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PARTISAN REVIEW
about the Soviet system. It can be very irritating to people to know
that everything is bad around them and to see and hear this again
and again. An important characteristic of totalitarian ideology, as
it was so well described by Hannah Arendt many years ago, is that
it doesn ' t suppose that people believe in it; it doesn ' t rely for
obedience so much on propaganda as on fear. When people are
scared and anxious, they know that what they hear are lies but
they support them because they are scared, not because they are
believers. So, first of all we have to get rid of this fear. I may know
very well that alchemy is wrong, but this is not enough for me
to
pass an exam in chemistry. The same goes for Communism: we
know that it's wrong, but we don't know all the forces influencing
the political process. Our evaluations, our statements, are usually
too general. For instance, we used to say that the Soviet system was
very stable-that it was generated by Marx, that Lenin continued
these ideas, and that Stalin was a direct continuation of the ideas
of Marx and Lenin, and so on with Krushchev and Brezhnev. And
what is the result? We assume that our country hasn ' t changed at
all-that it doesn' t have a history. And if it didn ' t have a history
before, then it is easy to conclude that it won't have a history in the
future. So the result of criticism is nothing but despair.
We have to study our own country. We have
to
study what
was written by scholars in the West, who know our country bet–
ter than we do. We have to study the experience of Czechoslovak–
ia, of Hungary; of Poland especially. For we know almost no–
thing. Nor do we know enough about the West. We have only
very vague ideas of what "welfare system" means, and of other
such important achievements.
We have to take one further step. Of course it is very impor–
tant to continue our human rights activity, but we must preach
less and learn more.
VICTOR ERLICH: Our second speaker is Stanislaw Baranc–
zak, who is, without doubt, one of the most significant Polish
men of letters of his generation. He is a gifted and resourceful
poet, critic, and publicist. The titl e of one of his most important
collections of essays is
Ethics and Poetics.
STANISLAW BARANCZAK: I will start with two semantic
problems; as a matter of fact my talk will be almost entirely devot–
ed to semantic explanations. This event is called a conference of
dissident writers, and in the program I read a description of my-
