CZESLAW MILOSZ
17
the Russian policy of the stick and carrot in Belorussia and the Ukraine is
more effective; namely, the suppression of schools in native tongues on
one hand and, on the other, the advantages offered those who are
trained in the dominant written culture.
As you see, I speak of nationalism without giving it in advance a pe–
jorative meaning, even if it is often responsible for hatreds between vari–
ous nationalities.
It
should be recognized as an important factor even
though progressive thinkers - the socialists and so on of the last century
- ascribed it to temporary circumstances and hoped that those circum–
stances would disappear in the course of history.
It is possible that we now stand before new mutations of national
movements endowed with a nearly religious appeal, and in this connec–
tion, an arch-nationalist writer, Dostoevsky, may be quoted. For ob–
servers of the present Soviet Union his pronouncements may sound dis–
quieting. I quote: "The object of every national movement, in every
people, and at every period of its existence, is only the seeking for its
god who must be its own god, and the faith in him as the only true
one." Another quotation from
The Possessed:
"If a great people doesn't
believe that it alone is fit and destined to raise up and save all the rest of
its truth, it would at once sink into being ethnographical material and
not a great people."
These are pronouncements of pure messianism, a current of thought
that ascribes to a collective body the function of savior both of itself and
of other nations. This transposition of the individual Messiah of the Bible
to the collective is blasphemous; nevertheless, it was dear to Dostoevsky,
who considered himself a Christian. We find a similar messianism, though
opposed to that of the Russians, in Poland, a country that used to be
called by its poets "the Christ of nations." Today such factors exist
which may favor the rebirth of such dreams. The first of those factors, I
would guess, is the atomization of societies under the impact both of
technology and, as in the countries which passed through the Communist
system, of something which we could call the withering of society and
the strengthening of the all-embracing state . There was a search for some
principles of cohesion, some bonds surviving the destruction of organic
communities. The state ideology inculcated in schools provided at least
an illusion of integration, even though in some countries as Poland the
official Marxism was entering into a conflict with another set of values
maintained by the Church and the family. With the erosion of the
Marxist doctrine, a void was opened, and it calls for being filled with
something. The Solidarity movement in Poland had had may compo–
nents, but the nationalist component was undoubtedly very strong. Per–
haps in some Western national movements, the Basque for instance, we
could distinguish a somewhat similar search for new bonds in the mod-
