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PARTISAN REVIEW
vented from doing so by the state or by the passage of time . You can't
return. The country I left twenty years ago now is a different country.
Those of different generations are in power now, and I mean not po–
litically but culturally; they are the ones exuding the creative energy and
in a sense controlling reality. Simply by being older than they are, I be–
lieve I have little in common with them. I would prefer to remember the
past as I do rather than attempt to qualify it, but that is an entirely
personal preference. What Mr. Milosz said also appli es to me, ]'m afraid:
it would be even more burdensome for me to arrive in Russia with a
halo around me, to tolerate those sentiments of adulation that are so
taxing. Therefore, it is far better to maintain by necessity or def.mlt some
distance from your home and from your own past. Although at first it
seems that there always is a gravity pulling you back to your home, it
may eventually seem that the force pulling you is one that extends out–
ward rather than backward. For this reason, to say the least,
to
return to
or to review the past seems problematic.
Questioll:
Do you think there is a difference between voluntary and
involuntary exile?
Joseph Brodsky:
Presumably, it is a moral pickle for some people, but
not for me. To begin with, I don't really know whether a writer can in
good conscience speak of exile being voluntary or involuntary, because
for the majority of us emigre writers, it was a physical transition at least
from worse to better. Moreover, if you think of all the people in the
world who have had to migrate, this effectively takes the boutonniere
out of the writer's lapel for having done so. He loses a distinctiveness in
the greater picture.
Questioll:
It was said before that the shift away from art and high culture
could be said to be the result of a free and more prosperous society in
which people have many choices. I think this accounts for some of the
hostility that many intellectuals have shown toward bourgeois society.
How do we combine allegiance to the va lu es of a free society with the
notion that people should listen to writers and pay attention to culture?
Saul Bellow:
This is a very vexing question, and I really don't know
how to answer it. It involves an hi storical movement of enormous scope,
namely the transformation of a whole nation , or civili zation really, into
a new mode in which the individual is overwhelmed by the novelty and
power of certain compelling instruments that drive one to li ve out the
destiny of its time on a material level. We are in a way, all of us , the
