INTELLECTUALS AND WRITER
SINCE THE THIRTIES
541
Joseph Brodsky: I
would like to pick up where Mr. Bellow left off,
and, I hope, to complete the circle. Basically, I gather that there is some
general idea that the intellectuals, or for that matter writers as a sort of
spin-off of intellectual life, are responsible up to a certain point for the
general mental climate in society, let alone for the blueprints of the so–
cial organization - whether they are implemented or left on the board.
Well, up to some point of course this is so, but what we have to re–
member here is a very simple thing, that is, indeed, we owe ninety per–
cent of our political thought today to the gentlemen of the nineteenth
century . We can trace it back to Rousseau, who is the enemy number
one, of course, because of his very concept of the noble savage, that man
is inherently good; that what is bad is the institutions, therefore, "Let's
improve the institutions." If we take it to the logical end, we end up
with the police state, of course. The Age of Enlightenment was a rel–
atively delicate period of our history, for which we have some sort of
nostalgic or almost idyllic longing. It's an idea, but we associate it with
Watteau, Boucher, that sort of thing. A nice realm, but rather divorced
from the everyday reality of most people.
But the social ideas, the blueprints and the implementation that we
use to control our civil institutions today - we owe them more or less
to individuals such as Hegel and Marx. The whole point about them is
that they were city boys. Their designs for society were based on the ur–
ban structures that they knew. In a sense, whenever they talked about
society, they were envisioning the city, factories . Hence their emphasis on
the predicament of the working class and their designs to improve the life
of the working class. But the whole point is that they habitually gave
very short shrift to the agricultural sector, the peasants, who actually
were the source of life . It's a very strange phenomenon, to want to
change society but to approach it by way of its very end, not its very
beginning. That is, to start with the proletariat and not with the coun–
tryside, which was the source of the society. And even to this day, the
processes that are taking place in Central Europe and in Russia follow
the same logic, that is, the cart being put before the horse. There still is
the emphasis on industry and production. I should think if you wanted
to reorganize society, you should start with where the bread comes from
before it sits on the table. Beyond that, all those discussions of how to
proceed are terribly affected by the fact that people are hungry, to begin
with. That's one thing.
There is a distinction between the intellectual and the writer, because
by definition the intellectual is a systematic person. He tries to give you a
system or antisystem, created as an effort of will. And so it has gone
throughout our history. Even the most anarchic intellectuals have tried,
