SHRAYER
485
would channel anti-Semitic ideas through interviews and other discur–
sive public statements, committing the writer's greatest mistake by mak–
ing politics their literature. Ironically, despite their insistence on the
artist's responsibility for maintaining his nation's memory
(pamiat' ),
their statements on the Jewish question reveal a complete indifference
to- but surely not an ignorance of-the incessant anti-Semitism of the
Soviet system from the first postwar decade to the late 1980s. Clearly,
not every silence constitutes an act of endorsement. In this case, by
blaming the Jews for the decline of the Russian village and traditional
Russian Orthodox culture, while simultaneously refusing to treat the
Jews with the same honesty as they have the ethnic Russians, the Village
Writers have endorsed both popular and state-sponsored anti-Semitic
practices of the Soviet period. They have, one might add , paid a price
for the choices they made by becoming a marginal segment of post–
Soviet Russian culture.
Thinking of the decline of the Russian Village Prose in the mid-1980s,
one is reminded of the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose 1948 book
Qu 'est-ce que La Litterature? [What is Literature?
1948], still remains one
of the most important explorations of intolerance in literature. Speaking
of the writer's freedom and responsibility in connection with racism,
Sartre said this: "Thus, I require of all freedoms that they demand the lib–
eration of colored people against the white race and against myself inso–
far as I am a part of it, but nobody can suppose for a moment that it is
possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism."
C OMING SOON IN PARTISAN REVIEW:
• Eugene Goodheart
on Elias Canetti
• Norman Man e a
"Berenger at Bard"
• Ronald Radosh
on Intellectuals
&
Communism
• Reviews by
Stephen Miller, Sanford Pinsker,
Igor Webb
&
Susan Miron
• Fiction by
Ivo
AndriC
&
Sharona B en-Tov
• Poetry by
Robert Bly, Stephen Sandy,
Rebecca Seiferle,
&
Adam Kirsch
