The Thinking Reed

may crush men physically, it can thrust them into outer darkness where they are unable to do their work, it can silence them, and it can corrupt them, it can rule its society with the aid of the police and the army; but it cannot destroy the intellectual tradition unless it also annihilates those who bear it. Modern tyrannies have never succeeded in doing this — though they have exiled many and sent many others to concentration camps.

As long as totalitarian regimes allow creative personalities who have had contact with the great intellectual traditions to work in libraries and laboratories, to have pupils, and to be in touch with each other through their published writings and through conversation, the continuity and growth of intellectual traditions are not seriously in danger. Somehow the mind finds its way and the stream flows onward.85

In fact, although the repression was very severe, not all bearers of the tradition were exterminated and many continued to work. Although they, too, often had to include in their books some absurd passages in praise of ‘Comrade Stalin’, the Party and the government; although they, too, had to participate in the universal hypocrisy; although they, too, despite that, suffered persecution as ‘cosmopolitans’, ‘bourgeois scholars’, and so forth, they nevertheless went on contributing to culture. The most important thing was that they had pupils. Many of them were no longer able to do anything important themselves, but they passed on the tradition, their way of thinking, the European type of education. And that was very important.

One of these figures who probably linked together the old and the new intelligentsias in Russia was M.M. Bakhtin, the literary critic, culturologist and philosopher. Although he began his work in the twenties it was only in the seventies that he became widely popular. Bakhtin was persecuted for a long time; many of his works remained unpublished for decades, and some he published under other people’s names. But not long before he died his books began to be published and his name became fashionable. People learnt from Bakhtin and he became the founder of a whole school of culturology and literary criticism. He passed on his humanist and democratic ideal to members of the new intelligentsia and gave them a lesson in original, non-standardized, undogmatic thinking.

Besides this there exists and cannot be destroyed the objective bearer of the tradition — the great Russian literature of the nineteenth century. This determined, and will go on determining, the cultural orientations of the Russian intelligentsia. It must not be forgotten that the categorial apparatus of Russian literature — its elements, its language — are European. That Russian literature is distinctive is beyond dispute, but this is a distinctiveness within the framework of a common cultural archetype, like the distinctiveness of English, French or Spanish literature. In philosophy and art every new generation, as Marx and Engels themselves remarked, has to use the material bequeathed by its predecessors. Whatever efforts have sometimes been made to separate Russian literature of the Petersburg period from Soviet literature, and counterpose the one to the other, this is objectively impossible.