PARTISAN REVIEW
349
they are precisely the same as those which obtain, according to
Hannah Arendt, when a totalitarian system achieves full power: like
the victim of the totalitarian state, the suicide assists passively at the
cancellation of his own history, his work, his memories, his whole
inner life - in short, of everything that defines him as an individual:
The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous
(mak–
ing it impossible to find out whether a
prisoner
is dead or alive)
robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense
they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth
nothing belonged to
him
and he belonged to no one. His death
merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
For both the exterminated millions Miss Arendt writes about and for
Pasternak's suicides the conditions of terror were the same: "chaos,
no longer screened by art, fixed, unfamiliar, motionless." But the
suicides retained at least one last shred of freedom: they took their
own lives. In part this is a political act, both a gesture of defiance
and a condemnation of the set-up -like the self-immolation of the
student, Jan Palach, in Prague in 1968.
It
is also an act of affirma–
tion; the artist values life and his own truths too much to be able to
tolerate their utter perversion. Thus the totalitarian state presents its
artists with suicide as though with a gift, a final work of art validating
all his others.
It was part of Pasternak's own genius and uniqueness that he
refused to be canceled
in
this way and continued, by some political
miracle, to write his poems and his novel as though all those im–
probable personal values still survived. No doubt he paid for
his
understanding with isolation and depression, but few others got out so
cleanly. Yet neither those who survived contaminated nor those who
went under ever managed to hold up the mirror to that complete
corruption of nature which is the totalitarian system in action.
Not necessarily for lack of trying. But despite the hundreds of at–
tempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be
more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened
in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond
art and all those human values on which art
is
traditionally based.
The most powerful exception is the Pole, Tadeusz Borowski.
Where the Russian poets to whom Pasternak paid his homage con–
tinued to write up to the point where they felt their whole life and
