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PARTISAN REVIEW
cess of modernization and mechanization of the countryside all over the
world, against the very means of technological expansion that seem to be
affecting every aspect of human life, creating our new cultural values.
A
comparison with the Green movement in the West wouldn't be inappropri–
ate; it is conceivable to see the country writers' platform as primarily ori–
ented towards ecological issues. In recent years, under Gorbachev, the
country writers gained the public's sincere gratitude by successfully chal–
lenging some of the monstrous projects suggested by the Brezhnev adminis–
tration, most notably the plan to rechannel some Siberian rivers to irrigate
Central
Asian
deserts, laden with disastrous ecological consequences. Valentin
Rasputin is still leading the fight for the preservation of Lake Baikal, a real
Siberian gem, now in danger of permanent pollution from a military factory
producing airplane tires. One of Rasputin's best works is a novella,
Farewell
to Matiora,
the story of a Siberian island village about to be submerged by a
newly constructed hydroelectric dam.
When we realize, however, that the country writers' concern for the
environment assumes a broad ideological dimension, the comparison to the
Green platform becomes inadequate. For the country writers, technological
expansion symbolizes the implementation of the communist project. In other
words, this project itself is reduced to the destruction of the real bonds of ex–
istence and to the substitution of artificial, machine-made ones. Murder of
millions, political terror - these are all part of a global process bent on de–
stroying nature, destroying the essence of life, rooting out the whole
ontological reality. The country writers' rebellion is a rebellion of the swamp
against the machines ofland reclamation. This rebellion has its justifications.
The experience of the twentieth century seems to have indicated that the
swamp is much more valuable to the preservation oflife on earth than the
practice ofland reclamation
is.
The concerns of the country writers have been shared by thinkers in
the West. Horkheimer and Adorno, in
Dialectics of Enlightenment,
argue
that the source of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the very orienta–
tion of the so-called positivist world-view. "The logic of domination," they
said, results from belief in the possibility of shaping the world according to
some man-conceived scheme, completely dominating the forces of nature and
fashioning man's physical environment and his whole existence along a char–
tered course. They had Kant in mind, not the traditional English positivism of
Locke and Hume. What is more important, however, is that for the
theoreticians of the Frankfurt School, domination was the most basic charac–
teristic of the bourgeois world-view and, in that sense, a function of this in–
tensely activist and engaged way of relating to the universe. They base their
analysis offascism on the notion that fascism is
bourgeoisme
taken to the ex–
treme. Later the Frankfurt School thinkers were to write that Auschwitz and
Maidanek were perfect examples of the "logic of domination" carried to its
