The Thinking Reed

The conservative official pseudoculture has many tasks, but one of the most important is constantly to neutralize true culture and render it harmless. It tries to depict every opponent, once he is dead, as its own precursor. Pushkin, Gogol, Pasternak, Tvardovsky, Vampilov — all, despite the persecution they suffered in their lifetime, became classics after their death. The same thing seems now to be happening with V. Vysotsky. When he was alive not one line of his was ever printed — except in the collection entitled Metropol', published abroad — but as soon as he died the authorities’ attitude towards him improved. True, this change was facilitated by the way his funeral turned into a mighty popular demonstration. Vysotsky had to be transformed without delay from a bard of the opposition into a ‘popular Soviet poet and songwriter’. Reaction needs geniuses, but only dead ones. Reactionaries feel easier, more comfortable with them. Where the dead are concerned, there can be no inferiority complex. Dead men do not give interviews to the foreign press or get mixed up in current political life. The Bulgarins claim the role of executors to the Pushkins:

What force is it that draws them irresistibly towards those they have killed? They take their stand in the guard of honour, their faces pious and sorrowful, their eyes bright and clear. They are sure nobody will dare to drive them away. They make better use of this death than anyone else. They get to work at once after the funeral is over. The deceased genius has to be adapted, given the required appearance. Pleasant portraits are produced, together with moving and instructive biographies. Whatever is not needed and out of place is deleted. From selected quotations, canons and dogmas are built which are as solid as prison walls.51

But on one plane they are mistaken. The essential characteristic of a genius is that he remains spiritually alive for us even after his physical death — whereas a reactionary mediocrity falls victim to oblivion while still with us. In this sense Bulgarin’s fate was tragic: he fought a notoriously hopeless battle with Pushkin, and even the genius’s death left him no choice of victory. Bulgarin was doomed: in the twentieth century who will ever read his book about Vyzhigin? But others come to take Bulgarin’s place: mediocrities just like him, while nobody has replaced Pushkin.

Is there a solution to this tragic collision? And does not history, in the end, ensure the triumph of Pushkin over Bulgarin? Granin does not put this question to us, but nobody is left with any doubt as to whose side he is on. Reaction, though, does not come from nowhere. It is based upon certain classes, on state institutions, on the bureaucracy. Consequently progress, too, can base itself not only on the abstract power of reason but also on quite real social forces. The victory of reason, said Brecht, is possible only as the victory of the rational — as the victory of the advanced classes and parties which can smash reaction.

This revolutionary force is the working masses, including the intelligentsia — masses which have acquired political (class) self-awareness. But is the intelligentsia a real force? Igor Kon, in ‘Reflections on the American Intelligentsia’, came to this conclusion, from the sociological standpoint. Kon’s article, which belongs in the context of the general theories of the Frankfurt School (he refers directly, for example, to ‘the remarkable book by Robert Wolff, Barrington Moore and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance’52), is undoubtedly related to the most interesting researches of the New Left movement. According to the German political scientist Mehnert, ‘Kon’s work is also of interest to the Western reader.’53 Such profound penetration into the heart of the problem was possible because, to a certain extent, Soviet oppositionists at the end of the 1960s were able to identify completely with the movement of the new intellectuals in the West.

Kon examines the making of a mass intelligentsia, its transformation into a ‘new working class’, and so into a mighty economic and political force: