The variety of titles, including Russian-language books by Soviet émigrés and defectors, was seductive, almost overpowering.” (3) His appraisal is an honest discovery by someone who is privileged by a doctrinal and totalitarian ideological zest for coercion. If I had been allowed, I would have spent all my time in them. As a vivid example of what Bradbury has in mind, let us consider how Shevchenko describes his discovery of bookstores in one of his diplomatic forays to New York: “But for me, the crown, the jewel, of the great city was its bookstores. The great confusion that has been propagated by most commentators of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is to neglect that he wrote the novel in 1950, precisely as a vivid commentary on Stalin’s communist Soviet Union. After I had lived that kind of life for years, I began to see Dorian Gray’s real picture in my shaving mirror. I pretended to believe what I did not, and to place the interests of the Party and the state above my own, when in fact I did just the opposite. I tried to remember everything I ever said, and what others had told me, because my survival and success depended greatly upon that. The gulf between what was said and what was done was oppressive, but more oppressive still was what I had to do to widen the gap.
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While criticizing the bourgeois way of life, its only passion was to possess it while condemning consumerism as a manifestation of philistine psychology, a result of poisonous Western influence, the privileged valued above all else the consumer goods and comforts of the West. So I had become part of the stratum that tried to portray itself as fighting what it coveted. In terms of the moral double-dealing that these systems of terror thrive on, consider what Arkady Shevchenko, United Nations Under Secretary General and former advisor to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, wrote after his much-publicized defection to the United States in 1978: If there was ever a type of government that succinctly and successfully institutionalized mass schizophrenia, clearly we do not need to look further than the twin murderous ideologies of the Twentieth Century: Communism and Nazism. In many respects, the film as well as the novel, are studies of a type of human temperament that revolves around an anti-humanism that prides itself in destruction. (1)įahrenheit 451 is much more than an allegory of the future, and the dangers that lurk for modern man. It is difficult to imagine a greater realism than this depiction of the double morality - the duplicity forced on its citizens by totalitarian systems. This drab and socially engineered reality is beautifully contrasted with the imaginative ways in which readers hide their books: one rests in a ceiling lamp, more are found in a hollowed out television set, and others in the tight confines of a heater.
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When the firemen, that is, the book burners, arrive at a high-rise with orders to burn books we are immediately struck by the stark and vulgar aesthetics of the buildings that are so typical in totalitarian countries - globs of spiritless, unimaginative, state-commissioned modernism. The premise is simple: talk becomes the natural medium in an illiterate state.
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François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) begins with a striking narration of the film’s credits.