Paradise Lost Explained: How John Milton Wrote His Epic Religious Poem from Satan’s Perspective

Par­adise Lost is one of the books which the read­er admires and lays down, and for­gets to take up again,” Samuel John­son wrote in the late eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry. “None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a plea­sure. We read Mil­ton for instruc­tion, retire harassed and over­bur­dened, and look else­where for recre­ation; we desert our mas­ter, and seek for com­pan­ions.” These near­ly two and a half cen­turies lat­er, how many of us attempt to seek out the instruc­tion of Mil­ton in the first place? What was a lit­er­ary hit in 1667 has become a work read most­ly by spe­cial­ist schol­ars — but will, per­haps, become a favorite among view­ers of the YouTube chan­nel Hochela­ga thanks to its new video above.

The first thing to know about Mil­ton’s epic poem, says Hochela­ga host Tom­mie Trelawny, is that it “tells the sto­ry of the Bib­li­cal fall of man — but, curi­ous­ly, from Satan’s per­spec­tive.” Even if it’s nev­er occurred to you to set eyes on Par­adise Lost, you’ve almost cer­tain­ly heard one of Satan’s most mem­o­rable dec­la­ra­tions: “Bet­ter to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.”

There’s a decent chance you’ve also run across anoth­er, “The mind is its own place, and in it self. Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” per­haps with­out know­ing which char­ac­ter speaks it. But if you hear enough of his quotable quotes, you might start to think that this Satan fel­low makes some good points after all.

Par­adise Lost had a sim­i­lar effect on some of its God-fear­ing ear­ly read­ers, who sus­pi­cious­ly start­ed to won­der whose side Mil­ton was real­ly on. What the poem seems to glo­ri­fy, when read today, isn’t Satan, and it’s not even so much God or man as lan­guage itself. Now as then, Mil­ton’s baroque gram­mar and heav­i­ly Lati­nate vocab­u­lary con­sti­tut­ed a good por­tion of both the work’s chal­lenge and its appeal. Equal­ly notable is his obvi­ous con­vic­tion that lan­guage is up to the task of address­ing the most fun­da­men­tal truths, ques­tions, and con­tra­dic­tions of exis­tence. Satan may not emerge vic­to­ri­ous — and cer­tain­ly does­n’t at the end of the sequel, Par­adise Regained — but if he hap­pens to have the best lines, that just reflects our greater, and thor­ough­ly human, fas­ci­na­tion with the bad guys more than the good ones.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Sur­viv­ing Man­u­script of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost Gets Pub­lished in Book Form for the First Time

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

John Milton’s Hand Anno­tat­ed Copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio: A New Dis­cov­ery by a Cam­bridge Schol­ar

Spenser and Mil­ton (Free Course)

A Sur­vival Guide to the Bib­li­cal Apoc­a­lypse

Did the Tow­er of Babel Actu­al­ly Exist?: A Look at the Archae­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

J. R. R. Tolkien Reads from The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings & Other Works

If you want­ed to hear the voice of your favorite writer in the nine­teen-six­ties — a time before audio­books, let alone pod­casts — you con­sult­ed the cat­a­log of Caed­mon Records. That label spe­cial­ized in LPs of lit­er­ary emi­nences read­ing their own work. This may or may not be the kind of com­pa­ny in which you’d expect to find a writer of high fan­ta­sy like J. R. R. Tolkien. But in 1967, just as The Lord of the Rings was enjoy­ing a burst of coun­ter­cul­ture-dri­ven pop­u­lar­i­ty, the label put out the album Poems and Songs of Mid­dle-Earth, which you can sam­ple above.

Tolkien’s voice had been put on a com­mer­cial record just once before, in 1930, years before he’d pub­lished even The Hob­bit. That was for a series of Eng­lish lessons by Arthur Lloyd James, the ill-fat­ed pho­neti­cian who pio­neered stan­dards of pro­nun­ci­a­tion in broad­cast­ing. Tolkien had already estab­lished him­self at Oxford as a philol­o­gist, which may have had some­thing to do with his selec­tion to par­tic­i­pate in such a project.

Not that Tolkien him­self sound­ed quite like the ide­al BBC announc­er, but then, the vast read­er­ship he would lat­er accrue with his nov­els would­n’t have want­ed him to — and indeed, they’d thrill par­tic­u­lar­ly to the record­ings he would make not in Eng­lish at all, but in Quenya and Sin­darin, two Elvish lan­guages of his own inven­tion. The album’s sec­ond side is tak­en up by The Road Goes Ever On, a song cycle adapt­ed from Tolkien’s poems of Mid­dle-Earth by pro­lif­ic com­pos­er and per­former Don­ald Swann.

Lat­er, in the sev­en­ties, the now defunct label would assem­ble the mate­r­i­al for two more releas­es fea­tur­ing the author’s voice and the author’s voice alone, one with selec­tions from The Hob­bit and The Fel­low­ship of the Ring and anoth­er with selec­tions from The Two Tow­ers and The Return of The King. By that time, there was a large and recep­tive mar­ket for such prod­uct. “I pre­sume that most peo­ple who buy this record will already have read Pro­fes­sor Tolkien’s tetral­o­gy,” say the lin­er notes for Poems and Songs of Mid­dle-Earth, describ­ing that tetral­o­gy as “a work that will either total­ly enthrall you or leave you stone cold, and, whichev­er your response, noth­ing and nobody will ever change it.” The writer adds that, “as a mem­ber of the enchant­ed par­ty, I have found by expe­ri­ence that it is quite use­less to argue with the uncon­vert­ed.” His name: W. H. Auden.

Relat­ed con­tent:

J. R. R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hob­bit for 30 Min­utes (1952)

J. R. R. Tolkien Writes & Speaks in Elvish, a Lan­guage He Invent­ed for The Lord of the Rings

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit in Vin­tage Record­ings from the Ear­ly 1950s

When J. R. R. Tolkien Worked for the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary and “Learned More … Than Any Oth­er Equal Peri­od of My Life” (1919–1920)

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

J. R. R. Tolkien in His Own Words

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Iconic Animator Chuck Jones Creates an Oscar-Winning Animation About the Virtues of Universal Health Care (1949)

While our coun­try looks like it might be com­ing apart at the seams, it’s good to revis­it, every once in a while, moments when it did work. And that’s not so that we can feel nos­tal­gic about a lost time, but so that we can remind our­selves how, giv­en the right con­di­tions, things could work well once again.

One exam­ple from his­to­ry (and recent­ly redis­cov­ered by a num­ber of blogs dur­ing the AHCA deba­cle in Con­gress) is this gov­ern­ment pro­pa­gan­da film from 1949—the Har­ry S. Tru­man era—that pro­motes the idea of cra­dle-to-grave health care, and all for three cents a week. This mon­ey went to school nurs­es, nutri­tion­ists, fam­i­ly doc­tors, and neigh­bor­hood health depart­ments.

Direct­ed by Chuck Jones, bet­ter known for ani­mat­ing Bugs Bun­ny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and the Road Run­ner, “So Much for So Lit­tle” fol­lows our main char­ac­ter from infancy—where doc­tors help immu­nize babies against whoop­ing cough, diph­the­ria, rheumat­ic fever, and smallpox—through school to dat­ing, mar­riage, becom­ing par­ents, and set­tling into a nice, healthy retire­ment. Along the way, the gov­ern­ment has made sure that health care is noth­ing to wor­ry about.

The film won an Acad­e­my Award in 1950 for Doc­u­men­tary Short Subject—not best sci-fi, despite how rad­i­cal this all sounds.

So what hap­pened? John Maher at the blog Dot and Line puts it this way:

Par­ti­san­ship and cap­i­tal­ism and racist zon­ing poli­cies shat­tered its ide­al­is­tic dream that Amer­i­cans might actu­al­ly pay com­mu­nal­ly for their health as well as that of their neigh­bors and fel­low cit­i­zens.

Three cents per Amer­i­can per week wouldn’t cut it now in terms of uni­ver­sal health cov­er­age. But accord­ing to Maher, quot­ing a 2009 Kingsepp study on the orig­i­nal Afford­able Care Act, tax­pay­ers would have to pay $3.61 a week.

So folks, don’t get despon­dent, get ide­al­is­tic. The Great­est Gen­er­a­tion came back from WWII with a grand ide­al­ism. Maybe this cur­rent gen­er­a­tion just needs to fight and defeat Nazis all over again…

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of Chuck Jones, the Artist Behind Bugs Bun­ny, Daffy Duck & Oth­er Looney Tunes Leg­ends: A Video Essay

How to Draw Bugs Bun­ny: A Primer by Leg­endary Ani­ma­tor Chuck Jones

Chuck Jones’ 9 Rules For Draw­ing Road Run­ner Car­toons, or How to Cre­ate a Min­i­mal­ist Mas­ter­piece

Chuck Jones’ The Dot and the Line Cel­e­brates Geom­e­try & Hard Work: An Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion (1965)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear the Letter of Gratitude That Albert Camus Wrote to His Teacher After Winning the Nobel Prize, as Read by Footballer Ian Wright

When Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize, he wrote a let­ter to one of his old school­teach­ers. “I let the com­mo­tion around me these days sub­side a bit before speak­ing to you from the bot­tom of my heart,” the let­ter begins. “I have just been giv­en far too great an hon­or, one I nei­ther sought nor solicit­ed. But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my moth­er, was of you.” For it was from this teacher, a cer­tain Louis Ger­main, that the young, father­less Camus received the guid­ance he need­ed. “With­out you, with­out the affec­tion­ate hand you extend­ed to the small poor child that I was, with­out your teach­ing and exam­ple, none of all this would have hap­pened.”

Camus ends the let­ter by assur­ing Mon­sieur Ger­main that “your efforts, your work, and the gen­er­ous heart you put into it still live in one of your lit­tle school­boys who, despite the years, has nev­er stopped being your grate­ful pupil.”

In response, Ger­main recalls his mem­o­ries of Camus as an unaf­fect­ed, opti­mistic pupil. “I think I well know the nice lit­tle fel­low you were, and very often the child con­tains the seed of the man he will become,” he writes. What­ev­er the process of intel­lec­tu­al and artis­tic evo­lu­tion over the 30 years or so between leav­ing the class­room and win­ning the Nobel, “it gives me very great sat­is­fac­tion to see that your fame has not gone to your head. You have remained Camus: bra­vo.”

It isn’t hard to under­stand why Camus’ let­ter to his teacher would res­onate with the foot­baller Ian Wright, who reads it aloud in the Let­ters Live video at the top of the post. A 2005 doc­u­men­tary on his life and career pro­duced the ear­ly viral video above, a clip cap­tur­ing the moment of Wright’s unex­pect­ed reunion with his own aca­d­e­m­ic father fig­ure, Syd­ney Pig­den. Com­ing face to face with his old men­tor, who he’d assumed had died, Wright instinc­tive­ly removes his cap and address­es him as “Mr. Pig­den.” In that moment, the stu­dent-teacher rela­tion­ship resumes: “I’m so glad you’ve done so well with your­self,” says Pig­den, a sen­ti­ment not dis­sim­i­lar to the one Mon­sieur Ger­main expressed to Camus. Most of us, no mat­ter how long we’ve been out of school, have a teacher we hope to do proud; some of us, whether we know it or not, have been that teacher.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Albert Camus’ Touch­ing Thank You Let­ter to His Ele­men­tary School Teacher

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Albert Camus’ Exis­ten­tial­ism, a Phi­los­o­phy Mak­ing a Come­back in Our Dys­func­tion­al Times

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

An Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Power Manufactures Truth

Soon after the first elec­tion of Don­ald Trump to the pres­i­den­cy of the Unit­ed States, George Orwell’s Nine­teen Eighty-Four became a best­seller again. Shoot­ing to the top of the Amer­i­can charts, the nov­el that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s lat­est opus, the poet­ry of Rupi Kaur, the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, and the mem­oir of an ambi­tious young man named J. D. Vance. But how much of its renewed pop­u­lar­i­ty owed to the rel­e­vance of a near­ly 70-year-old vision of shab­by, total­i­tar­i­an future Eng­land to twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, and how much to the fact that, as far as influ­ence on pop­u­lar cul­ture’s image of polit­i­cal dystopia, no oth­er work of lit­er­a­ture comes close?

For all the myr­i­ad ways one can crit­i­cize his two admin­is­tra­tions, Trump’s Amer­i­ca bears lit­tle super­fi­cial resem­blance to Ocea­ni­a’s Airstrip One as ruled by The Par­ty. But it can hard­ly be a coin­ci­dence that this peri­od of his­to­ry has also seen the con­cept “post-truth” become a fix­ture in the zeit­geist.

There are many rea­sons not to want to live in the world Orwell imag­ines in Nine­teen Eighty-Four: the thor­ough bureau­cra­ti­za­tion, the lack of plea­sure, the unceas­ing sur­veil­lance and pro­pa­gan­da. But none of this is quite so intol­er­a­ble as what makes it all pos­si­ble: the rulers’ claim to absolute con­trol over the truth, a form of psy­cho­log­i­cal manip­u­la­tion hard­ly lim­it­ed to regimes we regard as evil.

As James Payne says in his Great Books Explained video on Nine­teen Eighty-Four, Orwell worked for the BBC’s over­seas ser­vice dur­ing the war, and there received a trou­bling edu­ca­tion in the use of infor­ma­tion as a polit­i­cal weapon. The expe­ri­ence inspired the Min­istry of Truth, where the nov­el­’s pro­tag­o­nist Win­ston Smith spends his days re-writ­ing his­to­ry, and the dialect of Newspeak, a severe­ly reduced Eng­lish designed to nar­row its speak­ers’ range of thought. Orwell may have over­es­ti­mat­ed the degree to which lan­guage can be mod­i­fied from the top down, but as Payne reminds us, we now all hear cul­ture war­riors describe real­i­ty in high­ly slant­ed, polit­i­cal­ly-charged, and often thought-ter­mi­nat­ing ways all day long. Every­where we look, some­one is ready to tell us that two plus two make five; if only they were as obvi­ous about it as Big Broth­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

George Orwell Explains How “Newspeak” Works, the Offi­cial Lan­guage of His Total­i­tar­i­an Dystopia in 1984

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

George Orwell’s Har­row­ing Race to Fin­ish 1984 Before His Death

George Orwell’s Final Warn­ing: Don’t Let This Night­mare Sit­u­a­tion Hap­pen. It Depends on You!

What “Orwellian” Real­ly Means: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son About the Use & Abuse of the Term

Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

William Faulkner Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spectacular Letter (1924)

Work­ing a dull civ­il ser­vice job ill-suit­ed to your tal­ents does not make you a writer, but plen­ty of famous writ­ers have worked such jobs. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked at a Boston cus­tom­house for a year. His friend Her­man Melville put in con­sid­er­ably more time—19 years—as a cus­toms inspec­tor in New York, fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of his father and grand­fa­ther. Both Walt Dis­ney and Charles Bukows­ki worked at the post office, though not togeth­er (can you imag­ine?), and so, for two years, did William Faulkn­er.

After drop­ping out of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­sis­sip­pi in 1920, Faulkn­er became its post­mas­ter two years lat­er, a job he found “tedious, bor­ing, and unin­spir­ing,” writes Men­tal Floss: “Most of his time as a post­mas­ter was spent play­ing cards, writ­ing poems, or drink­ing.” Eudo­ra Wel­ty char­ac­ter­ized Faulkner’s tenure as post­mas­ter with the fol­low­ing vignette:

Let us imag­ine that here and now, we’re all in the old uni­ver­si­ty post office and liv­ing in the ’20’s. We’ve come up to the stamp win­dow to buy a 2‑cent stamp, but we see nobody there. We knock and then we pound, and then we pound again and there’s not a sound back there. So we holler his name, and at last here he is. William Faulkn­er. We inter­rupt­ed him.… When he should have been putting up the mail and sell­ing stamps at the win­dow up front, he was out of sight in the back writ­ing lyric poems.

By all accounts, she hard­ly over­states the case. As author and edi­tor Bill Peschel puts it, Faulkn­er “opened the post office on days when it suit­ed him, and closed it when it didn’t, usu­al­ly when he want­ed to go hunt­ing or over to the golf course.

He would throw away the adver­tis­ing cir­cu­lars, uni­ver­si­ty bul­letins and oth­er mail he deemed junk.” A stu­dent pub­li­ca­tion from the time pro­posed a mot­to for his ser­vice: “Nev­er put the mail up on time.”

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the pow­ers that be even­tu­al­ly decid­ed they’d had enough. In 1924, Faulkn­er sensed the end com­ing. But rather than bow out qui­et­ly, as per­haps most peo­ple would, the future Nobel lau­re­ate com­posed a dra­mat­ic and unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly suc­cinct res­ig­na­tion let­ter to his supe­ri­ors:

As long as I live under the cap­i­tal­is­tic sys­tem, I expect to have my life influ­enced by the demands of mon­eyed peo­ple. But I will be damned if I pro­pose to be at the beck and call of every itin­er­ant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.

This, sir, is my res­ig­na­tion.

The defi­ant self-aggran­dize­ment, wound­ed pride, blame-shift­ing… maybe it’s these qual­i­ties, as well as a noto­ri­ous ten­den­cy to exag­ger­ate and out­right lie (about his mil­i­tary ser­vice for exam­ple) that so qual­i­fied him for his late-life career as—in the words of Ole Miss—“Statesman to the World.” Faulkner’s gift for self-fash­ion­ing might have suit­ed him well for a career in pol­i­tics, had he been so inclined. He did, after all, receive a com­mem­o­ra­tive stamp in 1987 (above) from the very insti­tu­tion he served so poor­ly.

But like Hawthorne, Bukows­ki, or any num­ber of oth­er writ­ers who’ve held down tedious day jobs, he was com­pelled to give his life to fic­tion. In a lat­er retelling of the res­ig­na­tion, Peschel claims, Faulkn­er would revise his let­ter “into a more pun­gent quo­ta­tion,” unable to resist the urge to invent: “I reck­on I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with mon­ey all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When William Faulkn­er Set the World Record for Writ­ing the Longest Sen­tence in Lit­er­a­ture: Read the 1,288-Word Sen­tence from Absa­lom, Absa­lom!

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

William Faulkner’s Review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Guide­lines for Han­dling William Faulkner’s Drink­ing Dur­ing For­eign Trips From the US State Depart­ment (1955)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

George Orwell Reviews Salvador Dali’s Autobiography: “Dali is a Good Draughtsman and a Disgusting Human Being” (1944)

Images or Orwell and Dali via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Should we hold artists to the same stan­dards of human decen­cy that we expect of every­one else? Should tal­ent­ed peo­ple be exempt from ordi­nary moral­i­ty? Should artists of ques­tion­able char­ac­ter have their work con­signed to the trash along with their per­son­al rep­u­ta­tions? These ques­tions, for all their time­li­ness in the present, seemed no less thorny and com­pelling 81 years ago when George Orwell con­front­ed the strange case of Sal­vador Dali, an unde­ni­ably extra­or­di­nary tal­ent, and—Orwell writes in his 1944 essay “Ben­e­fit of Cler­gy”—a “dis­gust­ing human being.”

The judg­ment may seem over­ly harsh except that any hon­est per­son would say the same giv­en the episodes Dali describes in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, which Orwell finds utter­ly revolt­ing. “If it were pos­si­ble for a book to give a phys­i­cal stink off its pages,” he writes, “this one would. The episodes he refers to include, at six years old, Dali kick­ing his three-year-old sis­ter in the head, “as though it had been a ball,” the artist writes, then run­ning away “with a ‘deliri­ous joy’ induced by this sav­age act.” They include throw­ing a boy from a sus­pen­sion bridge, and, at 29 years old, tram­pling a young girl “until they had to tear her, bleed­ing, out of my reach.” And many more such vio­lent and dis­turb­ing descrip­tions.

Dali’s litany of cru­el­ty to humans and ani­mals con­sti­tutes what we expect in the ear­ly life of ser­i­al killers rather than famous artists. Sure­ly he is putting his read­ers on, wild­ly exag­ger­at­ing for the sake of shock val­ue, like the Mar­quis de Sade’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal fan­tasies. Orwell allows as much. Yet which of the sto­ries are true, he writes, “and which are imag­i­nary hard­ly mat­ters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.” More­over, Orwell is as repulsed by Dali’s work as he is by the artist’s char­ac­ter, informed as it is by misog­y­ny, a con­fessed necrophil­ia and an obses­sion with excre­ment and rot­ting corpses.

But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughts­man of very excep­tion­al gifts. He is also, to judge by the minute­ness and the sure­ness of his draw­ings, a very hard work­er. He is an exhi­bi­tion­ist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more tal­ent than most of the peo­ple who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paint­ings. And these two sets of facts, tak­en togeth­er, raise a ques­tion which for lack of any basis of agree­ment sel­dom gets a real dis­cus­sion.

Orwell is unwill­ing to dis­miss the val­ue of Dali’s art, and dis­tances him­self from those who would do so on moral­is­tic grounds. “Such peo­ple,” he writes, are “unable to admit that what is moral­ly degrad­ed can be aes­thet­i­cal­ly right,” a “dan­ger­ous” posi­tion adopt­ed not only by con­ser­v­a­tives and reli­gious zealots but by fas­cists and author­i­tar­i­ans who burn books and lead cam­paigns against “degen­er­ate” art. “Their impulse is not only to crush every new tal­ent as it appears, but to cas­trate the past as well.” (“Wit­ness,” he notes, the out­cry in Amer­i­ca “against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence.”) “In an age like our own,” writes Orwell, in a par­tic­u­lar­ly jar­ring sen­tence, “when the artist is an excep­tion­al per­son, he must be allowed a cer­tain amount of irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty, just as a preg­nant woman is.”

At the very same time, Orwell argues, to ignore or excuse Dali’s amoral­i­ty is itself gross­ly irre­spon­si­ble and total­ly inex­cus­able. Orwell’s is an “under­stand­able” response, writes Jonathan Jones at The Guardian, giv­en that he had fought fas­cism in Spain and had seen the hor­ror of war, and that Dali, in 1944, “was already flirt­ing with pro-Fran­co views.” But to ful­ly illus­trate his point, Orwell imag­ines a sce­nario with a much less con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure than Dali: “If Shake­speare returned to the earth to-mor­row, and if it were found that his favourite recre­ation was rap­ing lit­tle girls in rail­way car­riages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write anoth­er King Lear.”

Draw your own par­al­lels to more con­tem­po­rary fig­ures whose crim­i­nal, preda­to­ry, or vio­lent­ly abu­sive acts have been ignored for decades for the sake of their art, or whose work has been tossed out with the tox­ic bath­wa­ter of their behav­ior. Orwell seeks what he calls a “mid­dle posi­tion” between moral con­dem­na­tion and aes­thet­ic license—a “fas­ci­nat­ing and laud­able” crit­i­cal thread­ing of the nee­dle, Jones writes, that avoids the extremes of “con­ser­v­a­tive philistines who con­demn the avant garde, and its pro­mot­ers who indulge every­thing that some­one like Dali does and refuse to see it in a moral or polit­i­cal con­text.”

This eth­i­cal cri­tique, writes Char­lie Finch at Art­net, attacks the assump­tion in the art world that an appre­ci­a­tion of artists with Dali’s pecu­liar tastes “is auto­mat­i­cal­ly enlight­ened, pro­gres­sive.” Such an atti­tude extends from the artists them­selves to the soci­ety that nur­tures them, and that “allows us to wel­come dia­mond-mine own­ers who fund bien­nales, Gazprom bil­lion­aires who pur­chase dia­mond skulls, and real-estate moguls who dom­i­nate tem­ples of mod­ernism.” Again, you may draw your own com­par­isons.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When The Sur­re­al­ists Expelled Sal­vador Dalí for “the Glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Hit­ler­ian Fas­cism” (1934)

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envis­ages a Hor­ri­ble Brain­less Empire” (1940)

How the Nazis Waged War on Mod­ern Art: Inside the “Degen­er­ate Art” Exhi­bi­tion of 1937

Tol­stoy Calls Shake­speare an “Insignif­i­cant, Inartis­tic Writer”; 40 Years Lat­er, George Orwell Weighs in on the Debate

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Leo Tolstoy’s Family Recipe for Mac and Cheese

In 1874, Stepan Andree­vich Bers pub­lished The Cook­book and gave it as a gift to his sis­ter, count­ess Sophia Andreev­na Tol­staya, the wife of the great Russ­ian nov­el­ist, Leo Tol­stoy. The book con­tained a col­lec­tion of Tol­stoy fam­i­ly recipes, the dish­es they served to their fam­i­ly and friends, those for­tu­nate souls who belonged to the aris­to­crat­ic rul­ing class of late czarist Rus­sia. 150 years lat­er, this cook­book has been trans­lat­ed and repub­lished by Sergei Bel­tyukov.

Leo Tol­stoy’s Fam­i­ly Recipe Book fea­tures dozens of recipes, every­thing from Tar­tar Sauce and Spiced Mush­rooms (what’s a Russ­ian kitchen with­out mush­rooms?), to Stuffed Dumplings and Green Beans à la Maître d’Hô­tel, to Cof­fee Cake and Vien­nese Pie. The text comes with a trans­la­tion, too, of Russ­ian weights and mea­sures used dur­ing the peri­od. One recipe Mr. Bel­tyukov pro­vid­ed to us (which I did­n’t see in the book) is for the Tol­stoys’ good ole Mac ‘N’ Cheese dish. It goes some­thing like this:

Bring water to a boil, add salt, then add mac­a­roni and leave boil­ing on light fire until half ten­der; drain water through a colan­der, add but­ter and start putting mac­a­roni back into the pot in lay­ers – lay­er of mac­a­roni, some grat­ed Parme­san and some veg­etable sauce, mac­a­roni again and so on until you run out of mac­a­roni. Put the pot on the edge of the stove, cov­er with a lid and let it rest in light fire until the mac­a­roni are soft and ten­der. Shake the pot occa­sion­al­ly to pre­vent them from burn­ing.

We’ll leave you with bon appétit! — an expres­sion almost cer­tain­ly heard in the homes of those French-speak­ing Russ­ian aris­to­crats.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Leo Tol­stoy Read From His Last Major Work in Four Lan­guages, 1909

Leo Tol­stoy Makes a List of the 50+ Books That Influ­enced Him Most (1891)

The Final Days of Leo Tol­stoy Cap­tured in Rare Footage from 1910

Thomas Edison’s Record­ings of Leo Tol­stoy: Hear the Voice of the Great Russ­ian Nov­el­ist

More in this category... »
Quantcast