556
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
Questioll.'
As each of you reflects on the intellectual and artistic life, what
is your feeling about the religious and spiritual health of your respective
nations? Do you think of it as part of the solution or part of the prob–
lem?
Czeslaw Milosz:
Your question is so large that I don't think I would
be able to talk about it sensibly. Personally, I believe we are living
through a period of enormous erosion of the religious imagination, and
for me the phenomena of contemporary poetry, such as the work of
Samuel Beckett or Philip Larkin, are crucial. Theirs is a hopeless vision of
the human condition. It prevails, not always as openly as in , for example,
Larkin's work, but we are confronted with those issues, and the work of
the community of writers and artists does reach beyond its own sphere to
affect the population at large . Perhaps Poland is an exception, but I am
actually very skeptical about some aspects of the fate of religion in
Poland. To start a discussion of this dimension, I feel , we would have to
go to the core of our predicament in the world today . It would be the
beginning of an enormous debate.
Ralph
Ellison:
Without going into the spiritual aspects of religion, I
would note the decline in attendance within the black church. There has
been a loss of a certain discipline. The lore of the older generations is
being lost to the younger generations, and thus they lose a sense of the
complexity of historical experiences. For instance, you can hear ads on
television or the radio in which young, white, Northern girls are
screaming in the accents of N egroes ; it's pervading our culture, but we
don 't know where it actually originated. In other words, we are losing
our folklore and the discipline, religious and otherwise, that existed
through those churches. They were one of the institutions, during and
after slavery, that were tolerated. We could get together there and ex–
change experiences, and so on.
Joseph Brodsky:
I can speak here only for Russia. I think historically
and at present the Church played a rather destructive role in the life of
society. Since Russia is an Orthodox country, the ecclesiastic doctrine
does not divorce the head of the state from itself. So even the most
enterprising churchmen in the end would insist on the principle of obe–
dience. In a sense, the Russian Church is responsible for the creation of
the spiritual climate of obedience. It also has been responsible for the
idea that whatever takes place is the manifestation of a divine providence
that is testing us; therefore, it is essential that the individual should endure
this trial; upon this depends how his soul scores afterwards. The Russian
