WRITERS ON THE BARRICADES:
THE PEN CONGRESS
Czeslaw Milosz
WRITERS AN 0 UTOPIAS
In
one of the nineteenth-century novels we find the char–
acter of a scientist who makes a discovery with enormous importance
for the future of mankind, promising universal peace and harmonious
relations between the nations of the planet. Namely, he discovers a
metal lighter than air. This means that one would be able to fly.
Consequently, distance between countries and continents would dis–
appear and, consequently, there would be universal peace.
Today we are amused by the silliness of such an expectation.
Andyet,
let us recognize that the planet Earth became small thanks to
man's ability to fly. The gradual unification of this small globe is the
reverse side of all the horrors and dangers threatening it. This shows
that utopias often become realities but always with some ironic twist
of that big prankster-history. At the same time we may measure dis–
tance separating the twentieth century from the nineteenth century .
For our great-grandfathers' utopias were in the future, whether we
judge by the first works of science fiction, which has since grown pes–
simistic, or by a book seminal for the revolution in Russia, Nikolai
Chernyshevsky's
What Is To Be Done?
Our century is that of utopias
being implemented, with a very curious division of the earth into the
areas which live in a postutopian era and those which have not had
such an experience. And here I approach the question of writers and
utopian thinking. I do not quite agree with the main topic of this
conference as it infers the writer's estrangement from the state.
In
this century a basic stance of writers, wherever they live, seems to be
an acute awareness of suffering inflicted upon human beings by un–
just structures of society. And, since our planet is growing very
small, that awareness extends to continents and islands remote from
the native town of a given writer. This awareness of suffering makes
Editor's Note: This essay was first presented as a talk given at the Forty-eighth In–
ternational PEN Congress in January of this year.
