Politics and Cultural Freedom

...Surely this is not the fate of an author of a personal testimony...

...We do not mean what it is we have in mind when we speak of a cultured man—someone who cares very much about, and is well-educated in, literature and the arts...

...We mean, rather, all the forms of communication, other than trade, by which society binds its members to one another in some sort of coherent whole...

...He is not consulted about the decisions of the Kremlin any more than the American or English intellectual was consulted about Hiroshima or Suez...

...The fact that Russia suppresses Pasternak may, on the surface, show but a small connection with Russia's brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising of two years ago...

...This tendency I would describe as the wish to regard Soviet culture as an autonomous force, unconditioned by Soviet politics, and therefore susceptible of democratic penetration—and it rests on some such line of reasoning as the following: The Soviet writer or scientist or intellectual is an individual, just like his opposite number in America or England...

...We refuse to see that the Soviet Union has declared cultural war upon us and that therefore, in any cultural program which we undertake in the international field, we must proceed with enormous caution and acuteness, with the knowledge, indeed, that our lives are at stake...

...I have not named the signatories of this message because obviously there can be no question of their entire good faith in sending such an ill-conceived message...

...both stem from the one source—the need of totalitarianism to countenance no least threat to the power of the dictatorship...

...And I dwell on it for only one purpose: to isolate the tendency of thought which it embodies, a tendency which seems to me to be more and more prevalent in democratic life...

...Unlike democracy, modem totalitarianism has always' recognized the integral relation between culture and politics...

...It ignores the fact that the intellectual in England or America can say anything he chooses to his opposite number in Russia but his opposite number in Russia can answer him only in the voice of his government...

...Or take even the words, "We appeal to you...

...On the contrary, it believes that human rights are wholly subservient to the requirements of the state, and it takes daily advantage of our growing impulse to say that Communism and democracy have, after all, the same human goals but just go about achieving them in different fashions...

...By culture, in this context, we do not of course mean cultivation...

...Once we disarm ourselves in our cultural dealings with Russia and persuade ourselves that a Pasternak case is merely an isolated incident, or accident, in which we can "appeal" for the redress of the wrong that has been done, the step is short indeed to disarming ourselves in the political sphere as well, and persuading ourselves that Hungary was merely an isolated instance, too, rather than the wholly predictable and irreversible response of dictatorship to any assertion of freedom...

...We comport ourselves as if we were engaged in a large operation of international philanthropy or a large advertising campaign to prove to the world that we're not as crass and materialistic as they like to think us...

...Zhivago is not a political document, why—we must ask—was it refused publication in the Soviet Union, and why was Pasternak expelled from the Writers' Union immediately he received the Nobel Award, which is tantamount to being denied all means of earning a living in his own country...

...But while we await that millenium, we have constantly to keep it in mind that totalitarianism doesn't share our conviction that the goal of government is the dignity of man...

...If his government and our governments can't find a common ground for communication, this doesn't mean that we have to be deprived of our natural community...

...If Dr...

...Were it true that Communism and democracy come to the matter of human rights in the same spirit of respect...

...He doesn't like slave labor camps, or restrictions on his freedom of speech and movement, any better than we American intellectuals like segregation or we British intellectuals like colonialism...

...DIANA TRILLING, a regular contributor to these pages, adapted this article from an address she delivered recently before the Manhattan Chapter of the American Association for the United Nations, on the 10th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...

...Until the publication of Dr...

...There is only one thing wrong with it: it is predicated on a democratic notion of culture in which the individual artist or intellectual is free to work out his own fate and can hope to nurture a politics consonant with his cultural ideals...

...We have our own lines of cultural communication which cut across the barriers of national policy...

...To try to control a culture is, in a sense, to deny the very nature of culture, because it denies the human distinctiveness which impels people to look for and develop their common possibility, And yet we live in a world in which, for large sections of supposedly civilized society, the cultural impulse is made to serve a goal which is precisely destructive of human variety and distinctiveness...

...Why has he been called a pig...

...The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man is a beautiful and moving document...

...Well, it is a sweet line of reasoning and one that does credit to our humanity...

...Why has he been called a liar...

...I quote it in full because I think it is worth pausing over as evidence of the misapprehensions which still color our view of Communism: "To the Union of Soviet Writers, the Kremlin, Moscow: 'We are profoundly anxious about the fate of one of the world's greatest poets, Boris Pasternak...

...I simply think we should know what we're doing...

...Zhivago...

...And a similar recognition of the Soviet reality must of course govern our concern with the rights of man vis-a-vis the Soviet Union...

...We are properly on the alert against censorship and against political misuse of our channels of free communication...

...Indeed, it is in the great variety of our cultural expressions, and in our inability to say with any final certitude what is or is not a proper way for people to draw closer together, that we discover the need for an entire freedom of culture...

...We appeal to you in the name of the great Russian literary tradition for which you stand not to dishonor and victimize a writer revered throughout the civilized world.' " Passing over this last phrase—a writer revered throughout the civilized world, which of course Pasternak was not...

...we could wish it were the covenant of all the peoples of the world...

...But both acts are integrally related...

...The "you" in this sentence, remember, is the Union of Soviet Writers which suppressed Dr...

...It is a very short message...

...Daily the Soviet Union becomes more practiced in the manipulation of its own culture and that of the satellite countries, and more adept in its strategies for confusing the cultural issue as between itself and the democracies...

...Zhivago in the first instance and then, when the book appeared elsewhere, expelled Pasternak and called him every ugly name in the rich lexicon of Communist invective...

...The Western democracies, on the other hand, are extremely reluctant to make any connection between politics and culture, except perhaps as a potential domestic problem...

...This cable was sent to the Union of Soviet Writers whose address is the Kremlin, Moscow...

...The food we cook, the way we dress or comb our hair, the way we sit and walk, the particular noises we make when we are ill—all of these are expressions of culture, the things which relate people to each other or make them strange to each other...

...Or take the phrase, "The great Russian literary tradition for which you stand...

...We consider his novel, Dr...

...It may well be that we talk to each other most intimately and persuasively where our language is most trivial or even vulgar...

...That's as if our own Author's League were addressed at the White House...

...It is the fate of a man who dared speak up for freedom in a totalitarian dictatorship which knows, as the signers of this cable seem not to know, that such free acts of culture are political acts, acts on behalf of political freedom...

...Does an organization of this sort represent the great Russian literary tradition which we all of us so rightly honor...

...Nor does art have to be good art to be part of this giant system of communications...

...Among these forms of communication, art is the highest method man has devised for addressing himself to his fellow-creatures and joining with them to create a civilization...

...In this country, for instance, we will protest —and rightly so—any sign of government interference in the arts...

...It is the reality which lies behind all of our cultural dealings with the Soviet Union, and if we don't keep it in mind we may discover that in our eagerness to come to cultural terms with Communism, we have actually come to political terms with Communism...

...Why has he been accused of betraying his country to the degenerate bourgeois democracies...

...were it true that the world is united in its basic aspirations for man, no doubt there would still be need for a United Nations organization...

...Let me make myself clear: I am not opposed to cultural exchange...

...In fact, we live in a world where, perversely enough, culture is one of the chief instruments—next to the secret police, the chief instrument—by which people are robbed of their individuality and regimented into masses, the chief instrument by which political tyranny establishes itself and insures its continued existence...

...Wherever there is politics, there is the struggle for power, and dissension...

...In consequence, when a Pasternak case comes along, the Western democracies are as surprised and shocked as if we had never had forty years of Soviet history to prepare us for this latest outrage to our own concept of a free culture...

...And this is the reality that lies behind cultural exchange...

...and perhaps it is not without significance that intellectuals can so readily fall into cliches and untruths of this kind the minute they start to deal with public issues—we start with the sentence, "We consider his novel a moving personal testimony and not a political document...

...We appeal to you in the name of the great Russian literary tradition...

...Can any office of dictatorship be supposed to have a free heart any more than it has a free mind...

...Is there any appeal possible to the Kremlin...

...But we have an extraordinary reticence about boasting of our free culture in proof of our political freedom, and—which is even more important— we seem to feel that there is something illiberal, almost indecent, in recognizing the primary political role played by culture in the Communist countries...

...Surely it should be clear that were there the freedom in Russia to act on decent humane feeling for Boris Pasternak, there would be no need for censorship of his novel just because it speaks out on behalf of human freedom...

...We will speak to each other and perhaps some day, in some unspecified way, our governments will follow us along the peaceful cultural paths we have cleared, to a resolution of their differences...

...Thus, even today, when we concern ourselves with the foreign export of our culture on a scale that would not have been thought possible ten years ago, we still evade the fundamental truth on which this disturbance of our cultural peace should be premised...

...For example, the distinguished British periodical, Encounter, reprints in its December number the text of a message sent by a most imposing list of British writers and intellectuals to the Union of Soviet Writers in protest of the treatment being accorded the author of Dr...

...But it is far from the sole method...

...but, like fascism, it knew from the cradle that dictatorship and freedom of culture are a basic contradiction in terms and that the existence of a free culture anywhere in the world poses a constant threat to totalitarianism...

...Nor is this failure of imagination peculiar to America...

...His problems are purely personal and professional...

...Zhivago, a moving personal testimony and not a political document...

...In England and France, no less than in the United States, and especially among the educated classes where an awareness of culture is most conscious, again and again the effort of good-will and conscience throws itself, not on the side of recognizing the inseparability of Soviet culture and politics, but on the side of the wishful hope that culture has the same autonomy and serves the same high human purpose in the Communist countries as it does in the free world...

...But it would be dissension of the good old-fashioned sort, such as would make the work of the United Nations a field day compared to what it is at the present time...

...Zhivago, he was known only to a handful of schoiars and literary specialists...

...What it ignores is the fact that under Communist totalitarianism, both the individual and his cultural ideals count for nothing except as political pawns...

...No, it's much worse than that...

...And why has he had directed against him so violent a campaign of abuse from his countrymen, young and old...