‘The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks… And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.’ The quote is usually attributed to Stalin, though the phrase ‘engineers of human souls’ most likely came from someone else. Who’s to argue? Purges, executions, deportations – what’s a little light plagiarism in comparison? Whoever coined the phrase, it certainly struck a chord and indeed continues to ring various alarm bells whenever one comes across writers who deliberately set out to influence politics and ideas – and not just the big beasts, the Nobel Prize winners, say, or the shopfront-filling non-fiction authors hawking their wares, or the endless novelists with their little axes to grind. What now is Twitter/X but a global furnace and forge for those frantically tapping out their hot takes in the hope of making an impact? Social media, like all media, ain’t just entertainment: it’s in the business of taking souls.

In Engineers of Human Souls, Simon Ings examines the lives of four writers – Auguste-Maurice Barrès, the French ‘novelist, politician and grouch’; Gabriele D’Annunzio and Maxim Gorky, who probably need no introduction; and Ding Ling, who probably does – ‘whose political visions shaped and misshaped their century’.

Although awarded the Stalin prize for Literature, Ding Ling was eventually  denounced, purged and exiled

Ings is a pretty unusual individual and the perfect guide to this peculiar selection of odd and ambitious writers. The arts editor of the New Scientist, he writes science fiction, journalism and non-fiction, most notably Stalin and the Scientists (2016). He has tremendous range and moves at speed: he’s the sort of writer so bursting with energy and ideas that it’s sometimes difficult to keep up. He tosses out incidental remarks and insights at an extraordinary rate – the right-wing in politics is ‘split between reactionaries, who never believed in the democratic impulse in the first place, and romantics, who believe that there has to be more to democracy than just a contest between rival intellectuals’ – and there are brilliant novelistic flourishes throughout as he frantically blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. He imagines Barrès, for example, passing Oscar Wilde on a Paris street: ‘There on the pavement outside the Café d’Égypte, tapping his foot, all the while mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief’. And then there’s Lenin, working on his Materialism and Empirico-Criticism in London in 1908:

He brings all the resources of the British Museum to bear on this sketchy and bad-tempered work: physics, philosophy, economics. He talks to nobody. After a day in the library, he retreats to the East End for plates of chopped liver and herring.

There’s enough material in the vignettes alone for about four different books.

Instead, we get just this one wild ride, divided into four parts, beginning with the story of Barrès, French nationalist, monarchist, anti-Dreyfusard and the author of a so-called trilogie du moi, including Un Homme Libre (1889), with Ings plunging fearlessly in and providing a crash-course in late 19th- and early 20th-century French revanchism. Some of the details are fascinating, if instantly forgettable, but many of the insights seem shockingly relevant today: ‘The thing about Barrès’s hatreds is that he thinks he’s in control of them. He thinks they’re tactics.’ Note: beware tactics. And, in general, high-energy individuals: ‘Barrès’s whole project, literary and political, was about finding something to do.’

The chapters on D’Annunzio and Gorky are similarly rammed and jam-packed, though with the general lineaments of the chief protagonists shockingly similar: ‘Maxim Gorky was a fixer, one of that vanishingly small band of writers who are not only willing but able to run a soup kitchen.’ D’Annunzio, likewise, was a live wire and a narcissist: ‘What D’Annunzio actually offered the electorate was what he always offered, in the course of a long, prolific, chaotic life – extra helpings of D’Annunzio.’

The chapter on Ding Ling seems rather sketchier, but that may well be because of my own lack of background knowledge. I’ll admit, to my shame, to never having read her. Born Jiang Bingzhi in 1904, Ding Ling was a pioneering Chinese feminist and socialist realist writer, most famous outside China, apparently, for The Sun Shines Over Sanggan River, awarded the Stalin Prize for Literature in 1951. She was, alas, eventually, inevitably, denounced, purged and sent into exile.

Engineers of Human Souls, among other things, serves as a very timely warning. Examining the lead-up to the first world war and the writers urging themselves and their governments to action, Ings says:

Parliamentary institutions across Europe were proving shaky, their members lazy and venal, their constituencies embittered or just plain uninterested. What better fillip than a war to foster national identity and promote democratic involvement?

Be careful what you wish for.