74
PARTISAN REVIEW
for the adventurer that he is, before the Western writers, with their
'humanist' way of looking at things, make a hero out of
him. . . .
Let us show up this grotesque so that even future generations will turn
away from him in horror."
For numerous writers who remembered the Moscow Trials of
1936-1938/ to believe in the accusations hurled at Rajk amounted to
committing a kind of moral hara-kiri, akin to offering their brains up
for sacrifice. How they envied the non-Communists, whom it cost noth–
ing to believe-and why not?-that the Communist Saint-Just was
the most infamous of traitors! The reactionaries were jubilant, the op–
portunists put on a great show of zeal, while the Communists-! refer
to the sincere ones-were required to work a miracle, and did. They
believed, because "the Party cannot be wrong."
2
They believed in a
spirit of self-flagellation. They entered into the cult of Stalin as though
into a purification bath, after having shed the soiled garments of
bourgeois culpability. The cuirass of their faith, the
credo quia absur–
dum,
became the distinctive sign henceforward setting them apart from
the rabble of in-and-outers whose nationalist or cosmopolitan, formalist
or naturalist, subjectivist or objectivist deviations, they occasionally
joined in denouncing. They submitted with infinite good will to the
spiritual direction of Revai, the supreme custodian of the laws of Marxo–
Lenino-Stalinist art. One no longer wrote for the public: one wrote
for the
Akademia Ucca,
Revai's headquarters. One wrote to please the
Party.
Ad majorem gloriam.
.. .
One lied. One lied in heroic accents.
Then came the moment when all these sacrifices, all this heroic ef–
fort perversely directed at the destruction of their own consciences, were
revealed from on high as having been not only vain, but positively
1 I am ·told that my friend Andor Nemeth, a very subtle and lucid man,
and author of one of the best studies on Kafka, had listened to the radio re–
broadcast of the Rajk trial with a transcript of the Bukharin trial in his hand.
2 These were the last words flung at me, on the subject of Rajk, by a
very dear friend, that prince of simpletons, the poet Andre Havas, former Secre–
tary of the Hungarian Legation in Paris. Recaiied to Hungary after the arrest
-of Rajk, Havas was arrested and tortured to death. I have recently learned
that his t.eeth were broken off one by one; that the son of General Farkas,
Vladimir, the Number
'l'
sadist of the police, pissed in his mouth (the "ideological
specialty" of this Stalinist, it appears); and whim Havas, not understanding
exactly what was wanted of him nor able to bring himself to believe his Com–
munist comrades could be subjecting him to such atrocities, went out of his
mind, they continued to beat him until he died. The writers of Hungary are
now planriing a national funeral for Havas, the very man who kept repeating
indefatigably, while I was demonstrating point by point the utter baselessness
of the charges brought against Rajk: "The Party cannot bf' wrong; nothing
counts but loyalty to the Party."
