential wilderness of an isolated soul? Or simply the old chestnut ‘we’ve all got one book in us’ gone wild?

Mind you, many a democratically elected leader has foisted his or her dreadful prose on the rest of us also. In the end the answers may not be all that different from the reasons the rest of us write. And yet tyrant authors unquestionably enjoy major advantages over the rest of us lowly toilers at the typeface. Directly or indirectly they control the printing presses and the publishing houses, and something even more valuable — the lives and souls of their publishers. Then of course they enjoy a literally captive audience of millions: they can force kids to read their books at school, or sit exams on their ideas at university. They are guaranteed astronomical print runs and countless awards. Their books will be printed in many foreign languages — either by sycophants within the system, or foreign companies looking for influence, as happened with Turkmenbashi’s notorious Ruhnama.

In short, it’s great when you’re a dictator-author. And yet in spite of all these advantages, posterity is invariably less kind. Once a tyrant dies and the pain of death, excommunication, jail or a life spent cleaning toilets for those who dare criticize him vanishes, his books as a rule languish unread, bar one or two exceptions — Mein Kampf still does a roaring trade in certain markets, I’m told. These dead books remind me of Shelley’s famous sonnet, Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

But rather than sit in a desert, the ruins of Dic Lit haunt unseen bookshelves, where they stand abandoned, unread, gathering dust. Even so, they offer the same moral lesson, the same proof, if proof were needed, that man’s dream of eternal earthly glory is futile.

Having been haunted by the thought of these lost books for some time now, and intrigued by their reported awfulness, I recently embarked on a reading project dedicated to uncovering a few of these sand-swept wrecks. I consider it archaeology, an act of literary excavation. From time to time I’m going to report back on some of my more curious finds. My first dispatch is here. Are there any pleasures left to be extracted from these dismal volumes? Or are the literary crimes against humanity of Dic Lit best left forgotten? I suspect the latter, but I’m going to keep reading anyway, choking down as much dictator prose as I can, until I go mad from boredom, my eyeballs start bleeding, or I find another channel for my obsession with the transcendentally bad — whichever comes first.

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Daniel Kalder

Daniel Kalder is an author and journalist originally from Scotland, who currently resides in Texas after a ten year stint in the former USSR. Visit him online at www.danielkalder.com