Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny.
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
New York: Penguin Books, 2018.
Originally published: Tańczące niedźwiedzie, Warsaw: Agora SA, 2014.
Book Information : Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.
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Author Information :
- Witold Szablowski (b. 1980), Wikipedia.
- Witold Szabłowski. The Assassin From Apricot City. Poland, 2010. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London(?): Stork Press Ltd, 2013.
[Publisher; Amazon.com.] - Witold Szabłowski. How to Feed a Dictator. Poland, 2019. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. New York: Penguin Books, 2020.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.] - Witold Szabłowski. What's Cooking in the Kremlin. Poland, 2021. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. New York: Penguin Books, 2023.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
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Wikipedia Articles :
- Cold War, 1947–1991.
- Eastern Bloc.
- Post-communism.
- Communist nostalgia.
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Note:
This book's title, Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny, seemed a little strange to me, awkward somehow. "Dancing Bears"? No, that evokes only a mildly pleasurable idea of seemingly happy bears. After some reflection the cause of the awkwardness became apparent: the subtitle "Life Under Tyranny". That's quite a contrast, from seemingly happy "Dancing Bears" to an ominous and forbidding "Life Under Tyranny". There are at least two ways of considering this contrast. First, in reading the book you will find that the individual bears were in a sense tyrannized by their keepers by the iron ring their keeper inserted into the bear's nose and used to manipulate the bear's behavior, giving the illusion that the bear "danced". Somehow you might also create a vague metaphor or simile between bears and people, that people living in societies in which the ruling ideology included some variant of communism are like bears controlled by a ring in their nose. I don't think that simile is successful because ALL societies have some kind of ideology in which individuals are indoctrinated and by which their behavior can be manipulated and controlled. Anti-communist ideologues seem to me particularly obnoxious in their jumping up and down exclaiming and pointing at a foreign society, that it is ruled by some kind of communist ideology. What about themselves? What ideologies rule their own society? And is there not also some kind of tyranny in their own society? These reflections point to a second way of viewing the contrast in the book's title: the phrase "Life Under Tyranny" is pure Cold War propaganda. As someone born in the USA in 1960, I lived the first 30 years of my life on the receiving end of American Cold War propaganda; we were constantly instructed on the evils of communist tyranny. So this book's title gives me an uneasy feeling. Further, consider this: nobody wants to live under tyranny and tyranny can rarely be justified, although in rare circumstances of extreme danger all societies will impose some temporary measures considered tyrannous in order to deal with some temporary emergency. Otherwise nobody will argue in favor of tyranny. Note the shift from specific policies considered tyrannous to the more nebulous penumbra of "tyranny". My main point in this note is to point out that the book's subtitle "Life Under Tyranny" screams out to me that this book is engaging in propaganda.
I started wondering whether the book's title had been engineered for the American audience. The USA and United Kingdom editions of this book have the same title with the "Life Under Tyranny" subtitle. HOWEVER, the Australian edition has a different subtitle! : Dancing Bears: True Stories about Longing for the Old Days.
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Witold Szabłowski. Dancing Bears: True Stories about Longing for the Old Days. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing Company, 2018.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
I think this difference in subtitles confirms my suspicions about the propagandistic nature of the title of the USA edition. Looking more closely at the Wikipedia article about Szablowski, and noting the praise he has received from American establishment propaganda outlets (The New York Times, NPR, Foreign Affairs), I can only conclude that Szablowski himself is an experienced propagandist.
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