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PARTISAN REVIEW
one should not pay them any attention.
Yet their attitude makes me recall something that took place a long time
ago. In the early thirties, when Nazi speakers gathered together and dis–
cussed these same national-religious themes, in the same way and at the
same level of discourse, highbrow intellectuals in various countries and uni–
versities also said that one should not pay attention to such idiots. The atti–
tude of the intellectuals stayed the same up until the catastrophe that changed
the physical and Spil;tUal map of Europe.
Within the last year, there have been more and more alarming voices
heard from Russia. For example, a correspondent for the journal
Literatur–
naya Cazeta
reported in it a telephone conversation he had with an elderly
Jewish woman who more and more fears living in her own country. She told
the correspondent that her grandparents and aunt had been buried alive in
Kiev in 1945, but that since then she had not experienced anti-Semitism–
until recently. The woman was terrified by the meetings of
Parnyat,
by the
anti-Semitic articles frequently appearing. She was terrified to go out into the
street, for fear of being harassed by her neighbors. The corre pondent asked
her why she did not go to the police to report such harassment and he of–
fered to help her; she replied that no, it would just get worse.
Just before I arrived in America, I received a letter from a young
journalist in Leningrad, an expert philologist who knows thirteen languages.
He informed me that he has decided to emigrate. He explained that first of
all, from a creative point of view, he saw no way for himself to fit into the
system, although he had tried. He went on to say that the real problem was
his Jewishness. Although he had been christened, he was terrified of what he
was seeing and hearing and reading.
Strange things are happening in Russia. We have
glasnost,
and it is
easier
to
breathe. The state indeed seems to be giving up on military
expansion and pretensions of global power. But the desire to emigrate seems
to be on the increase. Of cou rse, I can judge only by those people in my
circle of friends, intellectuals and academics who have asked me for help and
advice. When someone who is close to sixty years old is willing to depart and
start a new life in the West, something serious is going on. In another case, a
man who has been published and continues to be published in Russia, who
continues to write books there, repeats to me how terrified he is.
Parnyat
cannot simply be dismissed.
Last year, an event of extraordinary significance, I think, took place.
Igor Shafarevich published a fundamental piece of work, a theoretical
foundation offascism, that was serialized in the Soviet Union in the journal
Nash Sovremennik
(Our
Contemporary),
titled, "Russophobia." Unfortunately,
it has not yet been translated into other languages. It was apparently in-
