The Cold War and the battle of the books

In The Battle of In The Battle of the Books (1704) Jonathan Swift satirised the current “quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” by dramatising it as quasi-military combat between books animated by the spirits of their authors, and fought on the premises of the venerated St James’s library. “In these books”, asserts the narrator, “is wonderfully instilled and preserved the spirit of each warrior, while he is alive; and after his death his soul transmigrates there to inform them” (1933: 545). Duncan White begins his book on literature from the time of the Cold War by invoking a similarly outlandish incident, which, however, was no literary fiction: in 1955 CIA agents penetrated the Iron Curtain by sending balloons loaded with copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm from the territory of West Germany to Poland. However bizarre the idea may seem from the twentyfirst century vantage point, the episode effectively illustrates the tangible power that writers wielded, whether for good or ill, during several decades of twentieth-century history1. This was a phenomenon which, White claims, is unlikely to be repeated. As Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal write, “[t]he Cultural Cold War” is a “well established research area” (2012: 4). Duncan White contributes to it in his dual capacity as a historian and a literary scholar. Educated in England, he moved to the United States where he is currently Assistant Director in the History and Literature Department at Harvard University, his special interest being the Cold War. His first book-length study was devoted to the Russian émigré writer Nabokov, Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace (2017). White’s most recent monumental work, Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold