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PARTISAN REVIEW
unrecognizably before the eyes of one generation. From the cap–
italistic encirclement on which the Soviet Union has been
harping for so long, urging the population to labor and defense,
now we find ourselves more and more in a situation of Commu–
nist encirclement. But there's another side of things, which we
hardly notice at first, the power and health of the Western world,
its powers of endurance, despite all the diseases, storms, and
cataclysms. I was extraordinarily glad to see the soundness of the
structures of this free society in the West.
We Soviet people are inclined to perceive freedom as an–
archy, as the freedom of destructive forces inside man, forgetting
that freedom has carried enormous creative potentials, thanks to
which these Western structures have come into being. The Soviet
Union is a world without structure, which in many respects is held
up by commands and prohibitions of every kind. The Soviet
Union, to express it graphically, is a big sack, tightly tied and filled
with flour, dust, or gravel (it doesn't matter what). Untie the sack
and everything will spill out. The Western world is like honey–
combs. They are fastened by a multitude of partitions, at times
invisible partitions. They are light, and it would seem easy to
blow them down with one breath. But in reality, according to the
laws of physics, honeycombs are architecturally very sound.
Correspondingly, to my great surprise, even the traditions in
the West proved much more sound than those in Russia, because
here the traditions are alive. Besides, these are the most varied tra–
ditions-right up to the relation of people to their homeland, to
their own earth, to the traditional landscape. In Norway a con–
struction engineer led us along the mountains and waterfalls,
pointing out along the way the numerous power stations under his
jurisdiction. But it turns out that they are situated so as not to
spoil the landscape of Norway, something supported by the
whole country, which at the slightest provocation takes offense and
comes out in defense of nature. And the engineer himself, as I
saw, was in love with these rocks and fjords and watched over their
wild beauty as over the apple of his eye. All of this takes place
without the least patriotic outcry on the theme of devotion to
one's homeland. How I envied Norway! Together with the feel–
ing of structure and culture, there is the culture of work, to which
we have become so unaccustomed in Russia that I am ready to ad–
mire the work of a French butcher at the market as the work of an
