LANGUAGE AND RESISTANCE; THE RUSSIAN DISSIDENT MOVEMENT
Pevear, Richard
The Russian poet Varlam Shalamov spent almost 25 years in Soviet prisons and labor camps, 17 of them in Kolyma, for "counterrevolutionary activities." One of his Kolyma Stories, published here...
...The struggle for freedom of language is an inner struggle to bring meaning to words, as the Russian dissidents have shown over the past 15 years...
...The dialectic is much more complicated...
...In this sense there was no specific movement, if one understands a movement to be a definite structure with organizing principles and a political ideology...
...he has been called a "Mickey Mouse of the bourgeoisie" and a "Russian McCarthyist...
...To attempt to resolve them by applying to them the old absolutes of the struggle for power is to surrender again...
...Mandelstam's theme in his essay is the "unity of Russian literature," by which he means the enduring elements of Russian existence...
...It is possible for the state to kill a man because men are mortal, not because the state is omnipotent...
...According to an old story, in the 8th century the Kievan Slays sent a fine, two-edged sword as part of a tribute payment to the Khazars, their oppressors...
...But there are few even among the best of them that do not have an air of colonial self-consciousness, as if they were products of a gift for mimicry, not of the deep life of language...
...not official language, but speech rooted in dialects and in the inventions that accompany different kinds of work—what Valery called "that perpetually active poetry which harasses the rigid vocabulary, expands or contracts the meaning of words, works on them by symmetries or conversions, constantly altering the values of this legal tender...
...If this long war has largely been a war of words, it has not been entirely so...
...in the figure of the youngest brother it shows us how one's chances increase as the mythical primitive times are left behind...
...That was true to an extent even of Mandelstam...
...My reason for recalling this passage from Benjamin is that it embodies, with a remarkable likeness, a series of recognitions that the Russian dissidents have come to in their struggle with the state, recognitions both of the nature of the struggle and of the best ways of undertaking it...
...But nothing is more contrary to the tradition of Russian literature...
...Baudelaire fought that battle with the censors of Napoleon III in 1857, and we would have to say that he won...
...not for his own benefit, for in his self-abnegation he was probably sincere...
...Bukovsky's mother said, of the example her son has been to her, "I was always a hen, and suddenly in my house there grew an eagle"—a very Leskovian sentence...
...Baudelaire's negative way was also a way of self-sacrifice for the sake of common humanity, in opposition to the nonhuman forces that dominated his era...
...That is the word of this plain account that deepens into a legend...
...Only I would have occupied an independent position--I would not have identified anarchism with socialism...
...The writing function consists in the production of well-made works for general consumption, works that are part pure comestibles, part an ideological engineering of souls...
...It is always possible to seize power, but that act of power cannot, even eventually, lead to freedom or justice...
...VII P ower is a persuasive illusion...
...The tone of desperate insistence can be heard in the speeches and writings that defend it, because that very insistence debases the defenders who are also only men...
...the revealing of a mysterious bond between the earth and exposed humanity...
...We will preserve you...
...But Mandelstam has already spoken of the Russian word as "flesh, active, and permitted entry into the event," which is perhaps the best way to understand the historical continuity of the spirit, embodied now in the flesh and now in the word, that stands behind the dissident movement...
...Freedom is neither an end nor a means...
...Mikhail Aksenov, a self-exiled member of the dissident movement, said in an interview with Irina Kirk: Mandelstam was asked many times why he didn't emigrate...
...Solzhenitsyn wrote, in the second book of Gulag Archipelago: "How difficult it is, how difficult it is, to become a human being...
...But the last two stanzas turn abruptly to the "earth outside the city" and end with a variant that is also an interpretation of the image of the hearth: Then why does the distance weep in mist, And why does black dirt smell so bitter...
...And true poetry is always found on the side of the people, if only because of its care for the life of speech...
...But his was more of a figurative and willed martyrdom, a source and subject of poetry...
...The same pattern has been repeated for too many years: repression consented to in the name of the struggle against repression...
...Pares wrote, in his History of Russia...
...And the recent tradition of urban poetry owes its existence largely to the work of Baudelaire, who understood the crisis and devised a strategy to meet it...
...Neither the Stone nor the North would let the corpses into their womb...
...nothing, in fact, could have been more foreign to him...
...If I forget, surely grass will...
...Edward Dahlberg was right to accuse those who write for money or prestige of "stealing the genius of the people," and to define that genius as "the will to resist evil...
...The prisoners imagine that the bulldozer will be a help to them in the backbreaking work of trelling—dragging and stacking logs by hand...
...Simone Weil condensed a subtle portrait of the man of power into a single sentence: "Richelieu wanted to enslave people's very minds...
...and so many more in Baudelaire's work, testify to an absence that is the part of experience in the great urban centers...
...But folly has always had a special place in Russian thought...
...What can be changed may well need to be changed...
...Of course, any exiled Russian who publicly criticizes the Soviet regime can be said to have served the interests of the capitalist West...
...But it also has its share of cunning and high spirits...
...What draws these people together is not political agreement...
...The word in the Hellenistic conception is flesh, active, and permitted entry into the event...
...And there is a corresponding difference in Mandelstam's later poetry...
...To recover his voice, he had to free himself of the demonic logic of the state and accept the role 264 RICHARD PEVEAR of outcast and victim that was to be his in the years of Stalin's terror...
...JDs...
...American speech is not yet wise...
...The point was to consider that one was finished, and that the question lay in the "quality" of such an end...
...Surrender, on the other hand, leads to a bureaucratic assimilation of the realm of language, to the creation of a "union of writers" administered by the state, to the isolation of a "writing function" or "writing profession" (and it should be said that something of the same effect can be achieved without the explicit bureaucratic apparatus by the commercializing of the realm of language...
...The prisoners watch this work being done, and they notice the look of "pride and satisfaction" on the driver's face as the machine turns and roars back past them—"not a scratch, not a mark on its mirrorlike knife...
...the self-righteous ideologist doing with his left hand what he attacks with his right...
...For that I have my special calling, To keep the open from being bored, To keep the earth outside the city From isolation and despair...
...It speaks the dead out of the ground...
...LANGUAGE AND RESISTANCE 263 IV Poetry has little meaning apart from other human activities, which are its nourishment...
...Instead of exposing the writer to the experiences of common humanity, it protects him from them...
...It both preserves and exposes secrets...
...This translation, by J. de Yepes, is taken from Index, the splendid English journal that chronicles violations of freedom in all-repeat, all-countries...
...And the price he must pay is the betrayal of his fellow men or of conscience, acceptance of a part in the perpetration of untruths and the glorification of power, the dividing of himself into one who speaks and'one who is silent...
...they speak a disenchanted language...
...But for some time their work goes on as before, with the one exception that they are led out to the work site along a much more roundabout and arduous path...
...Festivity was the polis...
...An unexpected strain of high spirits runs through the writings of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Andrei Sinyaysky, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Amalrik, and even through the chronicles of Gulag Archipelago...
...now I saw and understood...
...I must underline, especially as I live abroad, that I am in no way a partisan of the preRevolutionary regime...
...The wisest thing—so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day—is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits...
...A list of these stratagems was set down by Walter Benjamin in an essay on Leskov called "The Storyteller...
...But the state may not only be the final outcome of this human need, but also its ultimate perversion...
...That is, in LANGUAGE AND RESISTANCE 269 the last six lines...
...He allowed the "modern" its compulsive fascination, but not its triumph...
...But the real strength of these lines, and their surprise, comes from their two-way defiance...
...The negative way can be a way only on condition that the poet, lost in the crowd, keeps hold of his right to see everything and to say everything...
...It is possible to make the polis into a termite-state without contradicting the laws of nature...
...Andrei Amalrik's "Open Letter to A. Kuznetsov" appears in the paperback edition of Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984...
...An idea is a provisional construction, a tool like a wrench or a screwdriver, unless it is made into a myth...
...Finally, yielding to force, defeated and humiliated, the Stone had promised to keep its secret, but harsh winters, hot summers, the winds and the rain, at work for six years, had wiped away the secret by casting the corpses forth from the Stone...
...This radical difference is the real issue...
...Dark night takes them by the throat...
...one might call it a domestic Hellenism...
...must be set the short, untitled poem that begins, "I have not forgotten...
...We should not be more concerned about the bad treatment of poets than we are about the bad treatment of other people...
...But sometimes to obtain this one must risk even the freedom one has...
...V S oviet repression works by a complex system of betrayal, in which it attempts to implicate as many people as it can...
...The poem by Mandelstam quoted in section IV is from "Vos'mistishiya" (1932-35), translated by Clarence Brown in Delos, 1968...
...they are the very thing we need to understand...
...The privilege of power is that it need not answer, but the truth of power is that it cannot answer...
...Naive lines, perhaps, but all the more remarkable for their repetition of that one image that is the opposite of the night-world and the degradation Baudelaire deliberately cultivated: the image of the hearth...
...A century after Baudelaire published Crepuscule du soir, Pasternak wrote a poem that is related to it as closely as a photograph to its negative...
...An awkward time Today's time...
...Any record which does not take account of it must inevitably be inconsequent and unintelligible...
...Freedom of speech is a blank check...
...What, on the other hand, can a movement that has no leaders, no organization, no program, amount to...
...one can be free to speak and have nothing to say...
...Words should reveal conditions, not determine them...
...For the first time the places traditionally assigned to the ideal, the true, the good in poetry were filled by strange silences, by gaps in the text...
...And the narrator says...
...The power of the state represents, in human terms, not a triumph but an abject surrender...
...Life has become better and gayer," Stalin said in a famous speech in 1937...
...Hellenism is the system, in the Bergsonian sense of the word, which a man opens around himself like a fan of phenomena which have been liberated from temporal dependence, and which have been co-ordinated by an inner relationship through the human I. This passage, from "On the Nature of the Word," brings together under an appropriate name all that is threatened by the power of the state...
...The Russians might, like the people of southwestern France in the early Middle Ages, define themselves as the people of a language...
...The warmth it needs is not the kind supplied by central heating...
...Kafka used the same strategy...
...And it makes a striking contrast to the will to fixity embodied in the state-idea...
...But in making that attack, without touching on politics, Mandelstam was nevertheless taking aim at one of the fixed dogmas of the Soviet regime, the insistence that a new reality had been brought in by the Revolution, a reality that summed up the past in itself and thereby canceled it...
...The same radiance surrounds the simplest objects when they are drawn into the economy of the household...
...But Stone and Permafrost will not...
...By attacking the loyalty between friends, or simply between fellow human beings, it strengthens loyalty to the state...
...Alexander YeseninVolpin, considered the "father" of the dissident movement, suggests the nature of these choices in an interview with Irina Kirk...
...How complex it was, he has indicated by the one word that animates the lines, the word "alas...
...it is every bit of clothing which is placed on any shoulder, and with that same feeling of sacred trembling with which As the swift river froze And wintry blizzards raged, We covered with a furry hide The sainted old man...
...I would not have divided the world into the right and the left—the stupidest of divisions, losing any meaning after a 180-degree turn...
...Thus the mountain was stripped bare and converted into a gigantic stage for the performance of a concentration camp mystery play...
...in the shape of the animals which come to the aid of the child in the fairy tale it shows that nature is not merely subservient to the myth, but much prefers to be aligned with man...
...The prisoners watch it climb a terrace and move off down the old work-road, which happens to go past the camp cemetery...
...Language seems to have confronted its own speechlessness for the first time in the industrial cities of the 19th century...
...But there is another recognition in the poem, without which the first would have little meaning...
...I thanked God for giving me the time and strength to see this...
...The Russian people have faced something more than the loss of personal freedoms, and for the same reason the opposition of the dissidents cannot be seen only as a struggle to regain those freedoms...
...Excommunication from language for us is tantamount to excommunication from history...
...Attempts to resolve these difficulties by righteous indignation simply will not work...
...That many of them are now in exile is another matter—not a magic escape but an extreme misfortune, accepted only in the face of an even more extreme repression...
...If they have an answer, it is a living one, woven out of countless relationships...
...Of the two essays by Mandelstam, "On the Nature of the Word" was published in Malahat Review, No...
...It behooved one to be patriotic during the Great Fatherland War, and it was one of the rare occasions when Akhmatova was allowed to print her work...
...otherwise their strength would be hard to account for...
...And further on, he says: For Russia the defection from history, the excommunication from the kingdom of historical necessity and succession, from freedom and expediency, would be a defection from language...
...It cannot permit any festivity that is not a state festivity...
...But other activities lose their meaning when they are isolated from poetry, which is the pollen that turns events into experience...
...Dynamite charges set under the biggest stumps sent them flying...
...Knowledge of these things, which have all but disappeared from the world, seems to have been entrusted to the Russian people and their language...
...The willtowill is a blind force...
...The acts of the dissidents, on the other hand, are acts for the sake of community, and are self-fulfilling to the extent that in them the community already exists, in however tenuous a form...
...Yet he allows his own books to be printed in the Soviet Union, where the state is the only publisher...
...The two-way exchange Pasternak describes is the economy of the human order of existence...
...the past was not so superstitious...
...Why should people attach such a high price to something as quixotic as freedom...
...Russian speech, From servitude in foreign chains, Keep you alive, great Russian word, Fit for the songs of our children's children, Pure on their tongues, and free...
...Had I lived before the Revolution, undoubtedly I would have fought not for socialism but for notions of an anarchic order, in the spirit of Kropotkin and Bakunin...
...It is characteristic of state power generally that it attempts, as Simone Weil put it, "to break all the bonds that could, outside the sphere of public life, provide a goal for the exercise of loyalty...
...The scholasticism of ideological controversy can serve the ends of power but not of liberation...
...A tyrannical state is a reversed thing...
...Mandelstam characterized such works as "a competition of inventions for the improvement of some kind of literary machine, it being unknown where the judges are hiding or what purpose the LANGUAGE AND RESISTANCE 265 machine serves...
...If an individual person or even the whole country actively wanted to be free, they must achieve freedom somehow, even if it be by means of non-co-operation with their oppressors...
...And the Soviet state has used various cruder methods...
...In the second book of her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam has included a long digression on freedom and license, which goes to the heart of these questions...
...Maintaining it, he says, is the poet's special calling...
...a foreshadowing of the inevitable detente between the United States and the Soviet Union and what that implies...
...Soviet socialism, German fascism, Western capitalism—which has been the greatest devourer of its children...
...The earth had opened its mouth to reveal its underground storerooms...
...The universe does not need that warmth, mankind needs it...
...Just too ashamed, but How are you to lie still...
...Mandelstam was silenced by the state in another way, however, before his work was banned...
...To put it another way, such a state, ironically, collectivizes its opposition...
...in the figure of the wiseacre it shows us that the questions posed by the myth are simple-minded, like the riddle of the sphinx...
...Human beings are exposed not only to the force of the universe, which all creatures are exposed to, but to the knowledge of its inflexible laws, to a weight and a violence that are suffered in spirit...
...The accusations testify to the importance of words in modern politics...
...Those who have read the story will not have forgotten it, but I want to quote a few paragraphs from it here at the beginning: they contain, in language of a higher order, most of what I hope to bring together in these pages...
...It would be trivial to associate the acts of a man like Bukovsky with mere literature...
...The poem is difficult because it holds things strangely together...
...Mandelstam himself referred to Baudelaire as "an ascetic, in the most authentic sense of the word martyre...
...Gunter Grass, for example, criticized Andrei Sinyaysky recently for associating himself with the magazine Kontinent, because it is supported by a right-wing German publisher...
...But reality does not change, and the nature of oppression does not change...
...instead of the freedom of language, it brings him privileges of a highly suspect variety...
...One of his Kolyma Stories, published here under the title "LendLease Comes to a Soviet Camp" (these stories have not been published in the Soviet Union but have circulated in samizdat), tells about the arrival, during the war years, of an American bulldozer in one of the Kolyma mining camps and about the first use it was put to...
...A state may be tyrannical in its power, but that power does not belong to the state...
...Our time...
...Its aims fill the void left by the destruction of the common culture of the people...
...Only in extreme cases, or as a result of its own inexperience, does a state have to resort to physical force...
...Hellenism is any little oven around which a man sits and appreciates the warmth as if it were kindred to his own inner warmth...
...Baudelaire, who was forever exhorting himself, wrote once in his diary, with a mixture of innocence and selfdeprecating humor: "To be a great man and a saint for one's own sake, that is all that matters...
...In their acts and writings they have drawn once again from the oldest, the most forgotten layers of common experience...
...It amounts to an outline of the methods of popular revolt: Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest...
...In the moment of greatest danger, the danger of forgetting, which threatens the prisoners themselves, that is, which comes not only from the forced silence that surrounds them but from their own human weakness— the earth "opens its mouth...
...III M ythification and power are intimately related, whether the myth embodies power or 262 RICHARD PEVEAR disguises it...
...Justice is not inherent in any political order, because any political order 270 RICHARD PEVEAR can be subverted...
...The use of the power of myths to control the people is characteristic of modern statepolitics...
...VIII I n his poem Crepuscule du soir, Baudelaire described the night-world of 19th-century Paris, that swarming city: crime, prostitution, the luxurious pastimes of the rich, all that comes out at twilight—which is also: The hour when the sufferings of the sick grow sharper...
...It acquires the momentum of a dead weight moving in a vacuum, a momentum that can have no regard for people and that overwhelms even those who presume to guide it...
...Solzhenitsyn has been more crudely attacked, not only for playing into the hands of Western propagandists, but, for example, for failing to distinguish between those who were killed for the right reasons in the early years of the Revolution and those who were wrongly killed by Stalin...
...The political order can be changed...
...It is a principle that Mandelstam presented, with some apprehension, in an essay entitled "Humanism and the Present," published in 1923: LANGUAGE AND RESISTANCE 267 There are epochs which contend that they care nothing for man, that he is to be used like brick or cement, that he is to be built with, not for...
...Not everyone can come out openly against the conditions in which we live and maybe that is not always the best method...
...Corpses lay waiting in the doubly hardened realm of Stone and Permafrost...
...Folly can be sacrificial, as it was for Pasternak and for Mandelstam...
...Time after time we have let the world fall into the possession of demonic forces, but our very way of thinking has made us less and less able to recognize the nature of those forces and the right way to combat them...
...In it we can see a commentary on the alliance of industrial and state power against the people...
...It seems to me that one can see not only the spirit but almost the day-to-day lives of the Russian dissidents in these lines...
...That is why my friends and I Meet together in early spring, And of our evenings make farewells, And of our small feasts, testaments, So that the hidden stream of sorrow May lend some warmth to the chill of being...
...But it is always better to be silent than to utter falsehoods, better to refuse to publish any of your books than to put out something which is completely contrary to what one had written in the beginning, better to refuse a trip abroad than to become an informer through it or to "report" by means of a false poem, better to refuse a press conference than to declare publicly that creative freedom exists in our country...
...But in fact the ideologists of the Revolution shared the basic assumptions of the capitalist autocracy they opposed, and spoke the same language...
...It means rather that the oldest need, the need for mediation, has been forgotten...
...The mountain slope was stripped bare...
...Hellenism is a kettle, a pair of oven tongs, a milk jug, a domestic utensil, dishes, all the familiar bodies...
...He made a poetry out of that struggle without resolving it, but without letting it fly apart...
...There is no clearer example of the breaking of bonds between people than the Soviet system of betrayal, which goes beyond collective submission to corrupt the innermost life of each person, that is, to isolate each person from himself...
...It is an attack on the evolutionary point of view applied to literary history, the idea that a writer works "to clear the road of those who preceded him...
...For that reason, the Russian language is historical in itself, since in its totality it is a surging sea of events, an unbroken incarnation and the action of wise and breathing flesh...
...He has also been accused of harboring pro-Nazi sentiments, and even of personal greed...
...What can it hold up against the temptation of power, since it renounces power, if not an illusion that is even briefer and more questionable...
...A stone pit, the common prison grave, full of preserved corpses, had been reopened by the disappearance of the topsoil...
...He could work as he did only because he was left a marginal territory of disorder, of the anonymous or the not-yet-organized, a space for private meaning, the gratuitous, dandyism, the extraordinary claim of Kierkegaard that the individual is higher than the universal...
...Magically escaped' are the beings that LANGUAGE AND RESISTANCE 271 lead the procession of Leskov's creations...
...Yet most of them have not known even The hearth's comfort, or ever really lived...
...Reason would not lead that way, any more than reason would lead a person to oppose the Soviet state...
...Like every good story, it speaks in the language of images, our approximation to what Leskov called "the voice of Nature," and it is memorable precisely because it does not explain itself...
...Then I remembered putting out grass fires and, by contrast, the intense blooming of the taiga in summer, whose foliage together with the grass may hide all human actions, good or bad...
...The point is this: that one single phrase that turns out to be treachery is much worse than ten years in camp...
...It is the surrender of the world to what Heidegger has called "the uniformity of the will-to-will...
...The old art of storytelling has almost disappeared in our time...
...Negative figures: the seven old men, the swan wandering in the rubble of a building project, the blind men ("What are they looking for in the sky...
...The house of the world extends to include the earth outside the city, just as the earth in spring sends its life into human habitations...
...And in this particular case the revolutionary reality appears as a total objectification of the meaninglessness that kills human beings...
...it is even the hardest thing to do...
...Each of our dear ones who had perished in Kolyma, each who had been shot or beaten to death, or wasted away from hunger, might have been identified decades later...
...Freedom of language is not the same as freedom of speech, a right guaranteed by some constitutions and denied by some dictators...
...in other words, it attaches no more value to their lives than the force of necessity does...
...Perhaps it resulted from the separation of active intellect, of an intelligentsia, from the common culture of the people and the waning of that culture under the influence of commercial and ideological civilization...
...It has been the one voice of a culture that has never entered into institutions or become a politics...
...These works have thrown off the burden of myth-enforcement...
...There were no gas ovens in Kolyma...
...Brecht and Mandelstam, who would seem to have little in common, shared an admiration for Villon, who was a prototype of the urban poet (the only others were perhaps some of the poets of imperial Rome...
...In the figure of the fool it shows us how mankind "acts dumb" toward the myth...
...Hellenism is the conscious surrounding of man with utensils instead of indifferent objects...
...It is touched by the particular radiance of disenchantment...
...New York, 1971...
...What is asked of us, instead, is that we fashion a provisional language, concrete and , selfcritical, suited to local applications, which will not trap people into consenting to what, under another name, are the very evils they are fighting against...
...the tactical shifting from a dogmatic rigidity that denounces the struggle for freedom for its lack of theory, to a realpolitik that denounces it for its idealism...
...from the vast changes proposed by Solzhenitsyn, through more modest calls for the recognition of human rights, to the pessimism of Amalrik...
...All of these words are metaphors, because of the peculiar economy of our existence...
...In Kolyma not only gold was hidden, not only lead, wolfram, and uranium, but also preserved human bodies...
...At times it becomes inimical to man and feeds its own grandeur on his debasement and nullity...
...That is the nature of poetic speech...
...The more elementary the choices, the more "spiritual" they become...
...2 a.m...
...It begins as a description of spring coming to the city, of daylight and fresh air penetrating closets and attics, dissolving all difference between inside and outside, of pussywillows and gillyflowers on windowsills, at intersections, in streets and workshops...
...And that is the real explanation...
...In the 1930s the Soviet state banned all of Mandelstam's work, arrested and exiled the poet, and finally killed him...
...His point was not to resist the overwhelming novelty of modern urban existence—its pastlessness, its crowded anonymity, its violent contrasts of wealth and squalor—but to lose himself, freely and knowingly, in that alien world, to undergo its shocks, to become its typical figure...
...The "dumbness" of two or three generations could lead Russia to a historical death...
...The language of that other order is the 268 RICHARD PEVEAR language of poetry...
...Meaning belongs to another order of existence...
...American speech has produced some lasting works...
...But there also exists a different social architecture of which man is also the scale and measure, but which builds for man rather than with him To build with man rather than for him is at heart a despairing thing, that is, a desperate thing...
...He says, in the same interview...
...The Russian language, Mandelstam wrote in his essay "On the Nature of the Word," is Hellenistic in character...
...Finally, Hellenism is the funeral boat of the Egyptian dead in which everything necessary for the continuation of the terrestrial travel of man is placed, even including the scent jar, the mirror, and combs...
...It has no inner motive, and is therefore inscrutable...
...That demonic myths are a nightmare and an intolerable weight bearing down on the life of mankind was once understood...
...VI The Russian dissidents, Irma Kirk wrote in the preface to Profiles in Russian Resistance, "had no leaders, no manifestos, no political 266 RICHARD PEVEAR philosophy...
...What is the relationship Pasternak implies in the ellipsis between the two stanzas...
...They could talk about what constitutes power, but they could not say what makes a community...
...In that case, what good is it...
...The state is cold, its touch is metallic, but it takes its coldness from the "chill of being...
...A poetic work exists by its own laws as a finished object, a construction...
...The dissident writer Andrei Amalrik has said of the cultural sector in the Soviet Union: I sometimes think that the Soviet "creative intelligentsia"—that is, people accustomed to thinking one thing, saying another, and doing a third—is as a whole an even more unpleasant phenomenon than the regime that gave it birth...
...We ask why, and get no answer...
...it exposes its people to cold, hunger, random destruction...
...The house is the beginning of the city, and the hearth is the center of the house...
...Yesenin-Volpin is aware of the dissidents' complicated position with regard to the West...
...The poem by Akhmatova quoted in section 11 was translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward in Poems of Akhmatova (Boston, 1973...
...I remembered that grass is more forgetful than man...
...As for Amalrik, it was once suggested that he was an agent of the KGB...
...q Kim Chi-ha 2 a.m...
...32, October 1974, translated by John M. Gogol, and "Humanism and the Present" was published in Clarence Brown's Mandelstam (New York, 1973...
...Finally, one morning the bulldozer is put into operation...
...Baudelaire's greatness was that he recognized how deeply both were threatened by silence in the face of the incommensurable, and that he found a way of overcoming it...
...The state has no other power than necessity, the real source of all mythical power, which it receives from the universe and turns as a weapon against the people...
...That can also be said of Bukovsky, Marchenko, Larisa Bogoraz, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, and the many other prisoners and exprisoners still in the Soviet Union who have managed to make their opposition known...
...for me emigration is the question of escaping from my fate...
...A person can be enslaved only when he is inwardly in a condition to accept slavery...
...Only the felt need for justice can bring a measure of justice...
...This passage is from an open letter addressed to a Russian writer, one who had adopted the strategy of accepting the conditions imposed on him by the state and doing what was asked of him, though secretly he despised the authorities he served, and who was rewarded with permission to travel to the West, where he defected...
...The political thought of the Russian dissidents varies widely, from true conservatism, through liberal-democratic reformism, to the hope for a rebirth of Leninism...
...A state that builds with man rather than for him has no use for freedom...
...Note "Lend-Lease Comes to a Soviet Camp," by Varlam Shalamov, appeared in Dissent, Summer 1974, translated by Mark Liwszyc...
...Meaning does not descend from above, according to the law of gravity...
...Of course, physically one might be alive, or perhaps one might not be—that was not the point...
...The people of the dissident movement have a long ancestry...
...To have recovered it after 17 years in Kolyma is something more than remarkable...
...The smaller ones were uprooted with crowbars and still smaller ones were simply pulled out by hand...
...It requires a constant struggle with oneself to resist the operation of a "law of history" that would emancipate productive forces by enslaving human beings and claim that the process was not willed but providential...
...These products are, despite a certain variety, alike in one thing: in them existence is unrecognizable...
...The apparent aimlessness of their dissent, the lack of a program and even of any real hope of reforming the Soviet state, has puzzled Western radicals, who are more conventionally political, and has led to some bitter and confused accusations...
...Too ashamed to be eating things Before your hungry cell mates' Too ashamed of your own self To be mumbling away...
...They are of the third generation whose dumbness would mean historical death, the loss of their past and of the inner freedom of their language...
...In Russia the Slavic people, to speak only of that one among the many nationalities of the Soviet Union, have seen the rise of a number of states and have also seen their fall...
...in them the relationship between language and the world appears to have been dissolved...
...A state that negates the past and would appropriate all forms of human relationship for itself cannot permit festal poetry to unite people in its own way, even in the solitude of one reader's mind...
...Leskov, whose work more than that of any other Russian writer breathes the spirit of legends and is rooted in native speech...
...The character Vasily sees a similar prospect for the future, in Sinyaysky's story "Iced-over...
...Leskov, who was renounced by the left and attacked by the right in his own time because he could not take sides...
...Looking back at the entire 19th century of Russian culture ," Mandelstram wrote at the end of The Noise of Time, "I see in it the unity lent it by the measureless cold which welded decades together into one day, one night, one profound winter, within which the terrible State glowed, like a stove, with ice...
...That is the only difference, the only true choice, in a universe ruled by necessity...
...in the figure of the man who sets out to learn what fear is it shows us that the things we are afraid of can be seen through...
...One myth exchanged for another is not liberation...
...Hypocrisy and the acceptance of things as they are foisted on it have become so much a part of it that it considers any attempt to act honorably as either a crafty provocation or madness...
...The state is an outcome of the oldest human need: the need for mediation between the necessity of the universe and the exposed condition of mankind...
...One way to approach an understanding of the dissident movement in Russia, a way that might free it of the misconceptions it has met with in the West, is to ask why such a movement should be so deeply involved LANGUAGE AND RESISTANCE 261 with language, and precisely with the language of poetry...
...Nicholas I himself censored Pushkin's poetry—a tribute Pushkin could have done without...
...And he used to say, "I can't...
...The bodies had slid down the mountain slope, revealing the secret of Kolyma...
...And the one struggle that may be said to underlie all struggles against tyranny in our time is the struggle for freedom of language...
...These lines end what seems to be a straightforward patriotic poem, written by Anna Akhmatova in 1942...
...The attempt to control the life of language has been one of the constant attributes of political tyranny in this century...
...For me emigration is not a question of changing a place of residence...
...A common misconception in political thinking attributes all human suffering and injustice to political conditions...
...Brecht used it in the "asphalt cities" of Berlin and Munich in the '20s...
...The answer to these questions cannot be improvised out of present-day concepts...
...Nothing at all you can do It's 2 a.m...
...This need was the need created by the myth...
...Freedom is the triumph of the personality, but license is the product of individualism...
...Passages from interviews with Irina Kirk are from her book Profiles in Russian Resistance (New York, 1975...
...For five years, from 1926 to 1930, he lost his poetic voice...
...It is a telling irony that the Russian Revolution should have brought about not a new sense of community among the people but the breakdown of all social relationships, the reduction of society to a mass of isolated individuals...
...Commercial publishing has its own ways of censoring poetry...
...L IX ogic and reason alone will always side with necessity...
...But it is not an object of value in itself, it is merely an instrument or occasion of human communion in a festive existence...
...It is based on some primary distinctions: "Freedom seeks meaning while license sets aims...
...Nothing could better express the exigency to which the dissident movement has responded...
...In Kolyma dead bodies are not committed to earth but to Stone...
...If the state takes over that territory as well, it leaves only the choice between opposition and surrender...
...If the chronicles of the ruling powers are the repository of state history, what is the repository of the history of peoples...
...In a passage that ought to make his critics reflect, Solzhenitsyn cries out against his "Russian fatherland that has always devoured its children...
...But it must be added, for the sake of human understanding, that even in those years there were moments, "always accompanied by a nervous state, as though he were under hypnosis," when Mandelstam doubted himself and was afraid that the Revolution was passing him by...
...For that reason, the contradictions raised by the Russian dissidents are not incidental difficulties, to be explained away or to be thrown back at them...
...Vacant professionalism, because of the power of money, has always been a threat to the life of American speech...
...At the same time it speaks for something very old, even primeval: the force of the demonic, the crushing weight of myth...
...But what of the other stanza...
...Confronting each other within him were the forces of renovation (which means oblivion) embodied in the city and the fertile memory that was the sign and burden of his humanity...
...It is only in this sense that the phrase "magically escaped" can refer to the Russian dissidents...
...Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in her memoirs about the decisive part played in the subjugation of the intelligentsia "not by terror and bribery (though, God knows, there was enough of both), but by the word `Revolution,' which none of them could bear to give up...
...What takes shape there is as far from Baudelaire's fallen world as his voice is free of Baudelaire's self-torment...
...Festivity, in the last lines of Earth, is itself the hearth...
...The warmth of the hearth, on the other hand, is generated by the very folly of opposing the indifference of the universe...
...The absurd term "Soviet reality," which is used to condemn unwanted people and unwanted writings ("they do not fit our new, Soviet reality"), speaks for one of the novelties of modern political theory and practice, one that is not limited to the Soviet Union or to a particular period of its history: the editing of reality, which has meant the editing out of whole sections of the population, to fit an idea...
...but for that of the state he represented...
...State myths are imposed by a corrupt use of language...
...Social architecture is measured by the scale of man...
...People come together, most literally, for warmth, for shelter against storms, hunger, random destruction...
...So wrote Walter Benjamin...
...The festivity of speech, which is also a festivity in time, cannot be controlled by the state...
...It was a negative way, and that is worth thinking about, because for it to be a way at all and not merely a surrender it had to bring its opposite with it, even if the opposite should remain unnamed...
...But that is not, and never was, the point...
...for example, that the dissidents are reactionaries who want a return to czarism, that they are crypto-fascists or tools of capitalist imperialism...
...The measure Mandelstam introduces is not politically determined, it is a measure of politics...
...they finish Their destiny and move towards the common pit...
...Alongside Le Voyage which ends with the cry: "To the depths of the Unknown to find the new...
...He sensed his predestination to be sacrificed...
...Which explains nothing...
...it is the transformation of these objects into utensils, the humanization of the surrounding world, the warming of it with the most delicate teleological warmth...
...Stone is more reliable than earth, especially when fortified by Permafrost...
...The last of the tree stumps were uprooted...
...Meaning is in relationship...
...is an awkward time You can neither fall asleep Nor splash cool water onto your face Nor read a book You're too tired for fantasies Too ashamed to shuffle about...
...it is the earth to whose laws human life itself is submitted, but which, through the intervention of language, is also filled with a living spirit, so that it too can be said to suffer from isolation and despair...
...But a politics of words is a politics that tends to talk itself to death...
...Therefore it cannot be allowed...
...It is necessary to seize at the outset this conception so strongly suggested by the beginnings of Slavonic history, that the history of states may be something very different from the history of peoples, and that, however little chronicled, it is, in the long run, the history of peoples that counts...
...It is an unremitting act of force that reduces life to the most elementary moral choices...
...But the events of the past 200 years ought to have taught us that the power of myths cannot be fought with the corrupted language of myths...
...Mankind needs justice...
...Behind it the people have suffered and state power has increased...
...Our common needs are the root of politics...
...one form of tyranny overthrown and a new form of tyranny installed...
...But that is, at the deepest point, what the Russian resistance is about...
...272 KIM CHI-HA...
...I II n this country, the state-idea, the image of the Republic, has been the one unifying force in our short history...
...Mandelstam wrote, about the work of Innokenty Annensky: The lesson of Annensky's creation for Russian poetry is not Hellenization, but internal Hellenism, adequate for the spirit of the Russian language...
...Language was no more prepared than people were for life in the industrial cities...
...He has been denied all contact with the outside world, and allowed neither exercise nor reading matter...
...It is by no means easy to throw off the weight of this age...
...Poetry that has no connection with work is a sterile competition, for rewards that must become more and more tangible, like the rewards of power...
...It was that vision of the "house of the world," and not only his personal courage, that made Mandelstam's example so important for the dissident movement...
...The earth of the poem is not simply the earth that is cultivated and harvested to feed the city, though it is that...
...Language incapable of that kind of speaking leads, whether we will it or not, to divisions of consciousness and of activity, of which the divorce of reason from perception is only one example, the one most typical of an age dominated by myths...
...Be house of the world, then, is not a chicken coop or a crystal palace...
...The Khazar prince understood the message, and perhaps the Soviet officials understrood Akhmatova...
...For that reason alone we might well listen to what Russian speech has said...
...from the fatality of evil, which is akin to the force of gravity...
...From the inertia of the universe, which afflicts the human heart...
...in other words, it is a communal answer, or what might have been called a cultural answer...
...Russian speech developed slowly, and anonymously over a long period, into a language that is rich in works and, in its native way, wise...
...There are others who have refused exile, or who are unable to choose because they are in prison, to whom the phrase applies equally well...
...It is an inventory of the provisional constructions of mankind, which, like justice, and like speech itself, are mediations...
...But the suppression of poetry is another matter, because it implies something more general: the suppression of free human communion, of the festive communion of a people with each other, with their past, with future generations...
...The poem is called Earth, and appears, somewhat unexpectedly, among the religious poems of Zhivago...
...But the conclusion of which these are the premises is an annihilating one...
...Yurodstvo is a protest against the meaninglessness of the world...
...but events left him no choice but selfsacrifice in the most literal sense...
...Only six poems were suppressed from Les Fleurs du Mal...
...the present is far from reasonable...
...that is, it raises the question of community in a new and urgent way...
...Nothing, it might be said, has been so well prepared for in the depths of Russian history as the return of that spirit in a time of extreme need...
...It is a view of the world and of human existence released from the weight of myth, minutely detailed, integral, filled with presence: And the notched paw of the maple Bathes in the round angles, And from the spots of butterflies One can compose drawings on the walls There are mosques that are alive, And now I have guessed it: Perhaps we are the Hagia Sophia With a numberless multitude of eyes...
...But that was not his only struggle...
...But an explanation is not what I am after right now...
...He talks about what he learned from his first arrest in 1949: The chief problem was not what they might do to you—that, strictly speaking, was not your affair...
...The hospital is filled with their sighs.—More than one Will not come again to seek his fragrant soup By the fire, at evening, beside a loved soul...
...The universe does not need justice and offers no models of it...
...The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest...
...Escaped from what...
...The joining of a doctrine of equality and justice with its most brutal denial in fact, makes defense against force particularly difficult for its victims...
...Experience, however, has made the citizen of the 20th century question that assumption...
...We have forgotten some of the oldest secrets of our culture, among them the tricks of disenchantment...
...What explains our loss of that understanding...
...And only with great difficulty, in the present circumstances, can it move closer to wisdom...
...The task that Baudelaire took upon himself is beautifully suggested in two lines from Le Cygne: "The old Paris is no more (the shape of a city/ Changes, alas, more quickly than the human heart...
...Speech is the repository of the history of peoples...
...so, too, were the ways of breaking their power...
...It has generally been assumed that the progress of civilization has been a movement out of superstition and toward the rule of reason...
...Mikhail Aksenov, talking with Irina Kirk about Pasternak, referred to Zhivago as a yurodivy, a "saintly fool," and said: Here Pasternak goes back to the deepest roots not only of Russian literature but of the Russian concept of human nature and religion...
...Against that surrender the dissidents have met together, in proximity to "the hidden stream of sorrow," for the sake of warmth...
...And the Mandelstam of Tristia was himself a poet immersed in the life of a city, his demonic Petersburg...
...The will-to-will uses mankind for vast projects of development and conquest because, in its emptiness, it cannot bring about the illusion of meaning in any other way...
...It learns to speak the language of necessity, and the more it learns, the colder it becomes and the further removed from mediation...
...q Kim Chi-ha is a South Korean poet who has repeatedly been harassed by the government of his country for writing critically...
...it is built up from below, in defiance of gravity, consecrated by human needs and human uses...
...Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth, which is sensed as sacred...
...Complete submission to an idea is already a form of slavery, and can easily be followed by submission to the person or party or state said to embody the idea...
...And that, in turn, throws light on the particular character of Russian culture and its submerged history...
...Something much larger is going on than can be contained in the terms of 19th-century revolutionary thought...
...But this country is an exception...
...In its perpetual activity, speech embodies the inner life, the cultural life, of a people...
...That is the turn that Russia took in the course of the Revolution...
...Though this strategy has a certain kind of cleverness about it, it has no connection with Baudelaire's negative way...
...A state that has increased in power to the extent that it has been able to turn the crowd of Baudelaire's time into a disciplined body of subjects leaves no room for a Baudelaire to maneuver in...
...Revolutionary discipline, in that case, may not be very different from the discipline the offending state imposes on its subjects...
...It brings about the most primitive social conditions, enabling the state to extract huge tributes from the people and to submit them to the most useless sacrifices...
...But while the substance of the story is of most concern, we might ask what resources Shalamov drew on for the telling of it...
...Work without poetry is drudgery, or forced labor...
...it is the bottom of Russia, not the top ..., that has in the long run decided not only the economic but the political life of the state...
...Not even the right to free speech can restore a dumb man's voice...
...A man like Vladimir Bukovsky, who is now serving a twelve-year sentence (his fourth imprisonment) for protesting the abuses of psychiatry for political repression, might have stepped out of the pages of Leskov—Leskov, of whom Tolstoi, who admired his work, said that he was "the first to point out the inadequacy of economic progress...
...What is implied in that statement is not a change in reality but an exhaustion of language...
...After a period of arrest, he was released last February, only to be rearrested the following month and imprisoned "in a dark space of 1.7 pyeng" (the size of a small table...
...It is a knowledge closely linked to the spirit of legends and the tricks of disenchantment...
...Mandelstam did not want to be a martyr...
...But, as he implies, Western Marxists and socialists are also put in a complicated position by the Russian dissidents, one in which ideological adherence and the very liberties the adherents would establish are strangely opposed...
...The bulldozer's first job in Kolyma is, in fact, to excavate a new mass grave and shovel these 260 exposed corpses into it and out of sight...
...The snow, still not deep enough, was blown away by the wind...
Vol. 23 • July 1976 • No. 3
