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PARTISAN REVIEW
Hungarian revolution was also due to mislaying the calendar.)
1
What Mr. Deutscher does not face up to is the political significance
of the Pasternak case. Pasternak, writing almost as if he too, at the end
of the book, accepted Mr. Deutscher's optimistic prognosis, offered a
novel that forced the regime to decide how far the "thaw" could go.
The party-state answered by brutally suppressing the book. Does this
fact support Mr. Deutscher's theory about the expected gradual "de–
mocratization" of Russian Communism, or does it indicate that, with
less violent methods, the regime stands ready to suppress fundamental
disagreement and criticism, and insists upon maintaining its ideological
monopoly?
Mr. Deutscher seems almost to plead with "the censors": let the
senile old poet mumble his memories of the dead, he can do you no
harm, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were also Christians. But the "censors"
may realize that Pasternak's version of "Christianity," because it speaks
of human freedom,
is
a danger to them; and they may feel that they
can manage their dictatorship without the help of Western
Besserwissers.
Or perhaps there is truth in Herbert Marcuse's remarks about the
Soviet attitude toward art:
... it is precisely the catastrophic element inherent in the conflict be–
tween man's essence and his existence that has been the center toward
which art has gravitated... . The artistic images have preserved the
determinate negation of the established reality-ultimate freedom. When
Soviet esthetics attacks the principle of the "insurmountable antagonism
between essence and existence" . . . it thereby attacks the principle of
art itself.
May it not be then, that from
their
point of view, the "censors"
are not so obtuse? Mr. Deutscher gives involuntary support to this pos–
sibility when he writes that, while a relic in Russia, "Zhivago still rep–
resents a powerful force" in Poland and Hungary. But the Russian "cen–
sors" know how short is the distance from Warsaw or Budapest to
Moscow. And in any case, what is the logic of Mr. Deutscher's state-
1.
But one need not wonder for long. In
Russia
in
Transition
Mr. Deutscher
writes: "It may be said that in October-November [1956], the people of Hun–
gary in a heroic frenzy tried unwittingly to put the clock back, while Moscow
sought once again to wind up with the bayonet, or rather the tank, the broken
clock of the Hungarian Communist revolution. It is difficult to say who it
was who acted the more tragic, and the more futile or hopeless role."
Calendars, clocks-the image changes, the politics remains. Like Yuri
Zhivago, the people of Hungary in their quest for freedom are seen as rep–
resenting the past, while the Russian tanks, however brutally, push forward
the clock. No wonder that, again, Mr. Deutscher feels no overwhelming
im–
pulse to identify himself with those who fight against the tanks.
