Russia Watch/The Dispossessed

...We remember what happened last time the prescription that writers should deal with social injustice came to power: socialist realism," she declared, adding that either today's P.C...

...In a country where, in 1996, a large segment of the population may vote for Dan Quayle, I think we should also be able to entertain the idea of electing a serious intellectual...

...The city of Newark, generally not known as a cultural center, hosted a dazzling constellation of literati, including Nobel laureates Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, and Czeslaw Milosz, grand dame of Russian letters Tatyana Tolstaya, occasional heretic Susan Sontag, novelists Vassily Aksyonov, Ralph Ellison, and Doris Lessing, historians Richard Pipes and Walter Laqueur, writer and translator Richard Lourie, and others...

...The political role of intellectuals proved an even more contentious issue...

...yes, democratic capitalism allows vulgar tastes to assert themselves...

...watchdogs do not know what their historical antecedents are, or, worse than that, "they know, and do not care...

...Doris Lessing, once a worshipper at the leftist altar herself, was positively scathing...

...When one of them suggested that instead of nationalism or imperialism there could be a "glorious mosaic" of cultures, Tolstaya shot back that this was a mere metaphor "and therefore, like all metaphors, can be dismissed...

...In fact, Intellectuals as Bad Guys had not been altogether neglected...

...Tatyana Tolstaya intervened to say that east Europeans had good reasons to distrust leadership by intellectuals, since "we already had Lenin, an intellectual, as head of state...

...free, especially since few people in the audience seemed poor...

...Bellow sounded more pessimistic as he spoke of a rising tide of "aesthetic illiteracy" and of flagging interest in "the things we have devoted our entire lives to serving," eclipsed by popular culture and TV...

...Though highly receptive to such concerns after catching a few minutes of "Studs" on TV the night before, I was bothered by the dim view Bellow, with his predictions of "mental misery," seemed to take of what the ex-Soviets longingly call a normal society...

...Such is the brief history of intellectuals in the ex-Communist world that emerged from discussions at an extraordinary conference, "Intellectuals and Social Change in Eastern and Central Europe," held on the Newark Campus of Rutgers University from April 9 to April 11 and co-sponsored by Partisan Review...

...He voiced relief at the poets' "much-lamented loss of authority," which means they are no longer expected to articulate other people's rage—but cautioned that eastern Europe could still be a different story, despite the fact that its dissidents (with numerous exceptions) have broken the cycle of violent rhetoric by embracing a more civilized discourse...

...Progressive Western intellectuals took quite a drubbing...

...Mihaies said that it was not contempt but "desperate compassion," and Eda Kriseova, Czech writer and adviser to President Havel, added wistfully, "We are disappointed that people don't want freedom, they want a parent to tell them what to do...

...Ah, but what do intellectuals want...

...I also wondered if I was listening to the same Tolstaya who, in an interview to the Moscow weekly Stolitsa last fall, sneered at the American professor who had approvingly told her that America was an anti-intellectual country...

...No intellectuals will liberate us from this responsibility...

...I suppose a society can livewithout art, just as one can eat without salt," he said, "but it's not very agreeable, and it's not even real life...

...it always has to come back to you...

...The case of Yugoslavia "shows how dangerous it is when writers and intellectuals are taken seriously," Drakulic summed up, ending on a Paul Johnsonesque note about the perils of faith in the moral superiority of intellectuals...

...She outlined the substantial contribution of writers and academics to the nationalist passions ravaging what used to be Yugoslavia—for example, by quibbling about the number of authors from this or that ethnic group in the school curriculum (sound familiar...

...One could argue, of course, whether Lenin was really an intellectual or merely a monomaniacal disgruntled would-be lawyer...

...The conference was supported by the National Endowment for Humanities—undoubtedly a worthier cause than a chocolate-covered Karen Finley, but I'm still not sure why admission had to be Cathy Young, our regular Russian Press-watch columnist, is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...

...But some of them would also do well to learn how not to assume imperious airs that someone not as sophisticated as they might confuse with arrogance...

...I came and took all those wonderful lands, all those swamps, from tribes that lived there, caught fish, whatever...

...Then intellectuals led the fight against totalitarianism—until one day, to their amazement, they won, only to find themselves confused and unsure what to do next...

...And all that was created by our hands, culture, is dismissed...

...Czeslaw Milosz voiced his unease over a backlash against the intelligentsia in eastern Europe: "In Poland, a small group of intellectuals contributed to the downfall of Communism and then wanted to do good for people, but the people don't necessarily like that...

...The emerging consensus clearly favored William F. Buckley, Jr.'s timeless dictum that one is better off entrusting government to 200 people randomly picked out of the phone book than to 200 Harvard professors...

...And the liberated countries of the ex-Soviet bloc, despite their reputation for spiritual richness, do not seem to have found a third way in culture any more than they have in economics: these days, the public in Moscow lines up for a movie called A Gang of Lesbians (presumably Russia's answer to Basic Instinct...

...I am made to feel that I am a conqueror," Tolstaya proclaimed with regal indignation...

...Surely the personal computer and the fax machine, which kept Russia's democratic forces in touch with the world during last August's coup, deserve a better rap...

...I find it amusing," Susan Sontag remarked in that causticway she has, "that intellectuals should be the first to admit that intellectuals aren't fit to run a government...

...I don't know if Richard Lourie had any particular person in mind when, later that day, he said that Russian intellectuals need to learn how to listen...

...It fell to Ralph Ellison to observe that in a democracy, "the individual has the responsibility to sort out the good from the false...

...No Finns were on hand to protest that their ancestors might not have done a bad job of building a culture either, but what time was left for questions and answers was taken up by angry Ukrainians...

...Asked to comment on the role of personal communications technology in the defeat of Communism, he turned the question around to lament these technologies' grip on us—"man-made miracles" we don't understand but serve and worship...

...Brodsky, whose works are being published in his native country nearly thirty years after he was jailed as a "parasite," confirmed that the role of writers and intellectuals in Russia was diminishing...

...Solzhenitsyn, in contrast, got short shrift: both Pipes and Slavic languages professor Sidney Monas characterized him as "out of touch" and his recent works as unreadable...

...T he very first panel—which, accidentally or not, included the three Nobel laureates—grappled with the modern intellectual's dilemma, summed up by Bellow: in totalitarian societies, intellectuals are important but oppressed...

...1 -03 T rti The Dispossessed by Cathy Young Early in this century, revolutions born of utopian visions to reshape human life seemed about to bring intellectuals to unmatched power—only to demote them to a far less exalted status as servants of the totalitarian state and take away their freedom of thought...

...West) German poet and critic Hans Enzensberger spoke of "Intellectuals as Hatemongers," citing choice nuggets of nationalist and class bloodlust and trying to answer the unflattering question of "why intellectuals have been so successful in the hate business...

...Rt ichard Pipes, in his belated tribute o the late Andrei Sakharov, made similar distinction between the old utopian intelligentsia and that of Sakharov's generation, which fought to reaffirm moral values and individual rights...

...Conference director and Partisan Review executive editor Edith Kurzweil suggested that the Americanleft should follow the example of the French ex-Communists and perform public penance...

...Blaga Dimitrova, herself an example of this trend as poet, novelist, and vice president of Bulgaria—her earlier speech was a rather lovely allegory of the dissident as Sisyphus who has suddenly succeeded in pushing the stone to the top of the hill and now finds himself occasionally nostalgic for his old task—insisted that it was merely a transitional phenomenon needed to fill a vacuum, since "we have no real politics yet...

...Even so, there was remarkably little cheering for the current extraordinary role of intellectuals in east European politics...

...Ultimately, even Bellow relented enough to express the hope that art and literature will survive if even a tiny fraction of the population pursues the life of the mind...

...This applies equally to ideologues and system-builders such as Rousseau or Marx, whose ascendancy was unanimously deplored, and to true writers interested in language, harmony, and human experience...

...He also uttered what may have been the most memorable line of the conference: "The writer owes absolutely nothing, zilch, to society...

...On the final panel, Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic (whose new collection of essays, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, is so good one can overlook the blurb from Gloria Steinem), charged that the conference had focused too little on the theme of "Intellectuals as Bad Guys...

...She also had the tact to complain that while she used to be able to feel at home anywhere in Russia, she was now denied that feeling even in Moscow or St...

...But this was Tatyana Tolstaya at her least controversial...

...earlier she had offered a gallant defense of Russian cultural imperialism, asserting that the only alternative was the narrow nationalism of small groups...

...0 46 The American Spectator June 1992...

...Toward the end of the conference, Mircea Mihaies, a journalist and political commentator from Timisoara, was—more justifiably—bitter about the state of affairs in Romania, prompting one listener to question this "contempt for the masses" once they are no longer willing to support the intellectuals...

...but I wondered if there wasn't something shockingly selfish about suggesting that misery and oppression for most people were at least in some ways preferable to a society less appreciative of the things we enlightened The American Spectator June 1992 45 few cherish...

...in democratic societies, they are free but marginal...

...Petersburg, because of claims that these cities were built on lands taken by the Russians from "some Karels or Finnish-speaking tribes...