WRITERS IN EXILE
351
Jan Kott will speak first, followed by Pavel Litvinov and
Efim Etkind. Efim Etkind is a renowned scholar and literary
critic who is best known for his courageous testimony affirming
the literary merit and social contributions of Joseph Brodsky.
This act, chronicled in
Notes of a Non-Conspirator,
coupled
with his possession of some of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's manu–
scripts, led to his emigration. He teaches at the University of
Nanterre, France. Jan Kott is a prominent literary scholar and
critic who left Warsaw in the late 1960s. He has since taught at
Yale and Berkeley and now teaches English and comparative lit–
erature at the State University of New York at Stonybrook.
Among his books and articles are
The Eating of the Gods, Shake–
speare Our Contemporary,
and
Theater Notebook.
Pavel Litvinov
is best known for his role in defending Soviet dissidents and for
his tireless efforts in trying to establish the facts in dissidents'
cases. He compiled a book on the case of Aleksandr Ginzburg
and Yuri Galanskov, who had earlier compiled a book on the
case of Siniavsky and Daniel. And he served a five-year prison
sentence for his demonstration against the invasion of Czecho–
slovakia, after which he was exiled. He currently works on the
Chronicle of Current Events,
a journal of human rights in the
USSR. And he 's the grandson, you might recall , of the famous
Russian Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov.
Jan Kott is the next speaker.
JAN KOTT: Hamlet came to Elsinore for the wedding of his
mother to his uncle, who had killed his father; his uncle had be–
come the king of Denmark. Hamlet came to Elsinore from Wit–
tenberg. Elsinore, Denmark, is a prison, and Wittenberg is not.
Let's assume for one moment that the opposition between Elsi–
nore and Wittenberg, which was so crucial for Hamlet, is the
same as the opposition between the open society and the closed
one. For any director of
Hamlet,
the first choice is, Where is the
audience?
In
Wittenberg, looking at the others, at the drama in
Elsinore? Or is Elsinore
our
drama? The answer is that we are
living in Elsinore, in the closed society.
It
seems to me that one of the questions for this conference
is, Where are we?
In
Elsinore, in Wittenberg, in what kind of so–
ciety? Or, to put the matter in different terms, do we have to look
at Wittenberg with the Elsinore perspective, or at Elsinore with
