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PARTISAN REVIEW
knows where else and in what form.
In
a word, I take the liberty
of drawing the following conclusion:
In
all that is decisively un–
talented, vulgar, and degrading to the human spirit and the
dignity of existence, whether it be a thing, a work of art, a relation
to nature, people, culture, and society, there is without fail a
Soviet kindred one, which must be called
world evil
and exposed
as
world evil.
This realization is essential for our common salva–
tion, for the salvation of those still living in freedom, and for
all those peoples enslaved by totalitarianism.
In
the West I discovered, to my surprise, that the degree to
which both simple laborers and the intelligentsia distinguished
between good and evil was much greater and more heartfelt in the
Soviet bloc nations, particularly in the USSR, than in the free
world. We are speaking here solely of a feeling of the nature
of totalitarianism. But what, strictly speaking, can be said of the
simple people who for sixty-five years have endured the triumph
of Communist ideas, hunger, cold, wars, prisons, slave labor,
and demagogy? What can be said of the creative and scholarly
intelligentsia, which has endured, in addition, measures aimed
at degrading the human spirit that, unfortunately, have exceeded
any previously known?
Even in private, mainly drunken talks with Party bosses,
with generals, with prominent economic planners, with gang–
sters from cinematography, the Writers Union, sports, trade,
science, and so on, there arose among us, despite differences
in world views, a full unity of opinion towards the system.
The System-we clenched our teeth at the thought of the dark,
alien power fettering the normal, healthy, vital activity of the
country. This power spurs with skeleton bones the same Gogolian
troika-and at the same time the aged coachmen-Politburo
members, who have lost possession of their faculties, driving it
toward a hellish abyss. Tragic experience and the facts of ugly
reality themselves correlated the notorious Soviet system with
evil, with an evil that is objective and that triumphs all the
spheres of the "building of Communism. " Forgive me for this
Soviet journalistic cliche, which I have used not without disgust
and shuddering. My criticism of the totalitarian monster is not
simply the result of my far from apologetic attitude toward the
way of life of the West, although I do not conceal a romantic
l
