OLGA SOBOLEV is an academic at the London School of Economics who specialises in various aspects of Russian culture, including comparative studies of anglophone and Soviet literature during the cold war. She is the author of “The Only Hope of the World: George Bernard Shaw and Russia” (2012).

Were there similarities between the literature on both sides of the Iron Curtain?

Definitely. And the phrase itself is an interesting place to start. It is commonly assumed that the term was first used by Winston Churchill in a speech in Fulton, Missouri on March 5th 1946, but in Patrick Wright’s book “Iron Curtain” (2009) he traces the origin to 18th-century theatre. The iron curtain was a safety curtain that came down between the stage and the audience in case of fire. It was the divide between stage and audience and the whole political rhetoric of cold-war literature and its narrative discourse was marked by this profound opposition between self and other, good and evil, democracy and tyranny.

The idea of theatricality was the very essence of cold-war literature and discourse—the manipulation of language…Continue reading

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