PARTISAN REVIEW
451
of societies, the changing of human beings. Now I changed my opinion
in the sphere of politics.
INT: Yes, I can see that in your last book that just came out in
America.
DJILAS:
The Unperfect Society.
Anyhow, I am against the so-called
"engaged" literature, in the sense that Sartre is.
INT: How about Camus?
DJILAS: I am more inclined to Camus's ideals. In literature and even
in philosophy. I feel very close to Camus. I was astonished, when
I read him for the first time, to see how many ideas we had in
common.
INT: Are you referring
to
his essays?
DJlLAS: I read first
Le mythe de Sisyphe,
that's the first book of Camus
I read. I read it too late, in 1954, when I was in the Office and
then I was expelled from the Central Committee. Later I read hiS
other books, the best of the others:
The Fall, The Stranger,
etc. I
find
him
one of the best authors of World War II.
L'homme revolte
is also good. It has new ideas.
INT: To write about political issues and have a universal meaning is
not so common. Not everybody can write a book like Dostoevski's
The Devils.
DJILAS: Not even that. I don't think
The Devils
is good.
INT: Turgenyev's
Fathers and Sons?
DJILAS: No, not even
Fathers and Sons.
I think that literature and art
generally must be engaged, but not in everyday politics, in party
struggles. They should be engaged in some great human ideas. You
cannot avoid talking about human beings while dealing with such
problems.
INT: Yes, the most important thing is man. His relation to a political
or social issue, with its moral implications. And even when this
issue is resolved, there is still the problem of existence: man on this
earth, with the big questions: what to do, how, and why.
DJILAS: With such questions literature must
be
engaged.
INT: In this respect, don't you feel that everything in politics is tem–
porary?
It
is only one stage leading to another. And so is Communism
itself.
DJlLAS: I agree with you. This Communism. We don't know about the
future, what will happen; but this Communism is temporary.
INT: Isn't Marxism itself leading into something else?
DJILAS: I think that Marx was one of the greatest thinkers, but Marx–
ism is a small dogma.
(Laughter)
Just like any other dogma. Prob–
ably the idea of Marx was to avoid the dogmatization of his ideas,
