When Language Becomes a Weapon Rather than an Art

The author, who does use language as art!

I recently read A Gentleman in Moscow, a very good book. I enjoyed the romance and the humor, the thrilling climax as well as the book's many reflections on the human condition.

I read a review that complained that the book didn't tackle/discuss Stalin's horrific policies more. I think the reviewer missed the point. The book is about a good, somewhat flawed but otherwise upstanding, decent, and insightful man being steadily constricted not only by house arrest but by the culture in which he lives. It isn't always dramatic. It is absolutely chilling, especially since it brings to mind current attitudes in American culture, including attempts to corral language. Though the legal authority is quite different, the theoretical claims for this corralling are quite similar. 

1. The removal of wine labels because they denote class--the mere idea of class threatens the people in charge. (Hilariously enough, the wine labels are later restored because even Communists can be wine experts.)
2. The mandated ban of the Count's honorifics--because they denote aristocracy--even by people who wish to use the terms.
3. The use of "Comrade" as a bland pronoun that means nothing--the supposition that "Comrade" will produce a leveling effect (it doesn't work).
4. The insidious bullying by which incompetent, unpleasant people get positions because of whom they know, not because of their skill.
5. The derision of skill, intelligence, experience, and the past.
6. The exile of a young man because he had a single picture of Tsar Nicholas in his apartment that he'd forgotten about. The badgering pettiness of the authorities that leads to the constant searches, which fail, initially, to turn up any sign of "sin."
7. The censure of the person who hired the young man to play for his orchestra: guilt by association.
8. The greed, self-aggrandizement, of the hierarchy masking itself as generosity: all the high-end furniture that the party officials sit on supposedly belongs to the "people".
9. The fear of an audience in a theater to clap because a party official is displeased by a historical-drama, and the addendum that a toadying literary critic is able to get attention because he condemns the historical-drama for its retroactive, old-fashioned, decadent themes, yadda yadda yadda.
10. A party member who loves literature being forced to remove a single line from a letter by Chekhov that praises bread in Berlin--that is, violates current acceptable political thought. 
11. The disappearance, almost erasure, of Sofia's mother and father into the chasm of a labour camp. They disappear from all records--the Count is the only one left with stories. The record is rewritten as if they never existed.
12. The mind-numbing rules of the Bishop (who is rather like Shakespeare's Malvolio), from his lack of humor to his compiling of petty infractions, from his self-absorbed constant feelings of personal offense, which feelings utterly define him, to his literal and egotistical interpretations of statements and beliefs.

It's horror literature in some ways, a creeping manifestation of what happens when people determine that language controls thought; therefore, the "good" people should control language. The end result is a lack of art and poetry--all the wonder that accompanies people who are trying their best to communicate in what they fully acknowledge to be ambiguous, imperfect words. It is erasure not only of the past but of passionate attempts to experiment with ideas and images in the present. It is a world where all is streamlined and corrected. There is one answer to every problem. Detractors aren't allowed. Imagination is squelched. Bodies are physically altered and controlled--turned into literal manifestations of belief--rather than freed through imagination and art.

However self-contained the Count's world before his incarceration, his greatness of heart and thought, as well as the expansiveness of his education, make him a better, more artistic, and wiser man than his revilers--even as he simply desires that they leave him, his family, and his friends alone.