The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy by Daniel Kalder.
A darkly humorous tour of “dictator literature” in the twentieth century, featuring the soul-killing prose and poetry of Hitler, Mao, and many more, which shows how books have sometimes shaped the world for the worse.
Since the days of the Roman Empire dictators have written books. But in the twentieth-century despots enjoyed unprecedented print runs to (literally) captive audiences. The titans of the genre – Stalin, Mussolini, and Khomeini among them – produced theoretical works, spiritual manifestos, poetry, memoirs, and even the occasional romance novel and established a literary tradition of boundless tedium that continues to this day.
How did the production of literature become central to the running of regimes? What do these books reveal about the dictatorial soul? And how can books and literacy, most often viewed as inherently positive, cause immense and lasting harm? Putting daunting research to revelatory use, Daniel Kalder asks and brilliantly answers these questions.
The chapter Turkmenistan: Post-Everything focuses on The Rukhnama, or “Book of the Soul”, central to Turkmenbashi’s cult and goes into Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov’s books that made the people realize that “they were still strapped to Kafka’s writing machine, that there was no escape from the prison house of (dictator) language, and that nowhere on earth was the tradition begun by Lenin more enduring”.
On the Rukhnama:
It was a hugely ambitious project, perhaps the most ambitious of all dictator books. Rather than take a preexisting theory and explain it, Turkmenbashi conjured something new out of everything he saw lying around that he felt he could use, and not only that but he did it while running a totalitarian state. In addition, he followed the Rukhnama with a sequel while also cranking out book of poetry and history. In all this, Turkmenbashi was striving to create not merely an ideology but a new history, a new mythology for this nation: by means of long discourses on Turkic clans, a child’s take on religion and history, a sheer narcissism, he sought to restore dignity to the desert people who has been colonized by the Russians and stripped of their culture by the Soviets. It would have been a monumental task for a very great author, but Turkmenbashi was not even a mediocre author. He was a very, very bad one. With the Rukhnama, he aimed for the starts but ended up in the landfill.
