354
PARTISAN ' REVIEW
est achievements of Polish technology. We were feeding each
other with our own illusions. And at that moment, I understood
something of that mysterious definition of literature, "Writers
are the engineers of the soul." But it was many years later that I
came to a fuller understanding of this perverse definition of liter–
ature, through one of Brecht's books, which was published after
his death. I don't remember the exact title of this book, but it was
on Chinese 'thought, and it presented a lot of material under the
Chinese names for Stalin, Trotsky, and Brecht himself. One sen–
tence was for me most astonishing. The Chinese character rep–
resenting Brecht himself says that the one and only justification
for The Great Terror was industrialization. The Great Terror as
a
fact
Brecht understood quite well, but to justify The Great Ter–
ror by Russia's need for industrialization? This was almost ex–
actly the same as my conversation, three years back, with the
Deputy Minister of Heavy Industry. Industrialization was a fic–
tion, but The Great Terror was not a fiction. Now literature was
to be perverted into a tool for justifying The Great Terror, by ex–
tolling the great fiction of industrialization.
It
is important to note that this perversion of literature was
much more limited in Poland than it was in the Soviet Union.
One can say that, during the years of Stalinization and the post–
Stalin era, Poland lived on two different levels. On one level,
Poland lived in economic depression and under the impact of
the Soviet Union. On another level, Poland was still
Ii
ving
under the impact of the spontaneous, autonomous, authentic
tradition of Western literature. Now the Polish experience has
been quite different from the Czech and Hungarian experience,
and completely different from the Russian one. In some way,
Marxism, the Communist models, were under the surface in Po–
land; the oppression was much more political in nature, and the
intellectual oppression was only the result, the 'consequence of
the political one.
'-1 remember a conference of dissidents very similar to this
one, in Venice. We had more or less the same kind of discussion ,
and many of the participants were the same. Also attending were
a few students from Poland. After the discussion, they came and
said to me, "Stop all this nonsense! There is only one choice for
Poland-to get rid of the occupation."
If
we look at the Polish experience of the last eighteen
