From Arben Borshi
Memorie.al / At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, a new literary movement emerged, called ‘VERIZMI’ (in English: ‘Realism’ or ‘Truthfulness’). This new literary movement had its most notable representative in Italy, Giovanni Verga, who was inspired by the French writers Alexandre Dumas, father and son. “Nedda” is the first story in Verga’s narrative (I Malavoglia, Mastro don Gesualdo, etc., are stories that continue to fill Verga’s creativity), where the tragedy that follows this girl over the years reflects the miserable reality of the poor classes. Verga uses a direct language, without embellishments and rhetoric, focusing mainly on transmitting and reflecting the tragic truth. Thus, the narrative of “Verizmi” is that of a literary movement that has as a condition the faithful and uncompromised telling of reality.
Of course, until the period before the invention of the radio apparatus by Guglielmo Marconi, the book (the press!) was the conduit of thought and the formation of people’s consciousness, thus influencing society. Through books, novels, poetry, Man was informed about events, adventures, places, feelings, etc., thus influencing his education.
Even after the invention of the radio, and later the television, reading remained the most effective means of addressing human consciousness, even though recently, social media and especially bombarding media with “fluff” television programs have been encroaching on this terrain!
Therefore, the importance of the writer in addressing social themes remains primary, just as significant as it was 100 years ago when the leader of the Soviet Revolution, Lenin, in his speeches, would declare that “Writers are the architects of the spirit of the Revolution,” and he would add about art in general: “Art is the most efficient means to disseminate the party’s message!”
In his writings, he often puts forward the idea that the importance of intellectuals in general, and that of writers in particular in building class consciousness, is the fundamental subject of the ideological formation of the revolutionary party. Essentially, Lenin was convinced that culture and literature were not aesthetic or recreational phenomena of the moment, but very important instruments of ideological education and mass mobilization. (I add: ideological indoctrination).
In conclusion, the influence of the writer in particular, and that of art in general, in the service of communist ideology, led to the transformation (I call it degeneration) of human society, thus contributing to the brainwashing of the masses with the creation of a new way of thinking: creating the New Man! In relation to this being, there is a pamphlet by the dissident writer and Nobel Prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, titled: “THE NEW MAN.”
After the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and several other stories that would make him known on the international stage, Solzhenitsyn dedicated himself to novels and essential narrative cycles. In the 1990s, after almost 20 years of staying in the USA, following a permanent exile imposed on him by the Soviet Communist Party in 1974, the dissident writer dedicated himself to the short form of narrative (let us remember that the novel “The Gulag Archipelago,” with which he won the Nobel Prize, has about 1400 pages!).
The protagonists of the four stories compiled in the book titled “The New Man” live in the 1920s. They are characters who, starting from the ideological indoctrination they have undergone, believe that with enthusiasm and ideological dedication, they will build the “New World” and the “New Man,” as an implementation of the project of the Marxist doctrine and Soviet communist propaganda.
The first story speaks of a strict professor in his subject (Anatoly Pavlovich Vozdvizhensky, an engineer and associate professor at the Faculty of Bridge Construction) and an incapable student (Konoplyov), who benefits from the conditions of the police policy and builds a career. This mediocre and incompetent student, in the role of an investigator, forces the professor to abandon his rigorous educational method as an associate professor, compelling him to become a spy on his friends and colleagues.
Nastenka, the daughter of the epidemiologist, grew up in an intellectual environment facing internment. Surrounded by the books of her father’s library, she managed to form her beliefs about the reality of the vigilance of the October Revolution when she was a newly accepted student at the Moscow Lyceum. However, her father’s transfer to the province of Rostov interrupted her studies at the lyceum at the age of 16, leaving her one year short of completing her schooling. Suddenly, Shurka Gen, a young enthusiast of communist ideas, entered her life, who immediately became the chairman of the literary course, “Komsorg”!
In his speeches to the group he led, he expressed: “Our ideological antipodes have not fallen asleep. The comrades of our path are the literati, who were our former enemies and will be tomorrow’s dead; they are reactionaries who deliberately distort and slander the revolution, and the more talent they have, the more dangerous they are! Literature is not a garden of pleasures, but a battlefield!
And all these traitors will be subjected forcefully to the proletariat’s literature, or they will be swept away by the iron broom! No reconciliation will be possible! And we, all young people, sons and daughters of the October Revolution, must contribute to forming a single communist line in literature!… In general, they cannot be our companions on the path; either you are our ally, or you are our enemy!”…
After the Revolution, not only will new words need to be introduced into the vocabulary and a new alphabet, but also the previous punctuation marks will become disgusting!
The third story speaks of two young women: one is a victim of ideological violence, forced to adapt in order to survive and gain material benefits, while the other symbolizes heroism and the self-sacrifice of a teacher (Anastasija Dimitrievna), who seeks to instill in her students the values of universal and eternal morality, despite the fact that Soviet educational programs contradict these values. But she continues her conscious path, knowing that she will lose the battle with the Soviet monster.
The fourth story presents a lost and hopeless character. He is a young villager, the child of a kulak family, who, suffering from hunger in the internment camp, addresses the “Great Writer” with a plea for concrete help. The regime’s writer, this “engineer of human consciousness,” limits himself to a valuation of the freshness of the letter, using a “popular” vocabulary, and promises that in the next novel, he will use some fragment of his work. This is also the peak of the abyss of human morality.
Therefore, returning to the theme of ‘socialist realism’, the truth is that this literary movement is the opposite of the meaning of words. Just as the “Father of the October Revolution” himself emphasizes, the regime’s writers of socialist realism faithfully served the criminal communist party, becoming the main lever for the brainwashing of the masses and the dissemination of deceptive propaganda.
For almost half a century, the ideological bombardment through socialist realism caused a psychological trauma in a significant portion of the population (it should be noted that literacy was a widespread phenomenon in the Albanian population after World War II, and this created extraordinary ease for the spread of brother-killing ideologies and hatred through socialist realism!), and this fact greatly favored the formation of the “new man”!
If we agree, and I believe no one who can distinguish good from evil will object, that the communist regime was merely a criminal terrorist regime, then those who served it with devotion and will cannot be excluded from this criminal framework. Nor can the devilish or childish justifications, such as “we were young, or the conditions were such, or we were forced,” justify these zealous collaborators in crime! Because crime is not just damage or physical annihilation!
An even more serious crime is the deformation of people’s consciousness by the brother-killing doctrine of Marxism-Leninism and class warfare. Even Adolf Eichmann declared himself “innocent” in the famous trial in Jerusalem, before the court. “I executed the orders of my superiors; with my own hands, I did not touch anyone,” Eichmann declared before the court. Nevertheless, his involvement in the holocaust of the Jews was not abstract, theoretical, and the judges dismissed this banal justification with compelling facts, condemning him to hang! From this event, Hannah Arendt’s book: The Banality of Evil was born!
A gun kills one, two, ten or more people! A pen in the hand of a writer of a criminal regime kills hundreds of thousands of human consciences! Therefore, the shared guilt of all those who willingly and zealously served the criminal communist regime has never been and is not abstract, merely theoretical. Even the mere act of consciously supporting or spreading deceptive propaganda constitutes a crime. And I, along with many like me who experienced the inquisitorial period of socialist realism, are living witnesses to this tragedy of biblical proportions of brainwashing.
Even today, despite 35 years having passed since the collapse of the evil empire, the distorted way of perceiving reality, as an effect of ideological intoxication with socialist realism, is still present in Albanian society. Moreover, no one, especially not the relevant departments, takes clarifying steps regarding this criminal ideology. On the contrary, the same authors who aided the communist crime with their toxic writings and their heirs continue to be promoted, especially in educational programs!
It is enough to observe the race towards the cult of the individual and the division of the population into “Us” and “Them,” as well as the language of hatred that flows from the mouths of these individuals who hold “power” in their hands, to understand how present the anti-morality of socialist realism is… unfortunately! There is a meaningful phrase in the famous novel by Czech writer Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”:
“Whoever thinks that the communist regimes of Central Europe were the exclusive work of criminals denies a fundamental truth: criminal regimes were not created by criminals, but by enthusiasts, convinced that they had discovered the only path leading to paradise. They courageously defended this path, executing many individuals for it. Subsequently, it became clear to them that paradise did not exist and that these enthusiasts were merely murderers.
Then everyone began to attack the communists: you are responsible for this tragedy of the country (impoverished and reduced to ruins), you are responsible for the loss of independence (having fallen under the yoke of Russia), you are murderers! Those accused responded: We didn’t know! We were deceived! We believed! Deep down in our conscience, we are innocent!”
But the discussion ultimately reduced itself to this question: Did they really not know? Or are they just pretending that they didn’t know?! Memorie.al
