328
PARTISAN REVIEW
country is one of the painful experiences of the age. Karl Marx,
who lived for sixty-five years, spent more than thirty-seven years
of his adult life in exile. And one can say, perhaps wryly, that the
Communists
~ant
their best minds to live the way Marx did.
Millions of people emigrate and change the pattern of their
lives, but most of them, at least the fortunate ones, are able to do
so voluntarily and for voluntary reasons. For a writer, the ability
to travel is necessary for broadening his horizons. Among Amer–
ican writers, people like Washington Irving, James Fenimore
Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain,
Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway all spent
significant parts of their lives in travel and abroad, but they
could and did come home. Home is an essential fact for being a
writer-not only the physical surroundings and details of ordi–
nary life, but of course the language and the voices and the streets
and the air, and when one is not at home, it creates tremendous
problems .
Today, as my colleague William Phillips has observed, al–
most the entire Russian and even Czech culture (that part which
is not in prison), a large part of the Hungarian culture, and a
significant part of the Polish culture live in exile. And our theme
here is: What does this mean for the writer?
If
we turn to the Russian writer, his problem is significantly
different from the problem of those writers from Eastern Europe.
The years of Stalinism beginning in 1929 created a huge pressure
chamber that has lasted more th"an fifty years and has stamped out
an extraordinary, vibrant, and independent culture. There's a
very curious paradox of Soviet Marxism: it believes in history
with a capital H, but not in memory.
The question is: Whose past now becomes more relevant?
We 've had perhaps three emigrations. For the Russian writer,
there were of course the great nineteenth-century emigrations of
Herzen, of Turgenev. There was a second emigration, less well–
known but in its own way significant: after the Revolution people
like Berdiaev, Ivan Bunin, Mark Aldanov, Lev Shestov all lived
and worked in exile, most of them in Paris, although Aldanov
came to this country after World War II. Today, the people
gathered here represent the third emigration. The question is:
To whom do they relate?
There is also, however, the great fruit of Russian experi-
