Four dangerous visionary writers

‘The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks… And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.’ The quote is usually attributed to Stalin, though the phrase ‘engineers of human souls’ most likely came from someone else. Who’s to argue? Purges, executions, deportations – what’s a little light plagiarism in comparison? Whoever coined the phrase, it certainly struck a chord and indeed continues to ring various alarm bells whenever one comes across writers who deliberately set out to influence politics and ideas – and not just the big beasts, the Nobel Prize winners, say, or the shopfront-filling non-fiction authors hawking their wares, or the endless novelists with their little axes to grind. What now is Twitter/X but a global furnace and forge for those frantically tapping out their hot takes in the hope of making an impact? Social media, like all media, ain’t just entertainment: it’s in the business of taking souls.

In Engineers of Human Souls, Simon Ings examines the lives of four writers – Auguste-Maurice Barrès, the French ‘novelist, politician and grouch’; Gabriele D’Annunzio and Maxim Gorky, who probably need no introduction; and Ding Ling, who probably does – ‘whose political visions shaped and misshaped their century’.

Ings is a pretty unusual individual and the perfect guide to this peculiar selection of odd and ambitious writers. The arts editor of the New Scientist, he writes science fiction, journalism and non-fiction, most notably Stalin and the Scientists (2016). He has tremendous range and moves at speed: he’s the sort of writer so bursting with energy and ideas that it’s sometimes difficult to keep up. He tosses out incidental remarks and insights at an extraordinary rate – the right-wing in politics is ‘split between reactionaries, who never believed in the democratic impulse in the first place, and romantics, who believe that there has to be more to democracy than just a contest between rival intellectuals’ – and there are brilliant novelistic flourishes throughout as he frantically blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.