/lit/ - Literature

>>5830

Do ye have an example, Captain?

Was going to suggest "We" by Zamyantin. The more I think about it though, the more it seems based on western ideas about efficiency driven to the ultimate.

I'm sure it struck people in the fifties as somehow being all about communism.

Anyway, we seem to be drawing a blank. I'd love to see something like one of L. Neil Smith's novels done in that vein.

I'll poke around for some suggestions, but I've never read anything like this done in a positive light.

>>5836

Thank you

Also it's my impression too, that nothing like this exists…

Two suggestions I have to pass on. I am unable to vouch for them myself, though I trust the sources with whom I have had success in the past.

"Red Star" by Alexander Bogdanov. Red though Mars be, Earth is given the opportunity to verify that reality through the eyes of one scientist of the glorious revolution.

It sounds to me like something of a mild crossover between Edgar Rice Burroughs and Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Next, "Cancer Ward" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Unlike the previous this one is both strongly negative and hugely allegorical. It's a 1960's view of 1950's Soviet society, shown through the microcosm of a group of patients and their terrifying battles to survive. Ain't pretty, but this one has high praise in terms of literary value.

brave new world has some aspects of that.

in fact despite the very consumeristic society it depicts, now that i think about it every character seem to work for the state in a way or another and i would not be surprised if every kind of production is state owned.

isn't 1984 about that?

>>5915

>>5916

This is a point I think OP should weigh in on. It seems to me that unless a dystopian novel is explicitly non-communist (normally fascist), that most any dystopian story with an authoritarian government will seem communist, or at least influenced by communism.

So OP, does 1984 count?

>>5919

It does and it doesn't.

It looks like communism, has it's aspects, but for example the Big Brother isn't called "Comrade Something", the characters doesn't call each other comrade, there are no red flags and stuff like this…

/pol/ suggested 1984 as well, but I want to know if there are novels which have actual communism in an alternative past or in a futuristic setting.

Like, how I said before, C.J. Sansom's Dominion. It is set in a fictional '60's, where the UK made a treaty with the Nazis, and the Nazis won WWII, and the UK became a dominion.

>>5920

well the movement is called english socialism.

and you don't need to read further than animal farm or homage to calalunya to know that Orwell did not mean nationalsocialism.

>>5920

You might try something by Vasily Grossman or Victor Serge. I don't think either of them wrote a novel about world-conquering communism (though I haven't read all of them), But both of them wrote about some really powerful stories about real-world communism, so it might be worth checking out.

>>5922

>>5921

Gonna check out those, thank you

>>5988

That doesn't interest me, but thank you as well

>>6300

>>6300

>Sadly it is only available in Hungarian, and you have to be Hungarian to understand all of it, I think…

i know that feel…

btw. i don't know about burgers but this

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_ragazzi_della_via_P%C3%A1l

is a famous novel in my country too.

"Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford

>>6675

interesting

>>6321

This sounds cool, gonna check it out

Communism and totalitarian state that declares itself building a communist society are quite different things, and stupid posters, including some tripfaggot, don't even understand the triple vagueness of the discussion.

If you talk about official Soviet literature, you have rows and rows of dull gray socialist realism books written by authors that were “grown” by publishing bureaucracy. Of course, there were a number of talents who were not in conflict with political power, and temporary hideouts like children books, translations or historical fiction for others, but even in 70s and 80s printing presses were loaded with the same workers, engineers, farmers, policemen and bureaucrats either working hard in peacetime or fighting in the war that Nabokov ridiculed in 20s and 30s (aforementioned story of a teenager in pre- and post-revolutionary Russia was a cliche copied to death). I can't find the exact article, but he elaborated on that in “Russian Writers, Censors and Readers” from lectures on Russian literature. I don't know for sure if it's an accident that his 1958 talk shares some ideas with 1957 work “On Socialist Realism” published under pseudonym on the West by Andrei Sinyavski (of 1966 Sinyavski-Daniel trial fame).

If you want dark realistic picture, read dissidents, pre-war, like Solonevich, and post-war, like Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov. Or Brodsky, for less cannibalistic times. Or journalistic accounts on Soviet state, like “Nomenklatura”. Or any classical dystopias, as dystopia is what you get when you try to create utopia in real life by force.

And for developments in communist utopia department, read top Soviet Asimovian polemics authors, most notably Strugatsky brothers. In various novels, they made simple outstretches of contemporary Soviet life to near future and also mocked it, praised the global peace and progress in Noon Universe society and also subverted its power to bring progress to other civilizations, and generally twisted the idea in many possible ways. Scientific background and talent for writing make their books “simply a good hardcore Asimovian polemics” if you prefer not to see the hints and censorship-evading maneuvers pointing to bigger ideas being discussed.