Underground Notes
Friedberg, Maurice
BOOK REVIEW Underground Notes Mihajlo Mihajlov / Sheed Andrews & McMeel / ~10.00 Maurice Friedberg Of Yugoslavia's two most prominent political dissenters, one, Milovan Djilas, is currently...
...Legality is inseparably linked with the equal rights of all before the law...
...Mr Flynt's production line includes sex 3d The Alternative: An Amer,can Spectator April 1977...
...If General Motors ever made the claims ibr a Buick that Hustler makes for a set of genitals, Ralph Nader would be leading a mob on Detroit...
...Writes Mihajlov: "I don't know of any better and more serious theoretical book about Soviet society, and generally about Communism in all its forms"--which is extravagant praise indeed, if only in view of the sheer volume of competition that comes to mind...
...BOOK REVIEW Underground Notes Mihajlo Mihajlov / Sheed Andrews & McMeel / ~10.00 Maurice Friedberg Of Yugoslavia's two most prominent political dissenters, one, Milovan Djilas, is currently under a kind of house arrest but receiving a rather generous government pension, while the other, Mihajlo Mihajlov, is in jail for defaming the Tito regime...
...This, however, does not make these God-fearing Polish and Hungarian workers and peasants atheists...
...There is a wonderfully absurd double standard that flourishes in these farces produced, directed, and starred in by the heralds of the New Age...
...Still, in the best single essay in Underground Notes, Mihajlov does not hesitate to take Solzhenitsyn to task for what he regards as anti-Christian (and hence, also "antiRussian" !) overtones of his political creed as expounded in Letter jto Soviet Leaders...
...Yet their ardor for each cause seems to be conditioned by circumstances...
...Presumably, such readers won't also mind the very poor editing and careless translation...
...Not content with the traditional quack causes, these nuisances have excogitated new ones with which to victimize the average Americano, for instance the movement to extend civil rights to trees...
...known as "Yugoslavia's Solzhenitsyn...
...This, however, is true only in the sense that the two men share a steadfast opposition to Communism and a profound concern for religious values...
...Several of these had been previously published in England and in the United States...
...The fates of the two men illustrate the inconsistencies and contradictions of Yugoslav politics, sometimes relatively liberal, more often modeled after those of the Soviet bloc...
...With the exception of a brave attempt at a new reading of Anna Karenina, all deal with political problems...
...Thus, in one of his essays Mihajlov declares unequivocally that "the inevitable premise of the struggle against any Communist and nonCommunist totalitarianism is the criticism of atheism...
...In Mihajlov's view, the "Letter represents a tremendous danger and a trap for the future of Russia and of mankind...
...A relatively obscure Russian ~migr~ tract, Roman Redlikh's Stalinism as a Spiritual Phenomenon, is hailed as "itself a spiritual phenomenon of paramount importance...
...He is author of A Decade of Euphoria: Western Literature in Post-Stalin Russia...
...Upon his return, Mihajlov published in the West Moscow Summer, a book of travel impressions that made him famous and also established him as an enemy of the Soviet regime and hence a political embarrassment at home...
...MONKEY TRIAL (continued from page 4) olized the public discourse comparing their conditions as women or as homosexuals to the historically oppressed condition of blacks are frauds, freeloading on the misery of the past and on the compensatory impulse of the present...
...but apparently all judgment of him is to be suspended...
...Flynt all other ideals are to be abjured in deference to what is called his freedom of expression...
...Not only is Mr...
...Authoritarianism, on the other hand, presupposes unquestionable superiority of one certain ideology, principle, religion, doctrine, and that means of one certain group of people-be it a party, church, aristocracy, scientists-who are then the proponents, carriers and interpreters of the reigning principle...
...This is true of most of the so-called women's liberationists and even truer of the so-called homosexual rights advocates...
...Mihajlov is also convinced that "all those people who blame historical Russia for the sins of the Communist dictatorship, no matter how different their present ideological and political positions are, have one thing in common: their atheism"--a statement that is patently untrue...
...The book's interest, then, is'not intrinsic, and the volume can be only recommended to those with an a priori interest in the Yugoslav rebel's thought...
...black civil rights leaders who float on the Zeitgeist and allow this kind of bombast to go unchallenged are a curious lot...
...Millions of rank-and-file Communists in such devoutly Catholic countries as Poland and Hungary may be quite wrong in confusing Russia's national heritage with the ideology of the Soviet regime...
...Mihajlov, as the book's jacket informs, is Maurice Friedberg is chairman o] the department of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Illinois...
...Mihajlo Mihajlov, a Yugoslav-born son of Russian " " " em,gres, was a young assistant professor of Russian literature when he was sent in the mid-1960s to the Soviet Union to do research in his discipline...
...His excesses have hardly been mentioned by anyone save the heinous and probably Hitlerite Cincinnati prosecutors...
...A fu'm democrat, Mihajlov reminds the exiled Russian novelist that ...legality is the direct opposite of any authoritarianism, and it can exist only in a pluralistic, democratic society...
...It is a shameful thing...
...Flynt to be free to exploit his readers, scorn women, humiliate decent workingclass men, publish arrantly racist material, and sell fraudulent goods...
...Today the land abounds with white people who rue the fact that fifteen years ago they did not spy the Negro civit rights movement for the winner that it proved to be and who now will leap on ahnost any so-called social justice bandwagon so long as it costs them little, is fashionable, and has a reasonable chance of giving them the feeling they are acting heroically on behalf of an historic sure thing...
...Whether inspired by guilt or opportunism these impostors have become the worst nuisances since the reformers of the early twentieth century commenced their wars against Demon Rum and licentiousness...
...While warning against the evil of ideologies as such (the significance of which, Mihajlov believes, Solzhenitsyn greatly exaggerates), Solzhenitsyn "proposes an authoritarian future for Russia" which "in an ideological sense, paradoxically repeats Lenin's sin...
...In the case of Mr...
...Unfortunately, the other pieces in the volume, ranging from a defense of Marx's theory of alienation from attacks by the Marxist Djilas to reflections on the modern Catholic Left, are often shallow and sloppy...
...The situation was not improved by the subsequent publication of Russian Themes, and is not likely to be affected by his Underground Notes, a collection of essays written over a period of five years...
Vol. 10 • April 1977 • No. 7
