Oh Native Land! Bu-Bu-Bu, Miaow, Miaow

By Mosby Woods

"SOVIET PROSECUTOR: Please don't lecture us on literature."

The writing style of dissident Abram Tertz, informed by select literary traditions, took an "insincere" or "excessive" approach to reality that allowed truth to evade a culture of lies.

The Stalinist mustache of permission hovers. Gatekeepers require writers to serve the Communist purpose, a doctrine of art codified as Socialist Realism. Tertz famously wrote,

". . . I put my hope in a phantasmagoric art, with hypotheses instead of a Purpose, …May the fantastic imagery of Hoffmann and Dostoevsky, of Goya, Chagall, and Mayakovsky. . . teach us how to be truthful with the aid of the absurd and the fantastic."

Why important: Tertz' time had communist Purpose. Our time (USA, circa 2021) has a late progressive Purpose, with decreasing tolerance for competing opinions. Fiction writers seeking to tell the truth today could benefit from examining Tertz's defiance of Socialist Realism. This won't help writers today acquiring permission from gatekeepers. Young staff of publishers will continue to cry and walk out when confronted with a galley-proof of dissent; publishers will continue to cave to the Mustache.

But as Tertz example shows, writers who seek to tell the truth do not need permission from the overseeing Mustache.

 

Illustrated

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mosby Woods
• Release date: Apr 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223660385

Book preview

Table of Contents

Oh Native Land! | Bu-Bu-Bu, | Miaow, Miaow | MOSBY WOODS

Oh Native Land!

Bu-Bu-Bu,

Miaow, Miaow

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MOSBY WOODS

Copyright © 2022 Mosby Woods

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9798223660385

Cover and interior art

copyright © 2023 Mosby Woods

Mosby Woods generated these images in part with DALL-E, OpenAI’s art-generation model. Mosby Woods prompted, reviewed and selected the art, and takes responsibility for the images.

MGC

Morris Gordon Cheats Press

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PROSECUTOR:

Please don’t lecture us on literature.[1]

Oh Native Land!  Bu-Bu-Bu, Miaow, Miaow

Set in Moscow just days before Stalin’s death, the novella The Trial Begins (1960) describes the private lives of a prosecutor’s family as it blunders toward destruction. The narrator is a character too, visited by a phantasm he calls the Master, who bids the narrator to exalt the prosecutor.

This means the mission is consistent with Soviet purpose-driven art, Socialist Realism.

The extraordinary 1966 Soviet trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and Yuri Daniel helped mark the end of the Khrushchev Thaw. It includes literary exchanges... Are the views of the first person narrator Sinyavsky’s views?

SINYAVSKY: The I in the story is neither Sinyavsky nor Tertz; he is the fictitious author, whose mood is one