POETRY IN EXILE
generation, so that the sons pay for the sins of the fathers and perhaps
only the grandchildren begin
to
get over it - or at least it takes a dif–
ferent form with them.
597
We are too quick to assume that Russia is well on its way to be–
coming what it so sincerely longs to be - a normal society. Russia needs
more than loans and roads, storage facilities, and time to learn tolerance
and trade. It must also cure itself of the madness of the twentieth cen–
tury. The case of Citizen Ch. proves how deep those derangements run.
He may be an extreme example, but he is an example nonetheless. There
are many, many Russian families harboring tales of cannibalism and of re–
turning soldiers treated as traitors for remaining alive.
In all this there may be some advantage for Russian literature. The
logic of Christianity, that sins must be atoned for, creates a dynamic that
can energize a culture. Italy and Germany, for example, created vital art
in the postwar period in part because those societies were compelled to
struggle with the sins of the fathers, the sins of fascism. If political condi–
tions allow, Russian literature can transform itself from a literature of
opposition to a literature of self-analysis and self-healing. Many observers
have noted the lack of a certain type of self-knowledge in Russian
culture. The Polish writer Kazimierz Brandys writes in
A Warsaw Diary:
Russian self-knowledge does not seem to extend past certain bound–
aries that have been drawn in their psyche, and Russian self-criticism
shrinks from what is hidden within them at the very source of Russian
unfreedoI11.... Do they see a connection between their own indi–
vidual psychology and their social existence or don 't they?
Russians not only need to view their complicity in their own fate
but also to ruthlessly scrutinize what that fate has in turn done to them.
But more than self-analysis is needed. The process that is required is as
closely bound to religious psychology as to analytical psychology. There
must be confession, atonement, and forgiveness, the hardest art. The
atonement for sin and the forgiveness of it are spiritual processes that
must take place within the Russian collective psyche, if Russians are to be
a human community again and not just an aggregate of victims and
victimizers.
In the Russian Orthodox religion, Easter is the great holiday,
celebrating the miracle of resurrection. And it was Russia who gave the
world its most radical philosopher, Nikolai Fyodorov. He saw no con–
tradiction between Christianity and science, and he called on science to
work for what was the obvious greatest possible good - the literal res-
