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PAR.TISAN IliVlEW
its grand tradition of witch-hunts. What is your position on this issue?
Does the probative valu e of retributi on outweigh its potential prejudicial
impact?
Czeslaw Milosz:
That epoch of the Communist state has re ceded very
fast into the past. One can even have the impression that it was all a
dream. Now we see a completely new situation, maybe demoralizing, in
which both former obedient servan ts of the system and dissidents are in
the same bag. [ don't think that there is actually much support for
vindictiveness. It exists, of course, but on the intell ectual level, in the in–
tellectual milieu, literary studies already have appeared in Poland that
purport to investigate very "objectively" long poems written in the time
of Stalin , and that are being characterized as having been "reli gious ritu–
als." So [ don't think this is a major problem. Of course within the
writers' communities, there are ce rtain hatreds. But hatreds are charac–
teristic of writers' communities.
Joseph Brodsky: [
haven ' t thought much about this phenomenon.
Obviously, there is a ce rtain appetite for justice. Now that justice is tri–
umphing, one wants to make that triumph complete. However, the
trouble with the triumph of justice is that it always arrives with consid–
erable delay - in this case, it wou ld be a delay of a quarter of a century. I
simply don ' t know what should be done to those people. For one
thing, I know about the problem of lu stration in Czechoslovakia.
It
leaves me w ith a very bad taste. But this whole phenomenon harks back
to Rousseau 's project, to the concept of the noble savage, which became
accepted in an intellectual climate that had abandoned the idea of
original sin. If one believed in original sin, one was prepared to accept
that man is not inherently good; if he is not evil, then at least his nega–
tive potential is quite substantial. Once you abandon that notion , then
you are open to all sorts of illusions about man, the individual, and the
state. If you prosecute or charge such individuals as we are speaking
about , those who participated in this so-called evi l political system, you
have to reincorporate into the framework of the law th e notion of
orginal sin. And I don't believe that the new emerging democratic soci–
eties are prepared to do that.
Questio ll:
[
am a Rutgers student, and one thing I have learned in
my
classes is that there are no truths to be held self-evident. In a world where
man-made borders are starting to vaporize and more of a world
coml11uinty is emerging, we also have w hat is going on between
Ind onesia and East T imor, between Serbia and Croatia. [s there ever
