Why Hamas Supporters Quote Céline and How Putinists Learned to Love Solzhenitsyn
There is little doubt that Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) was a talented, original, and influential writer. His debut novel, Journey to the End of the Night, made a sensation in 1932. Its echoes are distinct in Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller, written when the American was living in Paris and completely revised after he had read Céline, and in Nausea (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre, who was an early fan. Céline was admired by many iconic authors including Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth.
However, a recent spike in the French author’s popularity among certain groups is rather disquieting. While it can also be witnessed elsewhere, a place where it is most evident is VK (aka VKontakte), a Russian social media platform that has become a safe haven for all kinds of conspiracy theorists, Neo-Nazis, alt-right, and other radicals from around the globe.
As testified by the platform’s internal search engine, before October 2023 Céline was mentioned, on average, several times a month. Those were mostly quotes from Journey to the End of the Night, Death on Credit, and other works of fiction. But after October 7, the day when Hamas attacked Israel, he has been mentioned several times a day. Moreover, his most cited works these last two weeks have been Trifles for a Massacre (Bagatelles pour un massacre) (1937) and School for Corpses (L’École des cadavres) (1938).
Here are the two most popular quotes:
The aggressor screams that one is cutting his throat! The thing is as old as Moses.
The Goy, immersed, whirled in the prodigious, torrential, impactful Jewish carnival, has lost all discernment, and even all hint of discernment. He no longer reacts. He even no longer suspects that he doesn’t exist anymore. He is too meticulously processed since school, since high school, for too long monopolized, robotized, implacably stupefied, from the cradle to the grave.
While at the time of his early works Céline had described himself as an anarchist, which made him popular with the left, in the mid-1930s he turned right, which eventually made him popular with Nazi collaborators and led to a process against him after the war. During that period, he wrote three pamphlets — the two mentioned above as well as A Fine Mess (Les beaux draps) (1941) — replete with antisemitic rants. And now these works are perused by supporters of Hamas (and, coincidentally, of Putin, if you check their pages) to fuel antisemitism.
These people would gladly quote Adolf Hitler, but most of them are cautious enough to not do it. After all, Hitler’s name has too many negative connotations, and even VK has rules against glorification of Nazism (although they aren’t thoroughly applied in practice). Therefore they need other big names in the intellectual world to support their cause. And Céline is one such name.
This is similar to Martin Heidegger’s popularity with the right-wing, who don’t necessarily understand his philosophy (after all, who does?), but hold him in high regard for his support for Nazism. The Russian fascist propagandist Aleksandr Dugin is particularly known for reinterpreting Heidegger for his purposes. He even claimed Heidegger would have converted to Russian Orthodoxy if he had known more about it, because his philosophy purportedly reveals similar metaphysical principles, used by Dugin to justify his anti-Western stance.
And while we’re at it, Russian propaganda in its anti-Ukrainian campaigns has recently reverted to another, rather unlikely source: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Before 2022, whenever Solzhenitsyn was mentioned in Russian social media, commentators inevitably called him a “liar” and “traitor” for what he wrote about the Gulag. But then suddenly, in 2022, Putinists made him into a “prophet,” and one of the largest Russian publishers released a “new” book by him, titled With Ukraine, Things Will Get Extremely Painful. It is a collection of political essays and extracts where he reflects on Russia’s relations with Ukraine and the West and predicts future problems and conflicts.
Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was not as talented and influential as Céline when it comes to his literary style. I could hardly find an author who tried to emulate him. However, at first sight, Solzhenitsyn was politically sounder than Céline. After all, he is admired for denouncing Soviet totalitarianism, and his 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature had an undeniable political dimension.
But that is only at first sight. Beneath the surface, he was both suspected of antisemitism and criticized for his reactionary, conservative stance and sharing views with Russian imperialists and nationalists. It is however his opinion on Ukraine and the Ukrainians that is most pertinent here.
The title of the “new” book is a quote from the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago. While in that rant Solzhenitsyn asks Russians to be tolerant and reasonable and to allow the Ukrainians to decide for themselves whether they want to be a separate nation, he also repeats Russian chauvinist and imperialist tropes about the Ukrainians and Russians being actually one nation, claims that some Ukrainian lands should belong to Russia, and, in a condescending manner, expresses confidence that, after trying the taste of independence, the Ukrainians will “quickly realize that you can’t solve all problems with separation” and will want to reunite with Russia. In his later years, he was an even more vocal opponent of Ukraine’s independence and also made statements denying the genocidal nature of the Holodomor. Unsurprisingly therefore, he has the reputation of a Ukrainophobe in Ukraine, while Putinists have lately forgiven him his Gulag revelations and learned to love him as a staunch critic of the liberal West and a defender of Russia’s greatness.
The exploitation of long-dead authors for propaganda purposes, especially in the current geopolitical context, is an issue worthy of careful study and discussion. In the era of the Internet, it is impossible to effectively ban neither Mein Kampf nor Céline’s antisemitic books. One can easily download them from VK, which is a pirate paradise, or numerous other places. It is also impossible to simply cancel Céline, or Heidegger, or Solzhenitsyn, or Knut Hamsun (another Nazi supporter), or Dostoevsky (another Russian chauvinist), as without them the study of culture would be incomplete.
It is the responsibility of intellectuals, of university professors and publishers, of writers and journalists, to adequately present these figures both in their original contexts and in their relevance to the present day, with all the political skeletons in the closet. On the other hand, people who post controversial, politically loaded quotes by long-dead authors to prove their right should be ready to bear responsibility for moral, reputational, and legal implications.