PARTISAN REVIEW
The concentration camps, the idea of collective guilt, the denun–
ciation of parents by their children, belong, even in the eyes of apol–
ogists, to a world where the Soviet Union seems to have taken over
the heritage of Byzantium. No one can think of them as part of the
Christian universe. All this is also, of course, mixed up (though to an
ever lessening degree) with the Slavic passion for brotherhood.
Stalinism represents at the same time Sparta and Byzantium.
You, who are a historian, can realize how everything is taking place
as if the world were once more going to oppose the Eastern Roman
Empire to the Empire of the West.
Burnham:
In the cultural order, I know very well what the
Eastern Empire wants. But what do you want for the West?
Malraux:
What I think about this subject is based upon the
following premise: The idea of a democratic culture, which seemed
vague and suspect in the nineteenth century, has grown clear and
valid in the twentieth century because of the
devewpment of the
techniques for reproducing works of art.
Painting and music have at
last discovered their printing press. ·
In each of the large provincial cities of France, there
is
a museum
housing a large number of the usually abominable academic paintings
of the Third Republic. We would first like to see those paintings
gathered together in the attic of one of the museums in Paris (where
art :s involved, it is never good to destroy anything). Their place in
the provincial museums would then be taken by the most perfect
reproductions, in the original size, of the hundred or so masterpieces
of painting now scattered all over the world.
In this setting there would also be available and open to every–
one a record collection, a collection of movies, and as many repro–
ductions of other works of art as are published.
Lack of money would be no real obstacle. We could take ad–
vantage of the copyright machinery.
As
you know, every publisher
has to send two copies of each published work to the National Library.
If
we were to set up, say, fifty cultural centers, all that we would
need would be an amendment to the law which would require a
deposit of fifty more copies than at present. The publishers and the
record manufacturers are for it. The problem would not be to gather
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