DISSENT AS A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Sinyavsky, Andrei
My experience of dissent is extremely individual, even though, like any personal experience, it reflects in some way broader, more general, and more ramified developments, and not only the...
...It is not we who are guilty but someone alien (the West, a world conspiracy, the Jews, and so on...
...And is it the case that here, in an environment of freedom, he adapts himself to the situation, because here, as it suddenly turns out, "you cannot survive otherwise...
...Freedom...
...Outwardly everything went well: "the enemies of the people" confessed to being "enemies of the people" and asked for the chance to be good, honest Soviet citizens, or, even worse, not to be shot, so that they could improve, and by atoning for their crimes against the fatherland become good, honest Soviet citizens...
...But this theory seems to rr ° dangerous and insulting in reference to a government system—dangerous for the individual, and insulting to religion...
...Accordingly, people are usually nice and well-meaning to me as a human individual...
...What is more— of everything that is good, everything that is human...
...Can it be that, given freedom, we become slaves...
...After all, the West does not read Russian newspapers on this or that side of the ocean...
...In prison I was told with regard to my work, "It would have been better had you killed somebody...
...But this "goodness" itself, in order to be shown, requires unbelievable, uncontrollable, and autocratic power...
...I saw the purges as the death of culture and the end of any original thought in Russia...
...But the political climate had changed and they had entered a different environment, which demanded different human qualities...
...As a man I prefer a quiet, peaceful, and secluded life, and I am quite an ordinary person...
...Freedom is irresponsibility before the authoritarian collective...
...After all, the dissidents are by nature not a political party and do not even share an ideology...
...And yet it was also as if they had come into their own...
...The proceedings also included essays by Matei Calinescu, J. Michael Holquist, Irving Howe, and Jon Thiem...
...You hate your own mother, even your deceased mother...
...That people seek someone to worship and, "in order to do it surely together," look for a "community of worship" of some authority, to which they surrender their freedom...
...Of course, they do not throw you into a concentration camp...
...At the same time these intellectual or spiritual aspirations are correlated to a feeling of moral responsibility, which is bestowed upon a man and forces him to think, speak, and write independently without regard for the norms and prescriptions of the state...
...From the West came liberalism, undermining the autocraticalpatriarchal foundation of Russia...
...According to his personal convictions and tastes he is a liberal and a democrat, but politically he counts on Russian authoritarianism and nationalism...
...Of course, there had previously also been some people who repented and considered themselves not guilty, but no one ever heard about it...
...I personally fell into this category, and I hope to remain to the end of my days, in the eyes of Soviet society, an "especially dangerous state criminal...
...In those days the government granted the country the so-called economic breather, with the purpose of adjusting an economy devastated by war and revolution...
...For many dissidents this stumbling block, as we know, was the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, not only because their eyes were opened to the enormous crimes of the past, but also because, after having revealed to them some of these crimes, the Twentieth Party Congress and all of the subsequent Soviet ideology did not and could not give any sort of serious, historical explanation for these events...
...it is a process of independent and unintimidated thinking...
...Yet I am not concerned with American politics, which I understand poorly, but with Russian culture...
...Writing itself is heterodoxy in relation to life...
...here, in exile, I am an "agent of Moscow...
...My childhood and adolescence, in the 1930s, were spent in a wholesome Soviet atmosphere, in a normal Soviet family...
...But I do read them, and I can see...
...And this is my conclusion: there, in the Soviet Union, I was an "agent of Imperialism...
...As dissidents we are threatened by nothing except personal decadence...
...When coming to the West, we become very lonely, and we suffer from our loneliness...
...At any rate, I do not see such prospects in the near, foreseeable future...
...They support the authoritarian-nationalist wing by virtue of their inveterate, monarchist conservatism...
...In principle the writer should probably be killed—if for no other reason than because, when all people live like real people, he writes...
...You hate "everything Russian" (earlier, in the first dream, it could be heard: "You hate 160 everything Soviet," and incidentally, that too meant that you hate everything Russian...
...The question is: opposition against what...
...As a result, Abram Tertz is a dissident primarily by virtue of his stylistic qualities...
...What threatened us with prison in the Soviet Union promises us here, with a certain effort, prestige and material prosperity...
...After Soviet justice, if you will, there is emigre justice—and the same evidence...
...And in practice such power does not turn into love or goodness, but 158 into executions...
...q 155 also a man who does not consider himself guilty...
...After all, it is very easy to be a dissident in the West (that is, a dissident with regard to the Soviet system...
...But finally you awake in the morning after all these dreams and you smile ironically at yourself: didn't you wish that...
...I think that this man is somehow right in his own way...
...Moreover, nationalism and the proponents of the authoritarian system are supported by the largest part of the old emigres, who make up the majority of the Russian public, and who are, so to speak, the Russian soil in the West...
...There is another essential difference: we do not have our police and we do not have those prisons...
...31 (1982...
...And it is the "Devil" who interfered in our history...
...This is why I am afraid that in our emigration, under the warm wings of the democratic West, we reproduce the archetype of the Soviet system without wishing it or being aware of it—only with a different, anti-Soviet valence...
...I am now interested in one question: Why did Soviet and anti-Soviet, emigre justice agree (agree literally) in their accusations of me, a Russian dissident...
...And " 'goodness' is higher than 'law.' " Yes, I agree...
...At the same time I started to look closely at the nature of the Soviet state in general, in the light of the devastation that was visited on life and culture...
...The problem was that earlier on in all public political trials in the Soviet Union, the "criminals" (in quotation marks and without quotation marks) confessed their guilt, repented, and publicly abased themselves before the Soviet court...
...This is a problem to be resolved by each individual...
...I ask myself, how could I ever have sunk so low...
...It is a split into two wings or directions...
...After all, without the landowner's supervision he would immediately stop working and get drunk...
...n conclusion, I only want to confirm my "dissent...
...Yet all this is but a search for a "scapegoat" somewhere from without...
...Hence the moralistic and didactic pronouncements to the West on the part of some Soviet dissidents, who see this West for the first time and know it badly...
...I think, however, that this "split personality" is not a ques152 tion of my moral psychology, but rather a problem of the artistic style employed by Abram Tertz—an ironic, outt.e style, with elements of the fantastic and the grotesque...
...Under an avalanche of abuse, this is easy...
...The revolutionaries only turned into obedient party officials...
...Simultaneously, this was the time of crushing defeat for all opposition and the beginning of the powerful Stalinist consolidation...
...It is understandable that with the split now in process, serious and fundamental disagreements flare up...
...An outside observer interested in our problems does not always understand why and about what Soviet dissidents who have emigrated to the West argue so fervently among themselves...
...They think that the West will gradually disintegrate under the pressure of the monolithic, totalitarian system of the Soviet Union...
...I personally think that there is more agreement among us than is necessary...
...In those days I sent manuscripts abroad through secret channels and, hiding my real name, I published in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz...
...This is, in my view, the value of dissent, which in its ideal form is not the nucleus of a new church or of a new, unified, anti-Soviet state, but rather a pluralistic community, even if only on paper...
...I was wanted as a criminal: this I knew, and I understood that I would be caught sooner or later, for as the saying goes, "Crime does not pay...
...We have only to endure the test of prosperity, as well as the test of democracy and freedom, of which we had dreamed...
...In the end, the people who were, so it seems, saved from death by Western democracy now would like to restrict it...
...For the state this meant reducing the people to a common denominator, to a "moral-political unity of the Soviet people and the party...
...This is why I cannot agree with those dissidents who propose to exchange communism with another variety of despotism under the banner of nationalism and religion, even though such changes are probably historically feasible...
...His adaptation is justified with the words, "You cannot survive here otherwise...
...But one cannot call them dissidents for the simple reason that their roots go back to bygone, prerevolutionary traditions of Russian culture...
...the first can provisionally be called the "authoritarian-nationalist" wing, and the second the "liberal-democratic" wing...
...In Paris a nice elderly lady asked me, after she found out that I had recently come from Moscow, whether I had met ours there...
...It is characteristic that the political accent of the dissident movement is generally low-key, while intellectual and moral questions come to the fore...
...Like the decadent, liberal atheist in the West, we—in league with the Communists—hate the Russian people and Russia...
...As a result the process of writing itself assumed the nature of a rather thrilling detective story, although I do not write detective fiction and dislike it, and personally I do not care for the adventuresome...
...In essence, this means casting off one's own sins and omissions...
...When I was fifteen, on the eve of the war, I was an enthusiastic CommunistMarxist, for whom there was nothing finer than the world revolution and the future universal brotherhood...
...Each dissident encounters his or her own stumbling block, which serves as the catalyst of critical thought...
...As an illustration I want to tell you of a private conversation I recently had with a very clever and perceptive Western Sovietologist...
...Naturally, we look for our own people, for our environment, and we find it in the form of the dissident-emigre association...
...For similar reasons, Russian nationalists call Russian liberals (and me, specifically) Russophobes...
...It is only that the Western police somehow do not accept our reports...
...After all, this was exactly the time when the frightful purges were carried out in the Soviet cultural world...
...What has recently been going on with the dissidents who have come to the West should, in my opinion, be designated by the expression "dissident NEP...
...That would be ridiculous...
...But we are always arguing: Do we need freedom...
...Therefore the terms "Soviet dissidents" or "democratic movement" were and remain synonymous...
...One might state, in language that William O'Neill, Norman Podhoretz, Martin Peretz, and even Ronald Radosh might understand, that there has never been such a thing as "Stalinism...
...It is all subjective...
...Nor can we call, for instance, Pasternak, Mandelstam, or Akhmatova dissidents although they were heretics in Soviet literature...
...Only on our part (and this is worth remembering) all this is no longer a struggle, nor a sacrifice, nor an achievement...
...This distinguishes the dissidents from the Russian revolutionaries of the past, and if they bring about some "revolution"—let us provisionally call it by that term—then it will be in the form of a reevaluation of values, which is the starting point for dissent...
...He had been a left Social Revolutionary, and after renouncing the aristocratic milieu by 1909 he had already joined the revolution...
...tachments on a single card...
...My experience of dissent is extremely individual, even though, like any personal experience, it reflects in some way broader, more general, and more ramified developments, and not only the events of my own life...
...My father was admittedly no Bolshevik...
...After all it is not God, not Christ, who in reality rules a despotic state but the czar or the leader who, unfortunately, even if it is an orthodox czar, frequently does not resemble God but rather the Devil...
...Political justice in the Soviet Union was based on it...
...And all these are useful and absolutely necessary things in Russia as well as in the West...
...It is this last circumstance that sometimes adds a not altogether noble touch to the dissident cause in the West...
...The community of thought that arises in this environment, the narrowness of the environment and its seclusion, and at times its conservatism and subordination to authority, sometimes even the emigre's material dependence on this authority and this environment—all these create the fertile soil to foster conformity...
...If Russia could be conquered by a bunch of foreigners, how could this great nation be so worthy...
...The more so since the destiny of writers in the Soviet Union shows that literature is a risky and at times fatal path, and under Soviet conditions the writer who combines literature with his well-being often stops being a real writer...
...Let me remark in passing that to the extent that we are talking about dissent as a concrete historical phenomenon, this is a very typical biography for Soviet dissidents in general...
...Generally, a man who is thrown into prison should behave naturally—this is the only thing that helps...
...But under the circumstances of Soviet despotism, it is correct for a Russian intellectual—in my opinion—to be a liberal and a e. iocrat, and not to propose some other new kind of despotism...
...We have already built our society in the form of a Communist state, from which we do not know where to turn...
...Meanwhile I have not changed my position, but have said the same thing: art is greater than reality...
...Wherever you turn, you are an enemy of the people...
...As a sophisticated man he is shocked by the rudeness of this direction, and, if he were Russian, he would never become associated with it...
...How odd it is that in our Western environment the authoritarian-nationalist wing enjoys greater success and influence than the democratic one...
...All this happened without our willing it...
...We succeeded in remaining ourselves and outside the Soviet "unity...
...This person is, in contrast to Andrei Sinyaysky, inclined to go on forbidden paths and to take risky steps of different kinds, which has brought a great amount of trouble upon him and, accordingly, upon me...
...And we bring the needle of the compass, as has long been our custom, to the side of despotism...
...And very likely I would still be a perfectly happy member of the Soviet Academy of Science and a prosperous literary critic of the liberal direction, if it were not for my dark literary double by the name of Abram Tertz...
...I did not therefore consider myself guilty of a political crime, when they arrested me and when the second period of my career as a writer began...
...For such authors, as for dissidents in general, there exists a special juridical term in the Soviet Union: "especially dangerous state criminals...
...As far as I have observed, there are not that many Russophobes in the West...
...it is charity and philanthropy...
...Was it the case that in the Soviet Union, in prison, he was spiritually free and could live in his own way, different from the majority, and without yielding to any sort of pressure or bribery...
...I, personally, am not so optimistic...
...A threatening retribution is following me from various corners—for one and the same kind of books, for one and the same kind of statements, for one and the same style, for one and the same crime...
...Now this was a natural form of behavior, and not a result of cunning on my part...
...people who have criticized it, but who nevertheless cannot be called dissidents...
...For the old emigres, prerevolutionary Russia is an in159 disputable ideal to which contemporary Russia —occupied by the Bolsheviks—dreams of returning...
...154 In the internal conflict between politics and art I opted for art and rejected politics...
...Subsequently, art became this "higher meaning" for me...
...It is clear that we sincerely wish to help, and at times we actually do help those who are persecuted in the Soviet Union...
...But the concept of the "dissident" presupposes a specific kind of moral resistance or force of conscience, which does not allow him to repent and turn into an ordinary Soviet citizen who speaks at the bidding of the state all his life...
...Through their heterodoxy they anticipated dissent...
...Any writer is an outcast, a degenerate, a not fully legitimate person in the world, because he thinks and writes in opposition to the opinion of the majority—at least if he writes in defiance of the existing style and the already determined, accepted course in literature...
...We should probably be more modest and, by transmitting our distressing experience to the West, be careful to teach the West how to live and build its fundamental, Western society...
...No, they were heroes, without any doubt...
...To him it is important to save the world from a catastrophe...
...Most of the time, dissidents were formerly very high-minded Soviet individuals, people with strong convictions, with principles, and with 153 revolutionary ideals...
...The same may be said about my research and teaching activities, which even today run parallel to my work as a writer...
...In the recent past, however, this faith has cost too much and has led us too far astray...
...This was nothing less than dropping out from the prevailing literary system and the literary environment...
...My profession is narrower: I am a writer...
...Moreover, this may be said by someone who only yesterday risked his life for his convictions...
...And has it not lost with this policy...
...I do not mention any names, because it is not a question of names but of trends...
...But what I think does not matter...
...I do not regret it because in my childhood I adopted from my father the notion that one should not live in accordance with narrow, egotistic, "bourgeois" interests, and that it is necessary to see some higher meaning in life...
...In Russia one of the jailers admitted to me in a moment of intimacy, "I would put all writers without exception and independent of their greatness—Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky —into one big madhouse, because writers only disturb the normal development of life...
...Only the idea of "dissidence" itself fades somehow over here and loses its heroic, romantic, and moral aura...
...Within each dissident this process of reevaluation takes its individual course under the influence of one or another of the contradictions in daily life...
...The warrant of dissidence is prison...
...By the way, this fear of democracy, applied to the Russian people, has had bitter antecedents in our history...
...I will hardly touch upon the West itself, because I am interested in the dissident emigre environment and its press, in which I had occasion to get involved deeply enough to gain an exceedingly unsettling experience...
...At this point it is appropriate to remember that a dissident (I am using the expression now in its most general and broadest meaning) is not only a man who disagrees with the system and has the courage to express himself: he is Try-to-Beat-This Dept...
...We are, after all, like anyone else, equipped with the rudiments of reason and a sense of justice...
...It is difficult to defend oneself against such an accusation...
...I asked him, "Aren't you afraid that in the end, in succession to the Soviet system, or more likely, in the form of some kind of alliance with it, outright fascism will triumph in Russia...
...Does that mean that they had not been real heroes in the recent past...
...More precisely: many, many executions, and a little bit of goodness...
...And, correspondingly, they want the Russia of the future not to be a democracy but a more solid authoritarian-theocratic state...
...Is freedom psychologically more dangerous for him, the dissident, than prison...
...The Trotskyists developed the term as a pathetic attempt to identify their rejection by the Communist movement with mere factional squabbles...
...This is the most important precondition for the development of Russian culture...
...And if we want a free Russian idea, a free Russian word and culture to develop, we need diversity of thought...
...My period of reevaluating values and forming individual opinions was during the late 1940s and early '50s...
...By its nature literature is heterodoxy (in the broader sense of the word) with regard to the prevailing view of things...
...This is, of course, a matter of personal choice, and nobody may impose upon anyone any "rules of behavior" before Soviet justice...
...I asked timidly...
...So with reference to dissidents now in the West, the greatest danger of opportunism and conformism arises, as it seems to me, from the need for a general, communal worship of something or somebody...
...I am using this expression not as a scientific term but rather as an image, an analogy to that colorful period of Soviet history that began in the 1920s, after the Civil War, and continued for about five to seven years...
...We essentially do not resist anything and risk nothing, but only shake our fists in the air in the belief that we are carrying on a battle for human rights...
...For the longest time the "Russian patriots" were afraid to abolish serfdom in Russia...
...Everybody, of course, needs money, and if a 156 dissident has no other specialty, he is forced to earn his living on this well-trodden path...
...Writing—this is freedom...
...This rather strong pressure is exerted on your person and your family, and our denial of guilt played a specific role in the development of the dissident or, as it is called, the democratic movement, although we were not directly associated with this movement, but rather acted on our own...
...Let us assume that democracy as a social and government system has no future in Russia...
...Money is also necessary to publish books and journals, to organize conferences, and so on...
...You are a misanthrope...
...And this, it seems to me, partly explains the interest of the contemporary West in the problems of Soviet dissent, because the dissidents represent a view of Soviet society from within...
...There are others who retract their dissent, repudiate themselves, get free and become again "honest Soviet citizens...
...Yet I had not written anything terrible in these works, and had not called for the overthrow of the Soviet government...
...The "national-authoritarian" wing appeared later and entered, as it seems to me, into a conflict with the main premises of the movement...
...After all, should one shout loudly that one loves Russia...
...As a consequence each dissident's ideological or childish faith in the justice of communism was replaced by individual reason and the voice of one's conscience...
...It was the time when the revolution degenerated into its opposite, a conservative, petty-bourgeois/bureaucratic system...
...They form the basis of our quarrels...
...They are the people who were raised in Soviet society, who are children of the Soviet system, and who came into conflict with the ideology and the psychology of their fathers...
...In all periods of Soviet history there have been enemies of the Soviet government—people who have not been satisfied with it or who have suffered from it...
...So, in my view, the formalized and rationalistic "law" is better than czarist "goodness...
...Their concern: how could one grant freedom to a Russian peasant...
...One cannot accuse the dissidents of being an alien class, nor of not accepting the Revolution, like those people who lost out in it...
...We are actually the good ones, we are clean, we are most fortunate, because we are Russians...
...After all, I was a nice boy at some point, like all people...
...so I simply sent the manuscripts abroad...
...copyright ° 1983 by the Comparative Literature Program, Indiana University...
...Here it is necessary to take the specific character of emigre life into account...
...The repudiation of Soviet ideology presumes not only different thinking with regard to this ideology, but also diversity of thought within heterodoxy...
...Of course, this czar has the opportunity to show "goodness" in circumvention of "law...
...Objectively, that is, socially and publicly, I am the enemy of everything that is fine in the world...
...I am against the mixture of spiritual and material values, or of religious and political ones...
...This is a split between the authorial persona Abram Tertz and my human self (as well as my scholarly likeness), Andrei Sinyaysky...
...But a camp is not the most frightful thing in the world...
...On the whole, dissidents are the product of the Soviet society of the post-Stalin era, and not some alien elements in this society nor remnants of some old, shattered opposition...
...I belong to the liberal-democratic wing—not because I believe in the imminent victory of freedom and democracy in Russia...
...Sending works to the West was, however, the best means of "preserving the text" and did not represent a political action or a form of protest...
...We were simply writers and persisted in our own course...
...Freedom is a danger...
...University of Paris Translated from the Russian by MARIA-REGINA KECHT q 161...
...As we know, this was a comparatively peaceful and happy period, allowing the people to breathe relatively freely and grow fat a bit...
...And so if they had not fallen in battle, the heroes of yesterday turned into mediocre bureaucrats...
...And although the regime has become more moderate since Stalin, this has not led to a more liberal and more democratic state system, which would provide some guarantee of human rights and human liberty...
...Such are our quarrels in the broadest and crassest outlines...
...they supported and still support this later development...
...He took an extremely loyal position toward the Bolshevik government, no matter how they persecuted him for his former revolutionary activities...
...and the range of choices within the groups is extraordinarily limited...
...Having attempted to write "something original and artistic," I understood in advance that there would not be and could not be any place for it in Soviet literature...
...We, the dissidents, succeeded in breaking with this tradition...
...and you also killed Gogol...
...Here it is fitting to deviate a bit and point out that any real literature in modern times is most often a transgression of the rules "du bon ton...
...they were the very medium of the triumphant revolution...
...Why should diversity of thought be possible in the West, yet not for us dissidents...
...We only adjust ourselves subtly...
...As an emigre I began to understand that I am not an enemy of the Soviet government only, but generally: I am an enemy—an enemy as such—metaphysically, in principle...
...All the same, it is our vocation to remain proponents of freedom, because freedom, like some other "useless" concept—such as, for instance, art, goodness, or human thought—is an end in itself and does not depend on the historical or political trend...
...Oh yes, we forgot: after all, this is a democracy...
...In our court case (Yuli Daniel's and mine), this was made public, and it received support within the country and abroad, in the West, through "public opinion...
...However, I was not always such a bad fellow...
...This affects us Russians in particular, for we are used to closer, more amicable contacts than we can notice in the West...
...The converse, "Russophile" position would betray a lack of respect for the Russian people...
...It turns out that this does not upset him in any way...
...Let me pose a purely rhetorical question: has democratic America not at times supported extremely reactionary, authoritarian, and totalitarian regimes in developing countries, hoping thereby to save these countries from the Communist infection...
...To my misfortune, I loved modernism in art and everything that, as a result of the purges, was subject to destruction...
...From the very beginning of my literary career there was, whether I liked it or not, a kind of split personality, which still has not been obliterated...
...The first period of my dissent as a writer takes up approximately ten years, from 1955 to my arrest...
...It can even be an income, a living, and at times, unfortunately, a profitable enterprise...
...Let us say that many contemporary Russophiles tend to criticize the West for the formalized way of life, for the fact that here judicial and rationalistic categories of "law" and "justice" dominate, when the ideas of Christian "love" and "goodness" were indigenous to Russia from the very beginning...
...Any writer is a heterodox element within a society of people who think in an orthodox manner or, in any event, think alike...
...I personally do not undertake such great tasks as saving the world...
...But this has to be done: one has to think of those who are in prison over there...
...I said before that the Soviet dissidents are by their nature an intellectual, spiritual, and moral opposition...
...If we are heretics, then there should be many heresies...
...Watch out for it—freedom...
...We easily make concessions to this environment and its authorities, insofar as we fear losing it...
...You are anti-Semitic...
...The logic here is as follows: freedom and democracy are good for the West, but for Russia something simpler and more reactionary is required—as for savages...
...A very sad portent...
...In such a society the writer is a criminal, a more dangerous criminal than a thief or a murderer...
...What a horror...
...This is not a political opposition struggling for power...
...She replied, "The Whites...
...You hate culture...
...I have never belonged to any dissident movement or dissident community, and my heterodoxy has manifested itself not in public activity but exclusively in my writing...
...Consequently I was exhilarated at Stalin's death...
...By its nature, dissent is liberal and democratic, and that is the way it started...
...I am not anyone's friend, but only an enemy...
...There it is even pleasant compared to emigration, where they say that you have not been in any camp at all, but that you are sent "on an assignment" to destroy Russian culture...
...They do not understand why there is no agreement on opinions: after all, all of us 157 are dissidents...
...But apparently society knows better than I what sort of man I am...
...I just did not see any other way for my literary work to be published than this slippery path, which was condemned by the state, and was similar to a dangerous game of chance in which it was necessary to stake everything, one's existence, one's human interests, and one's personal atThis essay is part of the proceedings of "The Meaning of Dissent: An International Scholars' Conference," originally published in the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, No...
...These arguments are useful for the discovery of our different views on the matter, but in practice they are rather utopian...
...But the greatest contradiction again consists in the fact that freedom is a necessity for Russian culture, whereas for my Western interlocutor, Russian culture is of minor importance and not essential at all...
...In this manner my friend Yuli Daniel and I managed to take the position of "pleading not guilty" despite the pressure of the court and the KGB...
...It was sufficient that you think differently in some way, that you compose words in your own way and thereby enter into contradiction with the general official style, and with the official jargon, which determines everything...
...I personally experienced this normative process of dissent a little bit differently...
...He is right in that the writer, by the mere fact of his existence, introduces a kind of anxiety into the social system...
...The West, of course, only smiles gleefully at these "Russian specimens": exotics...
...And if Russia is incompatible with democracy, would that not mean that, by this interpretation, the people itself is inclined to slavery...
...This is a peaceful and comparatively happy period in our personal histories...
...they had faced death and feared nothing...
...We are, however, not concerned here with the problems of human history and psychology in general but with a concrete phenomenon: the dissident movement...
...Now let us transfer some characteristics of NEP to our dissident experience...
...I would like to dwell for a while on this point, since it is particularly complicated and, in my opinion, dramatic...
...And he no longer speaks his mind but rather what is demanded of him...
...We ourselves do not always realize how we turn from dissidents into conformists...
...Inasmuch as politics and the social structure are not my discipline, it can be said jokingly that my disagreements with the Soviet government were basically aesthetic...
...To write as is customary or as is ordered is simply of no interest to me...
...And the trend, unfortunately, shows that there are cases when the dissident who comes to the West loses his distinguishing feature, his independence and his courage of mind, and enters the service of some dissident-emigre corporation, or the service of some dissident ideological boss...
...That period of late, mature, and rampant Stalinism after the war coincided with the years of my studies, when I began to study the humanities at Moscow University, and the main stumbling blocks, which led to the collapse of revolutionary ideals, were problems of literature and art, which arose with particular poignancy in those days...
...I never tried nor even so much as dreamed of publishing it in my own country...
...On the contrary, I categorically do not believe in such a victory...
...Indeed, the concept, as used by anti-Communists, is no more than a convenient ideological club with which to beat their political opponents, divorced from any historical or empirical evidence...
...Although I personally belong to the Russian Orthodox church and like the old Russian culture fully as much as many writers and thinkers of the Slavophile circle, with regard to contemporary Russian nationalism I am extremely suspicious of the idealization of the state order and the social customs of a Russia of the past...
...Psychologically, this somewhat resembles the sort of nightmare in one's sleep that does not come to an end...
...They advise the West to turn to more authoritarian principles...
...Apart from this, there has recently been a clear split within the dissident movement, particularly on emigre soil...
...We were isolated and could not imagine that it would lead to a chain reaction...
...As everyone already knows, however, money not only makes it possible to do good and permits one to live independently but, as it happens, it also corrupts and enslaves...
...Not that I was someone's friend first and then became his enemy...
...It is interesting, however, that even Western circles sometimes tend to support the Russian nationalists and authoritarian representatives, even though the democratic dissidents are psychologically much closer to them...
...He regards Russian fascism as a realistic alternative to Soviet communism and hopes that Russian fascism may save the West from communism through its concern with nationalism...
...But in exactly that way, the heroes of the Revolution did not realize their degeneration during the NEP period...
...Divine goodness and love are higher and greater than all human lf.ws made on earth...
...It is this difference of interests that keeps us sometimes from coming to a mutual understanding...
...Having come to the West, we find ourselves not only in a different society but also in a different historical climate, at a different stage of its development...
...I now turn to the third and last period of my experience as a dissident—the period from my emigration up to the present...
...But there is already a censorship in its own right, and there are also informers...
...And dissidents cannot escape this universal human law...
...Or was Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor right when he said that people do not love freedom but fear it, and seek some support in life, in the form of bread, authority, and miracle...
...Dissidents, on the other hand, are a totally new phenomenon, which grew directly from the soil of Soviet reality...
...After all they did not betray the ideals of communism...
...You are a Judas who betrayed Christ in the form of the new, Communist, nationalreligious resurrection of Russia...
...In the aftermath of the Twentieth Party Congress, the Soviet people were simply told, as before, to trust the party and the state in everything...
...Most likely, because both of these organs of justice are just and therefore so similar to each other...
...Russian dissidents who have come to the West are sometimes afraid of democracy here...
...Subsequently, the term was employed by the whole claque of red-baiters in a giant guilt-byassociation ritual, blaming the entire Communist movement for every injustice, real or imagined, associated with Stalin...
...This is so because, owing to its psychological makeup, the authoritarian direction is more party-oriented, more disciplined, more single-minded, and more obedient to the authority of the "leader" than the democrats, who lean by nature toward tolerance, pluralism, and diversity of thought...
...Being in prison and being on trial, we did not presume that another process was beginning around our prosecution...
...And what are we to make of this...
...It was necessary to choose, in one's own mind, between one's existence as a human being and one's existence as a writer...
...Which ours...
...Supposing I were asked to describe ordinary life in an ordinary realistic manner, I would refrain from writing at all...
...It is natural for the writer to affirm that literature neither is nor can serve the purpose of political agitation and propaganda, as is maintained by the Soviet government— which, by the way, conducts political agitation freely and incompetently in the West...
...But to him it seems a movement with more of a future and greater advantage to the West than that of the Russian democrats...
...It is amazing that during the years of NEP (New Economic Policy), many heroes of the Revolution and the Civil War turned out to be cowards, opportunists, submissive executors of the new political system, veritable philistines and conformists...
...This is particularly the case in a standardized society, which lives and thinks according to state orders...
...No, even worse, even more horrible: you are Dante, who killed Pushkin...
...Accordingly, I was raised in the best traditions of the Russian Revolution, or more precisely, in the traditions of revolutionary idealism, which, by the way, I do not by any means regret...
...Marxism came from the West...
...But he is an impudent, incorrigible dissident, who provokes indignation and aversion in a conservative and conformist society...
...I reason to myself that despite all deficiencies, I am still not the Antichrist...
...To be sure there have also been various inconveniences in this regard—in connection, for example, with my study of the poetry of Pasternak—but, after all, those are trifles...
...What I am saying here is a sacrilege from the nationalists' point of view...
...Who needs freedom...
...Norman Markowitz, "The New Cold-War 'Scholarship,' " Political Affairs (magazine of the American Communist party), October 1983...
...in my opinion, the West should save itself from communism by its own efforts, and not with the help of someone's fascism...
...You know what happens in a dream: you seem to wake up, but only to find yourself in an even more intense continuation of your dream...
...Not simply against the Soviet system in general, but also opposition against the uniformity of ideas and their paralysis in Soviet society...
...All foreigners (Poles, Jews, Latvians, Hungarians) who brought about the October Revolution were Western intruders...
...On the whole my career as a scholar and a literary critic has developed successfully enough...
...There was simply no other way...
...The Soviet system is extremely solid and does not promise any freedom (including freedom for the founding of an orthodox theocracy or autocracy...
...Yes, all that is true...
...moreover, in a kind of writing that initially was esoteric, stylistically obscure for the general public, and not meant to evoke any openly political resonance...
...At this level of understanding the democratic dissidents who come to the West are something like "Soviet devils," who are specially sent here by the Bolsheviks, in order to disarm the last bulwark of the Fatherland...
...The new Russian nationalists object to this argument by claiming that all our Russian misfortunes have come from the West...
...After all, we do not commit treason, we do not leave one camp for the other...
...There is even an excess of agreement, to the detriment of our dissent...
...There are those who do not repent their words and their deeds, are consequently sent to labor camps, and remain dissidents...
...Thus the dissident movement is, in my opinion, primarily an intellectual movement...
Vol. 31 • April 1984 • No. 2
