Catherine Eisner: Arnhem

Anthony Blunt – tarnished knight of the realm, professed communist, and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures – was unequivocal when a young man in expressing his utopian sympathy for the cultural worthiness of Social Realism: ‘The culture of the revolution will be evolved by the proletariat to produce its own culture . . . If an art is not contributing to the common good, it is bad art.’

(Art Under Capitalism and Socialism.

Anthony Blunt. 1937.)

Compare this counterview published twenty-five years later . . .

‘Too much art is no art at all. Like candy instead of bread! And the politics of it is utterly vile—vindication of a one-man tyranny. An insult to the memory of three generations of Russian intellectuals! . . . Then don’t call him a genius! Call him a toady, say he carried out orders like a dog. A genius doesn’t adapt his treatment to the taste of tyrants!’

(One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962.)

Sitting on the Fence Between Two Fires

Solzhenitsyn’s skewering of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1945) in his novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in which the Stalinist repressions of the Gulag punishment camps are documented in unflinching detail, is surely one the most eviscerating realisations of Doublethink since – well – since Orwell’s ur-text.

Accordingly, Ivan the movie has been interpreted by students of agitprop as an undisguised fawning defence of Stalin’s scorched earth dictatorship and as an allegory of a tyrranical reign of an autocrat who’s also proselytised as a meritorious unifier of disaffected conquered peoples.

‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

(Stalin’s Boots: In Budapest’s Memorial Park

are preserved the remains of a vast statue of Stalin

toppled in the 1956 uprising against Soviet oppression.)

Photo credit: Ines Zgonc

As I point out in my near obsessive recent posts on the ambivalance of Blunt’s passionless intellectualism when a young man ‘with too much ink in his veins’*. . .

(see https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2023/09/tyro-poets-eton-v-marlborough-finishing.html )

his self deception is a cautionary tale of a scholar (and accomplished mathematician) seduced by the idea of two states of mind coexisting and coequal, which confer the acuity of perceptual duality.

Unaccountability.

Blunt’s profound erudition could, for example, embrace those esoteric studies that challenge propositional logic and their consequences; amusements such as the paradoxes of Set Theory, which declare there can be countable sets which contain sets that are uncountable, defying finite reckoning.

Surely, then, the secretive life of Blunt too is shown to be one of a defiance that actively cleaves to the allurement of unaccountabilily.

In later life, Blunt’s devotion to Doublethink possibly finds its completest expression in his passion for Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), the idiosyncratic architect of the Late Baroque (see Borromini by Anthony Blunt, 1979).

Indeed, in his quasi-aetiological study of Borromini, Blunt quotes critics of this controversial architect who have damned the man’s visionary work as ‘a kind of contagion’, a ‘cloacus’ [sewer] even . . . where the True and the False are hard to tell apart. ‘So difficult is it to distinguish good from bad in a subject.’

Revealingly, Blunt is keen to identify signs of insiduous subversions in Borromini’s artifices of false perspectives; citing the practical instance of a cunning inventiveness in the intrusion of ‘sham’ elements such as the false half of a double window, one of many deceptions devised to balance structural obstacles by asserting an illusory effect of interspatial harmony controlled with mathematical precision and ‘an almost ruthlessly logical method’.

Ambiguities.

But, after all, is there ‘harm’ hidden in such contrived subversive ‘harmony’?

As a long-serving devotee of his own shrouded iconoclasm, the rule-breaking Blunt writes indulgently on the duality of Borromini’s genius: ‘The geometrical basis can always be felt through the fantasy of form, and he breaks the rules of classical architecture as can be done by one who knows them well. He is inventive but . . . eminently practical – a combination of qualities essential in a great architect.’ (Or, in Blunt’s case, qualities essential in a great spy.)

Certainly, both Blunt and Borromini are ‘Outsiders’ guilty of excessive ingenuity in their conduct, and surely the same can be said of Blunt that was said of Borrodini and his followers whose tendency was to ‘slip into heresy’ to defy predecessors and compeers.

An eighteenth-century critic of Borrominesque architecture echoes this jaundiced view, accusing its heretical style as a ‘wanton violation of propriety’ while a later nineteenth-century critic dismisses Borromini’s followers as ‘hare-brained moderns’.

So, in the arraignment of these two treacherous intellectual bedfellows, when called to answer for their crimes against time-honoured cultural values, we must remind ourselves that the jury is still out as to the definition of ‘heretical’.

How is History to judge?

How? When one of the Accused is a cloacal sewer and the other, according the KGB, is an ‘ideological shit’.**

Doublethink:
The ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in one's
mind simultaneously and accept both of them.
‘Khamelyon’:
(Хамелеон - Chameleon):
A person who switches their political views or loyalty
based on most advantageous position of the moment.
Ambigram Design Credit:
With respectful Acknowledgements to Scott Kim.

Blunt Instrument? A Narcissistic Didact’s Ultimate Betrayal?

Today, within the continuing swirl of rumour and countercurrents of suspicions, new theories are surfacing in the intelligence community as to the full enormity of Blunt’s treacherous acts. According to a new book (Master of Lies by Piers Blofeld, May 2026), British traitor Anthony Blunt allegedly passed on secrets to the Nazis which caused thousands of Allied forces to be killed during Operation Market Garden – the 1944 airborne attack by the Allies on the German defence of Arnhem – repelled by vastly superior enemy firepower, an assault allegedly forestalled by the Wehrmacht due to betrayal of invasion plans by a British spy. Blunt was one of only a very small group aware of the secret plans for Market Garden, which encompassed dropping thousands of paratroopers and glider troops into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands to drive an assault route into Germany. The earlier remarkable exposé, The Traitor of Arnhem (2024) by Robert Verkaik, is the source of the original accusation of betrayal by ‘Agent Josephine’, allegedly a Soviet cover name for the Soviet spy Blunt.

By foiling Operation Market Garden, this betrayal to the Soviets of the secret Allied plans was advantageous to the Russians because Stalin – while his troops were still fighting on the eastern front – had no intention of seeing the Americans and British occupy Berlin first and thereby thwart his plans to dominate Eastern Europe.

One desperately seeks an explanation for such an egregious betrayal.

It would take an egocentric didact who secretly harbours the arrogance of his own omniscience as keeper of state secrets to perpetrate such a crime against his own nation. A narcissistic donnish didact, then, secure in his pseudo-Proustian supremicist social positioning at the heart of the state while planted in the very highest echelons of high society and academia . . . with no convictions other than a jaded thrill from outplaying the field where there are no challengers because he alone is writing a dark chapter of history foreknown.

* A character sketch of Blunt by Charles Saumarez Smith, a fellow Marlburian, quoted in The Observer, November 2001.

** The Cambridge spies, according to a KGB officer quoted by the biographer of Philby, were despised and mistrusted by the ultra-Marxists of Moscow Centre and declared untrustworthy ‘ideological shit.’

Treason in the Blood by Anthony Cave Brown, 1994.

Catherine Eisner

Sunday, 17 May 2026

The Light that Failed: Counterviews. Polemical Art, Illusion and Disillusion. Blunt versus Solzhenitsyn.