TSVETAN TODOROV
257
of man (and, we may suppose, of women): Are they best defended
by signing petitions granting businessmen the "freedom" to stuff
their wallets or by protesting the outrage to which women are sub–
jected every day?
In occidental democracies the writer more than other members
of the society is not an entirely isolated individual, and thus irre–
sponsible; rather, he lives between the two poles, solitude and soli–
darity ; and this line of tension is preferable to the "triangle" of the
East (the State must emanate from the society rather than be in con–
stant conflict with it) . Some evenings, says Adam Zagajewski, it's a
true dilemma: listen to the BBC or to Brahms? Or, for the more ac–
tive among us : participate in political action or write a symphony?
It's probably an alternation between the two, rather than the
exclusion of one or the other, which is the preferable solution: to feel
myself a member of a community frees me from selfish illusions; but
sinking into myself and my art encourages me to fight off the cliches
floating all around me. The alternation can also be determined by
the rhythm of History. Dostoevsky imagined a poet who, the day
after the Lisbon earthquake, in the midst of the still-smoking rubble,
wrote a poem entirely concerned with the flutings of the nightingale
and the rippling of the brook, and - what's more - without a single
verb. Dostoevsky feared, for this poet, a hardly enviable fate: the
citizens putting him to death on the spot, and he couldn't bring
himself to blame them. This didn't prevent Dostoevsky from admir–
ing the poem in question : fortunately, the earth doesn't quake every
day, even in Lisbon.
Tsvetan Todorov
Translated from the French
by
Rosanna Warren
* * *
II.
"THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IS DEAD"
It
may finally be dawning on that shrinking class of Amer–
icans still alert to European intellectual developments that, over the
past ten or fifteen years, something remarkable has been taking
