INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS
SINCE THE THIRTIES
533
examples of what a society might become: creating more goods for more
and more people, presenting us with an unexampled prosperity, comfort,
and consumerism, together with the terrible threat of instability, dishar–
mony, and spiritual misery. That's the picture that came to me in the
night.
An important part of the struggles of the people of the East against
the Communist state was waged not only against the oppression of po–
lice power but for the fullness of life, of which they were deprived by
Communist dictatorship. The state was supposed to wither away, but it
was the individual who discovered that he was withering. And now
think of the impassioned chronicles, the poems, stories, and memoirs that
have come out of the East associated with, to name only a few, Osip
Mandelstam, Alexander Wat, Andrei Siniavsky, Irina Ratushinskaya,
Natan Sharansky, and a multitude of activists, writers, and artists mani–
festing the highest courage, struggling not merely for provisions, bread
and shelter, but also for the deepest experience of freedom .
In reading the letters that Vaclav Havel wrote in prison, I came
across a reference to literature in the West that stopped me in my tracks.
In one of his letters, Havel spoke of one of my books. He had read
Her–
zog
in jail, and in this letter, he spoke of the difference between words
spoken or written in the East as compared with the West. In the East,
you were arrested and imprisoned for voicing your opinions, while in
the West, you could make as many revolutionary statements as you
pleased, and no one would give a damn or pay the slightest attention to
you. In the East, it was dictatorship and its jails, its
gil lags
that waited for
you if you spoke the truth as you saw it. In the West, what you said
simply didn't matter. There were no penalties, and therefore, there was
no seriousness. Your freedom, therefore, was something of a joke.
But as the Stalinist world collapses, the problems of the West be–
come, in some measure, the problems of the East. The question is
whether we need these colossal evils of dictatorship to keep us honest, or
whether material prosperity, which now appears to be a universal desire,
is a threat
to
the higher life of mankind.
Czeslaw Milosz: I
will improvise this morning. I prepared a paper on
dissidence, which I planned to give at a later session of this conference.
By dissidence I do not mean dissidence in the East but dissidence in the
West. I left Poland too early to study the period of dissidence in the
East, but in the West I found myself thrown into a special situation,
placed in the special category of "emigre," quite independent of my
views or the quality of my writings. Being placed in such a category
meant in advance the presupposition that I couldn't do anything valu-
