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PARTISAN REVIEW
urrection of all those who had ever lived. The archetype of rebirth is
strong in Russia's culture, and the country has come back to life more
than once already - after the Mongol invasion, after the twenty-seven
million dead of World War Two. And now the very logic of its history
demands that it purifY its spirit and be reborn, or else it will perish from
its own poisons. Yes, Russia is dying, but only so it can rise again from
the dead, imitating Christ not in ethics but in actions.
Charles Russell:
Thank you. The next speaker is Sidney Monas, who
will speak on "Russian Literature and Exile."
Sidney Monas:
"A great writer is a second government." Solzhenitsyn's
well-known pronouncement, meant to apply everywhere, has a special
resonance for Eastern Europe and Russia, where so often and for so long
when political institutions were repressed, malformed, or nonexistent,
literature has been the vessel of national self-expression. Russian literature
in particular had its origins in modern times, in the eighteenth century, as
part of a truly monumental project to transform Russia, to Europeanize,
modernize, and civilize it. Thus from its beginning Russian literature was
intimately bound to the state, to the Petrine transformation, and
acquired its high affiatus from a close association with the sustaining
moral and grandiose aspiration of Peter the Great's project.
The subsequent history of Russian literature has not, of course, been
a rose-parade, and the relationship between a bureaucratic autocracy and
the rich, complex, and profound literature that developed in the course
of the nineteenth century took a radically different turn. Metaphorically
speaking, one might say that Russia's literature went into a kind of
deeply estranged exile from its marriage to the state. Nevertheless some–
thing of the old eighteenth- century aura still floated wistfully around the
edges of the relationship, and for all the subsequent estrangement, Russian
literature never entirely lost its sense of a moral or aesthetic commitment
to a grandiose utopian project.
Some individual writers may have pitted themselves against its im–
position as an unfair burden when what they wanted was merely to en–
tertain, or to share some particular insight, or to create a small fictive or
poetic world exempt from the prevailing or contending ethical and po–
litical forces. There were such writers, of course, but they always had to
contend with the weight of the dominant tradition, and inevitably that
tradition affected them. The literary calling was a high one. Yet some–
how, and especially for those to whom it imparted a heady success, it
was not quite high enough, and it seemed to point to an adjoining field
on a yet loftier level - prophecy. [n Nabokov's wonderful short story,
"A Russian Rimbaud," a promising young avant-garde poet abruptly
