Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Censorship in Twentieth-Century Literature - J. M. Coetzee (essay date 1996)

J. M. Coetzee (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: Coetzee, J. M. “Zbigniew Herbert and the Figure of the Censor.” In Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, pp. 147-62. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Coetzee considers how censorship by the Communist Party has informed and shaped the poetry of Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert.]

Under pressure at the 1934 Soviet Writers' Congress to embrace socialist realism, Isaac Babel announced that he would prefer to practice “the genre of silence.”¹ As a form of resistance to ideological prescription, the genre of silence was obdurately followed by a handful of Russia's leading writers. Widely interpreted as a refusal to accommodate their art to the demands of the state, their silence had an enduring moral and even political impact.

Until Stalin's death in 1953, and for a few years thereafter, writers in the Soviet Union and its satellite states had...

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