656
PARTISAN REVIEW
pers hanging from a rack on wooden poles. There is, of course, much
more to it than that. But if I had
to
pinpoint what it has offered to us
as readers and writers, I would say that it is not so much a new world in
the sense of being a geographical or socio-political region as in the sense
of having a commitment to taking ideas seriously, to the introduction -
unobtrusive at its best - of philosophical inquiry into literature, to coax–
ing literature to grapple with the abstract. On another level it has taught
us that literature and the arts in general can be taken seriously by a soci–
ety, that they do count, that they are not mere icing, froth, entertain–
ment; it has done so partly by showing us that artists can suffer not only
in garrets but also in labor camps. And lastly, it has given us an incentive
to move outside the self, to the body politic as well as the body as such.
This may make it seem dry, but anyone who has read this literature
knows it is anything but that.
Hemingway once said that in wartime a writer has no need
to
worry
about subject matter; the same could be said of the writer in a totalitar–
ian regime. Central European writers now agonize over whether they
have lost their
raison d'etre
by losing the need to oppose their regimes.
When writers serve as their country's parliament, what is left when that
country
establishes
a parliament, a real one? By now what has been clear
in these United States for two centuries should be clear in Central Eu–
rope: having parliament does not necessarily mean having a conscience.
There is still plenty of work for the writer to do.
Last November, George Konrad, in his capacity as President of In–
ternational PEN, the writers' organization, gave a talk entitled "The
World of Literature and the World," in which he expressed this point in
a typically Central European aphoristic manner. "What is left," he asked,
"when there is no more devil?" My answer would be that the devil is
still there. In fact, the situation is all the more insidious, the devil more
difficult to spot. As I see it, therefore, Central European writers haven't
had the rug pulled out from under them, and I am confident they will
continue to have a great deal to say to their people and to us.
Donald Fanger:
Thank you.
"Russian Writing in America": the several senses of my elastic title
could produce a curious and useful book. One chapter might deal with
Russian writing produced in America, from Gorky's
Mother,
written in
the Adirondacks, through the work of such transplanted poets as Nikolai
Morshen and Ivan Elagin, to that of the most recent wave of arrivals,
beginning in the 1970s - Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Dovlatov, Aksyonov,
Sokolov, Limonov. Another might deal with the invaluable service ren–
dered in America to Russian letters by publishing enterprises like Carl and
