Comprehension Passages
Book Burning!
abridged from Time Magazine
The library in Leningrad* burned for a night and a day. By the time the fire was out at the National Academy of Sciences, 400 000 books had been incinerated. An additional 3.6 million had been damaged by water. In the weeks since the fire, workmen have been shoveling blackened remains of books into trash bins and hanging the sodden survivors on lines to dry in front of enormous electric fans.
The mind cracks a little in contemplating a holocaust of words. No one died in the fire. And yet whenever books burn, one is haunted by a sense of mourning. For books are not inanimate objects, not really, and the death of books, especially by fire, especially in such numbers, has the power of a kind of tragedy. Books are life-forms, children of the mind. Words (in the beginning was the word) have about them some of the mystery of creation.
Russians have always loved their books profoundly. Literature has sometimes sustained the Russians when almost everything else was gone. During the siege of Leningrad, the city's population, frozen and starving down to the verge of cannibalism, drew strength by listening to a team of poets as they read on the radio from the works of Pushkin and other writers. "Never before nor ever in the future," said a survivor, "will people listen to poetry as did Leningrad in that winter - hungry, swollen and hardly living." Today Russians will fill a stadium to hear a poetry reading . . .
The Leningrad library fire was a natural disaster. Deliberate book burning seems not only criminal but evil. Why? Is it worse to destroy a book by burning it than to throw it into the trash compactor? Or to shred it? Not in effect. But somehow the irrevocable reduction of words to smoke and, poof!, into nonentity haunts the imagination. In Hitler's bonfires in 1933, the works of Kafka, Freud, Einstein, Zola and Proust were incinerated - their smoke a prefigurement of the terrible clouds that came from the Nazi chimneys later.
Anyone who loves books knows how hard it is to throw even one of them away, even one that is silly or stupid or vicious and full of lies. How much more criminal, how much more a sin against consciousness, to burn a book. A question then: What if one were to gather from the four corners of the earth all the existing copies of Mein Kampf** and make a bonfire of them? Would that be an act of virtue? Or of evil?
Sometimes it seems that the right books never get burnt. But the world has its quota of idiotic and vicious people just as it has its supplies of books that are vicious, trashy and witless. Books can eventually be as mortal as people - the acids in the paper eat them, the bindings decay and at last they crumble in one's hands. But their ambition anyway is to outlast the flesh. Books have a kind of enshrining counterlife. One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of words and books that is terrifying. For that is the deeper extinction.
* Leningrad is once again called St Petersburg
** Mein Kampf, a book written by Adolf Hitler
Questions
- Was the fire in Leningrad caused deliberately? Quote to support your answer.
- How have the Russians tried to save books damaged in the fire?
- Quote an example in which the books are personified in the first paragraph.
- In the 2nd paragraph the writer says that books are not really "inanimate". Explain what he means in your own words.
- Quote two incidents from the passage which shows that the Russian people love literature.
- What "terrible clouds ... came from the Nazi chimneys later." (paragraph 4) ?
- In your own words say why "the death of words and books....is the deeper extinction." (paragraph 6)
Writing Exercise
"What if one were to gather from the four corners of the earth all the existing copies of Mein Kampf and make a bonfire of them? Would that be an act of virtue? Or of evil?"
Write an essay of 300-400 words in which you set out to answer this question.
