A review of the new book “Bond Behind The Iron Curtain” by James Fleming
In October 1962, I was 14 when I went to see the new film “Dr No” which introduced me to James Bond aka special agent 007. For the next 60 years, I went to see each new Bond movie as it was released in a franchise which has now reached 25 outings for MI6’s top spy. Meanwhile, in my teenage years, I read all 14 of the Bond novels written by Ian Fleming.
It’s hard to believe now just how frenzied the media was for Bondmania. In the same month that the first Bond film was released, the world experienced the Cuban missile crisis which was about as hot as the Cold War became and Bondmania was very much a Western phenomenon with the films and books banned behind the Iron Curtain. And yet …
A nephew of Ian Fleming has now written a short but fascinating work which reveals that the Communist world was aware of the Bond phenomenon. Somehow, some months before the “Dr No” movie was released, a review of the film appeared in the Russian publication “Isvestiya” and Ian Fleming was so amused by this that he almost persuaded the publisher of his books to carry a translation of the review on the dust jacket of his next Bond book.
Although “Bond Behind the Iron Curtain” carries James Fleming’s name as the author, the majority of the 125 pages are not written by him but are translations of works from the mid 1960s in Russian, Czech and Polish.
The longest and most impressive of these foreign pieces is an excellent translation of a critical but erudite article by Maya Turovskaya that was published in the distinguished literary journal “Novy Mir” in 1966 which was arguably the height of the Bondmania.
Turovskaya had seen the first four Bond movies – “Dr No”, “From Russia With Love”, “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball” – and read the books on which these films were based and she wrote an incisive article that dissected the Bond phenomenon and placed it in a wide-ranging cultural context of the crime genre. Turovskaya saw enthusiasts for Bond as seeking “all that they lack in their dull and mediocre lives” and damned such enthusiasm as “compensation for the bourgeois inferiority complex” and “a form of narcotics for the senses”.