658
PARTISAN REVIEW
an independent moral philosophy, we do not have a social science,
and so we must look for all of this in literary works.. .. Many of
our writers have become writers only because they could not become
social figures or political writers; and as for those who are genuine
artists by vocation, they too have been obliged to become journalists
in some aspect of their writing activity.
Nikolai Chernyshevsky had made essentially th e same point six yeatS
before, but with an important added emphasis. For precisely those rea–
sons, he wrote:
... literature plays a greater role in our intellectual life than French,
German or English literatures play in the life of th eir respective
countries,
and it bears greater respollsibilities thall the literatllre of allY
other natioll.
Russian literature still expresses the entire intellectual life
of the people ; hence it ha s
the direct dllty
to take an interest in the
kind of subject matter that elsewhere has passed into the special com–
petence of other branches of intellectual activity. Imy italics - D. F.I
When the outside world began to read the Russians , it did so on the
same assumptions. Thus the Vicomte de VogUe, in his pioneering book
1.£
Romall
rllsse,
explained to his fellow Frenchmen in 1886:
Philosophy, history , the elegance of the podium and the bar - not to
mention the tribune - are genres absent from this young literature;
what one finds in other countries under these arbitrary labels goes, in
Russia , into the vast framework of poetry and the novel ... the only
Iforms] compatible with the demands of a ce nso rship formerly
implacable and today still highly suspicious. Ideas pass only when
concealed in the flexible threads of fiction; but there they all pass; and
the fi ction that shelters them takes on the importance of a doctrinal
thesis.
It remained only for George Steiner, exactly ninety years later, to
reduce this view to the stark formulation that "all of Russian literature is
essentially political" because "it is produced and published, so far as it can
be, in the teeth of ubiquitous censorship." There is some truth to the
statement, but much less in the emphasis on writers' responses
to
censorship; what needs rather to be stressed is the effect of ubiquitous
censorship on the reading of literature produced under those circum–
stances. The question is: political
to whom,
and
how?
Schooled by their
