180
PARTISAN REVIEW
reading as well, and as he was himself at the same time reading
Schweik,
he did not miss the opportunity of comparing the value of the
two authors. At all events, Dostoyevsky could not hold a candle
to
Hasek, but was rather consigned unceremoniously to the "nobodies,"
and he was doubtless close to extending to his work the term that he
holds ready of late for all writings which lack, or to which he denies, an
enlightening character. He calls them "clods."
1938
28th
June.
I found myself in a labyrinth of staircases. This
labyrinth was not everywhere roofed. I climbed up; other stairways led
downwards. On one landing I found myself standing on a summit. A
wide prospect opened across the country. I saw others standing on
other peaks. One of these was suddenly gripped by vertigo and plunged
down. The giddiness spread; other people now £ell from other summits
into the depths. When I too was eized by this feeling, I woke up.
On June 22nd I arrived at Brecht's.
Brecht points to a nonchalant elegance in the posture of Virgil and
Dante, describing it as the background against which Virgil's grand
gesture stands out. He called them both
promeneurs.
He stresses the
classical status of the
Inferno:
"You can read it in the country."
Brecht speaks of his inveterate hatred of clergymen, inherited from
his grandmother. He insinuates that those who have adopted the
theoretical doctrines of Marx, doctored to suit themselves, will always
form a clerical camarilla. Marxism lends itself far too easily to "inter–
pretation. "
It
is a hundred years old and has been shown ... (at this
point we are interrupted). "The state must be abolished' Who says
that? The State. " (Here he can only mean the Soviet Union.) Brecht
comes and stands in an artful, crushed posture in front of the armchair
in which I am sitting-he is imitating " the state" -and says, with a
sidelong squint at imaginary clients: "'I know, I
ought
to be abol–
ished'."
A conversation on the modern Soviet novel. We have given up
following it. We then turn to poetry and to the
translation~
of Soviet
lyric poetry from the most diverse languages with which
Das Wort
is
inundated. Brecht remarks that the authors over there are having a
difficult time. "It is taken as deliberate if the name Stalin does not
appear in a poem."
29th
June.
Brecht talks of the epic theater; he mentions the
children's theater in which errors of presentation, functioning as
