THE LITERARY IMPACT
619
OF
THE AMERICAN AND FRENCH REVOLUTIONS
This spectacle is sometimes dismaying: one sees former secret police
members posturing as born-again democrats; judges appointed under
Communist rule still practicing and calling for the persecution of the
former dissidents, as we have seen already in Czechoslovakia; central–
planning barons and Leninist propagandists converted into bankers and
yellow press tycoons, like Jerzy Urban, for instance, in Poland.
Critical intellectuals in these countries are now faced with the threat
of a new marginality. Their former centrality originated from their moral
standing: they were the jesters in the Marxist court, the embodiment of
the negative principle, the eternal1y restive element that broke the frozen
rules of the game. Communism tried
to
absorb and contain this seditious
dimension, to impose censorship and self-censorship. But as Miklos Ha–
raszti wrote in
The Velvet Prison,
critical intel1ectuals could rescue their
dignity in the roles of the maverick artist and the naive hero. There is
little room for these two postures in the often insensitive and brutal
world of post-Communism.
The marketization of culture and the abolition of state subsidies for
the arts has left the intel1ectuals in a state of material despondency and
moral siege. They do not know exactly what to fight for; if they do
know, they wonder whether the cause is worth suffering for. A recent
example is the case of Dan Petrescu, a Romanian writer who defied the
Ceausescu regime. He was the brother-in-law of the assassinated Professor
loan Petru Culianu from the University of Chicago, who happened to
be a friend of "ours," the people who were involved in the an–
tidictatorial, anti-Communist work in Romania . Dan Petrescu was in–
volved in the Romanian anti-Ceausescu movement; when he was under
house arrest, he wrote a number of texts that appeared in the French
media, primarily in
Liberatioll.
He was a member of the Group for Social
Dialogue. After the revolution, he became a deputy minister of culture,
only to be slandered in a most vicious way by the Stalino-fascist press.
Petrescu resigned, and in a series of articles published in the independent
weekly
Contrapllnct
he spel1ed out his outrage and his disgust with the
viciousness of the mass instincts set free by the collapse of tyranny.
As Vaclav Havel recently noted in the pages of the
New York Review
of Books,
the ultimate reference point in the post-Communist political
climate of widespread cynicism, hatred, and intolerance is stil1 to be
found in the anti-political search for a life in truth. Once again, intel1ec–
tuals are in an ambivalent position. They were the ones who spearheaded
the struggle against mythocratic Communism. They dispelled the system's
self-serving nimbus and initiated a moral quest for truth that convinced
many to risk their lives and take to the streets. They contributed de-
