Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

What Is Irony?

In Part Four of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Tamina, the heroine, needs some help from her friend Bibi, a young graphomaniac; to win her goodwill, she arranges for her to meet a local writer named Banaka. He explains to the graphomaniac that todays real writers have renounced the obsolete art of the novel: "You know, the novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?… All anyone can do is give a report on oneself… Anything else is a lie." And Banakas friend, a philosophy professor, says: "Since James Joyce we have known that the greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventure… Homers odyssey has been taken inside. It has been interiorized." Some time after the book appeared, I found these words as the epigraph to a French novel. I was very flattered but embarrassed too, because, in my view, what Banaka and his friend said were just sophisticated stupidities. At the time, in the seventies, I was hearing them all around me: university chatter cobbled together from scraps of structuralism and psychoanalysis.

This Part Four of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in Czechoslovakia as a small, separate volume (the first publication of any work of mine after a twenty-year ban), and a press clipping was sent to me in Paris: the reviewer was pleased with me, and as proof of my intelligence he quoted a line he considered brilliant: "Since James Joyce we have known that the greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventure," and so on. I took a strangely wicked pleasure at seeing myself ride back into my native land on a donkey of misunderstanding.

The misapprehension is understandable: I hadn't set out to ridicule Banaka and his professor friend. I had not made obvious my reservation about them. On the contrary, I did all I could to conceal it, to give their opinions the elegance of the intellectual discourse that everyone, back then, respected and fervently imitated. If I had made their talk ridiculous, by exaggerating its excesses, I would have produced what is called satire. Satire is a thesis art; sure of its own truth, it ridicules what it determines to combat. The novelists relation to his characters is never satirical; it is ironic. But how does irony, which is by definition discreet, make itself apparent? By the context: Banaka's and his friends remarks are set within an environment of gestures, actions, and words that relativize them. The little provincial world that surrounds Tamina is characterized by an innocent egocentrism: everyone has sincere liking for her, and yet no one tries to understand her, not even knowing what "understanding" would mean. When Banaka says that the art of the novel is obsolete because the notion of understanding others is an illusion, he is expressing not only a fashionable aesthetic attitude but, unknowingly, his own misery and that of his milieu: a lack of desire to understand another; an egocentric blindness toward the real world.

Irony means: none of the assertions found in a novel can be taken by itself, each of them stands in a complex and contradictory juxtaposition with other assertions, other situations, other gestures, other ideas, other events. Only a slow reading, twice and many times over, can bring out all the ironic connections inside a novel, without which the novel remains uncomprehended.

K.'s Curious Behavior During His Arrest

K. wakes up one morning and, still in bed, rings for his breakfast to be brought. Instead of the maid, two strangers arrive, ordinary men, in ordinary dress, who nevertheless immediately behave with such authority that K. cannot help but feel their force, their power. So although he is exasperated, he is incapable of throwing them out and instead he politely asks them: "Who are you?"

From the beginning, K.'s behavior oscillates between his weakness, prepared to bow to the intruders' unbelievable effrontery (they have come to notify him that he is under arrest), and his fear of appearing ridiculous. For instance, he says firmly: "I shall neither stay here nor let you address me until you have introduced yourselves." It would suffice to pull these words out of their ironic setting, to take them literally (as my reader took Banakas words), and K. would be for us (as he was for Orson Welles in his film version of The Trial) a man-in-revolt-against-violence. Yet it suffices to read the text carefully to see that this man said to be in revolt continues to obey the intruders, who not only never deign to introduce themselves but also eat his breakfast and keep him standing the whole time in his nightshirt.

At the end of this scene of odd humiliation (he offers them his hand and they refuse to take it), one of the men says to K.: "You'll be going to the bank now, I suppose?" "To the bank?" asks K. "I thought I was under arrest."

There he is again, the man-in-revolt-against-violence! He is being sarcastic! He is being provocative! As, by the way, Kafka's commentary makes explicit: "K. asked the question with a certain defiance, for though his offer to shake hands had been ignored, he felt, especially now that the inspector had risen to his feet, more and more independent of all these people. He was playing with them. If they should leave, he planned to chase after them to the front door and offer himself up for arrest."

Here is a very subtle irony: K. is capitulating but wants to see himself as someone strong who "plays with them," who mocks them by derisively pretending to take his arrest seriously; he is capitulating but immediately also interprets his capitulation in a way that lets him maintain his dignity in his own eyes.

People first read Kafka with a tragic expression on their faces. Then they heard that when Kafka read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends, he made them all laugh. Thereupon readers started forcing themselves to laugh too, but without knowing exactly why. What actually is so funny in this chapter? K.'s behavior. But what is comic about this behavior?

The question reminds me of the years I spent at the cinema school in Prague. During the teachers' meetings, a friend and I would always watch with a malicious affection one of our colleagues, a writer of about fifty, a man who was subtle and correct but whom we suspected of tremendous, incurable cowardice. We dreamed up the following scenario, which (alas!) we never carried out:

In the middle of the meeting, one of us would suddenly tell him: "On your knees!"

At first he wouldn't understand what we wanted; or more exactly, in his clear-eyed cravenness, he would understand instantly but would think to gain a little time by pretending not to understand.

We would have to say it louder: "On your knees!"

Now he could no longer pretend not to understand. He would be all set to obey, with just one problem: how to do it? How would he get down on his knees here, in front of all of his colleagues, without humiliating himself? He would look desperately for some funny remark to make as he got down: "Will you permit me, my dear colleagues," he would finally say, "to put a cushion under my knees? "

"On your knees and be quiet!"

He'd do it, putting his hands together and slightly tilting his head to the left: "My dear colleagues, if you have really studied Renaissance painting, this is exactly the way Raphael painted Saint Francis of Assisi."

Every day we imagined new variations on this delectable scene, inventing more and more witty remarks for our colleagues efforts to preserve his dignity.

The Second Trial of Josef K.

As opposed to Orson Welles, Kafka's earliest interpreters were far from considering K. an innocent man in revolt against the arbitrary. Max Brod never doubted that Josef K. is guilty. What has he done? According to Brod (Despair and Salvation in the Work of Tranz Kafka [Verzweiflung und Erlosung im Werk Franz Kafkas], 1959), he is guilty of Lieblosigkeit, the inability to love. "Josef K. liebt niemanden, er liebelt nur, deshalb muss er sterben." Josef K. loves no one, he only dallies, and therefore he must die. (Let us never forget the sublime stupidity of this sentence!) Brod is quick to adduce two proofs of Lieblosigkeit: according to a chapter left unfinished and excluded from The Trial (usually published as an appendix), Josef K. has not been to see his mother for three years; he has merely sent her money, getting information about her health from a cousin (a curious resemblance: Meursault, in The Stranger, is also accused of not loving his mother). The second piece of evidence is K.s relationship with Fraulein Biirstner, a relationship that Brod describes as of the "lowest sexuality" (niedrigster Sexualitat). "Fraulein Biirstner, to whom he is drawn by a kind of desire, remains shadowy to him as a human being, interests him only as a sexual creature."

In his preface to the 1964 Prague edition of The Trials the Czech Kafkologist Eduard Goldstiicker criticized K. with equal severity, even though his vocabulary is marked not by theology, like Brod's, but by Marxist-style sociology: "Josef K. is guilty because he has allowed his life to be mechanized, automatized, alienated, to be fitted to the stereotyped rhythm of the social machine, let it be deprived of every human quality; thus K. has broken the law that, according to Kafka, rules all humankind: 'Be human.'" In the fifties Goldstiicker underwent a dreadful Stalinist trial where he was accused of imaginary crimes, and he spent four years in prison. I ask myself: how could this man, the victim of a trial himself, some ten years later set up a trial against another defendant, no guiltier than he?

According to Alexandre Vialatte (L'Histoire secrete du Proces, 1947), the trial in Kafka's novel is the one that Kafka brings against himself, K. being nothing but his alter ego: Kafka had broken his engagement with Felice, and his future father-in-law "came from Malmo expressly to try the guilty fellow. The hotel room in the Askanischer Hof where this scene unfolded (in July 1914) gave Kafka the sense of a courtroom… He started the next day on 'The Penal Colony' and on The Trial. We do not know K.'s crime, and today's morality absolves it. And yet, his 'innocence' is diabolical… In some mysterious way, K. has violated the laws of a mysterious justice that has nothing to do with ours… The judge is Doctor Kafka, the defendant is Doctor Kafka. He pleads guilty to diabolical innocence."

In the first trial (the one Kafka recounts in his novel), the tribunal accuses K. without specifying the crime. The Kafkologists were unastonished that a person could be accused without cause and were not spurred to either ponder the wisdom or appreciate the beauty of this unheard-of invention. Instead, they set about playing prosecutor in a new trial that they themselves brought against K., this time trying to figure out the true crime of the accused. Brod: he is incapable of love! Goldstucker: he acquiesced in the mechanization of his life! Vialatte: he broke his engagement! They do deserve credit for one thing: their trial against K. is just as Kafkan as the first one. For if in his first trial K. is accused of nothing, in the second he is accused of no matter what, which comes to the same because in both cases one thing is clear: K. is guilty not because he has committed a crime but because he has been accused. He is accused, therefore he must die.

Inducing Guilt

There is only one way to understand Kafka's novels: to read them as novels. Rather than search the character K. for a portrait of the author and K.'s words for a mysterious coded message, to pay careful attention to the behavior of the characters, their remarks, their thoughts, and try to imagine them before your eyes. Reading The Trial this way, you are immediately struck by K.'s strange reaction to the charge: without having done anything wrong (or without knowing what he did), K. immediately begins to behave as though he is guilty. He feels guilty. He has been made to feel guilty. He has been culpabilized.

People used to see a very simple link between "being guilty" and "feeling guilty": it's the guilty person who feels guilty. In fact, the French word culpa-biliser-to induce feelings of guilt-is relatively recent; it was first used in 1966 because of psychoanalysis and its innovations in terminology; the noun derived from this verb (culpabilisation) was created two years later, in 1968. But long before that, the hitherto unexplored condition of induced guilt feelings was set forth, described, and developed in Kafka's novel, in the character K., and it was shown at different stages of its evolution:

Stage 1: Futile struggle for lost dignity. A man absurdly accused who does not yet doubt his innocence is disturbed to see that he is behaving as if he is guilty. Acting guilty without being so has a humiliating element, which he tries to conceal. Set out in the first scene of the novel, in the next chapter this situation is condensed into a tremendously ironic joke:

An unknown person telephones K.: he is to be interrogated the following Sunday at a house in the suburbs. Without hesitation, he decides to go; out of obedience? out of fear? Oh no, self-delusion works automatically: he wants to go there in order to be done quickly with these nuisances who are wasting his time with their stupid case ("the case was getting under way and he must fight it; this first interrogation must also be the last"). Immediately after, his chief at the bank where he works invites K. to a party on the same Sunday. The invitation is important for K.'s career. Should he therefore ignore the grotesque summons? No; he declines the chief's invitation since, without wanting to acknowledge it to himself, he is already under the sway of the trial.

And so on Sunday he goes to the house. He realizes that the voice on the telephone that gave him the address neglected to specify the hour. No matter; he feels pressed for time, and he runs (yes, literally, he runs; in German: er lief) across the entire city. He runs in order to arrive on time, even though no hour has been specified. Granted that he has reasons to arrive as early as possible; but in that event, instead of running, why not take the streetcar, which incidentally follows the very same route? The reason: he refuses to take the streetcar because "he had no desire to humble himself before the committee of inquiry by a too-scrupulous punctuality." He runs to the tribunal, but he runs as a proud man who will not be humiliated.

Stage 2: Proof of strength. Finally, he arrives in the room where he is expected. "So you are a house painter?" says the examining magistrate, and K., in front of the crowd filling the hall, reacts spiritedly to the ridiculous mistake: "No, I'm the chief clerk of a large bank," and then, in a long speech, he lambastes the tribunal for its incompetence. Heartened by applause, he feels strong, and in the familiar cliche of the accused turned accuser (wonderfully deaf to Kafkan irony, Orson Welles was taken in by the cliche), he challenges his judges. The first shock comes when he notices badges on the collars of everyone there and realizes that the audience he thought to win over consists of officials "here to listen and snoop." He turns to leave, and at the door, the examining magistrate is waiting to warn him: "You have flung away with your own hand the advantage an interrogation always offers an accused man." K. exclaims: "You scum! You can keep all your interrogations!"

A reader will understand nothing about this scene unless he sees its ironic connections with what comes immediately after the rebellious outburst from K. that ends the chapter. Here is the start of the next chapter: "During the next week, day after day K. awaited a new summons; he could not believe that his refusal to be interrogated had been taken literally, and having heard nothing by Saturday evening, he assumed that he was tacitly required again in the same building and at the same time. So he again made his way there on Sunday…"

Stage 3: Socialization of the trial. Alarmed by the case being brought against his nephew, K.s uncle arrives one day from the country. A remarkable fact: the case, it's said, is utterly secret, confidential, yet everyone knows about it. Another remarkable fact: no one doubts that K. is guilty. Society has already adopted the accusation and added the weight of its tacit approval (or its nondisagreement). We would expect indignant surprise: "How could they accuse you? And for what crime, exactly?" But the uncle is not surprised. He is only frightened by the thought of the trials consequences for all the relatives.

Stage 4: Self-criticism. In order to defend himself in a trial that refuses to declare the charge, K. ends up looking for the crime himself. Where is it concealed? Certainly somewhere in his curriculum vitae. "He would have to recall his entire life, including the most minute acts and events, and then to explain and examine it in every regard."

The situation is not at all unreal: this is actually the way some simple woman hounded by misfortune will wonder: what have I done wrong? and begin to

comb her past, examining not only her actions but her words and her secret thoughts in an effort to comprehend Gods anger.

To describe this state of mind, Communist political practice coined the term self-criticism (used in this political sense since the 1930s; Kafka never used it). This usage of the term does not correspond exactly to its etymology. It is not a matter of criticism (distinguishing good features from bad with the aim of correcting faults); it is a matter of finding your offense to let you help your accuser, let you accept and ratify the accusation.

Stage 5: The victim's identification with his executioner. Kafka's irony attains its horrifying peak in the last chapter: two men in frock coats come for K. and take him into the street. At first he struggles, but then he thinks: "All I can do now… is keep a clear head to the end… Should I show now that I've learned nothing in a year of this trial? Should I go off like a dimwit with no sense?"

Then, from a distance, he sees some policemen walking their beats. One of them approaches this suspicious-looking group. Thereupon, on his own initiative, K. forcibly drags the two men away, even starting to run with them to escape the policemen who, after all, might disrupt or perhaps-who knows?-prevent his coming execution.

Finally, they arrive at their destination; as the men prepare to stab him, an idea (his ultimate self-criticism) crosses K.s mind: "It would be his duty to seize the knife himself… and plunge it into his own body." He deplores his weakness: "He could not prove himself completely, he could not relieve the officials

of the whole task; the responsibility for this ultimate failing lay with the one who had denied him the remnant of strength he needed."

For How Long Can a Man Be Considered Identical to Himself?

In Dostoyevsky, the characters' identities lie in their personal ideology, which more or less directly determines their behavior. Kirilov is completely absorbed by his philosophy of suicide, which he considers to be a supreme manifestation of freedom. Kirilov: an idea become man. But in real life, is a man really such a direct projection of his personal ideology? Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace (particularly Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky) also have a very rich, very developed intellectuality, but theirs is changeable, protean, so that it is impossible to describe them in terms of their ideas, which are different in each phase of their lives. Tolstoy thus offers us another conception of man: he is an itinerary; a winding road; a journey whose successive phases not only vary but often represent a total negation of the preceding phases.

I've said road., a word that could mislead, because the image of a road evokes a destination. Now, what is the destination of these roads that end only randomly, broken off by the happenstance of death? Its true that, at the end, Pierre Bezukhov arrives at the state of mind that seems to be the ideal and final stage: he comes to believe that it is futile to keep searching for a meaning to his life, to struggle for this or that cause;

God is everywhere, in all of life, in ordinary life, so it is enough to live all there is to live and live it lovingly: and he turns happily to his wife and family. Is his destination reached? The summit that, retrospectively, makes all the earlier stages of the journey into mere steps on the stairway? If that were the case, Tolstoy's novel would lose its essential irony and come to resemble a novelized morality lesson. But it is not the case. In the Epilogue that summarizes the events of the next eight vears, we see Bezukhov leaving his house and wife for a month and a half to engage in some semi-clandestine political activity in Petersburg. So again he is off to seek a meaning to his life, to struggle for a cause. The roads never end and know no destinations.

One might say that the various phases of an itinerary do have an ironic relation to one another. In the kingdom of irony, equality rules; this means that no phase of the itinerary is morally superior to another. When Bolkonsky sets about the task of serving his country, is he seeking thereby to expiate the wrong of his earlier misanthropy? No. There is no self-criticism here. At each phase of the way, he focused all his intellectual and moral powers to arrive at his position, and he knows that: so how can he blame himself for not having been what he could not be? And just as one cannot pass judgment on the various phases of one's life from a moral viewpoint, similarly one cannot judge them as to authenticity. It is impossible to say which Bolkonsky is more true to himself: the one who withdrew from public life or the one who devoted himself to it.

If the various stages are so contradictory, how do we determine their common denominator? What is the common essence that lets us see Bezukhov the atheist and Bezukhov the believer as the selfsame person? Where does the stable essence of an "I" reside? And what moral responsibility does Bolkonsky No. 2 have toward Bolkonsky No. 1? Must the Bezukhov who is Napoleon's enemy answer for the Bezukhov who was once his admirer? Over what period of time can we consider a man identical to himself?

Only the novel can, in concrete terms, explore this mystery, one of the greatest known to man; and Tolstoy was probably the first to do so.

Conspiracy of Details

The metamorphoses of Tolstoy's characters come about not as a lengthy evolution but as a sudden illumination. Pierre Bezukhov is transformed from an atheist into a believer with astonishing ease. All it takes is for him to be shaken up by the break with his wife and to encounter at a post house a traveling Freemason who talks to him. That ease is not due to lightweight capri-ciousness. Rather, it shows us that the visible change was prepared by a hidden, unconscious process, which suddenly bursts into broad daylight.

Gravely wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz, Andrei Bolkonsky is regaining consciousness. At this moment his entire universe, that of a brilliant young man, is set rocking: not by rational, logical reflection, but by a direct confrontation with death and a long look at the sky. It is such details (a look at the sky) that play a great role in the decisive moments experienced by Tolstoy's characters.

Later on, emerging from his deep skepticism, Andrei returns to an active life. This change is preceded by a long discussion with Pierre on a ferry crossing a river. Pierre at the time is positive, optimistic, altruistic (such is that brief stage in his evolution), and he disputes Andrei's misanthropic skepticism. But in their discussion he shows himself rather naive, spouting cliches, and it is Andrei who shines intellectually. More important than Pierre s words is the silence that follows their discussion: "Stepping off the ferry he looked up at the sky to which Pierre had pointed. For the first time since Austerlitz he saw that high everlasting sky he had seen while lying on the battlefield, and something that had long been slumbering, something better that was within him, suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful, in his soul." The sensation is short-lived and vanishes immediately, but Andrei knows "that this feeling, which he did not know how to develop, was alive in him." And one day much later, like a dance of sparks, a conspiracy of details (the sight of an oak trees foliage, the happy talk of girls overheard by chance, unexpected memories) kindles that feeling (that "was alive in him") and sets it blazing. Andrei, still content the day before in his retreat from the world, abruptly decides "to go to Petersburg that autumn" and even "re-enter government service… And Prince Andrei, clasping his hands behind his back, paced back and forth in the room for a long time, now frowning, now smiling, as he reflected on all those irrational, inexpressible thoughts, secret as a crime, that were connected with Pierre, with fame, with the girl at the window, with the oak, with woman's beauty and with love, which had altered his whole life. And if anyone came into the room at such moments he was particularly curt, stern, firm, and, above all, disagreeably logical… as if to punish someone for all the secret, illogical work going on within him." (I emphasize the most significant lines.) (Let us recall that it is a similar conspiracy of details- the ugliness of faces around her, conversation overheard by chance in the train compartment, intractable memories-that, in Tolstoy's next novel, touches off Anna Karenina's decision to kill herself.)

Still another great change in Andrei Bolkonsky's internal world: mortally wounded in the battle of Borodino, he lies on an operating table in a military encampment and is suddenly filled with a strange sense of peace and reconciliation, a sense of happiness, which will stay with him; this state of happiness is all the stranger (and all the more beautiful) for the enormous harshness of the scene, which is full of the hideously precise details of surgery in a time before anesthesia; and strangest of all about this strange state: it is provoked by an unexpected and illogical memory: when the doctors assistant removed his clothes, "Andrei recalled his earliest, most remote childhood." And some lines farther on: "After the agony he had been enduring, Prince Andrei enjoyed a blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All the best and happiest moments of his life, especially those of early childhood-when he had been undressed and put to bed, and when his nurse had sung him lullabies and he had buried his head in the pillow and felt happy just to be alive-rose to his mind, not as something past, but as a present reality" Only later does Andrei recognize, on a nearby operating table, his rival, Anatol, Natasha's seducer, whose leg has just been cut off by a doctor.

The usual reading of this scene: Wounded, Andrei sees his rival with his leg amputated; the sight fills him with immense pity for the man and for man in general. But Tolstov knew that these sudden revelations are not due to causes so obvious and so logical. It was a curious fleeting image (the early-childhood memory of being undressed in the same way as the doctors assistant was doing it) that touched everything off-his new metamorphosis, his new vision of things. A few seconds later, this miraculous detail has certainly been forgotten by Andrei himself just as it has probably been immediately forgotten by the majority of readers, who read novels as inattentively and badly as they "read" their own lives.

And another great change, this time Pierre Bezukhov's decision to kill Napoleon, a decision preceded by this episode: He learns from his Freemason friends that in Chapter 13 of the Apocalypse, Napoleon is identified as the Antichrist: "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six." When the French alphabet is given numerical values, the letters in "I'empereur Napoleon" add up to the number 666.

"This prophecy greatly surprised Pierre, and he often asked himself what exactly would put an end to the power of the beast, that is, of Napoleon, and tried, by the same system of turning letters into numbers and adding them up, to find an answer to the question that engrossed him. He wrote the words l'empereur Alexandre and la nation russe and added up their numbers. But the sums were either more or less than 666. Once when making such calculations he wrote down his own name in French, comte Pierre Besouhoff; the sum was far from right. He changed the spelling, substituting a z for the s and adding de and the article le, still without obtaining the desired result. Then it occurred to him that if the answer to the question were contained in his name, his nationality would also be given in the answer. So he wrote le Russe Besuhof and adding up the numbers got 671. This was only five too much; five was represented by e, the very letter elided from the article le before the word empereur. By omitting the e, though incorrectly, Pierre got the answer he sought: l'Russe Besuhof made 666. This discovery greatly excited him."

Tolstoy's meticulousness in describing all the spelling changes Pierre works on his own name so as to get to the number 666 is irresistibly comic: l'Russe is a marvelous orthographic gag. Can grave and courageous decisions of an unquestionably intelligent and likable man be rooted in some foolish idea?

And what are your thoughts on man? What are your thoughts on yourself?

Change of Opinion as Adjustment to the Spirit of the Time

One day, with a radiant face, a woman declares to me: "So, there's no more Leningrad! We're back to good old Saint Petersburg!" It never did thrill me, cities and streets being rechristened. I am about to tell her this, but at the last moment I control myself: in her gaze,

bedazzled by the fascinating march of history, I foresee disagreement, and I have no desire to argue, especially because just then I recall an episode she has certainly forgotten. This same woman came from abroad to visit my wife and me in Prague after the Russian invasion, in 1970 or 1971, when we were in the painful situation of being under ban. She was showing her solidarity with us, and we wanted to pay her back by trying to entertain her. My wife told her the funny story (it was oddly prophetic besides) of an American moneybags staying in a Moscow hotel. Someone asks him: "Have you been to see Lenin in the mausoleum?" And he replies: "For ten dollars I had him brought over to the hotel." Our visitors face tensed. A leftist (she still is), she saw the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia as a betrayal of ideals she cherished, and felt it unacceptable that victims with whom she meant to sympathize should mock those same betrayed ideals. "I don't find that funny," she said coldly, and only our status as persecuted people saved us from a break with her.

I can tell lots of stories of this kind. Such changes of opinion involve not only politics but also attitudes generally-feminism first on the rise and then in decline, admiration followed by scorn for the "nouveau roman," revolutionary puritanism supplanted by libertarian pornography, the idea of Europe denigrated as reactionary and neocolonialist by people who later unfurled it as a banner of Progress, and so on. And I wonder: do they or do they not recall their earlier attitudes? Do they retain any memory of the history of their changes? Not that it angers me to see people change their opinions. Bezukhov, formerly an admirer of Napoleon, becomes his potential assassin, and I like

him just as much in the one role as in the other. Doesn't a woman who worshiped Lenin in 1971 have the right to rejoice in 1991 that Leningrad is no longer Leningrad? She certainly does. Her change, however, is different from Bezukhov's.

It is precisely when their interior worlds change shape that Bezukhov and Bolkonsky are confirmed as individuals; that they surprise; that they make themselves different; that their freedom catches fire, and with it the identity of their selves; these are moments of poetry: they experience them with such intensity that the whole world rushes forward to meet them with an intoxicating parade of wondrous details. In Tolstoy, man is the more himself, the more an individual, when he has the strength, the imagination, the intelligence, to transform himself.

By contrast, the people I see changing their attitude toward Lenin, Europe, and so on expose their nonindi-viduality. This change is neither their own creation nor their own invention, not caprice or surprise or thought or madness; it has no poetry; it is nothing but a very prosaic adjustment to the changing spirit of History. That is why they don't even notice it; in the final analysis, they always stay the same: always in the right, always thinking what, in their milieu, a person is supposed to think; they change not in order to draw closer to some essential self but in order to merge with everyone else; changing lets them stay unchanged.

Another way of expressing it: they change their mind in accordance with the invisible tribunal that is also changing its mind; their change is thus simply a bet on what the tribunal will proclaim to be the truth tomorrow. I remember my youth in Czechoslovakia.

Having emerged from our initial enchantment with Communism, we felt each small step against official doctrine to be a courageous act. We protested the persecution of religious believers, stood up for banned modern art, argued against the stupidity of propaganda, criticized the country's dependence on Russia, and so on. In doing so, we were taking some risk-not much, but still some-and that (little) danger gave us a pleasant moral satisfaction. One day a hideous thought came to me: what if our rebellions were dictated not by internal freedom, by courage, but by the desire to please the other tribunal that was already preparing, in the shadows, to sit in judgment?

Windows

No one can go further than Kafka in The Trial; he created the extremely poetic image of an extremely non-poetic world. By "extremely nonpoetic world" 1 mean: a world where there is no longer a place for individual freedom, for the uniqueness of the individual, where man is only the instrument of extrahuman forces: of bureaucracy, technology, History. By "extremely poetic image" I mean: without changing its essence and its nonpoetic nature, Kafka has transformed, reshaped that world by his immense poetic imagination.

K. is completely absorbed by the predicament of this trial that has been imposed upon him; he hasn't a moment to think about anything else. And yet, even in this no-way-out predicament, there are windows that open suddenly, for a brief instant. He cannot escape through these windows; they edge open and then shut

instantly; but for a flash at least, he can see the poetry of the world outside, the poetry that, despite everything, exists as an ever present possibility and sends a small silvery glint into his life as a hunted man.

Some such brief openings are K.s glances, for instance: he reaches the suburban street where he has been called for his first interrogation. A moment before, he was still running to get there on time. Now he stops. Standing in the street, he forgets the trial for a few seconds and looks around: "Most of the windows were occupied, men in shirtsleeves were leaning there smoking or holding little children carefully and tenderly on the windowsills. Other windows were piled high with bedding, above which the disheveled head of a woman would appear for a moment." Then he enters the courtyard: "Near him a barefooted man was sitting on a crate reading a newspaper. Two boys were seesawing on a handcart. A frail young girl was standing at a pump in her nightdress and gazing at K. while she filled her jug with water."

These sentences remind me of Flaubert's descriptions: concise; visually rich; a sense of detail, none of which is cliched. That power of description makes clear how thirsty K. is for reality, how avidly he drinks up the world that, just a moment earlier, was eclipsed by worries about the trial. Alas, the pause is short; the next instant K. no longer has eyes for the frail young girl in her nightdress filling her jug with water: the torrent of the trial takes him up again.

The few erotic situations in the novel are also like windows briefly ajar-very briefly: K. meets only women who are connected in one way or another to his trial: for instance, his neighbor Fraulein Biirstner, in whose room he had been arrested; troubled, K. tells her what happened and finally, at her door, he manages to kiss her: "He seized her and kissed her on the mouth, and then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a long-sought spring." I emphasize the word "thirsty," which gives the sense of a man who has lost his normal life and can contact it only furtively, through a window.

During the first interrogation, K. is making a speech but is thrown off track by a curious event: the bailiffs wife is in the room, and a scrawny, ugly student gets her down on the floor and is making love to her in the midst of the audience. With this amazing interplay of incompatible events (that sublime Kafkan poetry, grotesque and implausible!), a new window opens onto the landscape far from the trial, onto exuberant vulgarity, the exuberant vulgar freedom that has been confiscated from K.

That Kafkan poetry reminds me, by contrast, of another novel that is also about an arrest and a trial: Orwell's 1984. the book that for decades served as a constant reference for antitotalitarianism professionals. In this novel, which means to be the horrifying portrayal of an imaginary totalitarian society, there are no windows; in it no one glimpses a frail young girl filling a jug with water; Orwell's novel is firmly closed to poetry; did I say novel? it is political thought disguised as a novel; the thinking is certainly lucid and correct, but it is distorted by its guise as a novel, which renders it imprecise and vague. So if the novel form obscures Orwell's thought, does it give something in return? Does it throw light on the mystery of human situations that sociology or political science cannot get at? No:

the situations and the characters are as flat as a poster. Then is it justified at least as a popularization of good ideas? Not that either. For ideas made into a novel function no longer as ideas but as a novel instead- and in the case of 1984, as a bad novel, with all the pernicious influence a bad novel can exert.

The pernicious influence of Orwell's novel resides in its implacable reduction of a reality to its political dimension alone, and in its reduction of that dimension to what is exemplarily negative about it. I refuse to forgive this reduction on the grounds that it was useful as propaganda in the struggle against totalitarian evil. For that evil is, precisely, the reduction of life to politics and of politics to propaganda. So despite its intentions, Orwell's novel itself joins in the totalitarian spirit, the spirit of propaganda. It reduces (and teaches others to reduce) the life of a hated society to the simple listing of its crimes.

In talking with Czechs a year or two after the end of Communism, I would hear from every one of them that now-ritual turn of speech, that obligatory preamble to all their recollections, all their remarks: "after those forty years of Communist horror" or: "those horrible forty years" or especially: "the forty lost years." I looked at my interlocutors: they had been neither forced to emigrate, nor imprisoned, nor deprived of their jobs, nor even looked down on; all of them had lived their lives in their own country, in their apartments, had done their work and had their vacations, their friendships and their loves; with the expression "forty horrible years" they were reducing their lives to the political aspect alone. But even the political history of those forty years-did they really experience that only as an undifferentiated block of horrors? Have they forgotten the years when they were seeing Milos Forman's films, reading Bohuslav Hrabal's books, going to the little nonconformist theaters, and telling hundreds of jokes and cheerfully making fun of the regime? In their talk of forty horrible years, they were all Orwellizing the recollection of their own lives, which, a posteriori, in their memories and in their heads, were thereby devalued or even completely obliterated (forty lost years).

Even in his situation of extreme deprivation of freedom, K. is able to look at a frail young girl slowly filling her jug with water. I've said that such moments are windows that briefly open onto a landscape far away from K.'s trial. What landscape? To make the metaphor more precise: the windows in Kafka's novel open onto Tolstoys landscape: onto a world where, even at the harshest moments, characters retain a freedom of decision which gives life the happy incalcula-bility that is the source of poetry. The extremely poetic world of Tolstoy is the opposite of Kafka's world. But even so, because of the half-open window, it enters K.'s story like a breath of yearning, like a barely felt breeze, and stays there.

Tribunal and Trial

The philosophers of existence like to breathe philosophical significance into the words of everyday language. It is difficult for me to say the words anguish or talk without thinking of the meaning Heidegger gave them. On this score, the novelists preceded the philoso-

phers. In examining their characters' situations, they worked out their own vocabulary, often with key words that stand as concepts and go beyond the dictionary definitions. Thus Crebillon the younger used the word moment as a concept word for the libertine game (the moment of opportunity when a woman can be seduced) and bequeathed it to his time and to other writers. In the same way, Dostoyevsky spoke of humiliation and Stendhal of vanity. Thanks to The Trial, Kafka bequeathed to us at least two concept words that have become indispensable for understanding the modern world: tribunal and trial. He bequeathed them to us: meaning that he put them at our disposal, for us to use, consider, and reconsider in terms of our own experiences.

Tribunal: this does not signify the juridical institution intended for punishing people who have violated the laws of a state; the tribunal (or court) in Kafka's sense is a power that judges, that judges because it is a power; its power and nothing but its power is what confers legitimacy on the tribunal; when the two intruders enter his room, K. immediately recognizes that power, and he submits.

The trial brought by the tribunal is always absolute; meaning that it does not concern an isolated act, a specific crime (theft, fraud, rape), but rather concerns the character of the accused in its entirety: K. searches for his offense in "the most minute events" of his whole life; in our century, by this standard, Bezukhov would have been indicted for both his love and his hatred of Napoleon. And also for his drunk-ennness, since, being absolute, the trial concerns private life as well as public; Brod condemned K. to death for seeing in women only the "lowest sexuality"; I recall the 1951 political trials in Prague; biographies of the accused were distributed in enormous printings; that was the first time I read a piece of pornography: the account of an orgy during which the naked body of a female defendant was coated with chocolate (at that peak of shortages!) and licked by the tongues of other defendants, soon to be hanged; at the start of the gradual collapse of the Communist ideology, the trial of Karl Marx (a trial that has lately culminated in the razing of his statues in Russia and elsewhere) opened with an attack on his private life (the first anti-Marx book I ever read: the account of his sexual relations with his housemaid); in The Joke, three other students are trying Ludvik over a sentence he has written his girlfriend; defending himself, he says he dashed it off in haste, without thinking; they answer: "you could only have written what was inside you"; because everything the defendant says, murmurs, thinks, everything he has hidden inside him is to be put at the tribunal's disposal.

The trial is absolute as well in that it does not keep within the limits of the defendant's life; thus K.s uncle says: "Do you want to lose this trial?… It means that you will be absolutely ruined. And all your relatives along with you." The guilt of one Jew contains within it that of the Jews of all times; the Communist doctrine on the influence of class origin includes within the offense of the accused the offense of his parents and grandparents; in the trial of Europe for the crime of colonialism, Sartre accused not the colonists but Europe, all of Europe, the Europe of all times; because "there is a colonist in each of us," because "being a man here means being an accomplice since we have all profited from colonial exploitation." The spirit of the trial recognizes no statute of limitations; the distant past is as alive as today's event; and even in death you will not escape: there are informers in the cemetery.

The trial's memory is colossal, but it is a very specific memory, which could be defined as the forgetting of everything not a crime. The trial thus reduces the defendant's biography to criminography; Victor Farias (whose Heidegger and Nazism is a classic example of criminography) locates the roots of the philosopher's Nazism in his early youth, without the least concern for locating the roots of his genius; to punish someone accused of ideological deviations, Communist tribunals would put all his work on the index (thus, for instance, the ban on Lukacs and Sartre in Communist countries covered even their pro-Communist writings). "Why are our streets still named for Picasso, Aragon, Eluard, Sartre?" a Paris paper asked in a 1991 post-Communist intoxication; it's tempting to answer: because of the value of their works! But in his trial against Europe, Sartre said exactly what values mean now: "our cherished values are losing their wings; looked at closely, every one of them is blood-stained"; values stained are values no longer; the spirit of the trial is the reduction of everything to morality; it is absolute nihilism in regard to craft, art, works.

Even before the intruders come in to arrest him, K. sees the old woman in the house across the way gazing at him "with totally unusual curiosity"; thus, from the beginning, the ancient chorus of concierges enters the game; in The Castle, Amalia is neither accused nor convicted, but it is widely known that the invisible tribunal dislikes her, and that is enough to keep all the villagers away from her; because if the tribunal imposes a trial-regime on a country, the entire population is dragooned into the grand machinations of the trial, increasing its efficacy a hundredfold; every single person knows that he could be accused at any moment, and he ponders his self-criticism in advance; self-criticism: the subjection of the accused to the accuser; the renunciation of his self; a way of nullifying himself as an individual; after the Communist revolution of 1948, the daughter of a wealthy Czech family felt guilty about her undeserved privileges as a child of affluence; to show her repentance, she became so fervent a Communist that she publicly repudiated her father; now, after the disappearance of Communism, she is again undergoing judgment and again feeling guilty; ground between the millstones of two trials, of two self-criticisms, all she has behind her is the desert of a repudiated life; even though in the meantime all the houses once confiscated from her (repudiated) father have been returned to her, today she is merely a nullified creature; doubly nullified; self-nullified.

For a trial is initiated not to render justice but to annihilate the defendant; as Brod said: he who does not love anyone, who only dallies, must die; thus K. is stabbed in the heart; Bukharin is hanged. Even when the trial is of dead people, the point is to kill them off a second time: by burning their books; by removing their names from the schoolbooks; by demolishing their monuments; by rechristening the streets that bore their names.

The Trial Against the Century

For nearly seventy years Europe lived under a trial-regime. From among the great artists of the century, how many defendants… I shall mention only those who had some significance for me. Starting in the twenties, there were those hounded by the tribunal of revolutionary morality: Bunin, Andreyev, Meyerhold, Pilnyak, Veprik (a Jewish-Russian musician, a forgotten martyr of modern art; he dared to defend Shostakovich's opera against Stalin's condemnation; they stuck him in a camp; I remember his piano compositions, which my father liked to play), Mandelstam, Halas (the poet who was adored by Ludvik in The Joke., hounded after his death for gloominess seen as counterrevolutionary). Then there were the quarry of the Nazi tribunal: Broch (he gazes at me, pipe in mouth, from a photo on my worktable), Schoenberg, Werfel, Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Musil, Vancura (the Czech writer I love most), Bruno Schulz. The totalitarian empires and their bloody trials have disappeared, but the spirit of the trial lingers as a legacy, and that is what is now settling scores. Thus the trial strikes at: those accused of pro-Nazi sympathies: Hamsun, Heidegger (all Czech dissident thought, Patocka most notably, is indebted to him), Richard Strauss, Gottfried Benn, von Doderer, Drieu la Rochelle, Celine (in 1992, a half century after the war, an indignant official refused to designate his house a historical monument); supporters of Mussolini: Malaparte, Marinetti, Ezra Pound (the American military kept him, like an animal, in a cage for months under the blazing Italian sun; in his Reykjavik studio, the painter

Kristjan Davidsson showed me a large photo of him: "For fifty years it has gone with me everywhere I go"); the Munich appeasers: Giono, Alain, Morand, Montherlant, St.-John Perse (a member of the French delegation to the Munich conference, he was closely involved in the humiliation of my native country); then, the Communists and their sympathizers: Maya-kovsky (who today remembers his love poetry and his amazing metaphors?), Gorky, Shaw, Brecht (who is thereby undergoing his second trial), Eluard (that exterminating angel who used to decorate his signature with a drawing of crossed swords), Picasso, Leger, Aragon (how can I forget that he offered me his hand at a difficult time in my life?), Nezval (his self-portrait in oils is on the wall by my bookshelves), Sartre. Some of these people are undergoing a double trial, first accused of betraying the revolution, then accused for services they had rendered it earlier: Gide (in the old Communist countries, the symbol of all evil), Shostakovich (to atone for his difficult music, he manufactured rubbish for the regime's needs; he maintained that for the history of art a worthless thing is null and void; he didn't know that for the tribunal it is the worthlessness itself that counts), Breton, Malraux (accused yesterday of having betrayed revolutionary ideals, accusable tomorrow of having held them), Tibor Dery (some works of this Communist writer, who was imprisoned after the Budapest massacre, were for me the first great literary, nonpropagandistic reply to Stalinism). The most exquisite flower of the century, the modern art of the twenties and thirties, was even triply accused: first by the Nazi tribunal as Entartete Kunst, "degenerate art"; then by the Communist tribunal as "elitist formalism alien to the people"; and finally by the triumphant capitalist tribunal as art steeped in revolutionary illusions.

How is it possible that the Soviet Russian chauvinist, the maker of versified propaganda, he whom Stalin himself called "the greatest poet of our epoch"-how is it possible that Mayakovsky is nevertheless a tremendous poet, one of the greatest? Given her capacity for enthusiasm, her emotional tears that blur her view of the outside world, wasn't lyric poetry-that untouchable goddess-doomed one fateful day to become the beautifier of atrocities, their "warmhearted maidservant" (Baudelaire)? These are the questions that fascinated me when, some twenty-five years ago, I wrote Life Is Elsewhere, the novel in which Jaromil, a poet under twenty years old, becomes the elated servant of the Stalinist regime. I was aghast when critics, although praising my book, saw my hero as a fake poet, a bastard even. In my view, Jaromil is an authentic poet, an innocent soul; otherwise, I would not have seen any interest to my novel. Am 1 the one to blame for the misunderstanding? Did I express myself badly? I don't think so. To be a true poet and at the same time to support (like Jaromil or Mayakovsky) an incontestable horror is a scandal-in the sense of an unjustifiable, unacceptable event, one that contradicts logic and yet is real. We are all unconsciously tempted to dodge scandals, to behave as though they don't exist. That is why we prefer to say that the great cultural figures tainted with the horrors of our century were bastards., but it isn't so; if only out of vanity, aware that they are seen, looked at, judged, artists and philosophers are anxious to be decent and courageous, to be

on the right side, to be right. That makes the scandal still more intolerable, more inexplicable. If we don't want to leave this century just as stupid as we entered it, we must abandon the facile moralism of the trial and think about this scandal, think it through to the bottom, even if this should lead us to question anew all our certainties about man as such.

But the conformism of public opinion is a force that sets itself up as a tribunal, and the tribunal is not there to waste time over ideas, it is there to conduct the investigations for trials. And as the abyss of time widens between judges and defendants, it is always a lesser experience that is judging a greater. The immature sit in judgment on Celine's erring ways without realizing that because of these erring ways, Celine's novels contain existential knowledge that, if they were to understand it, could make them more adult. Because therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children.

Those with No Sense of Guilt Are Dancing

The music (commonly and vaguely) called "rock " has been inundating the sonic environment of daily life for twenty years; it seized possession of the world at the very moment when the twentieth century was disgustedly vomiting up its history; a question haunts me: was

this coincidence mere chance? Or is there some hidden meaning to the conjunction of the century's final trials and the ecstasy of rock? Is the century hoping to forget itself in this ecstatic howling? To forget its Utopias foundering in horror? To forget its art? An art whose subtlety, whose needless complexity, irritates the populace, offends against democracy?

The word "rock" is vague; therefore, I would rather describe the music I mean: human voices prevail over instruments, high-pitched voices over low ones; there is no contrast to the dynamics, which keep to a perpetual fortissimo that turns the singing into howling; as in jazz, the rhythm accentuates the second beat of the measure, but in a more stereotyped and noisier manner; the harmony and the melody are simplistic and thus they bring out the tone color, the only inventive element of this music; while the popular songs of the first half of the century had melodies that made poor folk cry (and delighted Mahler's and Stravinsky's musical irony), this so-called rock music is exempt from the sin of sentimentality; it is not sentimental, it is ecstatic, it is the prolongation of a single moment of ecstasy; and since ecstasy is a moment wrenched out of time-a brief moment without memory, a moment surrounded by forgetting-the melodic motif has no room to develop, it only repeats, without evolving or concluding (rock is the only "light" music in which melody is not predominant; people don't hum rock melodies).

A curious thing: thanks to the technology of sound reproduction, this ecstatic music resounds incessantly and everywhere, and thus outside ecstatic situations. The acoustic image of ecstasy has become the everyday decor of our lassitude. It is inviting us to no orgy, to no mystical experience, so what does this trivialized ecstasy mean to tell us? That we should accept it. That we should get used to it. That we should respect its privileged position. That we should observe the ethic it decrees.

The ethic of ecstasy is the opposite of the trial's ethic; under its protection everybody does whatever he wants: now anyone can suck his thumb as he likes, from infancy to graduation, and it is a freedom no one will be willing to give up; look around you on the Metro; seated or standing, every single person has a finger in some orifice of his face-in the ear, in the mouth, in the nose; no one feels he's being observed, and everyone dreams of writing a book to tell about his unique and inimitable self, which is picking its nose; no one listens to anyone else, everyone writes, and each of them writes the way rock is danced to: alone, for himself, focused on himself yet making the same motions as all the others. In this situation of uniform egocentricity, the sense of guilt does not play the role it once did; the tribunals still operate, but they are fascinated exclusively by the past; they see only the core of the century; they see only the generations that are old or dead. Kafka's characters were made to feel guilty by the authority of the father; it is because his father disgraces him that the hero of "The Judgment" drowns himself in a river; that time is past: in the world of rock, the father has been charged with such a load of guilt that, for a long time now, he allows everything. Those with no guilt feelings are dancing.

Recently, two adolescents murdered a priest: on television I heard another priest talking, his voice trembling with understanding: "We must pray for the priest who was a victim of his mission: he was especially concerned with young people. But we must also pray for the two unfortunate adolescents; they too were victims: of their drives."

While freedom of thought-freedom of words, of attitudes, of jokes, of reflection, of dangerous ideas, of intellectual provocations-shrinks, under surveillance as it is by the vigilance of the tribunal of general con-formism, the freedom of drives grows ever greater. They are preaching severity against sins of thought; they are preaching forgiveness for crimes committed in emotional ecstasy.

Paths in the Fog

Robert Musil's contemporaries admired his intelligence much more than his books; they said he should have written essays, not novels. A negative proof suffices to refute this opinion: read Musil's essays: how heavy they are, boring and charmless! For Musil is a great thinker only in his novels. His thought needs to feed on concrete situations and concrete characters; in short, it is novelistic thought, not philosophic.

Each first chapter of the eighteen books of Fielding's Tom Jones is a brief essay. Its first French translator, in the eighteenth century, purely and simply eliminated all of them, claiming that they were not to the French taste. Turgenev reproached Tolstoy for the essayistic passages in War and Peace dealing with the philosophy of history. Tolstoy began to doubt himself and, under pressure of advisers, eliminated those passages in the third edition of the novel. Fortunately, he later restored them.

Just as there are novelistic dialogue and action, there is also novelistic reflection. The lengthy reflections of War and Peace are inconceivable outside of the novel-for instance, in a scholarly journal. Because of their language, certainly, which is filled with intentionally naive similes and metaphors. But above all because Tolstoy talking about history is not interested, as a historian would be, in the exact account of events and of their consequences for social, political, and cultural life, in the evaluation of this or that persons role, and so on; he is interested in history as a new dimension of human existence.

History became a concrete experience for everyone toward the start of the nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic Wars that figure in War and Peace; with a shock, these wars made clear to every European that the world around him was subject to perpetual change that interferes with his life, transforming it and keeping it in motion. Before the nineteenth century, wars and rebellions were felt to be natural catastrophes, like the plague or an earthquake. People saw neither unity nor continuity in historical events, and did not believe it possible to influence their course. Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist joins a regiment and then is seriously wounded in battle; marked for life, he will limp for the rest of his days. But what battle was it? The novel doesn't say. And why should it say? All wars were the same. In eighteenth-century novels the historical moment is specified only very approximately. Only after the start of the nineteenth century, from Scott and Balzac on, do all wars no longer seem the same and characters in novels live in precisely dated times.

Tolstoy looks back on the Napoleonic Wars from a distance of fifty years. In his case, the new perception of history not only affects the structure of the novel, which has become more and more capable of capturing (in dialogue, in description) the historical nature of narrated events; but what interests him primarily is man's relation to history (his ability to dominate it or to escape it, to be free or not in regard to it), and he takes up the problem directly, as the very theme of his novel, a theme he explores by every means, including novelistic reflection.

Tolstoy argues against the idea that history is made by the will and reason of great individuals. History makes itself, he says, obeying laws of its own, which remain obscure to man. Great individuals "all were the involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work that was concealed from them." Later on: "Providence compelled all these men, each striving to attain personal aims, to combine in the accomplishment of a single stupendous result not one of them (neither Napoleon nor Alexander and still less anyone who did the actual fighting) in the least expected." And again: "Man lives consciously for himself, but is unconsciously a tool in the attainment of the historic, general aims of mankind." From which comes this tremendous conclusion: "History, that is, the unconscious, general herd-life of mankind …" (I emphasize the key phrases.)

With this conception of history, Tolstoy lays out the metaphysical space in which his characters move. Knowing neither the meaning nor the future course of history, knowing not even the objective meaning of their own actions (by which they "involuntarily" participate in events whose meaning is "concealed from them"), thev proceed through their lives as one proceeds in the fog. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness, we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog, we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close bv and react.

Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog. And yet all of them-Heidegger, Mayakovsky, Aragon, Ezra Pound, Gorky, Gottfried Benn, St.-John Perse, Giono-all were walking in fog, and one might wonder: who is more blind? Mayakovsky, who as he wrote his poem on Lenin did not know where Leninism would lead? Or we, who judge him decades later and do not see the fog that enveloped him?

Mayakovsky's blindness is part of the eternal human condition.

But for us not to see the fog on Mayakovsky's path is to forget what man is, forget what we ourselves are.