Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Writers, artists, etc, were funded by the state in countries like East Germany, the Soviet Union, etc. In a western nation, though, it would perhaps be difficult to decide who qualified for state funding, how much they should be paid, and so on. Perhaps not, though - it's what (in the UK, at least) we do for top sportsmen and women via government funding, so perhaps the same could be done for creative people too.
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And what is the great literature that the late unlamented USSR produced?
Pasternak - well he was refused permission to go to get his Nobel and escaped the camps because Stalin liked him and thought him harmless as per their phone conversations musings about the meaning of life
Bulgakov? - not published in his lifetime, escaped camp again due to Stalin's patronage
Solzhenitsyn - well we all know the story how he got published because Khrushchev liked his work and ordered it allowed and then lived to regret it...
All the writers that died shot in the back of the head (Babel, Mandelstam), poisoned (Gorky), in camps (too numerous to count)?