WRITERS IN EXILE
521
artist. In the West I discovered in an immeasurably broader sense
of that which can be called the open air and space of history.
Being a Soviet man, who "creates" history and must always
be in the vanguard, I as an emigre, as it is expressed by the Soviet
papers, have been thrown out to the backyard of history and, see–
ing the garbage, no longer create anything, but only contem–
plate. Probably all people, sooner or later, during their lives or
posthumously, end up in the backyard of history. It's just that in
emigration this is more readily apparent. Somehow you under–
stand more clearly that everything will pass. However, together
with this, the multifaceted nature of life becomes more visible to
the person tossed up on Western shores. An end is put to the sim–
plistic, linear approach to history. Here you can see for yourself
that history unfolds not along one fixed course, but along many
routes, at times very tortuous, giving rise to a refined and fantas–
tical pattern of various cultures, cities, and peoples. Of course, I
knew about this theoretically before, but I knew it abstractly,
speculatively, while here you breathe it, drink it. Moreover, the
various historical layers sometimes seem to interlace. In the
European West, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance don't seem so
far away. Just as in Israel I suddenly noticed that the Bible
becomes extraordinarily authentic. It's the authenticity of a place
where all this happened. I never noticed anything of the kind in
Russia. History turns out to be close by; moreover, it is inter–
layered with the contemporary world.
So, for example, we are in Padua, in the oldest university of
Europe. On its walls, and most important, in the traditions of
this university, in the form of a motto of human culture, are writ–
ten only two words,
universality
and
freedom,
which struck me
for some reason. I had occasion to study and teach in a university
in Moscow. And it used to be so difficult to say this long word,
similar to a snake-u - ni - ver - sity. I knew that all the disciplines
are taught in the university, but in essence, in actuality, I had no
idea how the university differed from any other institutions of
higher education. Well, a few institutions of higher education,
gather them together under one roof, and you end up with a uni–
versity. What's the difference whether physics and philosophy
and geography and geometry are studied there jointly or separate–
ly? The concept of a university as a great whole-as a unified edi–
fice of closely related and similar sciences somewhere in the cen-
