WRITERS IN EXILE
371
emigres. I would like to encourage all the emigres here
to
get in
touch with translators, with people who are willing
to
help
them,
to
edit their work. I believe they would have a very ready
market for fiction and for any kind of literature about their expe–
rience. Thank
yo~.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Thank you for your suggestions. We
have time for one or two more comments.
RUSS LIVINGSTON: I am a student here in town at Boston
University. I came to hear a little about writing in closed and
open societies, which I guess means writing and
thinking
in
open and closed societies. We heard a little about writing in
closed societies, and I'm sympathetic
to
the need for free con–
sciousness or the right to express oneself. I'm curious, though, as
to whether you want to assert that the Western world is open.
And if you do, what do you mean by the term
open society?
You
talked about the KGB and censorship, and we have the equiva–
lent: the CIA, and a more passive sort of censorship-our media.
As for this joke about
Pravda,
in lots of circles here one could
easily substitute the
New York Times.
We have a culture that in–
sulates us as well; our primary form of experiencing, of taking in
our world, is television. Do you consider this an open form of
expression?
PAVEL LITVINOV: This is a big question;
I'll
try to be brief. I
have lived in this country for eight years, after having lived for
thirty-four years in the Soviet Union, and in my opinion this so–
ciety is as free and open as it is possible for any society to be on
the level of today's civilization. You talk about the
FBI
and the
CIA and about certain distortions in the
New York Times
that I
know about. Of course abuses of power are bad, but to under–
stand the difference, imagine a society where the CIA, the FBI,
the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
General Motors,
General Electric, Hollywood, and all possible organizations
were all controlled from one center and ha:d one common censor–
ship. Likewise, all those small organizations that have dissent–
ing opinions-including the American Communist Party or any
other group-all of them also controlled from one center com–
pletely and having only one opinion. Can you understand the
difference? I could give you many more examples.
EFIM ETKIND: I am not inclined to idealize the Western world,
but I call it an open and democratic society-if only because yes-
