WRITERS IN EXILE
353
ing the nonhuman situation of human beings and of writers all
over the world, in many countries.
I would like to take up a personal experience, and, if I may,
I will refer once more to the opposition between Elsinore and
Wittenberg. After World War II, the situation was as if Elsinore
had come to Wittenberg: to Hungary, Poland, all the parts of
Europe invaded by the Red Army. I remember quite well when,
in 1947, while I was in Moscow, I had the opportunity to meet
Pasternak.
It
was not so easy of course; they told me to stay in the
hotel, to say that I had the flu, and later, through the help of
friends, I was given permission, and by night we came to Paster–
nak's
dacha.
At this time, he was translating Slovatskij from Pol–
ish into Russian. He understood my Polish quite well;
he
spoke
Russian.
It
was the second or third year after World War II. I was
full of enthusiasm, and I told him that, more or less, we were free
in Poland, we could write almost anything we wished. Pasternak
looked at me the wayan old man, or a mature man, looks at a
child, and he said, Look! You are now singing like a bird, you
are as free as a bird, and all of you are singing your own tune.
But one morning, one day, all of you will wake up in a small
cage, and under this cage will be the inscription, "The Former
Surrealist," "The Former Expressionist," "The Former Formal–
ist," -all of them "The Enemy of the People"!
A few days later, I came back to Warsaw, and on the Writers'
Union building there was a very big placard with an inscription
stating, "The writers are the engineers of the human soul." And
I understood quite well that Pasternak was right, that this was
just the moment he'd spoken of-to use the words of Kafka, "a
cage in search of a bird." The cage was Red. At this time, I was
still naive, and a member of the Communist Party. There was
only one thing that astonished me: Why are the writers the engi–
neers of the human soul and not the engineers of the human
mind? What is this strange concoction-engineers and soul?
I understood it two or three years later. I spent one summer
in a resort by the Baltic where I once had dinner with the Deputy
Minister of Heavy Industry in Poland.
It
was the beginning of
the socialization of Poland, the beginning of the depression.
Now, he was sure that literature was the greatest achievement,
and I was sure that our introduction of coal was one of the great-
