The Thinking Reed

Of course, a certain section of the public — the one which is delighted with commercial art — is angry with the new analytical works, especially when some productions connected in this spirit find their way on to the cinema or television screen. ‘What does it matter that now I know all this?’ we read in one viewer’s letter. ‘I personally can’t do anything about it, but, with such films, life gets very depressing. We have enough of these “serious problems” in real life, and yet here they are again, on TV.’23 But what matters is that more and more people are becoming aware that changes are not only necessary but possible — that we can no longer put up with what is going on around us. And the new art is playing no small part in forming the new mood in society.

Art, wrote the well-known commentator A. Vaksberg, replying to viewers’ letters,

fulfils its great mission only when it addresses itself to the complex problems of its time in all their depth and variety. Not because it can solve these problems, if we understand that in too utilitarian, administrative-departmental a sense.24

Nevertheless, in its own way it does solve them, ‘by forming public opinion, drawing attention not only to the event but to the phenomenon, examining it in the way that only art can’.25 Let us not entertain any illusions. Public opinion by itself cannot alter the nature of society, but the fact that it exists is significant. It bears witness that there are in our country healthy forces which are capable of fighting for a new life.

Art cannot provide answers to the questions of theory, cannot even formulate them as such. It transforms them into moral questions, creates a new psychological atmosphere, and in a certain sense also a new type of intellectual who is able to solve these problems, to contribute to an intellectual rebirth after a quarter-century of Stalinism.

Philosophical Trends

However, one important consequence of the break-up of the united cultural front was theory’s emergence into the foreground. We saw that at the beginning of the sixties fresh ideas were first proclaimed by writers and later taken up by theoreticians. The articles by Lakshin and Karyakin came after, not before, Solzhenitsyn’s book. After the united front ceased to exist several ideological tendencies started to take shape, and each of these sought to create its own theory. In this situation it was general philosophical ideas that began to determine the way art developed, not the other way round.

Doubts were sometimes voiced in samizdat writings as to whether there was any philosophy at all in the USSR. In Poiski the democratic socialist P. Tamarin complained:

Dystrophy of the soul became a universal phenomenon among us. The entire social organism was affected by it, every sphere of public activity. The sphere most sensitive, most predisposed to dystrophy was that of the humanities.26

And especially, according to Tamarin, philosophy. A certain kind of ‘samizdat patriotism’ is apparent here, for it turns out that for him only in the underground is creative thought alive among us. I beg to differ with Comrade Tamarin: all the most important phenomena in samizdat, including the journal Poiski, were engendered by processes that began in the legal culture. This does not mean, of course, that everything there is plain sailing. Philosophy does indeed encounter serious difficulties in the USSR.

In our country one can only be a Marxist philosopher, but it is hard even to be that, since every new idea is liable to be denounced as ‘revisionism’. ‘Scientific discussion,’ wrote P. Egides,