Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[The Spell] is ... the tendency to see the present from the
vantage point of the future. It starts with imagination--the
ability to fantasize about what some imminent happiness will
look like. Then the future-minded person leaps rashly toward
that gauzy image. He or she is subtly more attached to the
glorious future than to the temporary and unsatisfactory present.
Brooks may have a fondness for smiling proletarians on tractors, for the spell he describes is none other than the guiding aesthetic premise of socialist realism--which, according to Stalin's cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov, aimed to look beyond the unredeemed reality of the present to "catch a glimpse of our tomorrow" and...
