When freedom and imagination are threatened, ‘read dangerously’

When Mikhail Bulgakov begins writing his subversive novel, Master and Margarita, In 1928, he knew it would be impossible to publish it in his lifetime. Joseph Stalin was still at the helm of the USSR when he was prescribing the Final Amendment to his wife a few weeks before his death in 1940, and the purges targeted artists, writers, and every dissident. It was eventually published in the 1960s, heavily censored, and the original saw the light of day only after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

In the novel, the devil (Bulgakov calls him Woland) arrives and asks the master, an unnamed writer, why Margarita loves him so much. He answers this because he thinks highly of a novel written about Pontius Pilate. Woland first reprimands him for choosing such a subject “in this day and age” and asks for a copy from him. When the master tells him he burned it on the stove, Woland takes it away, “the manuscript doesn’t burn,” and then asks his assistant, the Behemoth, the cat to give him a copy. Woland gives back his destroyed novel to the master.

As reality mirrors fiction, and in a world where there is a “growing culture of easily insulting”, artists and writers are under attack almost everywhere. Some have had to pay with their lives, some are behind bars for advocating for freedom of expression, and many have been forced into exile. In an essay in February 2002, Salman Rushdie wrote that it is important to oppose “cultural closure”, as the freedom of art and intellect are closely related to the general freedom of society as a whole. For the writers, in particular, the work appears to be cut-throat – they must do everything possible against all odds and even violence to increase freedom and reduce injustice. Rushdie himself is recovering from a vicious stabbing at a literary meeting in New York two weeks ago.

Read: Editorial | the power of words

discussion as resistance

Iranian-American writer Azar Nafisi did one such act of resistance in 1995 when, after being expelled from a university in Iran for refusing to wear the obligatory veil, she selected seven of her best and most committed students and invited them for discussion. Invited home every Thursday. Literature. They read Persian classical literature, such as one thousand and one nightswith western classics, such as pride and Prejudice, madam bovary, Daisy Miller And lolita, he told the experience reading lolita in tehran, published in 2003, when he was forced into exile in the US in 1997. Life in the Islamic Republic was “as fun as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine suddenly gave way to rain and storms. It was unexpected: the regime would go through a cycle of some tolerance, followed by an action.”

As life became difficult for her students, she pushed them into the “other world” of writers. Nafisi turned his attention to the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to behead, Bend Sinister, Ada, Penny, where there is always “the shadow of another world, which can only be attained through imagination”. It is the world, he told them, that restrains Nabokov’s heroes and heroines from utter despair – it becomes his “refuge in a life that is relentlessly cruel”.

nafisi new book, read dangerouslyrevolves around a quartet writing about her life experiences in Iran and America ( Lolita is reading… fantasy republic, And that other world) It is written in the form of long-running letters to his father, beginning in 2016, in the face of a grave threat of authoritarianism in the form of Donald Trump. Wanting to uncover the conflict between the poet and the tyrant, and the precarious place of a writer and reader in an autocratic society, Nafisi traces Plato’s idea to Republicray bradbury Fahrenheit 451 to Salman Rushdie The Satanic Versesand touches on the works of other writers such as Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston who have written extensively on gender, race, and oppression.

foster suspicion

Rushdie posed the question, would we give the enemy the satisfaction of transforming ourselves into his hated, benevolent mirror-image? Like him, Nafisi asks, how do we treat our enemy by either not becoming like him or surrendering to him? She offers to read and write as a form of resistance to all forms of hostility to imagination and ideas. The reading does not necessarily imply direct political action, but it “promotes a mindset that questions and doubts”. Imagination arouses curiosity, she writes, “and it is this curiosity, this restlessness, the desire to know that makes writing and reading so dangerous.” As Rushdie says, democracy can only grow through a clash of ideas and thrive in a difficult market of dissent.