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TISAN REVIEW
exist. It forces him into contact with something which is greater than he
is. Call it God, call it conscience. It's not really important what we call
it - contact with the soul, if you like. It takes us to our innermost
depths, our most precious qualities.
When a person is a dissident, he or she is wiped off the face of the
Earth. A writer who is not allowed to publish is a writer who doesn't
exist. They take away a superficial part of him, the confirmation of his
own success, the affirmation of his own existence. His echo is removed.
Thus they place him in the void, turn him into a solitary voice - and do
him a great service. They gradually increase his resistance until he loses his
fear. To lose his fear the dissident needs only to be aware of the risks he
runs, reconcile himself to them, and take account of them. Then he can
come to no harm. When a man reconciles himself to his own mortality,
then nothing can happen to him at all. At that moment, the hell that
until then had appeared so real, changes into a mock hell. Man is finally
prepared to free himself of the policeman's clutch and be received into
the embrace of transcendence. The dissident is obliged to abandon ev–
eryday concerns, he is thrown out of the establishment, he loses all cer–
tainties. But he then also loses those pragmatic crossroads and milestones,
the guardrails between which life buffets him. This may be another rung
on Jacob's ladder to heaven. Thus it is that everything can, and in fact
usually does, have a paradoxical effect. When they take the ground from
underneath a man, when they throw him out of the little world he
knows, he can become a citizen of the universe. They release him from
his made-to-measure opinions, the everyday clothes in which he lived and
went his way about the world.
Politics, for a writer, is an interesting experience. For that matter,
every experience is interesting - it's the main advantage of the profession.
The experience of politics is more enriching than it might appear at first
sight. A writer is usually self-centered. He writes about things he sees and
lives through. And the fact that he signs every word makes him all the
more self-centered. (By the way, the Communists supported the writer's
self-importance by calling him "an engineer of human souls," a phrase
you may know as the title of a Josef Skvorecky novel. Perhaps it was not
a bad idea. But the nation, in its moral degeneration, had its conscience
delegated to mediocre writers and cowards.) Under any circumstances, it
is not surprising when the writer easily succumbs to the delusion of his
own importance and irreplaceability. The significance of his writing, even
if he suffers only slightly from writer's itch, his sense of belonging among
the chosen ones, is enhanced by being banned. Many "underground
writers" falsely believed that their voices were of significance, simply be–
cause their governments felt obliged to ban their works.
