Aldous Huxley and Soviet post-war propaganda

The article explores the reasons behind the publication of a highly biased review of Aldous Huxley’s “nuclear dystopia” Ape and Essence (1948) in “Literaturnaja Gazeta” (September 1949). How did Huxley - of all Anglo-American men of letters - come to be viewed as a proper target for such an aggressive attack after ten years of complete silence (the last pre-War review of his work appeared in 1937)? The close reading of 1949 essay concerning his satirical novel and the comparative reading of numerous publications in Soviet press, Soviet official documents highlighting post-WW II international and home politics alongside with the articles in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, all this put together uncover a cluster of reasons why Huxley had become a worthy target. His anti-totalitarian worldviews, long-standing involvement in anti-war activism, his support of the idea of making the UNO a World Government, resentment towards nuclear weapon and the related arms race - this is what made the writer an ideal object of the attack at the time when the Soviet physicists were about to test their nuclear bomb. There were other equally important circumstances conditioning the specific tone of the reviews of Huxley’s oeuvre in post-war years, e.g. “Lysenkoism”. However, ideological campaigns of the late 1940s, such as “anti-cosmopolitanism” and “anti-Americanism”, had a much stronger impact on the assessment of Huxley’s ideology by the Soviet critics. There is a definitive causal connection between the atmosphere of Cold War and the despiteful tone of the random Soviet reviews of Huxley in which he is presented as a new American, a warmonger, and an anti-democratic extremist.