The Unknown Unknowns

The Guardian has stories of great writing that has lain forgotten, suppressed or invisible.

From the piece...

I love the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, which is mysterious, raw, brutal and profound. But I am also haunted by the story behind the story; by the fact that Gilgamesh lay forgotten in the sands of Iraq for thousands of years. Unlike other lost books that we know went missing – Ovid's Art of Love, the second part of Gogol's Dead Souls – Gilgamesh was, to quote D Rumsfeld, an unknown unknown: nobody knew it had even been there. The idea of this invisible literature, lurking in darkness, fascinates me.

Another such book – very far from Gilgamesh – is John Kennedy O'Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, about a fat slob called Ignatius J Reilly, who feels he doesn't belong in the world. Its invisibility was not the result of the collapse of the civilisation that produced it, but rather its rejection by American publishers. Devastated, O'Toole eventually committed suicide – but thanks to his mother's persistence, Confederacy was published 11 years after his death, won the Pulitzer prize and has since sold millions of copies worldwide. Today, it's a canonical text of southern literature.

Some countries provide better conditions for the generation of unknown unknowns than others. Totalitarian communist dictatorships, with their high levels of literacy and low levels of freedom, are ideal. Daniil Kharms (1905-1942), who lived in Stalin's Russia, is a fine example. During his own lifetime he was known as a children's author; his bizarre, adult tales of death, disappearances and random violence unknown to all but a close inner circle. Kharms starved to death during the Leningrad blockade of 1942. His texts would have vanished if a friend hadn't risked his life to rescue them. They first surfaced in the west in the 1960s and were published in Russia in the 1980s. Now festivals are held in Russia in honour of books that for 30 years nobody knew existed.