Two hundred years ago, the Russian writer, publisher and agent of the secret-police Third Department, Thaddeus Bulgarin, criticised the ‘prose-making machine’ and its users. Was he so wrong?
I saw here two machines, like organs, with many wheels and cylinders; they seemed to me extremely multifarious: my guide explained their use to me. They were: a machine for making verses, and a machine for prose. <...> — Couldn't you compose something on the given subject? — I asked. — Very possible, — answered my guide, — what do you like? Here I wanted to embarrass the conductor and prove the inconvenience of composing machines. I chose the subject of my composition to be a description of my homeland, wondering how the machine would get rid of this task and describe a place not seen or perhaps not heard of by any of the inhabitants of polar countries. The guide took out from the shelf a dictionary of ancient geography, found in it the name of my native city, picked up the words written on the bones, similar to the book, took proper names belonging to the description, a lot of adjectives, several auxiliary verbs and a bunch of ready-made expressions, threw all this into the box, put the spring, the drum struck a march, the trumpet played a march, and the bones began to fall. Imagine my surprise when half an hour later a rather detailed description of the city where I was born was published. At first sight it seemed to me to be as good as the work of mediocre minds; but on reading it carefully, I immediately noticed the pompousness, the vulgar sayings, the alien thoughts, and the lack of connection with the whole, which showed the action of a machine and not of a mind. — It is a great pity,’ said I, ’that this invention was not known in our time; it would have benefited a great many untalented heads. — ‘It was known in your time,’ replied the guide, ‘but it was kept secret among the men of letters, and passed like a hereditary secret, from the illiterate to the idle and back again. ‘Plausible Fables, or Travelling through the World in the XXIXth Century’ (1824) — Thaddeus Bulgarin
Comments