PARTISAN REVIEW
571
which, as I have already hinted, is hostile to the young: "We hear it
all the time," a thirty-seven-year-old electrical engineer told me in
Prague. "from the twenty-eight-year-olds, but e\'en more from the boys
just out of the uni\·ersity. 'There you sit,' they say, 'in the jobs you got
ten, fifteen years ago, with you r ,Hses gett ing bigger and bigger and
blocking the way.' And they're quite right. from their point of view.
But there are e\'en bigger arses blocking ours."
Of the two younger generations
I
ha\'e called the "recognized"
and the "new," the first consists of people already im'olved in the busi–
ness of their own lives and recognized by themselves and the rest of
society as the young adu lts of their time. The second is only emer–
ging to independence and to a sense of its own identity.
In Eastern Europe, I found the pattern of contrasts between these
two age groups much the most intriguing ; it reflects the contrasting
histories in which they ha\'e grown to consciousness.
Though fairly clear to me now, the pattern only began to occur to me
during the fourth week of my initial trip through Eastern Europe, in
Romania in
1968,
On my first Sunday in Bucharest
I
wandered into a
circle of young people discussing literature at the University Club, There
were about twenty of them, sitting in a large rool1l shaded from the May
morning sun, reading their own stories and poems and arguing about
them fiercely,
I
sat down and in whispers explained who I was to a
gypsy-faced boy of about twenty-two, H e turned out to be the chie f critic
)f the circle. and he translated for me the goings on .
One of the stories read was ca lled "Hegel in the Bar."
It
seemed
to ha\'e everything, an absurd situation, neo-surrea listic style, disillu–
sionment, se lf-pi ty, digs at official parlance and philosophy, in short
e\'erything that cou ld seem rebellious in Eastern Europe. Yet it was
torn to pif'cf's, "There's a lready a n inflation of this sort of stuff, it's too
easy, it's pseudoliterature," one of the boys said, "Unless it's done far
better than a lot of people are already doing it, it's not worth doing
at all."
This seemed to me , still frf'sh from the West, a cruel judgment.
Hadn 't the piece been a brave act of defiance against socialist realism?
"Oh, we're long past that," the gypsy critic said, " By now we're even
fed up with the rf'action against it. We want something really new.
Unlike both the \'ulgar soc iology that used to be sen 'ed here as liter–
ature, and the a ntidote which so many people are writing now," Cruel–
ty, it seemed, had been a matter of soph isticat ion.
"Yet they're a lso Illorf' tolerant than we used to be," a thirty-one–
year-old teacher to wholll I related the story in Pola nd said. "I see them
