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PARTISAN REVIEW
ordinary writer is more like an ordinary man. It's more presti–
gious to be in business, medicine, engineering, political affairs,
or law. The serious writer is visible and respected only in a very
small circle of readers. Our books published here are going to
Russia in one hundred copies. All in all, we have readers not
only in New York, Boston, and Paris, but also in Moscow, Lenin–
grad, Tallin, Kiev, and in every other place that copies of our
books can get to. And there they change hands until they are
reduced to dust.
If
books had souls and could communicate,
we might learn that every book wishes that this could be its fate .
We, the Russian emigrants, play prophets and teach man–
kind the right way to live. Recently, in a Russian newspaper, a
doctor published a big article about how badly Americans eat.
This doctor, like myself, lived all his life eating canned food,
which my intelligent dog refuses to eat.
We Russians live worse than others. Our government is the
stupidest and cruelest, but we still teach others how to live.
This is a paradox, but also a form of justice. Like doctors and
pharmacologists who test their medicines on themselves, we
can do research on ourselves-on law and lawlessness, on the
logic and non logic of history. We know something that other
nations do not-that Americans, in any case, cannot know. For
instance, we know that a kind, sympathetic, and cultured nation
is able to become a flock of lambs-or, what is worse, a pack of
wolves. We know that socialism and Soviet power is not only a
regime but also a way of life for many millions of people. We
know that our government is not a group of rascals who usurped
power, and not a gang of robbers from the planet Mars. They are
part of the people to whom we also belong, which means that a
small part of us and our souls are in the Soviet government.
When we lived in the USSR, we thought that America was a
paradise; life was so horrible there that life in the great antipode
seemed to be paradise. Now we have lived in America a few
years, and we have persuaded ourselves that there is no paradise
on earth. Above all, we have discovered traits of socialism in
America. For example, the American post office is an almost
socialistic enterprise. We see in America things that look like
Soviet absurdities. One of my friends worked in American bus–
iness. One week his boss paid him less than they had arranged.
So my friend went to him, saying, "You paid me fifteen dollars
