Oleg Zabluda's blog
Friday, June 08, 2012
 
Жечь было наслаждением.
Жечь было наслаждением. [...] Медный наконечник брандспойта зажат в кулаках, громадный питон изрыгает на мир ядовитую струю керосина ...
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It was a pleasure to burn. [...] With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene ...

Fahrenheit 451 was written and published by Ray Bradbury in 1953, as an anti-American-establishment book, republished by an anti-establishment magazine Playboy in 1954.

This always comes as a big surprise to ex-Soviet people, just as it did to us. We learned it only ~10 years ago, after we lived in US for ~10 years. To this day it seems to be very arcane knowledge (very hard to find online), since everybody assumes he wrote it either as anti-fascist (who burned the books very publicly in 1933), or anti-soviet (who did so privately, but, unlike fascists, together with their authors and readers), similar to Orwell's anti-soviet "Animal Farm" (1945) or "1984" (1949).

The Soviets translated and published F451 it in 1956, in an extreme example of double-think. By the time I was reading it in mid-80's, I was sure it was extreme samizdat anti-Soviet propaganda. 

Bradbury never went to college, was self-taught in public libraries (just like Joseph Brodsky), was leftist in political views, seemed to know almost nothing about USSR at the time, and, as far as I can tell, didn't want to find out, and simply didn't care.

He was writing about what was surrounding him, and what he knew. How Americans, instead of reading books, were watching TV and Facebook. Books abridged (Cliff Notes) and modified to accommodate offended prudes, women and minorities, until the remaining garbage could just as well be burned [1].

It's a great social commentary, but he wrote many better books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_U.S.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
http://lib.rus.ec/b/322458/read

[1] Find 3 anachronisms in this paragraph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

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