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PARTISAN REVIEW
tion, deceitfulness, drabness, bureaucratic privilege, all flourish.
These societies betray a distorted evaluation of personality–
nonentities are elevated to great heights, exceptional people are
debased. The most moral citizens are subjected
to
persecution, the
most talented and efficient are reduced
to
the lowest common
denominator of mediocrity and muddle.
It
is not necessarily the
authorities who achieve this. A person 's own colleagues, friends ,
work-mates and neighbours bend all their efforts to deny a man of
talent the possibility of developing his own individuality, or an
industrious man the chance of advancement. All this takes on a
universal character embracing every sphere of activity, and panicu–
larly the spheres of government and of creative activity. Society is
threatened with being turned into a barracks. This threat determines
the psychological state of the citizens. Boredom and anxiety prevail,
and a constant fear of worse
to
come. A society of this kind is
condemned
to
stagnation and
to
a chronic putrefaction if it cannot
find within itself the strength to res ist these tendencies.
A fashionable cliche in literary criticism since the middle of the
nineteenth century holds that though society is degenerate, the writer
and artist can lift us above social corruption through their postures of
opposition to society. But while various artist-figures fill Zinoviev's
book, he decisively repudiates this claim, being utterly clear about the
fact that artists are always among the first to join the thoughtless social
file. "Once Dauber said jokingly that there was on ly one rule in art: the
higher placed the arse you licked, the better artist you were"; and in the
end Bawler recognized that " there's nowhere you'll find as many
degenerates as in the ranks of the Arts and Sciences." Yevtushenko and
Voznesensky are excoriated; Neizvestny's defection is noted with
sadness . Solzhenitsyn is labelled ''Truth-teller'' to stress the primacy in
his vision of morals over aesthetics. Schizophrenic, Slanderer, and
Chatterer write not to produce an artistic commodity fit for social
consumption, but because their fossil individuality is obliged, from
within, somehow to find expression. Even so, at last the book ends with
them all destroyed-in a rubble of lost lives, lost hopes , lost visions.
And yet not lost, perhaps, not entirely lost.
The Yawning Heights
itself was published in France in 1976 and since then in several
countries, causing a sensation wherever it has appeared . The episodes
and ideas in it are like lava flows intruded through the softer earth and
left to cool and harden just below the surface of the Shithouse swamp
of soc-ism. Truth, after all, is a very hard substance. Chatterer, let us
hope, was less right in his despair than in his original conviction that
the words of Schizophrenic and his heirs would prevail. As he once told
Dauber, though the spokesmen were eliminated, " the works themselves
