Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China, 1928-1978, by Paul Hollander (Oxford, 524 pp., $25) Dr. Johnson said of Ossian that a man might write such stuff forever if he would abandon his mind to it. For at least fifty years America’s best and brightest have been taking their minds on vacation to the most shining among the Communist dystopias and abandoning them there; excerpts from the resulting literature, culled and splendidly arrayed, are the meat of Mr. Hollander’s substantial book. Political Pilgrims swells with farragoes of gorgeous nonsense, crimson and gold, streaming out like revolutionary banners and pennants above crowds of millions; nonsense that, like the terraced windshield of Gatsby’s car, mirrors a dozen suns; nonsense that bangs and clatters with an idiot exuberance and sentimentality and credulity, an abandon of sensibility, like the worst music of Tchaikovsky. There is the silvered nonsense of aristocrats; the pompous nonsense of prelates; the belligerent nonsense of proletarian revolutionists; the fatuous nonsense of academicians; the breathy nonsense of ambassadors. It is a glorious pageantry of nonsense, a compost from which a great novelist might create a world of the absurd as whole and entire and particularized as the worlds of Dickens and Balzac.
Here are some voices from that world:
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