THE LITERARY IMPACT
615
OF
THE AMERICAN AND
Fl~ENCH
IliVOLUTIONS
Aristophanes's comedy,
The Fro<?5.
My eyes were drawn to reading these
lines:
Often has it crossed my fancy, that the city loves to deal
With the very best and noblest members of her commonweal,
Just as with our ancient coinage, and the newly minted gold.
Yea, for these, our sterling pieces, all of pure Athenian mold,
All of perfect die and metal, all the fairest of the fair,
All of workmanship unequalled, proved and valued everywhere
Both amongst our own Hellenes and Barbarians far away,
These we use not: but the worthless pinchbeck coins of yesterday,
Vilest die and basest metal, now we always use instead.
Even so, our sterling townsmen, nobly born and nobly bred,
Men of worth and rank and mettle, men of honorable fame,
Trained in every liberal science, choral dance and manly game,
These we treat with scorn and insult, but the strangers newest come,
Worthless sons of worthless fathers, pinchbeck townsmen, yellow
scum,
Whom in earlier days the city hardly would have stopped to use
Even for her scapegoat victims, these for every task we choose.
o
unwise and foolish people, yet to mend your ways begin;
Use again the good and useful; so hereafter, if ye win
'Twill be due to this your wisdom: if ye fall, at least 'twill be
Not a fall that brings dishonor, falling from a worthy tree.
Well, it's not all Greek
to
me at all.
Susan Sontag:
Thank you. Now, Vladimir Tismaneanu.
Vladimir Tismaneanu:
My remarks are titled, "Winners or Losers:
The Moral Dilemmas of the East European Intellectuals." For more than
four decades, East European intellectuals could be described as belonging
in a peculiar sociological and political category. They shared characteris–
tics that made them distinct from their peers in the West: affirming the
existence of moral values, reluctant to endorse utopian radicalism, and
even rejecting collectivism in any of its varieties. In many cases, politics as
such was regarded as a degrading exercise in hypocrisy. I speak here, of
course, of the idealized type of critical intellectual and not of the Party–
controlled stratum of ideological mandarins. Although the status of the
intelligentsia under Communism was ambiguous and its role controversial
and often disputed, it was given a privileged position in the monopolistic
and all-embracing pretense of official doctrine in Eastern and Central
Europe. Perhaps because of the ambiguous nature of the intellectual un–
der Communism, intellectuals appear to have played a vital role in the
