Eastern Europe
The failure of leftist writing
Petru Popescu
More and more western writers visit Russia and Eastern Europe: the majority as guests of Unions of Writers, Boards of Culture and Education or other such authorities. They come back and express, in pleased or bitter tones, the conclusion that apparently the Marxist countries care more for the arts and their representatives than the so-called 'Western democracies'. There is more money (that is, more state subvention), more public attention, more reading, and, indeed, more surveillance than in the West, where indifference has become ultimately the only serious artistic censorship. Eastern Europe is not indifferent to the arts (politically or financially), and the very idea of police control dilates the artist's ego as much as it frustrates his production. One compares also the attention given to minor figures — the revolution, putting 'out' several 'reactionary' generations, promoted and sometimes blew out of proportion a large number of selfmades and selftaughts that would not have seen, otherwise, their velleities accepted; through bureaucratic security, their rank and place is today still untouchable, while so 'many qualified Westerners have very uneven destinies and are not sure of their future. In Warsaw or Sofia, Western authors, sometimes of relatively modest reputation, are received pompously, wined and dined by Ministers of Culture, shown around in official cars, given generous TV coverage, etc. But, since in the East there is not much informative press to speak about, or many books of real attitude and controversy, the literary press and the books of literature do fulfil a certain informative function, and they also provide a limited degree of difference in areas where, otherwise, the state philosophy is strictly applied. This, naturally, brings attention and exaggerated printing figures; those would instantly dwindle if they had to compete with a banal mass publication full of western gossip and slick pictures. Unfortunately, this respect for the arts is an illusion. A correct Marxist analysis would only show that those governments still need the co-operation of artists because their propaganda has not translated yet into a professionally valid and relatively plausible `state subculture'. Actually, Eastern officials,
like Eastern audiences, are fascinated by American-style TV and press, which they try, still clumsily, but tenaciously, to mimic. Why, otherwise, would readers fed on Dostoyevsky crowd cinemas and TV sets for the palest westerns or musicals? For years, a city like Bucharest, the biggest in South East Europe, has been deserted on Saturday evenings, when the masses were offered as a treat the Man nix series, or The Untouchables, or even more commercial products. In the East, politics still need the arts — a past stage here: indeed, a trip to the East is in many ways a trip to the past. Detente in the letters has provided an even greater passe-ism, since the heroic stance of breaking all inheritance has been abandoned, and socialist realism, after strident failure, has been tuned down. The stable values and safe subjects, all historical, were allowed back after some touching up. The behaviour of the left in power, beautifying itself, at last, with the attributes of bygone cultures, is amusingly proconsular: since the establishment represents whatever is good and 'progressive' in the whole history of mankind, even the Bible or Dante have to be recuperated at least for their documentary value. In fact, more political effects were considered: impressed by the `metahistoricar effect of the Pantheon, the bureaucracy conceded that some values have to be explained through less `Darwinistic' principles. It accepted them grudgingly, also in the never confessed hope of being accepted by them. Of course, the bureaucracy, right or left, is philosophically a-political and judges principles only in terms of power. Tactically no more intransigent than any other historical force, the revolution recuperated the piano in China, and produced apparatchiks who speak fervently of Russian futurism, especially when it has to be proven that, in modernistic matters, the Soviet Union is no less competitive than any Western developed nation. But the baffling result is a stream of past, both at official and dissident level. After Stalin, and in more recent years, Eastern Europe has produced plenty of names and works, but almost no currents and innovations. Even the Polish and Czechoslovak attempts, judged so dangerous in their novelty, were reminiscences of the 'thirties. To reintro duce parliamentary pluralism in politics, to go back to Christian mysticism or surrealism in the letters is, after all, revivalism. The very success of many Eastern writers is not the result of inventing something new, but of reintroducing something that was for a while abandoned. The school of Soljenitsin was praised in the East not for revealing the unknown, but for confirming, and partially at that, what everybody knew already. From Ilya Selvinsky (authOr of a play in verse about Lenin) and other apologists who want to reread Marx and the Padres as they really were, to Soljenitsin who writes a gigantic Who Was Who in the Camps, everybody is obsessively concerned with the past and its potential explosiveness. A world built on a mystery, a world hiding its foundations, but nevertheless conjecturing infinitely about whether they are stable or not. In that sense there are striking similarities with the third world, and with the underdeveloped countries — the past is a way of defining an identity, felt as indispensable for a huge leap forward into the loftily proclaimed future. But this past, after all, is a European past, which makes the current cultural orientations all the more schizophrenic, since today Eastern Europe lives in an alternation of claiming and rejecting its European substance and affiliation.
The Romanian bureaucrats had given up Eugene Ionesco or Brancusi, fifteen years ago, as degraded products of bourgeois rottenness; now they comically claim them as universal representatives of the values of the Fatherland, a way of saying also that the Fatherland is as European, if not more European, than the countries of adoption; the Russians act similarly about Stravinsky or Nabokov, for even these controversial, 'convertible' blazons bring forward a common trait: the past. So, the East fabricates grand old men, usually presidents of the respective Writers' Union, Slav Faulkners, masters of a combination of wise baroque and no-nonsense `narodnose (peopleness). Their feigned simplicity is the same whether they are superofficial Solokhov, semiofficial Ehrenburg, dissident Soljenitsin and Siniavsky. Nice, large, moral bears. Consciously or subconsciously, they impersonate exactly the image the paternalistic party tries to give of itself, as it feeds or bites according to vital necessity.
But this, naturally, favours only historicism, sentimentalism, vaudeville and style. The languages of the East, unformalised by early printing and the constant spirit of court legalism, are far more poetic, descriptive, concrete, and, of course, codified, than those of the West, and they require genuine literary kremlinology on the part of the Western reader; this explains why Eastern writing, highly artisan, sells so badly in a consumer culture. But where is, after so much talk of realism, the real realistic book, the one that, taken out of its natural habitat, does not become a riddle? Why is, actually, so rare the book of real leftist content from the East?
There are, of course, several answers, but one is a question: can the left, established, keep its left essence? Once in the saddle, how can the opposition keep being itself? And if it cannot, does that explain why the apparatus is viscerally against artistic inventiveness? If the arts are the only segment of society that fights (unsuccessfully so far) official prescription, it would follow that the arts are, even when they are manned by authors like Soljenitsin, the true new left of Eastern societies. The division and confusion could not be greater, and detente.is the only advisable course for a world of seven million types of ambiguities. This detente between the bureaucracy and the arts will keep its syncopated pace for as long as the East is what it is now. Only one should remember that as in the real, political, East-West bargain, the tough side is always the winner.
Petru Popescu, the Romanian novelist and poet, is at present living in England. His novel, Sfirfitul Bahic, is being published by Barrie and Jenkins as The Burial of the Vine.
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