PARTISAN REVIEW
347
destruction is all turned inwards and the artist deliberately explores
in himself that narrow, violent area between the viable and the
im–
possible, the tolerable and the intolerable. Both approaches involve
certain radical changes in the relationship of the artist to his material.
For Totalitarian Art the changes are both inevitable and un–
willing. The simple reason is that a police state and its politics of
terror produce conditions in which the intense individualism on
which art is traditionally based - its absolute trust in the validity
of the unique personal insight - is no longer possible. When the
artist is valued like an engineer or factory worker or bureaucrat, only
to the extent to which he serves the policies of the state, then
his
art
is reduced to propaganda - sometimes sophisticated, more often not.
The artist who refuses that role refuses everything; he becomes super–
fluous. In these circumstances the price of art in the traditional sense
and with its traditional values is suicide - or silence, which amounts
to the same thing.
Perhaps this explains the phenomenal casualty rate among the
generation of Russian poets who had begun to work before the con–
vulsions of
1917
and refused the Joycean alternative of "silence, exile
and cunning." In
1926,
after Sergei Yesenin hanged himself, first
cutting his wrists and then,
as
a last great aesthetic gesture, writing
a farewell
poem
in his own blood, Mayakovsky wrote, condemn–
ing him:
In this life it is not difficult to die
it is more difficult to live.
Yet less than five years later Mayakovsky himself, poetic hero of the
Revolution and inveterate gambler who had twice already played
Russian roulette with a loaded revolver, came to the conclusion that
his political principles were poisoning his poetry at its source. He
played Russian roulette for the last time and lost. In his suicide note
he wrote laconically, "I don't recommend it for others." Yet several
others did, in fact, follow him, apart from all those who, like Man–
delshtam and Babel, disappeared in the purges. Boris Pasternak wrote
an epitaph on them all:
To start with what is most important: we have no conception of
the inner torture which precedes suicide. People who are physically
tortured on the rack keep losing consciousness, their suffering is so
great that its unendurable intensity shortens the end. But a man
