POETRY IN EXILE
585
Now the trouble is, Russian imperialism has always been anything but
facetious, anything but a fabrication. It has been a very real thing, and it
continues
to
be so - perhaps in a more morbid way - even today, after
the fall of the Russian/Soviet empire. How can we prove it? Simply: by
digging out the bones of the victims of mass executions, by talking to
the survivors of labor camps and forced resettlements, by listening to the
claims of those who wish their wrongs to be redressed at last - even if
those wronged happen to be some uncivilized Tatars who are brazen
enough to demand their return to Crimea, thus depriving the Russian
intellectual elite of its favorite vacation spot. Ms. Tolstaya's sole answer
to all the relevant points that the previous discussants raised after her
speech was : "You feel it your way; I feel it my way." If not for the sake
of her politics, then for the sake of her writing, I sincerely hope that she
only pretends to have forgotten a very essential rule about literature. And
this rule is that, while writing, you have to be genuine about your own
feelings, but you also have to make a genuine effort to understand what
others may feel. Without that, the claim "I feel it my way" can't help
but produce not merely bad politics (this, perhaps, we could tolerate)
but something much worse: bad literature.
Now, on to what I am to present here, my remarks on "The Poli–
tics of the Central European Poet in Exile." Some thirty-five years ago,
almost exactly where we find ourselves at this moment - actually not in
Newark itself but in one of its satellite localities called Manhattan - a
splendid Polish writer named J6zef Wittlin, who had lived in this country
for a while and was naturally enough completely unknown here, stood
in front of an American audience reading his thoughts on the subject,
"The Glories and Miseries of Exile." The first sentence of his presentation
was: "Among the miseries of exile, a major one is that you have to sit
here and listen to my dreadful English."
I feel a deep sympathy with Wittlin in that respect, but the sentence
I've just quoted is about all that I could pick up from his speech and
wholeheartedly subscribe to. So many things have changed over the past
thirty-five years that the steadfastness with which the English of Slavic
poets has continued to be dreadful is probably one of those few messages
from the Almighty reminding us that there are some isolated pockets of
stability in this changing world after all. What has changed is, among
other things, the very notion of exile. The title of my remarks, on closer
examination, could seem overconfident, suggesting that I feel at ease
discussing each of three areas of experience - poetry, politics, and exile.
In my particular case, the truth is that I know more or less what poetry
is; I have a slightly vaguer idea of the different meaning that politics can
have. Yet as time passes, I have a less and less clear picture of what
actually constitutes the notion of exile.
