Censorship and Government Oppression Theme Analysis

Italo Calvino had firsthand experience with government oppression, living through the reign of the fascist government of Benito Mussolini in Italy, and later opposing the harsh rule of Joseph Stalin and his immediate successors in the Soviet Union. This likely explains why the various story fragments within If on a winter’s night a traveler often contain elements of paranoia, evoking fears of surveillance and punishment, with some making direct reference to totalitarian governments. The most straightforward instance of government oppression comes in the final few chapters, when you (the Reader) are imprisoned in Ataguitania, a country that bans books, only to be sent later on secret mission to Ircania, a country with a totally different political situation that ends up banning different books for a different reason.

Although characters like Corinna and Arkadian Porphyrich try to emphasize how humane their prisons are and why the policy of book banning makes sense, the Reader can see the absurdity of his situation and how hypocritical those characters are. Arkadian Porphyrich considers himself part of a movement, which he calls “the Spirit,” that crosses national and ideological boundaries. But his seemingly hopeful declaration of unity has sinister undertones, suggesting that in many diverse nations and ideologies there is the danger of people who blindly submit to authority, enacting censorship and oppression without understanding why. Throughout the novel, Calvino depicts other menacing characters who also seem to have “the Spirit” of oppression, like the men from Section D in What story down there awaits its end? who are capable of making parts of the world disappear at will or the narrator of In a network of lines that intersect, who is so obsessed with safety that he ends up trapping himself. And so, in If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino celebrates the power of reading by showing how determined some people are to control books through censorship. In so doing, Calvino also satirizes oppressive regimes by showing how they can use benign language to hide cruelty and hypocrisy.