The role of the writer in the communist regimes

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THE INTELLECTUAL

“The intellectual history of our century might almost be written as a study of what has been achieved by all the imaginative writers, philosophers, social theorists, and scholars violently uprooted from their homelands in Eastern and Central Europe and transplanted, as a rich and exotic new stock, in the West.”15
What needs to be clarified first is the main character in this study: the intellectual. The concept is undoubtedly an ideological construct. Numerous studies have been dedicated to this concept over the last century, most of them, naturally, from the perspective of the sociology of culture. Alexander Gella’s 1976 edited volume — The Intelligentsia and the Intellectuals. Theory, Method and Case Study — gathers together scholarly work on the marked distinctions between the image of the intellectual in East-Central Europe (for whom the term ‘intelligentsia’ is used) and in Western Europe. Another cooperative effort, the volume edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, Towards a History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe: Theoretical Reflections (2002) helps to clarify the status of the intellectual in the area, based on historical considerations. Finally, Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu’s study Intellectuals in the Field of Power. Social Morphologies and Trajectories (2007)16 gives a sociological overview of the changing role of the intellectuals in communist Romania and Germany. The importance of the intellectual has been noted by A. B. Wachtel:
“[I]n the highly litero-centric societies of Eastern Europe, writers and their fate were generally recognized to be of central symbolic value.”17 Edward Said also notes the representative 15 Robert Alter, ‘Milosz: Poetry and Politics,’ Commentary 75 (April 1983), 41.
Chronologically, the figure of the East-Central European intellectual in the second half of the 20th century evolved from the ‘engineer of souls’ of the early years, while the Communist Party was still trying to attract intellectuals and use their works to its advantage, to the dissident of the later years, who was constantly under suspicion from the party and was overwhelmed by an ever-increasing feeling of helplessness. This evolution is visible both in Milosz’s, Kundera’s and Manea’s texts relating their personal experience of life under communism directly (discussed in the third chapter here), and in their fictional creations, often based on biographical and autobiographical accounts, as detailed in the fourth chapter.
This introductory chapter of our study offers an outline of the differences in scope for the term in the region where Milosz, Kundera and Manea built their literary careers. After comparing the different roles assigned to intellectuals in France and East- Central Europe (later to be referred to as ‘the Soviet Bloc’), the study identifies specialization as specific to Western intellectuals, while difficult and sometimes undesirable under communism. This (lack of) specialization has a definite impact on the kind of reception East- Central European writers had at home (where they were expected to offer their input under the guise of ‘fiction’) and in the West. On the whole, this chapter outlines a generic image of the intellectual in East-Central Europe, an image that will be brought into relief in the second chapter of this thesis, with the case studies of the three authors as real, flesh-and-blood
instances of the theoretical model.

The role of the intellectual

Most scholars focus on the end of the 19th century as the moment when the concept of ‘intellectual’ came to be used consistently (although, as Arthur Koestler notices, the social involvement of the Encyclopedists made them “the first modern intellectuals”19). From the very beginning, a clear split emerges between the term ‘intelligentsia’, as used in Russia and Eastern Europe beginning with the 19th century20 and the term ‘intellectual’ as first used in France during the Dreyfus affair.
In France, the Dreyfus affair triggered both (self)definitions on the part of intellectuals and violent accusations against this newly identified category. In this ideological war, intellectuals were accused of being voices without a mandate, of embodying the death of instinct, in “a reaction against tradition, with its faith in science and progress, and its intellectual cosmopolitanism.”21 They were also accused of seeing themselves as the new spiritual guides for humanity, or of being the enemies of the national ‘soul,’ as they insisted on “teaching an ‘absolute truth’ instead of teaching piously the ‘French truth.’”22 From this point on, as Victor Brombert has noticed, “the French concept of the intellectual […] remains bound up with the notion of a social, political and moral crisis. Better still, it implies the notion of a permanent state of crisis. Given this sense of crisis, the intellectual considers it his obligation to intervene,”23 to be socially involved, and this distinguishes the French intellectual from other intellectuals in the Western world.

INTRODUCTION 
1. THE INTELLECTUAL
1.1 The role of the intellectual
1.2 Specialization
1.3 The role of the writer in the communist regimes
1.4 Three case studies: Czeslaw Milosz, Milan Kundera, and Norman Manea
2. CONTEXT 
2.1 Geography
2.2 History
2.3 Politics
2.4 Language
2.5 Literature
2.6 At home
2.7 In the West
3. TEXT: The Need to Testify 
3.1 Cultural geography
Milan Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’
3.2 The burden of history
Czeslaw Milosz, Child of Europe
3.3 A wariness of politics
Norman Manea, The Eastern Messenger
3.4 Language as home
Norman Manea, The Snail’s House
The Nomad Text
3.5 Literature as lingua franca
Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
Testaments Betrayed
The Curtain
Norman Manea, Envelopes and Portraits
Black Milk
3.6 Traps for the writer at home
Norman Manea, On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist
3.7 Traps for the dissident in the West
Czeslaw Milosz, Visions of San Francisco Bay
4. TEXT: From memory to fiction and back 
4.1 Czeslaw Milosz, the self-effacing witness
4.2 Milan Kundera, the story-teller
4.3 Norman Manea’s literature as therapy
4.4 The search for authenticity in fiction
CONCLUSIONS
APPENDIX
Norman Manea 255
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Exorcising communism Three case studies: Czeslaw Milosz, Milan Kundera, Norman Manea