One Day in the Life

"'You're wrong, pal,' Caesar was saying, and he was trying not to be too hard on him. 'One must say in all objectivity that Eisenstein is a genius. Now isn't Ivan the Terrible a work of genius? The opirchniki dancing in the masks! The scene in the cathedral!'

'All show-off!' K-123 snapped. He was holding his spoon in front of his mouth. 'To much art is no art at all. Like candy instead of bread! And the politics of it is utterly vile--vindication of a one-man tyranny. An insult to the memory of three generations of Russian intellectuals!' (He ate his mush, but there was not taste in his mouth. It was wasted on him.)

'But what other treatment of the subject would have been let through...?'

'Ha! Let through, you say? Then don't call him a genius! Call him a toady, say he carried out orders like a dog. A genius doesn't adapt his treatment to the taste of tyrants!'

Caesar looked around and streched out his hand for the mush, as if it had just come to him out of thin air. He didn't even look at Shukob and went back to his talk.

'But listen! It's not what but how that matters in art.'

Kh-123 jumped up and banged his fist on the table.

'No! Your how can go to hell if it doesn't raise the right feelings in me!'" (Sol, 67)