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PARTISAN REVIEW
abokov ian , versions in which the driver, instead of sayin g "Ah?" says,
"Emmfs?"
-
a mind-boggling reversion to the pre-Hitler Berliner dialect
which as you know was richly trumed with Yiddish. Since this threatens to
take us far afield I shall abstain from comment, merely let it stand as a re–
minder of the extraordinary swiftness and density of our recent history, that
is, of the years of your lifetime and mine, so replete with tragic irony that we
cannot imagine how to explain ourselves to our children, let alone to theirs.
However that may be, your old correspondent, hav ing returned after
many a year to something like residence over here, as opposed to brief trips,
feels that he has missed a great deal and that this, precisely, shou ld make him
the most useful sort of informant, the ignorant kind, who can let you in on
what he finds out for himself. His first reaction, however, was that it may be
a bit ea rl y (in the spring of 1990) to inquire about the effect on political
thinking of the dramatic changes that have taken place and are sti ll taking
place to the East. People who have been totally stunned begin by feeling, and
aJorti011
thinking, nothing at all. This is confirmed by all that I have heard
and read here in the past two months. Vaguely relieved by the growing
prospect of a military stand-down, vaguely pleased by political developments,
vaguely concerned about the new shape of things and how they wi ll fit into
them, the French have for once failed to react with their customary intellec–
tual exuberance, as if (for the first time since the
philosophes!)
they found
themselves at a loss for words. And yet it was not as if the idea of commu–
nism had suddenly dropped dead , felled by blast and radiation from the So–
viet meltdown. It was already notoriously brain-dead, and certified as such
by every French political thinker since Sartre, long before the Soviets called
ofF their dogs in Warsaw and Prague. Hence one must distinguish between
the intellectual consequences of the
gradual
demise of Marxism and its vari–
ous
gauchiste
offshoots (and this would practically amount to a History of
Ideas in Postwar France) and reactions
to
the cataclysmic events of last
year, the
annus mimbilis,
during which the firework displays provided by
the French government to celebrate the bicentenary of
1789
seemed to be
simultaneously saluting the freeing ol'the Soviet Union's subject peoples, one
by one.
Now obviously your correspondent can hope only to deal here with the
latter, and in point of fact only with that part of it that falls, as they say here,
under his nose. Preoccupied by the problems of reinserting himself into a
vastly changed society, and hav ing for the moment little access other than
the local press and television to what you refer to so broadly as "political
opinion in the West," it seems to me that the most useful contribution I can
make
to
your inquiry would be to begin with the readily observable facts on
the ground and work up, or at least back,
to
the more general concerns ex-
