The Thinking Reed

This means that both democracy in production and political rights are needed. ‘Paramount attention must be accorded’ to increasing social and political liberties.144 But this signifies not only the victory of workers’ self-management over bureaucratic tyranny, but also the triumph of culture over barbarism. Without culture there can be no lasting democracy. Without democracy culture cannot triumph. Nowhere and never were Engels’s words so true as in Russia: ‘Each step forward in civilization was a step towards freedom.’145

Notes

Conclusion

‘Artistic production (and intellectual production in general) cannot be normalized, but one might well wonder whether any creative project isn’t necessarily but unwittingly normative’1. So wrote Régis Debray in his book on cultural problems in France. In short, his view is that although creative work cannot endure external control, it is itself fraught with the danger of authoritarianism: the creative personality who possesses new ideas is inclined to impose them on others. Debray’s ideas, often formulated in the style of Pascal’s aphorisms, must bewilder anyone brought up in the traditions of Russian culture. A genuine ‘creative project’ cannot be authoritarian because the artist or the scholar, unlike the engineer, does not carry out a project conceived in advance, but pursues a quest. The creative personality does not know exactly, beforehand, what it is he or she will create. What Debray calls a ‘project’ is merely the direction or the object of the quest. The ‘project’ acquires some definite outlines in the process of creation. Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky, nor Lenin, nor Solzhenitsyn carried out a ‘realized project’. In the creative process project and realization are not ‘two’ stages, they are one. Moreover, the ‘realized project’ does not precede creation, it can be seen clearly only ex post facto, so that it is not so much the departure point of the creative process as its culmination. After he had written Anna Karenina, Tolstoy understood what he had wanted to write this novel about. It may be that in the creative consciousness of a rational Frenchman everything happens somewhat otherwise than in our Russian heads, but there can be no doubt that any ‘normative’ project finds itself overtaken by the spontaneity, unpredictability and dialogicality of the creative process.

These thoughts about Debray are brought in here not so as to mention yet another foreign name, but in order to emphasize that art, science — everything that we mean by ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ — are indissolubly connected with freedom. Nowhere and never have such efforts been made by a government to create an unfree culture as in Russia, but our country’s experience has proved that this is impossible. In the course of cultural history any normative restrictions, internal and external alike, are overcome by the development of creative thought.

The history of the cultural-political struggle in our country, the history of the Soviet intelligentsia’s cognition of its society and its role therein, has not yet been written. These essays cannot give a complete idea of the full richness of this many-sided and complex process. Outside the limits of my work lie a great deal of illegal literature, the problems of the non-Russian national cultures, and much else.

Nevertheless, some conclusions can be drawn. Despite all the negative consequences of the breakdown of the united cultural front of the sixties, the delimitation between different tendencies and schools can be seen as extremely positive and valuable. It was in the seventies, which seemed to be a period of spiritual crisis and stagnation of thought, that the cultural and political pluralism necessary for any progress towards a democratic society came about. In comparison even with Khrushchev’s time, that was a big step forward.

Undoubtedly much, also, was lost, but one ought not to exaggerate the importance of those losses. Many liberals of the sixties became officials in the cultural sphere, but that should not surprise us. What is very much more important is that a significant section of those who came to the forefront during the ‘thaw’ remained loyal to their ideals. The epoch which began after 1968 was for our intelligentsia, on the whole, a time of disenchantment with socialism, like that which came upon the contributors to Vekhi after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution. But it became apparent that the ideology of disenchantment was unproductive — or, more precisely, that it could not provide concrete answers to the burning questions of social development. At the same time, a demand for practical conclusions and realistic solutions increased, along with the deepening of the statocracy’s crisis.