Jacoby, Susan. Moscow Conversations. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972.
"Moscow is one of the easiest places in the world for a journalist to become dishonest with himself and his readers." 15
"Dishonesty becomes a part of journalism in Moscow when correspondents fail to tell their readers about these inhibitions and the profound effect they have on a reporter's perceptions of Russian life. The reluctance of the Moscow press corps to write about its working conditions is less a conspiracy of silence than a product of frustrated resignations; an abnormal situation begins to seem quite normal after only a few months of life in Russia." 15
"Foreign correspondents do not travel as much as they would like to, partly because editors at home demand a steady flow of political news from the capital and partly because each trip involves endless bureacratic snags. A correspondent must obtain special permission from the press departmente of the Soveit Foreign Ministry if he wishes to travel outside a twenty-five mile radius of Moscow and even for some points inside the circle" 19
"THe dissenters are a small, diverse collection of people who disagree strongly on long-range goals for Russia; their main area of agreement is their determination to make the Soviet authorities observe their own laws. Their chief activity is publicizing official actions against other dissenters; they view the publicity as an important guarantee that no one will quietly disappear into prison or exile, as in the Stalin years. The dissenters naturally need foreign journalists to transmit the news of their activities to the outside world. Stories about Soviet political dissent published in foreign newspapers ensure that many Russians also hear the news." 22-23
"Some journalists are happy to consider dissidents friends as well as news sources; relationships with dissenters involve somewhat less strain and prestense than relationships with ther Russians. The skepticism about absolute truth that is characteristic of most truly educated minds in the west is completely foreign to the majority of Russians; only with a few of the dissidents did I find a common approach to intellectual questions that had nothing to do with politics." 23
"Khrushchev abolished formal censorship of correspondents outgoing news dispatches in 1961. Foreign journalists are now free to transmit their articles by telephone, Telex or cable without prior approval of a Soviet official. The authorities now attempt to censor news dispatches indirectly, through post-publication earnings, KGB harassment and the ultimate sanction of expulsion from the country. Officials in the press deparment in Soviet embassies throughout the world read articles that appear in newspapers and magazines with Moscow correspondents. If an article is both highly important and abrasive, a correspondent may receive an officialwarning from the press department in Moscow within two or three days of publication." 23
"Soviet officials are clearly furious about being unable to prevent contacts between foreign correspondents and political dissidents. The press department has established a pattern of harrassing and trying to get rid of correspondents who see dissidents frequently." 23
"Four foreign journalists were expelled from the Soviet Union during 1970; three of them had been particularly active in gathering news about political dissent and relaying it to other correspondents. Because it is difficult to arrange meetings and also because only the most urgent news is relayed over tapped phone lines, it is impractical for every correspondent to track down rach piece of dissident news himself. One or two correspondents usually meet with a dissenter and pass the news on to the rest of the Moscow press corps. Unfortunately, many spineless Moscow correspondents are only too happy to acquire the news of political dissent from their colleagues but are unwilling to incur official displeasure by meeting dissidents themselves." 23-24
26-most of the sources are intellectuals
"The reluctance to talk about Stalin today is deep and wide-spread, even amonf people who recognize the dimensions of spread, even among people who recognize the dimensions of the tragedy that befell their country under his dictatorship. Admissions of Stalin's evil, which meant the death and imprisonment of millions of Russians are not forthcoming from most Soviet citizens who grew up during that period. To acknowledge the full extent of the tragedy would be to admit complicity in horrors too great for most people even to think about: The refusal of many middle-aged Germans to admit they knew about the Nazi concentration camps is a similar reaction." 42
"Stalin was never fully toppled from his pedestal, even when Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign was at its height. Too many officials still in power had been the executors of Stalin's policies; indeed, many Western analysts believe Khrushchev's seriousness about de-Stalinization was the major gavtor that led to his loss of support within the Party Central Committee. After Khrushchev's partial cleansing operation, the new Brezhnev-Kosygin leadership said in effect, 'Enough is enough,' and clamped hte lid back on the sewer. " 42
"I never met a student in any part of the Societ Union who did not listen to the VOA. Although reception is hampered by jamming, Russians patiently persevere. For obvious reasons, English language broadcasts are interfered with less than Russian language runs. Many students also listened to the BBC, saying they preferred its news broadcasts because the reports were less slanted by American government propaganda. (I prefereed the BBC for the same reason in Moscow.) The student consensus, however, was that the VOA offered better music than the BBC." 94
"The girls said they did not believe everything in Soviet newspapers 'any more than you believe everything in yours.' Tanya's favorite paper was Komsomolskaya pravda, the organ of the Komsomol Central Committee.
Oskar Rabin- Unofficial painter
on Hope against Hope: "He felt that one of its greatest strengths was its recognition that what happened under Stalin was not a passing aberration--the product of one man's insanity--but a national sickness that permitted the Stalinist terrror to develop and may appear in mutant forms for generations to come." 171
"Realism is a word that loses its meaning in such an ideological context. If a painter chooses to depict a shabby apartment or a drunk, he is being a "critical realist" rather a Socialist realist, and the authorities frown on critical realism. In the Soviet Union, realism refers to reality as Soviet ideologues think it should be--not to a reality that an individual artist might perceive." 173
"Soviet papers--like books, magazines, canned food labels and every other form of printed material--are subject to official censorship. The existence of censorship does not, however, mean that every statement in every newspaper represent the official policy of the Soviet government. Pravda, the organ of the Party Central Committee, and to a slightly lesser extent Ivestia, the government newspaper, are forums for top-level statements on foreign and domestic policy. To use a favorite phrase of Stalin's, 'it is not by accident' that articles appear in Pravda and Ivestia. Columns by important political commentators sometimes reflect the official government position on important matters." 213
"Ideas for articles are initiated by party authorities, editors, reporters, outside specialists and sometimes by readers. Letters-to-the-editor columns are extremely important in Soviet newspapers; they provide what is essentially the only public forum for complaints about the way various institutions are run." 216
"Government offices often take percautions to prevent their typewriters from being stolen or used for nefarious purposes. At Vera's newspaper, every typewriter had to be locked away before the staff went home at night."234
Dmitri-college student
"At the same time all of this was rumbling around in my head, One Day came out. I thought things might have changed enough so there was actually a possibility of publishing honest writing." 237
"Dmitri's attitude toward the official writers is, quite simply that they are prostitutes. It is an attitude shared by all committted samizdatchiki and political dissidents." 242
Showing posts with label socialist realism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialist realism. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Sinyavsky "The Literary Process in Russia"
Sinyavsky, Andrei. "The Literary Process in Russia." Kontinent. New York: Anchor Books, 1976.
satirical
"The Russian author does not want to write to the state's direction has assumed the nightmarish status of an underground writer, that is to say, from the state's point of view he has chosen a life of crime for which strict penalties and deterrents are laid down. Literature has become a forbidden, risky and thus all the more fascinating activity." (S, 77)
"The writer had to be reduced to the status of a criminal, a lawbreaker-to which some writers first had to be driven to suicide, others expelled, still others tortured. Thousand of writers had to be corrupted and castrated-a task undertaken for several decades by the founders and stormy petrels of Soviet literature." (S, 78)
"Thus at a certain stage the literary process has assumed the character of a double-edged game, an escapade which in itself could well provide the plot of an entertaining novel. Authors have been turned into the heroes of as yet unwritten books; they have tasted the savor of an intrigue which may end in disaster ('If you play with fire, you can burn your fingers,' as Khrushchev warned writers with his customary bluntness), but which on the other hand lends a certain higher meaning-a gaiety, an interest, 'a pledge who knows, of immortality'--to the writer's otherwise drab existence." (S,79)
"The wrier nowadays is walking a knife-edge; but unlike the old days, when writers were simply eliminated one after another, he now derives pleasure and moral satisfaction from this curious pastime. The writer is now someone to be reckoned with." (S, 79)
"When they discovered that a woman of my acquaintance going to Russia from the West, was carrying a copy of Doctor Zhivago in her suitcase, she was immediately put into a gynecological chair and subjected to a medical examination to find out whether she might be carrying any more banned novels. This is excellent. This all to the good. It means that a book is worth something, it is sought after pursued; and by escaping, hiding, or being buried in the ground it gathers weight and power." (S, 80-81)
"We shall not be far wrong if we say that the major topics are prison and labor camps. The themes which inspire the Russian writer today are not stories about collective farms, or factories, not love stories or even the pangs of youth, but how people are imprisoned, where they are sent into exile and exactly how (interesting topic, you must admit) they shoot you in the back of the neck. The labor camp is now the central, the dominant them of literature." (S, 81)
"Whether we take Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, or for greater respectability Tolstoy's Resurrection, we will notice that both of them are based on the notion of escape, of breaking the bounds; that the writer's very soul longs to escape; that the savor, the sense, the ideal of being a writer has nothing whatever to do with 'telling the truth' (go an tell it if you want to-in a tramcar), but it has to do with planting that so-called 'truth' across the tracks of the 'lie' which is universally, legally, and publicly accepted as truth-- and thus to assume, as a duty, the role of 'criminal,' 'lawbreaker,' 'renegade,' 'degenerate,' or (what an apt new word they have invented) as 'ideological saboteur (hell-no dynamite!) and as he surveys the horizon wondering what to write about, more often than not he will chose some forbidden topic." (S, 84)
"It would be hard to invent a more precise and more inoffensive name than samizdat, indicating no more than that a person has simply written everything he wanted to say as he thought fit, and has published it himself, regardless of the consequences, by passing a wad of typewritten sheets to a friend. The friend has gone running to boas about it to two more like-minded drop-outs-and we are witnessing the conception of something great, fantastic, unique, incomparable: the embryo of Russian literature, which once before in the in the nineteenth century, delighted mankind, and is now once more feeling the urge to return to the old battleground." (S, 87)
"In historical perspective of the literary process in Russia, that period which for convenience we have marked with the searing brand of 'Stalinism' has also, perhaps made its modest but legitimate contributin to this process. It may be that too long a spell of silence and despair has made us speak up with such passion and fervor in the conditions of today's relatively tolerable (and even, as I have said, in some ways beneficial) unfreedom--in other words, as soon as the writers were able so much as to open thier mouths. If nowadays we shout so loudly to the world at large about the terrible and shameful things that are being done in Russia, then it is because among other things we have had direct experience eof the 'cold and murk of days to come' which Alexander Blok prophesied for us all." (S, 90)
"It is at this point that literature must be on its guard and must not give way to the seductive spell of speaking the truth and nothing but the truth. The danger threatening modern Russian literature--banned literature, of course (the other literature is not worth considering, since artistically it is about two hundred years out of date)--is assuming the role of a sort of whining complaints book, supposedly to be pursued by the leaders (who don't give a damn anyway), or to be stored away in a cupboard untli the advent of those better times when people will have learned to live by the light of truth." (S, 104)
"We are again faced by the eternal Russian dilemma: Where is your allegiance, you profession purveyors of culture? Whose side are you on? Are you for truth, or for the official lie? When the question is put like that, the writer obviously has no choice but to answer proudly: for truth! And that is the only fitting reply in such a situation. But in proclaiming oneself to be on the side of truth, it is worthwhile remembering what Stalin said when some brave members of the Union of Writers asked him to explain once and for all what socialist realism was, and how, in practical terms, to attain thos glittering heights. Without taking a moment's thought or batting an eyelid, the leader replied:
'Write the truth--and that will be socialist realism!'
The point has been reached where we should feat the truth, lest it hang round out necks again like an albatross. Let the writer refuse to tell lies, but let him create fiction--and in disregard of any kind of 'realism.'" (S, 104)
"All this is simply a set of variations on my original theme: the belief in the power of words. Everyone shares this belief: the common people, the writers, the authorities (who, having investigated the leaflets, immediately, as the rules prescribe, arrested and imprisoned the young truth-seekers), as well as the writers of those countless letters, complaints, and appeals to those same authorities. That is why people write, and why they are forbidden to write." (S, 108)
satirical
"The Russian author does not want to write to the state's direction has assumed the nightmarish status of an underground writer, that is to say, from the state's point of view he has chosen a life of crime for which strict penalties and deterrents are laid down. Literature has become a forbidden, risky and thus all the more fascinating activity." (S, 77)
"The writer had to be reduced to the status of a criminal, a lawbreaker-to which some writers first had to be driven to suicide, others expelled, still others tortured. Thousand of writers had to be corrupted and castrated-a task undertaken for several decades by the founders and stormy petrels of Soviet literature." (S, 78)
"Thus at a certain stage the literary process has assumed the character of a double-edged game, an escapade which in itself could well provide the plot of an entertaining novel. Authors have been turned into the heroes of as yet unwritten books; they have tasted the savor of an intrigue which may end in disaster ('If you play with fire, you can burn your fingers,' as Khrushchev warned writers with his customary bluntness), but which on the other hand lends a certain higher meaning-a gaiety, an interest, 'a pledge who knows, of immortality'--to the writer's otherwise drab existence." (S,79)
"The wrier nowadays is walking a knife-edge; but unlike the old days, when writers were simply eliminated one after another, he now derives pleasure and moral satisfaction from this curious pastime. The writer is now someone to be reckoned with." (S, 79)
"When they discovered that a woman of my acquaintance going to Russia from the West, was carrying a copy of Doctor Zhivago in her suitcase, she was immediately put into a gynecological chair and subjected to a medical examination to find out whether she might be carrying any more banned novels. This is excellent. This all to the good. It means that a book is worth something, it is sought after pursued; and by escaping, hiding, or being buried in the ground it gathers weight and power." (S, 80-81)
"We shall not be far wrong if we say that the major topics are prison and labor camps. The themes which inspire the Russian writer today are not stories about collective farms, or factories, not love stories or even the pangs of youth, but how people are imprisoned, where they are sent into exile and exactly how (interesting topic, you must admit) they shoot you in the back of the neck. The labor camp is now the central, the dominant them of literature." (S, 81)
"Whether we take Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, or for greater respectability Tolstoy's Resurrection, we will notice that both of them are based on the notion of escape, of breaking the bounds; that the writer's very soul longs to escape; that the savor, the sense, the ideal of being a writer has nothing whatever to do with 'telling the truth' (go an tell it if you want to-in a tramcar), but it has to do with planting that so-called 'truth' across the tracks of the 'lie' which is universally, legally, and publicly accepted as truth-- and thus to assume, as a duty, the role of 'criminal,' 'lawbreaker,' 'renegade,' 'degenerate,' or (what an apt new word they have invented) as 'ideological saboteur (hell-no dynamite!) and as he surveys the horizon wondering what to write about, more often than not he will chose some forbidden topic." (S, 84)
"It would be hard to invent a more precise and more inoffensive name than samizdat, indicating no more than that a person has simply written everything he wanted to say as he thought fit, and has published it himself, regardless of the consequences, by passing a wad of typewritten sheets to a friend. The friend has gone running to boas about it to two more like-minded drop-outs-and we are witnessing the conception of something great, fantastic, unique, incomparable: the embryo of Russian literature, which once before in the in the nineteenth century, delighted mankind, and is now once more feeling the urge to return to the old battleground." (S, 87)
"In historical perspective of the literary process in Russia, that period which for convenience we have marked with the searing brand of 'Stalinism' has also, perhaps made its modest but legitimate contributin to this process. It may be that too long a spell of silence and despair has made us speak up with such passion and fervor in the conditions of today's relatively tolerable (and even, as I have said, in some ways beneficial) unfreedom--in other words, as soon as the writers were able so much as to open thier mouths. If nowadays we shout so loudly to the world at large about the terrible and shameful things that are being done in Russia, then it is because among other things we have had direct experience eof the 'cold and murk of days to come' which Alexander Blok prophesied for us all." (S, 90)
"It is at this point that literature must be on its guard and must not give way to the seductive spell of speaking the truth and nothing but the truth. The danger threatening modern Russian literature--banned literature, of course (the other literature is not worth considering, since artistically it is about two hundred years out of date)--is assuming the role of a sort of whining complaints book, supposedly to be pursued by the leaders (who don't give a damn anyway), or to be stored away in a cupboard untli the advent of those better times when people will have learned to live by the light of truth." (S, 104)
"We are again faced by the eternal Russian dilemma: Where is your allegiance, you profession purveyors of culture? Whose side are you on? Are you for truth, or for the official lie? When the question is put like that, the writer obviously has no choice but to answer proudly: for truth! And that is the only fitting reply in such a situation. But in proclaiming oneself to be on the side of truth, it is worthwhile remembering what Stalin said when some brave members of the Union of Writers asked him to explain once and for all what socialist realism was, and how, in practical terms, to attain thos glittering heights. Without taking a moment's thought or batting an eyelid, the leader replied:
'Write the truth--and that will be socialist realism!'
The point has been reached where we should feat the truth, lest it hang round out necks again like an albatross. Let the writer refuse to tell lies, but let him create fiction--and in disregard of any kind of 'realism.'" (S, 104)
"All this is simply a set of variations on my original theme: the belief in the power of words. Everyone shares this belief: the common people, the writers, the authorities (who, having investigated the leaflets, immediately, as the rules prescribe, arrested and imprisoned the young truth-seekers), as well as the writers of those countless letters, complaints, and appeals to those same authorities. That is why people write, and why they are forbidden to write." (S, 108)
Friday, November 4, 2011
Meerson-Aksenov "The Dissident Movement and Samizdat"
Meerson-Aksenov, Michael. "The Dissident Movement and Samizdat." In The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian 'Samizdat'- An Anthology. Edited by Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shagrin. Translated by Nicolas Lupinin. 19-46. Massachusetts: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977.
"The dissident movement and samizdat are two sides of the very same process which may be called the awakening of the consciousness of Soviet society." (M-A, 19)
"Literally ideocracy means the supremacy of an idea-in our age of totalitarian societies, it means the supreme rule of a government ideology. The later is possible only in the absence of competing ideas. Ideology predominates only in full isolation, for there is a great difference between ideology in the singular and the plural. In free press societies competing ideologies exist with political groupings behind them. Any kind of party membership assumes the sense in which totalitarian society knows it. (M-A, 19)
"Reality begins to demand ideological interpretation; ideology is a deformation of this reality. For example, key ideas of communism such as "proletarian revolution," "class enemies," "ideological struggle," "enemies of the people," "building communism," and others do not reflect reality." (M-A, 20)
"In this way, irrespective of the private opinions of ideologues, ideology must remain true to itself. Aristing from this, at the level of principle, in the necessity of correlating it with objective information. This, in turn, leads to dual consciousness. However, this trait is particularly inherent in the layer of the Soviet intelligentsia whose function is, on the one hand, the preparation of ideological information, and, on the other, the extraction of 'pure' information to supplement ideology." (M-A, 22)
"Ideocracy needs a mentor in ideological catechism,--the intelligentsia which simultaneously turns out to be the servitor and the victim of ideology. It is the servitor because it is precisely to it, and not to the strata of administrators, party workers, manufactures and the military, that ideology is obliged for its worldly activity. At the same time it is the material foundation of its being. It is the victim because, consciously or unconsciously, it suffers from its mercenary role and the subjection of its labors to ideological goals which deprive it of its own professional values and which subsitute for professional honest. The historian, philosopher, literateur, teacher, journalist, writer, etc...are judged not by their professional qualities but by the degree of their 'ideological function.' (M-A,23)
"The ruling party apparatus, recognizing its dependence on ideology, and through it also its dependence on the intelligentsia, watches the latter with a sleepless eye. From the start it attempts to quash any tendency toward free thought or even cultural pluralism in the intelligentsia, for this would be destructive to its monolithic nature. If a significant part of the intelligentsia considers this position of "service" to be normal and even propitious insofar as it guarantees certain privileges, then it produces a moral conflict in the other sector of the intelligentsia between its professional consciousness and human virtue and that ideological role which it is forced to play. In the main this relates to the humanitarian intelligentsia whose activity is wholly drawn into the sphere of "ideological struggle." (M-A, 23)
"This Anglo-Saxon term, which initially signified a certain sectarian alienation of the minority from the ideological 'monolith' of the majority, especially in reference to the opposition movement in the USSR, is unusually good. A. Amal'rick very accurately noted that opposition first arose among the acadmic and creative intelligentsia and that the dissident movement commenced in the form of 'cultural opposition.' The intelligentsia came out for the 'separation of ideology from culture' not in the form of some kind of public announcement or an appeal to the party, but in the form of a free creativity frequently parallel to teh activity within the framework of the system's "official culture." This was the birth of samizdat an independent, subculture in the womb of of which a social consciousness began to be formed." (M-A,24)
"Furthermore, the possibility of 'ideocracy' assures an ideological hypnotization of society, its rejection whether voluntary or forced, of consciousness. It assumes an ideological state signifies the rejection of personal values with that which is called ideology." (M-A, 25)
"In a certain sense, samizdat always existed in Russia, whether in the form of Prince Kurbskii's letters to Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the writing of archpriest Avvakum, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the unpublished letters of Chaadeaev, or, finally in the Soviet period, in the from of factional party polemics in the '20s and various works in the '30s that could not be published." (M-A, 25)
"Despite Stalinist terror, samizdat in this form was bever crushed. Even in the fiercest year, 1936-1938, there were small groups of intellectuals that passed around within the group typed literature which was forbidden or not publishable." (M-A, 25)"
"It was transformed from an incidental use of forbidden information to a form expressing social consciousness, when it began to grow into an independent area of culture that saw itself not as a corrective or a supplement to official Soviet culture but as a self-contained and singularly original sphere for the realization of society's spiritual and intellectual life." (M-A, 26)
27: Pasternak as catalyst- "With its full weight it fell upon the writer. It showed all the intellifentia what an improper interpretation of "freedom," "liberalization," and "Creative collaboration" could lead to." (M-A, 27)
"Historical foresight has chosen as the creator of samizdat as a phenomenon which arouses man's social being toward independence-a quite unexpected social champion, one quite distant from this role, a writer taken up with the inner life of the spirit, deaf to political history and a social in the whole tone of his works. Spirit stands at the cradle of Russian samizdat. With Pasternak it began as process of the creative formation of consciousness. At first it was in literature, the poetry, the arts...Then it grew into a spontaneous social process expressed in hundreds of letters, complaints, witnessing the violation of 'human rights.' Finally, it gave birth to independent political and social thought. (M-A, 28)
"The subsequent growth of a 'legal' samizdat literature revealed: letters of protest to native and foreign organizations which witness widespread violations, a whole literature that calls for a formal adherence to socialist law and, finally, the emergence of the bulletin Khronika and the Committee for for teh Defense of Human Rights in the USSR." (M-A, 31)
"The movement is characterized by an 'absence of ideals' and by empiricism: its purpose is to defend, on the basis of law, those who are under attack by the regime; and hence it can function without overly concentrating on the nature of the regime itself." (M-A, 33)
"In the role of a disseminator of samizdat, typed in six to fifteen copies on a typewriter, I have heard the following requests many times from the reader: 'Please give me one of the first copies. In five years of reading samizdat I have managed to ruin my eyesite. In the last five year an anecdote about samizdat has made the rounds: a father of a family type out Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace--a classic Russian work that may be bought cheaply in any book store. When he is asked why he is doing this he answers: ''My son is in school where they are studying War and Peace. He must read it for the course but he refuses to read anything that is not in samizdat.' This anecdote, by the way, demonstrates a growing lack of faith in the printed word in the USSR as such, no matter what is printed." (M-A, 38)
"The dissident movement and samizdat are two sides of the very same process which may be called the awakening of the consciousness of Soviet society." (M-A, 19)
"Literally ideocracy means the supremacy of an idea-in our age of totalitarian societies, it means the supreme rule of a government ideology. The later is possible only in the absence of competing ideas. Ideology predominates only in full isolation, for there is a great difference between ideology in the singular and the plural. In free press societies competing ideologies exist with political groupings behind them. Any kind of party membership assumes the sense in which totalitarian society knows it. (M-A, 19)
"Reality begins to demand ideological interpretation; ideology is a deformation of this reality. For example, key ideas of communism such as "proletarian revolution," "class enemies," "ideological struggle," "enemies of the people," "building communism," and others do not reflect reality." (M-A, 20)
"In this way, irrespective of the private opinions of ideologues, ideology must remain true to itself. Aristing from this, at the level of principle, in the necessity of correlating it with objective information. This, in turn, leads to dual consciousness. However, this trait is particularly inherent in the layer of the Soviet intelligentsia whose function is, on the one hand, the preparation of ideological information, and, on the other, the extraction of 'pure' information to supplement ideology." (M-A, 22)
"Ideocracy needs a mentor in ideological catechism,--the intelligentsia which simultaneously turns out to be the servitor and the victim of ideology. It is the servitor because it is precisely to it, and not to the strata of administrators, party workers, manufactures and the military, that ideology is obliged for its worldly activity. At the same time it is the material foundation of its being. It is the victim because, consciously or unconsciously, it suffers from its mercenary role and the subjection of its labors to ideological goals which deprive it of its own professional values and which subsitute for professional honest. The historian, philosopher, literateur, teacher, journalist, writer, etc...are judged not by their professional qualities but by the degree of their 'ideological function.' (M-A,23)
"The ruling party apparatus, recognizing its dependence on ideology, and through it also its dependence on the intelligentsia, watches the latter with a sleepless eye. From the start it attempts to quash any tendency toward free thought or even cultural pluralism in the intelligentsia, for this would be destructive to its monolithic nature. If a significant part of the intelligentsia considers this position of "service" to be normal and even propitious insofar as it guarantees certain privileges, then it produces a moral conflict in the other sector of the intelligentsia between its professional consciousness and human virtue and that ideological role which it is forced to play. In the main this relates to the humanitarian intelligentsia whose activity is wholly drawn into the sphere of "ideological struggle." (M-A, 23)
"This Anglo-Saxon term, which initially signified a certain sectarian alienation of the minority from the ideological 'monolith' of the majority, especially in reference to the opposition movement in the USSR, is unusually good. A. Amal'rick very accurately noted that opposition first arose among the acadmic and creative intelligentsia and that the dissident movement commenced in the form of 'cultural opposition.' The intelligentsia came out for the 'separation of ideology from culture' not in the form of some kind of public announcement or an appeal to the party, but in the form of a free creativity frequently parallel to teh activity within the framework of the system's "official culture." This was the birth of samizdat an independent, subculture in the womb of of which a social consciousness began to be formed." (M-A,24)
"Furthermore, the possibility of 'ideocracy' assures an ideological hypnotization of society, its rejection whether voluntary or forced, of consciousness. It assumes an ideological state signifies the rejection of personal values with that which is called ideology." (M-A, 25)
"In a certain sense, samizdat always existed in Russia, whether in the form of Prince Kurbskii's letters to Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the writing of archpriest Avvakum, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the unpublished letters of Chaadeaev, or, finally in the Soviet period, in the from of factional party polemics in the '20s and various works in the '30s that could not be published." (M-A, 25)
"Despite Stalinist terror, samizdat in this form was bever crushed. Even in the fiercest year, 1936-1938, there were small groups of intellectuals that passed around within the group typed literature which was forbidden or not publishable." (M-A, 25)"
"It was transformed from an incidental use of forbidden information to a form expressing social consciousness, when it began to grow into an independent area of culture that saw itself not as a corrective or a supplement to official Soviet culture but as a self-contained and singularly original sphere for the realization of society's spiritual and intellectual life." (M-A, 26)
27: Pasternak as catalyst- "With its full weight it fell upon the writer. It showed all the intellifentia what an improper interpretation of "freedom," "liberalization," and "Creative collaboration" could lead to." (M-A, 27)
"Historical foresight has chosen as the creator of samizdat as a phenomenon which arouses man's social being toward independence-a quite unexpected social champion, one quite distant from this role, a writer taken up with the inner life of the spirit, deaf to political history and a social in the whole tone of his works. Spirit stands at the cradle of Russian samizdat. With Pasternak it began as process of the creative formation of consciousness. At first it was in literature, the poetry, the arts...Then it grew into a spontaneous social process expressed in hundreds of letters, complaints, witnessing the violation of 'human rights.' Finally, it gave birth to independent political and social thought. (M-A, 28)
"The subsequent growth of a 'legal' samizdat literature revealed: letters of protest to native and foreign organizations which witness widespread violations, a whole literature that calls for a formal adherence to socialist law and, finally, the emergence of the bulletin Khronika and the Committee for for teh Defense of Human Rights in the USSR." (M-A, 31)
"The movement is characterized by an 'absence of ideals' and by empiricism: its purpose is to defend, on the basis of law, those who are under attack by the regime; and hence it can function without overly concentrating on the nature of the regime itself." (M-A, 33)
"In the role of a disseminator of samizdat, typed in six to fifteen copies on a typewriter, I have heard the following requests many times from the reader: 'Please give me one of the first copies. In five years of reading samizdat I have managed to ruin my eyesite. In the last five year an anecdote about samizdat has made the rounds: a father of a family type out Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace--a classic Russian work that may be bought cheaply in any book store. When he is asked why he is doing this he answers: ''My son is in school where they are studying War and Peace. He must read it for the course but he refuses to read anything that is not in samizdat.' This anecdote, by the way, demonstrates a growing lack of faith in the printed word in the USSR as such, no matter what is printed." (M-A, 38)
Sunday, October 30, 2011
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)
'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)
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