Emigrants
What turned dissident writers to the West?
I answer right away: the awareness that there is no understanding and creative work at home, and they have to work, because the writer's homeland (being human) is nowhere else than where the guarantors of language are stored.
A writer's homeland is where he can create, and not only where neo-communist whistleblowers put money in their pockets with one hand and hold their hearts with the other while the national anthem plays - they don't need eyepieces or binoculars, you see cash-patriots lined up under the flag like sardines, their hearts is in a thick string.
One of the great dissidents, the still unrepentant Slawomir Mrožek, who was also hosted by you, in Mexico (this text is one of the lectures the author gave at the National University of Mexico, 2013/2014), dear gentlemen, for nine years ( he lived there somewhere in the vicinity of your capital), illustrates the fate of the apostate in a play for two actors entitled Emigrants:
"Don't run towards something, but from something!"
Perhaps it is the most played dissident piece in IE: two Polish emigrants, one a physicist, the other a philosopher, emigrate to Germany each for their own reasons, the first for a living and the second as a political persecutor. Life brings them together in a small room in the basement and the playwright adds his own spice: the new year is waiting - an ideal dramatic situation to tell a sad refugee story (and at the same time attempt a murder)!
In my opinion, this is the piece with the most fortunately found polemical situation in recent IE dramaturgy. In a poor little room, the playwright said everything. I have a lot of respect for Sławomir Mrožek, and kudos to you for opening the door to him!... I know the credit goes to Elena Poniatowska.
I have become familiar with the terms "IE dramaturgy", "IE critical spirit", "IE literature", etc., although I am aware that a few decades ago such a thing could not even be imagined. Listen, someone will say, how come: so you christen Romanian (or Russian, Polish, Hungarian, finally Yugoslav and Montenegrin) literature with the name "IE literature(s)"? Aren't we talking about national literatures in different languages (only Yugoslav literatures were created mainly in one language)?
I would answer that literature changes like everything else in this world, that you cannot bathe in the same literature twice (you can a thousand times from a historical point of view - but never from a current point of view!); I would argue, therefore, that my fellow writers also have the right to otherness.
I think that the dissidents carried this idea for a long time, even the Russians, whose literature is world-class in itself, without a complex against any other - the idea, therefore, of belonging beyond the boundaries of language. Or, better to say, about belonging to something in common alongside one's own language.
I like the latter better: moving alongside your language, being a being contained in it (and not just circling inside), going comparatively - striving for otherness.
We Eastern European writers - so I say...
Text as meaning
In our time, according to human rights researchers, the possibilities of recording the persecution of writers in totalitarian regimes have grown rapidly and with great success, especially during the Cold War, which, at least in literary terms, has already been discussed before - here is the proof:
Writing intelligence history based on documentary evidence from archives of information created by the secret services of totalitarian regimes for operational purposes became increasingly possible and a reality during the twentieth century. This type of history using these historical sources met with great public success during the Cold War. (Cf. in more detail to Virgilio Tarau: The Saga of the Securitate State Archive, 2008, 11).
In these lectures, maybe later, possibly, in some notebooks there, I am interested in the times when literature was important in the cursive meaning of words. Literature with bold dignity of its name. That bugs me.
Poetry is important unconditionally even in non-literary times, but concrete political circumstances sometimes give it a special significance, unexpected, strange, rare in its nature. What could be alien to a literature from Ecclesiastes to us, from Homer to our days - nothing! - and yet, there are non-literary times, then literary times, and finally times that are a little more literary.
On the other hand, every writer encounters the revival of old myths, literary tastes, events, affairs, styles. Someone is bringing this immense creation to life. That someone is time in the Heideggerian sense of the word (framework for the realization of being).
Third, literature with its narrative structures essentially stands either on the side or on the opposite side against the will of the times, which the Greeks called politics. Or at least this will of time understands things that way, and since it has the power to decide, it treats and operationally processes them.
"Everything is politics, even moonshine!", says Mr. Krleža jokingly, although he would be angry at this Dubrovnik overtone of lordship because he did not smell something of them.
Dissident literature IE - it is myth-busting, myth-busting, critical spirit destroyer, destroyer of false myths (someone who runs away from those with whom he used to agree: let's remember the good old French definition of good old dissident).
The dissident will really be forced to run away - "you don't run towards something, but from something" - and we will observe him precisely in flight, precisely in the capacity of an opposing opinion, a man who runs away and utters certain words in his escape (rescue). That is his vocation. A dissident does not necessarily have to be in prison, he is not some starving fool, he is someone who thinks and runs away with his opinion where he can think.
That's why these lectures of mine on Eastern European literature, if you'll allow me, monitoring of literary and other ideas in IE are designed to follow processes in a changing movement. Dissidents was a monumental process. Monitoring of dynamic inclinations. Monitoring of dynamic structures, as Prague and later French structuralists used to say.
Weightless consciousness
Today, the text is worn out from enormous use and "unprofessional handling", pale, clogged with countertext, in a genre environment where there is no difference between a critical judgment on the one hand and a suggestive one on the other. To separate the wheat from the chaff, the contaminated text needs a depository, a dump, a graveyard of text as wide as the desert.
The devil only knows how many cockroach gags the informant apparatus of a neo-communist regime has at its disposal. The trampling of significance, which has a text in one country and culture, is the most difficult kind of trampling.
Testimonies from a time that, despite terror and repression, managed to ensure the importance of their text, the dignity of the text, as it was during the time of dissidents, sound all the more precious. Despite everything, the dissident era provided its author with protection from the views of his colleagues in totalitarianism. This protection could not be heard every day, nor was it publicly consumed, but clandestinely, but it existed and everyone knew it existed. The persecuted and those who persecute.
Mrožek died not even six months later - a few weeks later Elena Poniatowska received the Cervantes Prize - and he started publishing the year I was born. I learned the European spirit with Mrožek's heavy anti-communist laughter, with the heavy laughter of the oppressed people.
Tell me, who are better teachers than satirists - look at Aristophanes, Juvenal, Boccaccio, Hasek, Krleža - definitely, there are no masters without big mockers and scoffers!
That's why archives are for - that's why "God employs many translators", as John Donne (1572 - 1631) says:
God employs several translators...
Cockroach gag
My countryman Krleža, one of the greatest polemicists in European literature, next to Rabelais (François Rabelais) and Jaroslav Hašek, says this:
"When these cockroaches start their suspicious movement, it means for sure rikzug" - which means backwards.
Žohar's reverse, the Krležian so-called rikcsug, cannot mean anything other than backward. On a symbolic level, it is neo-communism and, of course, together with it, on the opposite shore, the inspiration of human freedom that always accompanies slavery, prison and the closing of the creative perspective of the individual and society, and which accompanied the enslavement of the countries and peoples of the IE in the form of monumental dissident thought.
What was the goal of dissidence in Russia and several IE countries in the second half of the 20th century?
Democracy, freedom of thought, reform of ideas, progress of society, etc. - these are such well-known and justified answers that no remark on such ordinary answers is out of place. Is there anything further? - there is. Nevertheless, those living people, those eternal and tireless fighters (perpetual dissenters) - don't their ideas require a deeper analysis?
They believed that there is a way and a possibility of fighting - and that these two are called genre. They handled what they had at hand, which were artistic genres. Very fragile instruments compared to tanks, you have to admit, but nevertheless instruments that, one way or another, can be handled in the long run. Dissidents were our modest mini-West.
At the beginning of their journey, listen now, literary fame raised the probability of arrest and imprisonment. However, later, paradoxically, fame somehow protected the writer from prison. Western reporters were also on guard, they did not expand the circle of their sources, even when the source promises something challenging, in fear of provocations by the KGB, StB, Udba, Securitate and others. communist services.
So many cases are known, say witnesses from the seventies, when groups of authors could not get their information to foreign media (foreigners' fear of provocation) and would become famous only after arrest and trial. The search for independent communication has become an obsession of the dissident creative intelligentsia.
Who will admit today in the IE countries, in those that have left the dictatorship behind (Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia), and especially in those that have not yet, that the enormous effort of the dissidents, in the direction of building honest and open communication with with the country, with the neighbors, with time, with the paradox of life, actually represented a continuity of European culture?
And what then when human society is not measured by nations, will the literary word stop then - it won't, why would it stop?
A laughable legacy
In the eighties, I traveled across Europe many times. Mostly by hitchhiking. Working. Soaked. Dusty and muddy. With a crust of bread and a bottle of water in his tired backpack. (Although I attended one of the oldest universities in the world - founded exactly six seventy-three years ago - I gained certain knowledge on the dusty road hungry and thirsty for every good heart). Westerners staged Mrožek as crazy. They needed a laugh.
Every hitchhiker first smells the city center, so it happened to me: in the morning I stare at Mrožek's poster in a town in the north of France, at noon at a poster of the same author in another town (already in German!), the next day in a third theater (Austria - again Mrožek); all the way to the Czechoslovak border...
Well, sir, my friend, that's where every Mrozek falls!
Although they lived in a static reflection of the state and its will, the dissidents were a spark, a light in that static block, they remained the text as significance. They were not broken by the materialistic imagination of the state, as it is breaking writers today. If anything in a writer breathes dignity, it is the text as significance and role, the text as rebellion, strength, light in the tunnel. A metaphor for wrath. Semiotics of human destiny.
The dissidence lasted for four decades - someone with my experience can barely talk about the last two, which are a measure of the key problem of the modern European world: the problem of "golden, linden, sweet freedom", as Gundulić says.
I will tell an anecdote that I heard from my German friends. The protagonist is Heiner Müller (a great experimental playwright, lived in the GDR under censorship, I know him well, I staged at least three of his plays on the stages of avant-garde theaters in those years; I was preparing more of his - and Sophocles') Philoctetes, but I was interrupted by the war). Elem, in December 1989, the Berlin Wall finally falls. The citizens of the two Berlins are flying into each other's arms.
Heiner Müller is among the first to make his way through the crowd to West Berlin. He rushed into the taxi:
"Take me to the theater!"
"Which theater, sir?"
"In any. Everyone needs me!”
Bonus video:
