Many are surprised to discover that political life is by no means alien to the writers of our time. As passions heat up throughout the world, writers and poets are increasingly involved in political processes. Nekrasov has such a work - "The Poet and the Citizen"; it examines the participation of the creative intelligentsia in the political life of the state. You may not be a poet, but a citizen …
In modern information wars, all available means are used: from yellow tabloid rags and cheap Internet portals to giant film studios and "whales" from literature. Moreover, writers are not alien to both pro and counter government parties. And there are even people like Pelevin who manage to write for both political camps.
However, if you look into the past, you can see that formally nothing has changed. As before, writers, using fashionable political trends, tried to "push" their works into the world. And, perhaps, it is difficult to find a creative person who has not smeared himself with politicized prose or poetry.
But there is one interesting state that not only used its creative personalities for agitation and propaganda of its course, but also went even further. Practically all of her more or less significant poets and writers had a train of mysterious stories, fatal incidents and outright espionage activities. This state is Great Britain.
One of the first to draw attention to the "strangeness" of the reputation of almost all English writers of the 18th and 19th centuries was the literary critic Gilbert Chesterton. Himself, being a poet, he often spoke in society about the "oddities" of the behavior of his colleagues, both living now and dead. This idea was supported by Robert Graves and Adam Kirsch. Indeed, if you look closely at the biographies of English writers, you will discover the truly eerie nuances of their lives.
Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, was one of the most popular English writers. In his biography, there is one interesting fact that radically changed his whole life - in 1900 he went to the Anglo-Boer War as a military doctor. And everything would be fine and logical: the doctors were drafted into the army, but what happened after his return cannot be explained in any way. Before the war, Sir Arthur was a famous writer, but nothing more. A person who has returned from the war suddenly plunges into an active political life, as a result of which he contributes to the reform of the British judicial system, innovations in the army, and so on.
Moreover, in 1909 he disappears from London for six months, and upon his return he publishes a book about the atrocities of the Belgians in the Congo. In British society, the book has the effect of an exploding bomb - the public could not imagine that their allies were capable of such atrocities. With the outbreak of World War I, Doyle immediately went to the front (which, to put it mildly, is unnatural for an almost 60-year-old man), where he also leads an active journalistic and subversive activity: his ideas about "raids on the German rear" are one of the first works on the topic of sabotage operations in new types of wars. At the front, Doyle met with the founder of the British intelligence special forces Loweth, and they had a lot of reasons to talk about "secret wars" …
It is possible that in the Boer War, Doyle was somehow recruited by the British intelligence service and did not carry out his activities only in the literary field. The title "sir" at that time was not simply given. In addition, there was another interesting fact: Sir Arthur was awarded the Ottoman Order of the Medjidie 2nd degree. The number of holders of this order was small - only 150 people. And the Turks before the First World War were in alliance with Great Britain.
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Another interesting example is Rudyard Kipling, author of a book on Mowgli. Since childhood, dreamed of a military career, he was never able to graduate from a military school due to myopia, however, this did not prevent him from getting into the British army in the engineering troops unit, which provides communications. And at that time (1885) it was an elite branch of the military, using the most modern technological advances. Kipling has spent almost 10 years traveling in India, Laos, Burma, China and Japan. Simultaneously with writing books, he is collecting information about the actions of military formations on the territory of those states, because his connections among local journalists only favored this. It was a very turbulent region at a very turbulent time: the Opium Wars had just ended, and the countries of the Far East were re-sharing spheres of influence. Such events could not pass by the British Empire. And what better cover for an agent than being a traveling writer?
No less unexpected was the discovery of the secret life of the author of children's books about the bear Winnie the Pooh Alan Milne. In 2012, documents were found in his house confirming that he had been recruited by the British intelligence department of MI7, which was in charge of agitation and propaganda. Under their "wing" Milne wrote over a hundred propaganda articles for soldiers on both front lines.
But all this cannot be compared with the fact revealed by biographers about Jane Austen, the famous English writer, who created the novel "Pride and Prejudice" so beloved by the ladies. Possessing many relatives abroad, she corresponded with them. Jane received especially large amounts of correspondence from her brother's wife, a certain Eliza de Feyd, who lived in France.
For a long time these letters were inaccessible for study, and, as it turned out, this had quite serious reasons. Eliza de Feyd was an ardent opponent of the French Revolution, however, having connections in Jacobin circles, she supplied Austin with strategic information about the state of affairs in the economy, politics and the army of rebellious France. It was a very interesting communication channel - the friends used a kind of cipher system to mislead the censorship of the Jacobins. The entire Austin family, from father and mother to her four brothers, also hated the new French government. Her two older brothers went to war with France and ended up serving in the admiral's ranks. Jane Austen's family was such a difficult one.
All these facts indicate that the British government has never shied away from involving creative people in the work of its special services. Perhaps this is happening now. And who knows, maybe in 50 years we will learn about the disclosure of spy secrets in which, for example, Stephen Fry or Terry Jones are involved …