586
PARTISAN REVIEW
I am speaking here not just about the fact that, in the case of Cen–
tral and Eastern Europe at least, 1989 has brought about an obvious
change in the formal status of the exiled intellectual. To begin with, it is
interesting that the English language, otherwise so impressive in its rich–
ness of vocabulary and semantic precision, in this case seems to be com–
pletely satisfied to give just one word, "exile," to describe a wide array
of different experiences. Especially during the eighties, one could hear the
phrase "an exiled poet" applied quite indiscriminately and variously to
someone forcibly expelled from his country; to someone who just hap–
pened to be in the West as a tourist when something occurred in his
country which prevented him from returning; to someone who could
not stand living in a country deprived of basic human rights and, as the
East European saying puts it, "chose freedom" by escaping to or staying
in the West; to someone who, for this or that reason, had made at–
tempts to return to his old country but was never let in; to someone
who made his home in the West for reasons that were other than strictly
political; even to someone who lived in the West but was relatively free
to travel home.
The word "political" also leads us straight into another area of se–
mantic confusion. If we look it up in any English-Russian, Engli h-Polish,
English-Czech dictionary, we are bound to find a soothingly familiar–
sounding equivalent such as "polityka" or "politika." But what were,
before 1989, the actual meanings of phrases like "political involvement"
and "politically active" in Western and Eastern Europe? In America in
the eighties, I had a haunting feeling that whenever I spoke of politics or
the political I was being at least slightly misunderstood. For example, my
curriculum vita, under "Experience," lists: "1977: fired from the De–
partment of Polish Philology at the University of Poznan, Poland, for
political reasons." What "for political reasons" means is "as a retaliation
of the regime of the Polish People's Republic for my lack of conformity
with their policies, e.g., being involved in a human rights organization,
publishing books underground and abroad without the regime's permis–
sion, etc." The meaning for Americans, however, has much more to do
with the notion of "departmental politics" in the sense of vying for po–
sitions, personality clashes, differences of opinion about curricula. As a
result, this entry on my vita was interpreted in America to mean that I
had been fired from my job in Poland because I couldn't come to terms
with my department chairman!
Although that misunderstanding was rather trivial, it does reflect a
more essential conceptual difference. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it
seems to me that the Western meaning of politics is usually both more
specific and more neutral than its Eastern counterpart. In America, to
define your area of interest as "politics" means two things: first, that you
