The Thinking Reed

This is where we find the answer to the question. Theoreticians study the actual history of or the actual relations existing in other countries. The relevance to Soviet reality of their researches appears not in the garbling or mixing-up of some phenomena with others — that is done by the authors of official textbooks — not in any sort of camouflage, but merely in the choice of material. Here it is hard for the authorities to find fault with the researcher. One cannot forbid study of nineteenth-century Russian society, or Mexico in the 1960s. The censor is not himself a theoretician and cannot know beforehand what will be written. When the learned work is ready, it is not easy to cavil at it — especially as this would not be to the authorities’ advantage, for it would mean that they recognized themselves and were the first to strip off the camouflage. As a rule they do not go that far, though there have been some cases. In one way and another, the censors face a complicated task in attacking objective studies of other societies which are ‘not ours’. Thus topicality and relevance are manifested in the choice of those countries and periods in which problems similar to ours are to be found. This feature of the development of the social sciences determines also the nature of the interest taken in them. The best people are engaged, as a rule, in studying not our own country or our own period, but subjects far away in time and space. This should, at any rate, save them from the need to lie.

But the censorship remains the censorship. In these works the reader is always aware of some reticence and he pays attention not so much to what is written as to what is between the lines — what cannot be written in legal publications. He himself draws the conclusions and makes the analogies which were not possible for the author. Yet all the same something remains hidden even from him, something understated. Such books raise questions rather than answer them. Illegal material is available only to a relatively small circle of people and cannot, at least for the time being, effectively supplement the legally published literature.

Hence the special role played by art as a means of cognition and generalization. As I have already said, a work of art is less easy to censor. The specific feature of art lies precisely in the fact that its content is never on the surface: that it is not formulated but shaped. It is ‘encoded’ in artistic images. This is a law of creativity which has nothing in common with the censor’s rules, but that makes it all the easier, consciously or unconsciously, to get round those rules. The reader or the viewer draws his conclusions under the influence of the artistic whole. The censor can delete a phrase from a book about the history of the ‘Third World’, but it is much harder to correct a novel or a play. There may be nothing ‘seditious’ in any particular line. A work of art influences through its mood, its atmosphere, and here even the most skilful censor is helpless. As the saying goes, you can’t leave any words out of a song. This strange ability of some works of art to resist censorship was noticed as early as the nineteenth century. ‘La censure’, wrote Herzen, ‘est une toile d’araignée qui prend les petites mouches et que les grandes déchirent.’108

The censorship does not allow political conflicts to be directly depicted in art, but that does not mean that the artist is any the less politicized. Without wishing to, the censor does art a good service. For an idea to ‘get across’ it must be expressed in the most generalized form possible. Thoughts about society, a picture of our country’s life, must be presented to the reader as a story about one household, or to the viewer as a film about the work of one brigade. But this is a truly artistic task! The law of art proclaims that social and political conclusions have to be drawn at the level of high philosophical generalizations, for otherwise what we have is not art but, at best, illustrations to theoretical works. Well, the censor always keeps that law in mind. The state censorship has not only ruined our literature: as Sinyavsky observed, ‘up to a certain point it has also helped to make that literature more interesting.’109

We should not, however, see the censor as the artist’s friend. Bureaucratic restrictions cannot avoid constraining creative people. But the censorship is not confined to politics alone — its second level is the censorship of subjects. A former Soviet newspaper editor, L. Finkelshtein, has spoken in the West of ‘a 300-page index of banned subjects, known informally as the Talmud’.110 Glavlit takes its decisions on the basis of this list.