Central European Writers
as a Social Force
Donald Fanger:
Our topic today is "Central European Writers as a
Social Force." As you know by now, not all of the session or paper
titles have gone without revision, and some of them during this panel
may need reconstruing.
I
will invite each of the speakers to do that if
such is necessary. Our first speaker is Walter Laqueur, listed in the
program as speaking on "The Literature of the Fellow Travelers."
Walter Laqueur:
Thank you. Well, to be precise I'll talk about two of
the fellow travelers. The motives of those prominent Western fellow
travelers visiting Moscow in the 1930s have been a source of fascination
and puzzlem.ent for a long time.
I
want to concentrate here on the trips
that two of them took, Romain Rolland in the summer of 1935 and
Lion Feuchtwanger in December of 1936. Because of
glasnost
(and the
passing of time), one can now write about their motives and impressions
with some greater authority than before . There was a fifty-year embargo
on Romain Rolland's personal diary, which has become accessible only
recently; his Moscow diary was published in three installments in
Voprosy
Literatllr;
in 1989. As for Feuchtwanger, the daily reports his guide and
translator D. Karavkina made to VOKS (and ultimately the NKVD) are
now avai lab le. [VOKS was the society for cultural ties with foreign
countries; the NKVD was the predecessor of the KGB.] The reports on
the Feuchtwanger stay were published in
Sov;etsk;e Arch;vy
in1989.
Feuchtwanger's own book
Moscow
1937 was republished in 1990 in the
Soviet Union together with Gide's
RetllYII fronl the USSR,
with a long
infon1utive preface by A. Plutnik.
A few words about the
dramat;s persOIlae:
Both were major writers;
their works seem to have stood the test of time. There is too much
gushing, naive idealism in Rolland's
Jeall Christophe
for many tastes, and
his last novels,
L'ame e/lchalltee,
are now virtually unreadable. But his
Co–
las Brellglloll
is certainly one of the great master works of twentieth- cen–
tury French literature. Rolland was always more popular in Germany and
Russia than in his native country, which may have to do with his un–
popular pacifist stance in World War One. The Nobel Prize he received
in 1915 was sInall comfort for the disdain of many of his fellow coun–
trymen and the fact that for years he cou ld not return to France,
eventually settling in Villeneuve, on the shore of Lake Geneva. Feucht–
wanger wa a master in a genre more popu lar with the reading public
