352
PARTISAN REVIEW
the perspective of a free society, the proper society of Wittenberg?
It seems to me this is the first question, because almost all of us
here are people who left our own countries for this kind of open
society.
In some way, it is possible to term the opposition between
the closed one and the open one as the movement of emigration.
In the movement of emigration, the opposition is between a
country in which it's possible
to
live and a country in which it's
either impossible to live-to write-or impossible to live with
some kind of dignity.
Now, for the purposes of our conference, of course, and for
this kind of audience, most of whom have come from the Soviet
Union and from countries which, after Yalta, fell under the dom–
ination of the Soviet Union, the central problem is the Commu–
nist domination. But it seems
to
me that the problem of Com–
munist domination is only one part of a much larger situation in
which, after the 1970s and 1980s, a great part of the world became
a world in which great numbers of people were emigrating from
one country to another-a world in which a great part of its
people are now emigres, emigres from the Soviet Union , from
Poland, from other East European countries, with only a small
number from Asia and Africa.
So, a question arises: the question of literature, of the es–
sence of literature. To whom are we writing in the open society?
We are writing
to
the open society about the situation of the
emigre. And it seems to me that it is not by accident that the last
three Nobel Prize winners in 1iterature-Mi10sz, Canetti, Singer–
are all emigres, and have all, in some way, written emigre litera–
ture. Here, in the morning session, a very moving question
arose. After leaving our own countries in which we could not
write what we wished
to
write, in which we could not live in the
way we wished
to
live, we now have complete freedom, but we
have no audience, we are speaking with a full voice to a deaf
world.
It seems to me that the most essential issue is
to
present the
situation of the exiled writer, of the exile as a human fact of the
twentieth century, of the emigre as representing the basic human
situation. Of course, we have to understand why the nonhuman
situation of the writer in a Communist country is finally becom-
