Plato and art censorship (fwd)

[Daniel Rancour-Laferriere]

21 Nov 99

My, aren't we all touchy about censorship!

And a good thing, too.  All civilized people should be concerned about that
ever-present danger in the public media.  No doubt some censorship still
exists to this day in Russia (Thobe).  But can today's level of censorship
be compared to the level which existed up until the late 1980s?  Today in
Russia you can read most of what Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn wrote, for
example.  But back then you could only read bits and pieces (excluding
samizdat of course).

The "Russian thing."  Here I said censorship was a "Russian thing."  What I
should have said was that censorship was a "Russian thing" AND a "Marxist
thing."  One does not exclude the other.  I had a similar problem back when
I published _The Slave Soul of Russia_ (NYU Press, 1995).  People got the
idea that, just because moral masochism is common in Russia, it is not
elsewhere.  Not so.

Perhaps censorship has been more common in Russia than, say, in the US.  In
this respect it may be more of a "Russian thing" than an "American thing."
But we do have plenty of examples of censorship in America - e.g., "banned
in Boston."  Prof Levin correctly notes that Tolstoy's _Kreutzer Sonata_
had some difficulties in the US.  But of course it had problems in Russia
too.  It could not be published at all in 1889, when it was finished, so it
was circulated illegally in lithographed and other forms.  Not until Sofiia
Andreevna had a talk with the tsar and agreed to tone down some passages
was it allowed to be published in Russia.  One of the things that  this
devoted wife got rid of, by the way, was her husband's offensive statement
that wives are just like prostitutes, since they accept money for the
sexual services they perform (see my _Tolstoy on the Couch_, Macmillan-NYU
Press, 1998 for more juicy, uncensored details).  And by the way, if there
is not a strong tendency toward censorship in Russia, then why is it that
the autobiography of the most important woman in Tolstoy's life has yet to
be published there?

Collegial greetings,

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere


At 11:30 AM 11/19/99 -0500, you wrote:
>  Adassovsky Georges wrote:
>
>>I don't agree. Of course some form of censorship existed in Tsarist Russia,
>>it was the same sort of censorship that existed in any nation in Europe at
>>the same time, and it have nothing to compare with the Soviet censorship,
>>that was worse while all other nations were in progress.
>>I can give you a lot of writtings that passed the tsarist censorship, and
>>that would never had passed the Soviet censorship.
>
>Exactly!  The tsarist censor passed Das Kapital, and maybe Darwin, for all I
>know.  And didn't the Police Commissioner of New York--Teddy Roosevelt--try
>to censor The Kreutzer Sonata when it arrived (from England?).
>
>Jules F. Levin
>Professor of Linguistics and Russian
>University of California, Riverside
>JFLEVIN at UCRAC1.UCR.EDU
>