“The West, the West,” my guest chimes, looking indolently on. “I was in the West.”
He likes our country house, he is sitting at his leisure, arm winglike over chair back, to get the good of it, shedding words.
Oh, let us shed words
As the garden sheds its amber.
Our spot of timeless serenity is actually only a few miles from an airport where foreign statesmen land, some twenty miles from Moscow; but as one rides from the airport all one sees is forests and we are lost in them somewhere, we are pleasantly invisible.
“I was in the West,” he sheds words. “I talked with Ezra Pound just as I am talking with you—I dined with Sartre. Nothing special. You exaggerate, really.”
He likes our almost extraterritorial seclusion. For myself, I never touch on his Literature: those few people who come to us leave it outside. He is attached to the department of literature in a certain rank: he is a Member of the Board of the Union of Writers. Everyone is attached to some department, because if he is not, he is a Parasite, that is, a criminal, to be exiled to some remote area to work there as a serf-peasant. I am not attached to any department, a circumstance I recall sometimes with the numbness of a criminal too long and too safely immersed in his crime, sometimes with my father's despairing sloth—very Russian. As a Translator of Literature (how metallic is the name of my Profession) I could have become a Member of the Union of Writers many years ago. But I did not. Horribly enough, I did not become even a Trade Union Member at the departments for which I free-lance. Am I then a Parasite? Not far from my country house is the country house (it has less acreage) of a Member of the Politburo or a Candidate Member of the Politburo (I have never been interested in ascertaining which, exactly). Surely Parasites do not live in houses with more acreage than Members (or even Candidate Members) of the Politburo.
I am a statistical exception—a rare event—eluding the departmental mesh. I am not registered at any department because I am not attached to any department. No department can understand how I could have become a member of some department, with all the advantages accruing, but would not. Each department assumes that I belong to another department, evidently very high up, perhaps so high that no one knows what my rank is and who, precisely, knows it.
_____________
In the 60's it might have seemed that now one could and must voice his dissidence publicly (and yet those who would have done so are now perishing). I myself did not become an active participant because at that time all my spiritual power was going into what had long since become a pastime, or obsession, for me: my writing. I was like a woman with child; I was guarding a life the infinite value of which no one would perhaps ever appreciate but myself. To others these were just manuscripts, quite possibly a maniac's scribblings. I would not argue. No mother would, to explain the infinite value of her child. I just guarded them, with obtuse silence and cunning stubbornness.
A pursuit like mine only became possible after 1953 as it. gradually transpired that one could study and write in the privacy of one's home and be safe as long as one did not try to voice any dissidence publicly. Before 1953 this had been impossible, not because one did not want to take the risk, but because sustained intellectual activity is incompatible with constant danger. One can conspire, kill, explode, knowing that if it comes to that one must kill oneself rather than be caught alive. But one cannot engage in sustained intellectual activity knowing every second that one may be caught the next or may have to kill oneself. High sensitivity and alertness and constant suicidal preparedness are compatible with many years of happiness and periods of ecstatic exaltation, but certainly not with what we may call study, understanding, description.
The pre-1917 writers who survived into Stalin's 40's were as vulnerable as an old strain of microbes to a new antibiotic. But the new strain born after 1917 had developed immunity: a defense mechanism that included—well, call it paranoia, except that it was like the blinking of the human eye, a universal reflex that has made it possible to survive in the environment in which mankind has been living everywhere for millennia (except in a few places and then mostly in modern times). After 1917 and throughout the Stalinist period in Russia a life-and-death struggle ensued between two paranoias, the paranoia of the pseudo-czar-god himself and the ever more immune paranoia of the human life around him. He defended himself with all the means he knew against that human life, which in turn defended itself with all the means it knew and has ever known; and it knows many.
Then, suddenly, in 1953, the pseudo-czar-god was said to have died, or at least he seemed to have vanished no one knows exactly when and how, and in several years it became clear that one could safely write in the privacy of one's room, and into this, the life in me went.
_____________
I am the only strictly private person in the country, as my guest calls me, living on a kind of extraterritorial estate.
“And what is there?” he once asked, pointing at something looming between the trees beyond the invisible fence, running all around our estate.
“Oh, there—” I peered. “Serfdom.”
Foreign correspondents stayed the night at my country house after their New Year's party, and nothing happened. My son never joined any Children's Organization, nor did he ever go to school.
“See?” my guest exults. “You are freer than you would have been in America.”
“Yes. Except that I can't spare, say, one hundred billion dollars a year to defend my freedom. I just exist in a crevice between departments. This, by the way, is why I get all the books I want from abroad and you don't. The department of literature that watches over you does not watch over me because I am not its responsibility.”
I like him for his genuine, that is, self-scrutinizing, sincerity, which is so rare. He would be bringing his newly published book. He knows I will not say a word about it, and he is grateful, but he will just open to the page bearing his picture, and begin to admire it.
A Russian poetess, in one of her poems, addressed her aristocratic seducer thus: “How handsome you are, O devil.” Holding the open book in his outstretched hand, raised so that he has to look up in order to gaze at his portrait, the portrait of an elderly man who obviously suffers from a bad liver, he finally says in a languishing whisper: “How handsome you are, O devil.”
He always asks apprehensively if I'm expecting anyone else when he comes.
“People are monsters,” he explains. “Monsters.” Then he adds as a shy afterthought: “I am a monster, too, of course, but at least myself I can abide.”
Today he is out of luck. Very carefully I break the news. Yes, “that” man's wife. But she will just drop in on her way to somewhere else and will then go away. She is much too important to stay long.
My guest's rank in Literature is not the highest, and he shuns people either below his rank because they may try to humiliate him (if only to take revenge for their lowliness), or of the same rank because they may be more insolent still (entitled as they are to regard themselves as his equals). But “that” man is younger than he; once his rank in Literature was lower than his; and now it is higher!
“I know that the man is a kind of inflammation inside my brain,” he says in one of those flashes of lucidity for which I like him so much. “I am like a clerk in the department of railroads who can only talk about another clerk who has been promoted ahead of him. ‘Injustice!’ he cries out to the heavens, like Prometheus in a play of Aeschylus. But he forgets that the person hearing him may not himself belong to the department of railroads, and the immensity of the tragic injustice will be lost on him.”
He transfers his inflammation to the man's wife. “I know this is stupid,” he says. “I picture myself very elegant and ironic, with a carnation in my lapel, saying something really devastating about her husband, but in such a subtle, witty way that everyone is charmed. But it doesn't work.”
No, it doesn't. Throughout her visit he will be rather like Prometheus, only reduced to wearing a suit and enacting his inner state in a mute, livid gloom.
Her husband—well, he, on the one hand, is a famous writer. Just like Gogol, Chekhov, or Steinbeck. On the other hand, he is a serf albeit of high rank.
Under Peter I (the early 18th-century big serf-owner, misnamed a czar, that is, a caesar). there were as yet no noblemen in Russia. Noblemen were serfs, only ranked. These ranked serfs were to become attached to various departments. The words serfdom and serfs mean literally in the Russian language the right of attachment and the attached.
Her husband is attached to the department of literature.
Private serf-owners in Russia before 1861 owned serf musicians, serf engineers, serf actors, etc., who did not differ outwardly from musicians, engineers, actors, etc. in the West. But serf writers—what purpose would they serve?
In Russian etymologically there is no word state. The word translated into English as state connotes a master's arrangement, a lord's arrangement, an owner's arrangement (the period 1861 to 1917, when Russia was a state, was too brief for the Russian language to develop its new word state or to reinterpret completely its old word). The bigger their serf-ownership, the more easily can serf-owners afford the luxury of simulating a State, and of attaching more serfs to activities like literature (what is a state without literature?) and not merely to activities like theater or music, as small serf-owners once did.
The department of literature does not prescribe a uniform. A Writer is to be dressed like Gogol or Chekhov or Steinbeck. This is his uniform: he should look like a Writer. Many such serfs are to look as though they were living in old Russia or in the West, in all seriousness, in freedom. Partly a writer's rank is explicit (like, a Member of the Secretariat of the Union of Writers) but partly it is secret or implicit yet accurate, and as decisive as his position would have been at the court in Russia long before Gogol's day.
_____________
“Why do you want to go away to the West?” the famous writer's wife asks me. My wife must have mentioned to her the topic of the conversation before her arrival.
I would answer if she would listen. But she won't. Either because I am not important enough or she doesn't understand and gets bored. Her husband belongs to a very high rank and his fate will be an individual one, but for the rest of us our fate will be collective. There are, for example, two kinds of perfectly identical pinewood coffins for all of us, the screaming red kind and the imitation oak kind. They are identical everywhere and are sold in identical shops. But if I were to carry on about all this I would sound like a peevish miserable housewife, complaining of scarcities and shortages.
“What do you want to go away to the West for?”
She will listen to not more than ten words on end, or fewer. Her husband has a very high rank in Literature. She believes that his rank and his talent correlate, that many others are, indeed, yokels who have been promoted so high in Literature because they serve those people up there, while her husband has been promoted for his talent alone. When he is demoted a little, that proves to her that he refuses to sacrifice his talent to curry their favor, and when he is promoted still higher that shows her that even they have to reckon with his talent.
Still, imperceptible as his demotions are to an untrained eye (no invitation to the Kremlin New Year's party), they depress her terribly, perhaps because as a Russian woman, wise rather than intelligent, she senses IIQW easily everyone may roll suddenly all the way down. Talent or no talent. She was drinking a lot on one such occasion, and when somebody cautioned, “You are getting drunk,” she said to me: “It's good, I'll get drunk and untie on you.”
To untie on someone means to transcend, to forget the self, dissolve in another and hence be in bliss. Perhaps she meant to do it in heaven where there are no ranks.
Then she began to mope. “Tell me, why won't they put us all in one prison camp?”
“I know they will divide us,” she said, now weeping in all earnest. “We'll all be in different camps. But what harm would it do them if we were all together?”
She is generous, kind, impulsive, thoughtless, we all love her. Except for my guest, of course. Her face was bloated, like a huge child's only all going to pieces, and we began soothing her by reminding her that actually what she wanted was to leave everything and go to a small town to work as a medical nurse. She had even had a nurse's dress and cap designed for her, which is quite important, for once she wrote from London: “I haven't found a single decent rag here to buy.”
But her husband has since been promoted again, the windows are a liturgy of sunshine. To the West? Why do I want to go to the West? I know I cannot count on her attention for more than ten words, and. I answer her quickly.
“I want to be buried in a metal casket.”
The answer is a huge success: she laughs briefly.
_____________
After the visit of the wife of the very successful writer my guest tries to cast off his gloom and regain his word-shedding mood.
Oh, let us shed words
As the garden sheds its amber.
“People are always discontented,” he sheds words. “Straining elsewhere. Waiting. ‘That's when we'll begin to live in earnest.’ But what a period that was to live in—well, in, say, 1912. The Golden Age. What a flourishing of art.”
We invoke the names.
Stravinsky—Blok—Chaliapin—RachmaninoffStanislavsky—Kandinsky—Pasternak—
“My God!” he moans, overwhelmed. “Freedom! Pravda appeared legally after 1912—Pravda! Think of it. A newspaper published by a group calling openly for the overthrow of the regime could be bought On a newsstand for two kopeks. But no, they would not live. ‘We are born of Russia's age of horror,’ they proclaimed. Age of horror. Well, instead they got the age of joy. With Lubyankas all over the country to cheer them up. There is nothing like a large, efficient network of torture chambers for good cheer.”
I want to explain to him that the free expression of discontent has nothing to do with the collapse of the social structure, but he does not appreciate my saying that literature is impossible without social knowledge, and will not listen. Like many writers, or Writers, he still assumes that there is a certain irrational unconscious which is very profound, because in German (and in Russian) the word deep (in the sense of deep-lying in the stomach, for example) and the word profound are the same. The irrational unconscious is very, very deep—perhaps even as deep as the stomach. Sometimes this is assumed to be the same as Russianness, and then the writer says something irrationally unconsciously profoundly Russian (usually a century old); and if his ancestors are unknown, which would make him a pure Russian, and yours are known to have been Jews or Tartars or Germans, he will look over your head with the expression of a polite music teacher faced with a tone-deaf student.
He will not listen. So I falter and stop.
“Never mind,” he says. “Let us live. Everyone is unhappy. Before 1953 everyone was happy. Then it became safe to be unhappy, and everyone became unhappy. I am happy. I now have all the freedom I need: the freedom of thought and the freedom of ecstasy. As long as I think and feel without succumbing to the vanity of publishing what I think and feel, I am safe. At least in Moscow, in this year anno domini—”
“Those are not quite freedoms. Rather leniencies. But I agree. The ecstasy of writing without the need to jump up at every rustle. A stack of paper. No fear of search and death, provided you are content just to write—well, for yourself or for posterity. A stack of paper—”
“I am happy.”
“Also, we have had up to now the freedom of conversation in the privacy of our homes,” I go on cataloguing freedoms.
“Well,” he says vaguely, to imply that in the privacy of my home there is no such leniency because despite my unattached state, my home is certainly bugged in his opinion since I receive foreigners. “We really should go out. For a walk. Man must live for his complexion.”
It is just that he has a retentive memory of history: up to the mid-30's those who were not Members of the Party thought they could talk privately quite freely. This was known as Philistine Talk: Philistines were assumed to be too featherbrained to be noticed in this respect. Then suddenly in the mid-30's Philistine Talk began to be sufficient to doom anyone.
“Why are we still alive?” he asks in a superstitious whisper, and then answers. “Khrushchev met Furtseva in the corridor, I mean in 1957, and she warned him that the others wanted to throw him out. Why was he in the corridor? Perhaps he wanted a smoke. A slower rate of nicotine decomposition in someone's blood may seal our doom overnight, and secretly too—may have, indeed, sealed it already, only we don't know it. They have bought Japanese electronic equipment—you know, of course.”
The Japanese equipment has recently been a frequent topic of conversation, with elaborate descriptions of devices that allegedly monitor a conversation in a room from outside by recording a beam reflected off the vibrating window glass. That is if the room has not already been bugged from the inside.
_____________
“All right,” I say. “But listening to our tapes they must be moved, really.” Involuntarily, I speak more loudly and distinctly, as though to make a good tape recording. “You yourself complain that people are inclined to think that black is white just because it is beneficial for them to think so, and not because black is white. In the freest societies of the 20th century so many people have thought they were living in the least free society ever known. Few societies, on the other hand, were as unfree (or evil) as ours between 1937 and 1953, and hardly ever have there been so many people, here and elsewhere, who thought that this was the freest (and best) society in human history. When our society was no longer black enough for them to think it dazzling white, while China in the meantime had become perfectly black, some of these same people began to think China perfectly white. At least we, whether under Nicholas the Third, Shih Huang Ti, or Vaska the Skew-Eyed, will always think that in the 60's there existed the leniency just to live, to think, to write in the privacy of one's home, whereas there had been no such leniency before 1953. Are there many people who will think this, no matter what their ‘motivational’ circumstances may be?”
This reassures and inspires him.
“O God,” he says, his big hand thumping his chest, and I recall that his father was a fervent Orthodox churchgoer in his youth, so that the gesture is perhaps quite natural. The Russian “O God” has three syllables, the Slavic vocative case, and he blows out the first syllable with such subtle naturalness that it seems he was brought up in his father's faith since childhood, his big light eyes gazing heavenward or toward an imaginary microphone (still usually considered to be located in the ceiling). “O God, thank Thee for having enlightened them so that they do not unleash the plague upon us but still let us live in the privacy of our homes. What am I compared with their omnipotence?”
He lowers his voice to a whisper—partly as a conversational technique suggesting the tragic, partly to avoid at least some of the new Japanese equipment.
“They have squelched Czechoslovakia. As my boot would . . . a ladybug. Nothing new, of course. People simply have no memory. Georgia was reconquered in 1921 in exactly the same way. ‘The working people of Georgia have applied for our aid.’ See? In forty-seven years they did not even bother to think up a new cliché. Nothing new has happened since 1921, or perhaps 1922. Everything was clear by 1922. And yet we thought: Czechoslovakia—the oldest university in Central Europe. Nothing happened. Even your pet Anglo-Saxons would not act lest it endanger their trade. And what am I compared with the ladybug of Czechoslovakia? A microbe.”
He contemplates the enormous, infinite forces ranged against his microscopic size.
“O God, how can I thank Thee enough?” he exclaims, reaching the point where hysteria and irony, imagination and reality, fear and ridicule begin to blend as in the Stanislavsky method. “They allow me, a microbe, to live free of the fear that I may perish at the whim of some junior clerk of the local torture chamber. And that freedom from that fear means the freedom of ecstasy and thought. Have I deserved so much? Would I have been good enough to grant the same freedom to them, had they been—no, not even crawling infinitesimally at my omnipotent feet, but existing invisibly in a test tube clutched in my cold, scientific hand?”
_____________
Throughout the 60's he was worried that some of those who dared to express their dissidence openly after the mid-50's would draw him finally into some act that would displease the authorities: he would have to sign some petition requesting the release of someone imprisoned for dissidence, and thereby he would become an open dissident himself, also finally to be imprisoned. Yet if he had refused from the start to sign anything at all, he might have earned the reputation of a coward, a lickspittle, a careerist.
He tried for a while to put them off with jokes. “Look, right now 1 cannot challenge a nuclear power to an all-out fight because my liver is out of order.” Another mot of his: “Nietzsche said, ‘To be a hero one must have a heroic stomach.’ Does anyone know of a stomach so heroic as to brave our prisons?” Or: “The regime at least still lets me be at my home. Now, if you boys could defend me against the tyranny of my family. . . .” To me he complains:
These microbes believe that the microbiologist lets them be because they are too brave and noble and dedicated to be killed. They think they are fighting him by trying to displease him. Finally, it will end up as in the 30's. We must value the microbiologist's leniency—he is not obliged to be lenient if he can destroy us like microbes.
Well, with all these new advances in the science of surveillance, there's no need to drag us somewhere if they can watch us in vitro, so to speak, in our natural habitats. Also, they want to look good in those cities that foreigners visit. The democracies still count for something in the world—at least the United States does.
“Your democracies are governed by suckers,” he mouths his favorite phrase. “There were political parties of all shades in Russia in the summer of 1917. Then every vestige of democracy was destroyed. Yet Britain and France came to the destroyer, in 1922, asking to trade. What can surprise me after 1922? Nothing. The entire subsequent history of the world, along with your democracies which will be squelched like Czechoslovakia, was written from 1918 to 1922. All of it.”
Well, what do you want? The serf-owner cannot sign a contract with all his human property down to the last man: ‘We grant you herewith the freedom to live in the privacy of your homes, at least in the cities visited by foreigners, and you undertake, for your part, never to spread publicly what you create or think, not to mention acts like assembly or association. If you violate this contract we shall return to the situation as before 1953.’
“No,” he says with a sigh. “No such contract is possible.”
Before 1953 anyone suspected of less than infinite devotion would disappear. There was no such thing as martyrdom. He would vanish into the infernal unknown, and that was that. He might reappear, but as a different person inside the same physical frame: say, as a repentant ogre who had been poisoning children, preferably orphans, to spite the paradise-on-earth all around him. What sort of martyrdom can there be if there is no continuity of person before and after arrest? Now we have the chance of martyrdom, at least in the cities that foreigners can visit. If he is sentenced to imprisonment, and not ‘psychiatric treatment,’ a martyr may at least hope he will die his own self, a helpless cripple suffering from some horrible disease perhaps, but still his own self, see? Just as someone crucified in a Roman province two thousand years ago died his own self. As long as there is the chance of martyrdom there will be martyrs. But I am not sure that chance exists any longer, even in the cities that foreigners visit.
“I only know that those fellows you meet will draw you in,” he mutters gloomily.
I said, ‘crucified.’ The right to martyrdom. To one such martyr the state's Investigator may have just hinted that they will arrest his daughter as a suspected accomplice and for the course of the investigation imprison her by sheer mistake with thieves who will put her ‘under a streetcar,’ as it is called, that is, will rape her to death. No foreign correspondent will ever know. A mistake. Mistakes happen even in the best of prisons. Crucified? That was nothing, a Roman colony, you know—a high level of humanity by the standards of the time. Really nothing, comparatively.
“Insane, insane even to listen to this.” His face is terrible, like a huge sick swollen liver. He has a son and a daughter. I am sorry I said what I said.
The martyr didn't realize. He was unprepared. He thought: martyrdom. I will be crucified. He could not understand that this is not like a Roman colony of two thousand years ago.
He is not listening. He must be wondering whether he has been too careless of late.
“You may yet get involved, too,” he repeats as a fierce warning. “Those fellows you meet—”
They have been trapped in a way. They thought: laws, sentences, and all that. According to some law I will be sentenced to three years in prison, and according to another, six. But there are no laws or sentences. There's just the leniency of those in power—their grace, or mercy, or benevolence, putting someone in prison for only three or six years.
What prison? What sentence, for God's sake? They will sentence you to three days of prison, but will forget to heat the cell, and there you are, a corpse. Who will prove anything? They have chemicals to induce disease. This is the 20th century; man.
Some martyrs happen to believe that for all the horrors there is something basically good about the regime, because this is what they have been told from the cradle, and therefore the regime cannot be too cruel to them for their frank, trusting, loyal effort to suggest respectfully its further improvement for their mutual benefit. Others believe in the evolution of the regime because what else can one believe in? Anyway, there are so few of them that almost each case is unique—martyrs are never numerous, contrary to all apocryphal literature, they never belong to what I call great numbers, a term in the theory of great numbers.
_____________
As soon as I say “a term in the theory” his attention is switched off, but for a while I try desperately to trudge on.
“According to the law of great numbers there is something general in all fingerprints, and according to the law of small numbers there is something unique in each fingerprint. The whole point of man's knowledge and self-knowledge is not to confuse great numbers and small numbers, not to extend the domain of the small into the domain of the great, as writers and priests tend to do, or vice versa, as is often the practice of scientists. The case histories of martyrs are unique—for the most part. We cannot apply our own or anyone else's fingerprint to them.”
“Those fellows you meet will draw you in,” he repeats again, this time with an air of I-wash-my-hands-of-it finality.
“Suppose no one had been a martyr in the 60's, when there was the chance of martyrdom, or at least martyrs thought there was? What would it be like then? A country satisfied now and anon and forever with the freedom to think and create in the privacy of each inhabitant's home? The outside world would say: ‘All people in Russia are serfs infinitely devoted to those in power—there are no martyrs there, there are none who would say they are not so devoted, at the cost of martyrdom.’ As long as life has just another chance to moan and scream and call for all the world to hear, before infernal muteness descends again, how can you expect life to stop living with whatever life it can live?”
“I only know that I must keep away from this,” he mutters, thinking his own thoughts.
“Also, we say: ‘We are only microbes—we are not even the ladybug of Czechoslovakia, only microbes, and why should microbes displease those who let us live (though they may kill us as easily)?’ But it can all be turned the other way around. Having found that the population consists largely of perfectly safe, mute, invisible microbes like you and me, those in power will not be deterred by the tiny remaining displeasure some microbes might still cause them. They will have only the most pleasant of microbes, existing or perishing equally invisibly. It is perhaps only in the shadow of these martyrs, in the hinterland of their reckless innocence, that our 60's were so happy. By their martyrdom they showed there is still some power of resistance in the strain, and that our own pleasant muteness is actually dangerous too. To those in power they speak for us: ‘Look,’ they say, ‘this is our position, and for every one of us who accepts martyrdom for making it known, there are, obviously, unidentifiable numbers of microbes who have the same or even a less compliant attitude which may come out much more dangerously for you.’ Anyway, life will live—and moan and scream and call as long as it can, and when there is no more martyrdom it will all go into hiding again. Into everyone's own self. An infinite country, with infinite lines of defense where life can still fight even in a minority of one against all mankind—and win.”
