The Thinking Reed

From the village teacher to the philosopher, the writer, the artist, all have been broken and torn to pieces, until nothing but the name remains. The instinct of self-preservation compels the intellectual to defend himself.

Conscience does not let him cease to be himself, and so society’s observance of the contract presumes continual assaults on the intellectual, either literal or figurative, and he is forced to resist, to speak out, to reject, to refuse consent.66

The seventies brought into being new forms of cultural-political movement. Whereas in the sixties one could speak of a united anti-bureaucratic cultural front, a single stream in which the literary movement clearly played the leading role, in the seventies that unity no longer existed. This was not only because the common ideology of the ‘children of ’56’ had already passed away. Culture itself had become more diverse, had split up into many different streams, running in different directions, clashing with each other. In the last analysis it was only in the seventies that one would say that a real cultural pluralism had come to birth. The crisis of the cultural movement of the sixties, its break-up, was in itself, perhaps, a step back in the political sense, but it also opened up new historical prospects before the Soviet intelligentsia.

The pressure from above — what Kon calls the intellectual terror — caused a blossoming of illegal literature. Besides samizdat, many Russian publications appeared abroad. Those who remained loyal to the hopes of 1956 and unwilling to adapt themselves to the new period were pushed aside, but at the same time they broke with the system. This was a tremendous step forward on the spiritual plane. Henceforth there began to take shape, alongside the opposition within the system which had predominated in the sixties, a new opposition to the system. The dissident movement emerged.

‘Since the late sixties’, write Bence and Kis (they also write under the pseudonym Rakovski),

official culture has ceased to retain its monopoly in Eastern Europe. In some of these countries the non-official forms of communication have become customary, and in others, efforts have been made towards the same end. Works banned by the censor and works that had never been submitted to the state-controlled publishers began to circulate. This literature in some countries creates a whole system of non-official communication, a parallel culture; bulky volumes and periodicals appear, disputes flare up, different ideological tendencies become crystallized. Political ideologies, practical programmes and tactical conceptions are formulated and sometimes even political movements — though embryonic — are born.67