2. plesu a 1995 intellectual life under dictatorship english

Intellectual Life Under DictatorshipAuthor(s): Andrei PlesuSource: Representations, No. 49, Special Issue: Identifying Histories: Eastern Europe Beforeand After 1989 (Winter, 1995), pp. 61-71Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928749 .Accessed: 02/03/2014 09:09

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ANDRE I PLESU

Intellectual Life Under Dictatorship

IN 1 99 2, toward the end of the six months we spent together at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, Bruce Ackerman, professor of law at Yale University, asked me, with a sort of innocent perplexity, how I had survived intellectually in a Communist country, during forty-five years of a totalitarian regime. The question was only the surface effect of deeper and more nuanced perplexities. It opened a large field of other subjacent questions, some springing from the legitimate astonishment of common sense, others from an inevitable unfamiliarity with the type of society born in Eastern Europe, under Russian occupation, after the Second World War. Bruce wanted to know how it had been possible to reconcile the constitutive freedom of the spirit with the aggressiveness of an inflexible ideology, how somebody could become a competitive intellectual within a context which resystematized the whole culture of the world according to the criterion of class struggle, and which proposed taboos rather than models; in other words, he wanted to know how one could function normally in a rigor- ously abnormal environment like the one of Communist dictatorship. To a certain extent Bruce's question flattered me. It meant that I hadn't met his gloomy expec- tations: I was not inarticulate, I had read other writers besides Marx and Engels, I was perhaps more cosmopolitan than narrowly tribal, I could be accepted as a plausible partner in discussion.

I must confess that I myself share Bruce's perplexity. If anything, my perplexity increases when, beyond the individual case, we take into consideration the global performance of Eastern Europe. How can one explain-against the back- ground of Stalinist censorship, the Gulag, incessant authoritarian surveillance- Russian films, Russian music, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Vasily Gross- mann, or Andrey Platonov? How can one explain the Czech films of the sixties, the Hungarian films of the seventies, Roman Polanski, Milog Forman, or Andrzej Wajda, Polish mathematics or, if I may add, Romanian poetry? And, in general, how is it possible for a hyperideological teaching system and a cultural space whose axis is interdiction to produce, not always, but more often than expected, human types that, once outside of the system, make a more than honorable impression? Here I will only be able to briefly sketch an answer, a collection of suggestions which can open discussion but not settle it.

A way of dispatching the problem would be to declare-as my philosophy

REPRESENTATIONS 49 * Winter 1995 (? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 61


professor Constantin Noica, to whom I shall return later, used to do-that "for intellectual life bad conditions are good and good conditions are bad." This was an apparently cynical declaration that was intended, in fact, to prepare us men- tally for the maximum valorization of the minimal and to prevent the mental paralysis which the poverty of current means and the diirftige Zeit could have provoked. The East German writer Stefan Heym similarly refers to the potentially challenging effect of negative conditions when he says: "As a writer in the West you can write practically anything you like, it doesn't make any difference, nobody gives a damn. Of course, your work is being read, people may be enter- tained by it, but it has very little political effect. In this part of the world it is entirely different. The writer has more weight; that is why you have censorship, because his word counts and because politicians must take what he writes seri- ously. Therefore it is much more fun to work in this so-called socialist part of the world."'

From my point of view, Stefan Heym's tone is too casual, and his statements have a contestable linearity. Taking one of Jacques Rupnik's commentaries as a starting point, we could ask ourselves if "it is because the writer's word has more weight that we have censorship or if it is censorship that gives the writer's word more weight."2 And then, battles with censorship have not always been "fun." Nevertheless it is clear that many of the various limits imposed by the totalitarian state were converted into combustion. The existence of censorship led to the elab- oration of ingenious subtexts, allusions, and camouflage, techniques practiced with great virtuosity by writers and assimilated promptly by the mass of readers. The obstacles-the interdiction against a number of ideas and methods characteristic of the spirit of the age (such as structuralism or psychoanalysis), labelled by Marxist criticism as "formalistic," "reactionary," and "bourgeois"-intensified intellectual curiosity and gave the more or less conspiratorial "transgressions" the prestige of political risk, the charm of unconventional options. To be a structuralist became exciting, to be a crypto-structuralist-that is, to sneak in between the lines principles and procedures of a structuralist type-became romantic. What in a normal country is read naturally or with bureaucratic diligence is read in a totalitarian country with a passion as intense and as transfiguring as it is ineffec- tual. For the East European intellectual, says Gabriel Liiceanu, one of the most remarkable representatives of this category, culture is not "the natural rhythm of spiritual breathing" but "stolen oxygen," "clandestinely deposited," "a variant of survival."3 Loaded with such connotations, intellectual life under dictatorship has a dramatic, fiery aspect, capable of mobilizing the whole being of its protagonists, their ultimate resources. The need for culture is not nourished, in these circumstances, only by gratuitous tastes or by the disinterested vertigo of knowledge and creativity. The need for culture springs from a primary instinct for survival and, at the same time, from the exigency of individual "salvation" in an environment interested only in collectivistic solutions. One might suppose that this exigency

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could only exist within the small circle of an elite. In fact, it comprised, strangely enough, large social groups: people used to standing in line as patiently for books as they did for food; Plato and Martin Heidegger were sold in tens of thousands of copies, and when they very quickly went out of print they were sold on the black market together with butter, flour, and meat. It is, of course, hardly prob- able that there were forty-two thousand Heideggerians in Romania (that was the print run of Holzwege). The phenomenon indicates rather a certain fetishization of books and culture in general, an intellectual emulation provoked by the allure of clandestinity.

So, we can say that intellectual life under dictatorship is possible, paradoxically, because it is potentially impossible. In other words, the reduced possibility of a normal intellectual life enables its irruptive force, its capacity to profit from all the cracks of the system, to be enormous.

A second set of considerations should take us very far, to the nebulous problem of evil. Those who have undergone the experience of an immanent evil (war, life-threatening illness, different variants of carceral universes) know that even in its most barbarous embodiments, evil cannot have a homogenous texture and be perfectly compact. Ontologically-and theologically-evil is imperfect, which means it always leaves a "space for play," a chance for maneuvering, to those under its influence. Even the worst of all worlds is-I would say-cosmotic; that is, it illustrates an order within which all the ingredients of the normal world are present. Any world has the attributes of totality. Within this totality there naturally appear infinite variants of dosage, but the important thing is that the "recipe" is complete: only the proportion, the internal distribution of quantities, is wrong. If the Communist world had been a world of consistent evil, the numerous mechanisms of survival concretized in scientific and artistic performances like those mentioned above never would have occurred within its bounds.

When we talk of intellectual life under dictatorship, we must therefore avoid excesses of the geometric spirit, apocalyptic simplifications, sentimental fusses. The idea-widespread in the West and even today affecting the image of East European countries-that under dictatorship people thought only in terms of dialectical materialism, painted only portraits of homage to those in power, com- posed only propagandistic odes and wrote only socialist realist novels and poems corresponds only to some episodes in the history of Eastern Europe and, even then, only to the official stratum of these episodes. Under Communism-as on the front or in prisons-there is also, concomitant with the horror, the experience of love, of hope, and of free reflection. There is also humor, a specific humor which itself has become "a survival mechanism." "The Captive Mind"-to recall Czeslaw Milosz's formula from 1952-is still a mind and not necessarily a stupid one. The prison diary of Nicolae Steinhardt-one of the most remarkable and fascinating Romanian writers-is called Jurnalul fericirii (Diary of happiness). Naturally the happiness possible in prison is different from pastoral happiness,

Intellectual Life Under Dictatorship 63


but it is still a species of happiness, simultaneous and, at times, consubstantial with the tragedy of circumstances. When I say this I do not want to minimize in any way the atrocities of the totalitarian Communist regime, to absolve dictatorship of its essential inhumanity. I don't claim that evil is good but merely that it is, as I already said, imperfect-and that an earthly inferno without horizon is as improbable as an earthly paradise without blemish.

I would like to add that the imperfection of evil is also the strictly necessary condition for the adaptation to evil, with its unavoidable benefits and risks. Intel- lectual life under dictatorship was also possible because, in one way or another, intellectuals had adapted themselves to the conditions of dictatorship. The pros- pect of a change of regime seemed-to the last minute-almost nonexistent. Con- sequently, we were all prepared for a long race, practically an endless one. Resignation, sublimation of dissatisfactions, conjunctural cunning, melancholy, and humor-these were the props of our survival. Mihai Botez, who in 1988 became a political refugee in the United States (today he is Romania's ambassador to the United States), offered a clear summary of the situation:

It is sometimes said that an intellectual living under a Communist regime must always choose between being a courtier or a dissident. This is an excessive simplification. Accepting the Communist social contract does not automatically mean becoming a courtier-many East European technocrats and even some culturocrats prove it. Because there is a sad but true "art of survival"-even a dignified one, I would add-under Communist dictatorship, combining calculated submission, self-limited criticism, tactical keeping of a low profile and intelligent usage of opportunities. Of course, for many Western intellectuals, such strategies seem strange if not disgusting. In principle I am ready to agree with them, adding my sad wish that they will never be compelled to learn such an art.4

An insufficiently analyzed aspect of the imperfect-evil characteristic of dictatorship is the component of arbitrariness. As a rule, we associate dictatorships with an atmosphere of hysterical necessity, of absolute rigor. In fact, Communist dictatorships, especially, distinguish themselves by the surprising interstices in which rules are suspended. The law can suddenly become lax for no apparent reason. Whether the result of a whim of the leadership, internal conflicts at the top or political strategies which are obscure to the common mortal, the infringe- ment of the totalitarian norm plays an important part in the configuration of intellectual life under dictatorship. At first glance, arbitrariness seems only to weaken the functional network of power. Actually, it consolidates it, adding a confusing coefficient of unpredictability. This is the case, for instance, of such and such a dissident whose phone calls with friends are interrupted, while at the same time he is allowed to give long interviews, also by phone, to "hostile" radio stations, like Radio Free Europe or the Voice of America. Or, in a country of militant atheism, a certain poet is allowed to publish a volume of religious poetry. According to the same "strategy," in a country with one of the toughest political

64 REPRESENTATIONS


police forces, a novel full of passages which are transparently critical of the Secur- itate can appear, to everybody's amazement. Such exceptions succeed in main- taining, on the cultural scene, an atmosphere of confusion and insecurity very valuable to the nomenklatura. In any case, this strange mixture of intransigence and chaos, of rigidity and dissolution, was characteristic of East European and especially Southeast European Communism.

And yet how can one explain-although in a dictatorship not everything can be reasonably explained-the deviations from the rule of absolute authoritari- anism to which we refer? How does the moment of arbitrariness appear in a world saturated by normative abuse? To the extent that we can explain this, we need a few historical elements.

The evolution of Romanian Communism, like the evolution, with specific nuances, of the entire East European political bloc, passed through a few stages, in the course of which there were fractures with radical consequences on the cultural plane. Nicolae Ceausescu, who came into power in the mid-sixties, decided to suspend the Soviet model and clamorously adopted his own. The brutal Russification of the first Communist period (in which the only ideological landmark was Andrei Zhdanov)5 was followed by its opposite, a form of nationalism which brought about total changes in the criteria of censorship: the local tradition, particularly the one labelled "progressive," became more important than any borrowed philosophy and, at the extreme, than Marxism itself. History was again rewritten (for the umpteenth time) in order to create, for the system and for the leader, an autochthonous millenary legitimacy, a noble and ancient pedigree. Authors forbidden in the fifties were rehabilitated in the sixties, and intellectuals who had been in prison until 1964 reentered public life, so that the contours of intellectual and academic life underwent massive restructuring. The taboos changed: the sacred cows were no longer the Soviets and the Marxist- Leninist classics but the fatherland and the president. Whereas the Soviets had enjoined the translation of Immanuel Kant, of Sigmund Freud, and of Gottlob Frege, the fatherland and the president no longer cared about such marginal heresies. The intellectuals now had the right to play their little games with glass beads as long as they did not endanger, by gesture or express declaration, the advance of "multilaterally developed socialism."

After 1971, a new re-Stalinization took place, but it was an "original," "patriotic" re-Stalinization, organized around an autochthonous megalomania. The ideological liberalization at the end of the sixties continued, therefore, to have surprising effects. Besides the authors mentioned above, George Berkeley, Friedrich Schelling, Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper (of course, not The Open Society but Logik der Forschung), and others were translated. What could be translated could also be taught in universities and quoted in scientific articles and even in the current press. The essential patristic texts appeared, too, albeit in confidential editions and at prohibitive prices, at the Biblical Institute in Bucharest. The func-



tion and the functioning of censorship were modified. And this happened not only in Romania but in all European Communist countries. This is the way Gyorgy Konrad describes the process: "Under Stalin, censorship was both posi- tive and aggressive. Nowadays it is negative and defensive. Before, it used to tell you what to say. Now it advises you what not to say." "In the same way," Jacques Rupnik adds, "the transition has been made from mass terror into 'civilized vio- lence'; totalitarianisms now prefer internalized self-censorship to institutional- ized censorship."6

But this reformulation of the aims and strategies of power does not always explain the note of arbitrariness, at the same time confusing and redemptive, present in the "recipe" of dictatorship. Sometimes the pure ignorance of those who were responsible for ideology played a part. When, at the beginning of the eighties, Mircea Eliade's book Aspects du myth came out from one of the Bucharest publishing houses, the minister of culture at that time, informed by a well-wisher about the ideological nonconformity of the text, asked that the author be imme- diately brought before him, together with the Party secretary of the institution where he worked. A new saying began to circulate then among writers that it was not the minister of culture that had to be feared but the culture of the minister. But besides ignorance, the cunning of the culturniks was also to be feared. Let's take the case of a novel, which, although it referred disparagingly to the political police, was still published and distributed. Such a novel thus became evidence against the claims of foreign public opinion and Romanian dissidents, proving the nonexistence of censorship and the liberalism of the government. On the other hand, an atmosphere of suspicion would start to surround its author. Other writers, from whose works far more innocent pages had been suppressed, could not understand how the harsh "sincerities" of their colleague had been accepted. They would suspect a dark, treacherous deal, a secret concession, a betrayal. A useful nucleus of discord was thus ensured by the maneuver. And if somebody started asking uncomfortable questions regarding the excesses of the police which the novel presented, the answer was ready-made: actually the novel referred to the fifties, to pre-Ceausestic Stalinism or to its accidental survival.

At other times, the appearance of a "courageous" text could be explained by a passing access of magnanimity on the part of a higher "activist." Flattered by his own well-disposed attitude toward "artists," he anesthetized his conscience by adding a good deed to the countless miseries for which he was responsible at every moment. There is also the case in which a book or an author was suddenly allowed to be published simply because the personal agent of the interdiction disappeared. Heidegger could finally be published only when one of the strictest guards of ideological purity unexpectedly defected and became a professor of Marxist aesthetics in the West.

This is how complicated the "archaeology" of arbitrariness could be. It was sometimes a staged arbitrariness, an arbitrary disguise for occult maneuvers, but

66 REPRESENTATIONS


at other times it was pure arbitrariness, resulting from the taste of the Balkans for approximation and the beau geste.

The technique of intellectual survival under dictatorship was not only a technique of making the best of precarious means, the imperfections of evil, and the meanderings of arbitrariness. It also relied on a well-conducted exercise of marginality. We usually forget that all Communist countries, except Russia and China, were small countries, inevitably marked by the obsession of isolation, distance from the "center," historical insignificance. "The pride of a person born within a small culture is always hurt," says E. M. Cioran in a book published before he left for France.7 This pride, which often takes the form of an inferiority complex, favors, on the one hand, a masochistic tendency to self-annulment, to resignation before what is felt to be an irreparable historical inequity; on the other, a compensating sense of performance, of self-assertion in spite of unfavorable conditions. The intellectual belonging to a small culture always behaves demon- stratively: he must show that he is the equal of his colleagues belonging to big cultures, that he has kept abreast of the latest idea in fashion, that he is not deformed by provincial vices. His diligence is the diligence of exasperation, his ambitions are as great as his incurable frustrations. Such an intellectual never represents only himself. He has the fixed idea that he represents his country, that he is responsible for the image the culture of his people will have through him in the eyes of the world. Convinced that he is the spokesman of a community which has the misfortune to be badly placed geographically and spiritually, the intellectual we have in mind will mobilize his efforts in order to prove his ability to com- pete, irrespective of the disadvantages of his start. Consequently, the "normality" of his work can be explained by his very effort to camouflage the abnormality of marginality, the precariousness of his training and tools from back home.

A passage from Mircea Eliade's diary illustrates the point. When asked by a French scholar how he always succeeded in giving the impression of exhaustive documentation in his work, he answered: "Since I belong to a minor culture in which dilettantism and improvisation are almost fatal, I entered scholarly life full of complexes, permanently terrified at the thought that I do not dispose of 'up- to-date' information. This has always prevented me from sending a manuscript to be printed before being sure I had read almost everything that had been written on the subject."8 The fear of "discovering" things that are well known, of repeating remarks of others, and, especially, of ignoring a fundamental docu- ment, nonexistent in Romanian libraries, are decisive motivations for the diligence and precision of intellectuals formed, like Eliade, at the outskirts of great empires.

What we should keep in mind, then, is that the relatively normal functioning of intellectual life under the conditions of marginality imposed by Communist



dictatorship drew on an experience of marginality which, in the case of small countries, did not depend on but existed prior to Communism. Anyway, from this sui generis combination of two types of marginality, a species of intellectual resulted who, in Western societies, had long ago gone out of date and who, prob- ably, is going to disappear from Eastern Europe before long. I would call him "the nonprofit intellectual," an intellectual who does his work with no external motivation, with no palpable finality. He does not delimit his vocation according to the priorities of the moment, he does not regulate his efforts under the pres- sure of fixed appointment schedules, and he does not formulate questions so that they guarantee generous sponsorship. Under the hallucinatory influence of pure speculation, freed from the obsession of being competitive and from the mechan- ical rhythm of academic promotion, this kind of researcher does not integrate easily into institutional life. He is his own institution. At worst, he loses himself in brilliant oratorical performances and runs the risk of becoming a picturesque failure. But if he succeeds, his success is the success of free investigation, of the unconventional approach, of the unforeseen. The intellectual I have in mind does not have any inhibitions about the borders between disciplines. Since he has learned to survive without official support, he does not feel responsible to external authorities; he feels justified by his endowments and his efficiency and does not have to account for his "originality." He is an economist, but he is interested in Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein; he is a classical scholar but also studies the market economy in post-Communist countries; he is a physicist intensely concerned with mystical literature. He has one criterion and one motive only: curiosity, the curiositas that Cicero considered to be the source of disinterested knowledge, nulla utilitate obiecta. Today's scholar runs the risk of being learned without being curious anymore. The nonprofit scholar is more faithful to the Socratic tradition for which the question is more consistent than the answer, the way more certain than the end.

The invocation of Socrates in a discussion about intellectual survival under dictatorship is significant. Where written culture is a difficult enterprise, orality has an essential part to play: it acquires enormous importance as a privileged medium of freedom, of uncensored communication. In the same way, where the official educational system is subjected to dehumanizing ideology, the identi- fication of an autonomous didact, of a master outside the system, is essential. Meetings in small groups in caf6s, parks, or the homes of friends become the surrogate-tolerated up to a certain point-of institutional academic life. An unconventional history of the spirit would include, from the former Communist countries, a gallery of the champions of orality, with no other work than the eva- nescent one of conversation, of improvisation, of retort. According to the current criteria of a university career, it would be a gallery of failures. In fact, talk was a depository of the vitality of local cultures, the foundation of their continuity. It seems to me that particularly in Romania, the euphoria of orality explains the

68 REPRESENTATIONS


absence of "drawer-literature" or of samizdat. Everything was consumed in the discreet "agora" of dialogue, of the unrecorded word, of volatility.

Ironically, the political prison, too, was a dramatic space for inspiriting oral exercise. In cells with many prisoners, whenever the imposed "program" allowed it, lectures and discussions of all sorts took place; memory was refreshed collec- tively, through stories, recitals, and prayers. Orality became, under these conditions, an acrobatic form of spiritual survival, a rigorous mental discipline which in turn produced a whole generation of "professionals." A huge inventory of anecdotes was born, ranging stylistically somewhere between the wise paradoxes of Zen Buddhism, Hassidic-type stories, and apothegms of the Desert Fathers from the first Christian centuries. History had created a variant of prison which freed you from history, from its conjectural determinations. In such a prison, intellectual life could only unfold outside any reasonable motivation, feeding on its own substance. Once, for instance, a prisoner, an impassioned philosopher, was heard explaining to a stupefied ploughman, his cellmate, the difference between KarlJaspers and Heidegger. "What nonsense," his friends told him later, "to deal with these subtleties in front of such an inadequate audience." "This difference had to be drawn once and for all," answered the philosopher. The episode reminds me of a passage in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister in which a group of strolling players gives a show, which had been announced, and nobody watches it. It's a perfect parable of intellectual life under dictatorship, because the only reason to concern oneself with culture, to do culture within a totalitarian system, is that it must be done, regardless of audience, circumstances, outcome. The risk is, of course, a drastic decontextualization, an atrophy of the need for public engagement. But without assuming such a risk, survival is impossible.

Consequently, as was to be expected, the model of prisons extended all over the large prison which any dictatorship is. And I would like to add that most representative intellectuals of my generation were the product of "formative" stages spent near some former prisoners. Pardoned after 1964, they had the opportunity to become the transmitters of a tradition of intellectual normality which the current environment had lost.

Educated before the Second World War, in a democratic Romania with good schools and good teachers who had studied at great European universities-a Romania which made the appearance of a Constantin Brancusi, a Tristan Tzara, and later the triad of Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco, and E. M. Cioran possible- these former political prisoners were, for us, a guarantee of continuity. The world around us was talking only about fracture, about "the new" that must do away with "the old," about "the bright future" of Communism. We felt all the more a need for legitimacy which only contact with the previous generation could give us. We needed to feel, therapeutically, that although we were in a wasteland, we were not feeble creatures living in a desert. And this feeling was consolidated by the pedagogical presence of those who had been in prison.



For me-and for many others-the providential prisoner was Constantin Noica. A schoolfellow and friend of Eliade, Ionesco, and Cioran, he chose not to emigrate-which for him meant nine years of house arrest and six of prison, following a political trial at which he was accused, among other people, of urging young people to forge their identity papers. (The evidence presented was a com- mentary on "identity" beginning with Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit.) When I met him, he was old and euphoric. He had somehow managed to harmoniously integrate the episode of detention, claiming that his arrest had happened at the right time, when his own ideas had entered a vicious circle and needed a vital infusion-no matter how dramatic. (For such declarations Cioran had character- ized him, in one of his volumes, as "camouflaged in the face of evil," guilty of having adopted, right in the middle of the inferno, "touristic" behavior.) In 1975, in order to avoid the harassment of the capital, Noica returned to an atmosphere of seclusion by isolating himself in a small mountain resort (Paltinis), "four thousand feet above mankind," as he liked to say. There he had a room of eight square meters in an old hut, heated by a wood-burning oven, and ate at the canteen of the foresters. The isolation did not last long, however. Gradually many different people-young people, at first-longing for wisdom and a maitre a penser began to visit him. The political police could not ignore such pilgrimages. They could tolerate them, up to a point, on the condition that they could control them, always confirming their "innocence." The police exercised their control by regularly interviewing the former prisoner and now and then a more weak-willed visitor. (After the revolution of 1989, we found out that a whole room of the police archives in Sibiu [the nearest town to Paltinis] was full of tape recordings of the conversations between the old philosopher and his visitors.) Within the limits imposed by these precautions, the meetings in Paltinis continued until Noica's death, which occurred in 1987 due to a broken hip. He had had a bad fall while pursuing a mouse that was trying to eat his yogurt.

What did Noica's pedagogy consist of? First of all, he demanded a certain technical proficiency. He offered any young man who declared his love for philosophy ten introductory lessons in ancient Greek and advised him to learn German and to read the "one hundred important interpretations." I participated, for instance, in a thorough Plato seminar (with a special emphasis on the apor- etical dialogues of the first phase), a Hegel seminar, and a few discussions on Plotinus and Descartes. There followed a lively exchange of ideas on our own research projects and on those of the professor. But beyond such technical exer- cises (whose importance is difficult to grasp for anybody who lacks an exact pic- ture of the poverty of the context), Noica's pedagogy was a way of training the spirit for cultural performance, undiscouraged by the poor living and working conditions offered by Communist society. "You will find out that inner limits are far harder to overcome than outer ones" was one of his favorite formulas. Or "Don't pay attention to the immediate circumstances. Consider history to be pure

70 REPRESENTATIONS


meteorology: you don't change your destiny and your ideas depending on the weather. History needs circus horses. I ask you to be racehorses." When asked why he never thought to emigrate, he constructed a long discourse on the jubi- lation of the assumed limit, on insufficiency which enriches you as opposed to impov- erishing plenitude. "I prefer to live in a country where everything is still to be done, rather than in a country in which the great adventures of the spirit have been consumed. What should I do if I went to Western Europe? I wouldn't find any place unless I concerned myself with some obscure commentator of Aristotle, some apocryphal text, some uncertain fragment. Here I can quietly concern myself with Aristotle himself. The time of 'Alexandrianism' is still far away. Let's rejoice in the freshness of the 'archaic' and not miss-under the influence of a deficient real-the privileged experience of the possible."

I don't know whether Constantin Noica meant what he said. Maybe he only wanted to distract our attention from the daily drama, to give us courage. If, however, he meant what he said, I am not at all sure he was right. But he was extremely efficient. Many of us, I myself, survived thanks to the "obnubilation" which his way of thinking conveyed to us. I don't understand very well, even now, what the real price of this survival is, to what extent it created irreversible mental and psychic distortions. Sometimes I am inclined to believe that the right answer to Bruce Ackerman's question "How could you possibly survive under Commu- nist dictatorship?" should be: "Did I?"

Notes

1. Stefan Heym, quoted in Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe (London, 1988), 20 1. 2. Rupnik, The Other Europe, 201-2. 3. Gabriel Liiceanu, Jurnalul de la Paltini, 2d ed. (Bucharest, 1991), 6. Unless otherwise

noted, all translations are by the author. 4. Mihai Botez, Intelectualii din Europa de Est (Bucharest, 1993), 52-3. 5. Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896-1948), Soviet party leader and statesman, who

had important functions in the Stalinist nomenklatura, contributed to the creation of Cominform, and was a zealous defender of orthodox Communist ideology.

6. Gyorgy Konrdd, quoted in Rupnik, The Other Europe, 238. 7. E. M. Cioran, Schimbarea lafatd a Rominiei (Bucharest, 1936), 33. 8. Mircea Eliade, Fragments d'unjournal, vol. 1 (Paris, 1973), 13. 9. As we know, the European destiny of "curiosity" is quite intricate. Christianity has con-

demned the excess of curiosity as a vice, the cupiditas noscendi which undermines the foundations of faith together with superbia and concupiscentia. Curiosity may indeed be indiscretion and blasphemy. And yet, the free exercise of curiosity-with all its risks- was the axis of the Greek spirit (Seneca invoked curiosity as a Graecus morbus), and Europe, the old and the new, would be unthinkable without the Urphdnomen of Greece.



Article Contentsp. 61p. 62p. 63p. 64p. 65p. 66p. 67p. 68p. 69p. 70p. 71

Issue Table of ContentsRepresentations, No. 49, Special Issue: Identifying Histories: Eastern Europe Before and After 1989 (Winter, 1995), pp. 1-166Front MatterIntroduction [pp. 1-14]Parallel Autopsies [pp. 15-39]Censorship, a Comparative View: France, 1789-East Germany, 1989 [pp. 40-60]Intellectual Life Under Dictatorship [pp. 61-71]Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe [pp. 72-96]Symbols that Face Two Ways: Commemorating the Victims of Nazism and Stalinism at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen [pp. 97-119]Communist Camps and their Aftermath [pp. 120-132]From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia [pp. 133-166]Back Matter

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