The Memory Chalet (16 page)

As I returned to Oxford that evening, embarrassed by my failure to help and mortified at my own provincialism, I took what would prove, in its small way, to be a decision of consequence. I was going to learn Czech. It was one thing for Thames to ignore me: I did not mind being unimportant. But it offended me to be thought both unimportant and uninformed. For the first time in my life, I had found myself disquisitioning on a place and a problem whose language was unfamiliar to me. I realize that political scientists do this all the time, but that is why I am not a political scientist.

And so, beginning in the early 1980s, I learned a new language. I began by purchasing
Teach Yourself Czech
. Taking advantage of the lengthy (and increasingly welcome) absences of Wife #2, I devoted two hours a night to this book. Its method was old-fashioned and thus reassuringly familiar: page upon page of grammar, with the emphasis on the complicated conjugations and declensions of the Slavonic family of languages, interspersed with vocabulary, translations, pronunciation, important exceptions, etc. In short, just the way I had been taught German.

After advancing for a few months through this introductory text, I decided that I needed formal instruction if I were to break past the limitations of the isolated autodidact. Oxford in those days offered first-rate language teaching in dozens of familiar and exotic tongues and I duly signed on for a beginner/intermediate-level Czech class. There were only two of us as I recall; my fellow pupil was the wife of a senior Oxford historian and herself a linguist of talent. It took work and concentration to keep up with her.

By the later 1980s I had acquired a passive competence in Czech. I emphasize
passive
: I rarely heard the language spoken outside the audiovisual laboratory, I only visited the country a handful of times, and I was already discovering that—in early middle age—one is slow to master strange tongues. But I could read quite satisfactorily. The first book I read was
Hovory s T.G. Masarykem
(Conversations with Thomas Masaryk) by Karel Capek, a wonderful series of interviews and exchanges between the country’s greatest play-wright and its first president. From Capek, I advanced to Havel, about whom I started to write.

Learning Czech led me to Czechoslovakia, where I traveled in 1985 and 1986 as a foot soldier in the little army of book smugglers recruited by Roger Scruton to assist lecturers and students expelled from Czech universities or forbidden to attend. I lectured in private apartments to attentive roomfuls of young people, hungry for debate and refreshingly ignorant of academic reputation and fashion. I lectured in English, of course (though older professors would have preferred German). To the extent that I had occasion to use my Czech, it was to respond to unconvincingly casual questions from plainclothes policemen who stood under lamp-posts outside dissidents’ apartments and asked visitors what time it was, to establish whether or not they were foreigners.

Prague in those days was a gray, sad place. Gustáv Husák’s Czechoslovakia might have been well-off by Communist standards (second only to Hungary), but it was a grim and depressed land. No one who saw communism in those years could harbor any illusion about the prospects for a dead dogma immured in a decaying society. And yet I spent my days there in a whirl of enthusiasm and excitement, returning to Oxford each time energized and pulsing with ideas.

I began teaching East European history and—with some trepidation—writing it. In particular, I became deeply interested and engaged with the informal, underground opposition there. Reading, discussing, and (eventually) meeting men like Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, János Kis, and their friends, I rediscovered political passions and scholarly and intellectual interests of an urgency unfamiliar—at least to me—since the end of the 1960s . . . and far more serious and consequential than anything I could recall from that decade. It is only a slight exaggeration, and perhaps not even that, to say that my immersion in East-Central Europe brought me back to life.

Back in Oxford, I frequented specialists and refugees from the region. I established programs to host outcast intellectuals from the Soviet bloc. I even began to promote the careers of younger historians and others with an interest in this obscure and absurdly understudied part of Europe—a project I would continue with vastly greater funding after decamping to New York.

Through Poland in particular, and my newfound friends there and in exile, I was able to make links with my own East European Jewish past. Above all, and to my continuing embarrassment, I discovered a rich and seductive literature of which I had been almost completely unaware until then: a shortcoming doubtless attributable to the parochial qualities of even the best British education, but my own responsibility all the same.

Learning Czech, in other words, made me a very different sort of scholar, historian, and person. Would it have made a significant difference had I taken up, say, Polish? My friends certainly thought so: to them, Czech was a
small
Slav language (much as Russian colleagues would later describe Polish) and I had inexplicably opted to specialize in what—for them—was the equivalent of the history of, say, Wales. I felt otherwise: that distinctly Polish (or Russian) sense of cultural grandeur was precisely what I wanted to circumnavigate, preferring the distinctively Czech qualities of doubt, cultural insecurity, and skeptical self-mockery. These were already familiar to me from Jewish sources: Kafka, above all—but Kafka is also the Czech writer par excellence.

Without my Czech obsession I would not have found myself in Prague in November 1989, watching Havel accept the presidency from a balcony in the town square. I would not have sat in the Gellert Hotel in Budapest listening to János Kis explain his plans for a post-Communist but social democratic Hungary—the best hope for the region but forlorn even then. I would not have found myself, a few years later, in the Maramures region of northern Transylvania making notes for an essay on Romania’s post-Communist traumas.

Above all, I could never have written
Postwar
, my history of Europe since 1945. Whatever its shortcomings, that book is rare for the determination with which I set out to integrate Europe’s two halves into a common story. In a way,
Postwar
echoes my own attempt to become an integrated historian of Europe rather than a disabused critic of French historical fashion. My Czech adventures did not get me a new wife (until much later and only indirectly), much less a new car. But they were the best midlife crisis I could have wished for. They cured me forever of the methodological solipsism of the postmodern academy. They made me, for better or worse, a credible public intellectual. There were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in our Western philosophy and I had—belatedly—seen some of them.

XX

Captive Minds

S
ome years ago I visited Krasnogruda, the restored manor house of Czesław Miłosz, close by the Polish-Lithuanian frontier. I was the guest of Krzysztof Czyżewski, director of the Borderland Foundation, dedicated to acknowledging the conflicted memory of this region and reconciling the local populations. It was deep midwinter and there were snow-covered fields as far as the eye could see, with just the occasional clump of ice-bound trees and posts marking the national frontiers.

My host waxed lyrical over the cultural exchanges planned for Miłosz’s ancestral home. I was absorbed in my own thoughts: some seventy miles north, in Pilviškiai (Lithuania), the Avigail side of my father’s family had lived and died (some at the hands of the Nazis). Our cousin Meyer London had emigrated in 1891 to New York from a nearby village; there he was elected in 1914 as the second Socialist congressman before being ousted by an ignominious alliance of wealthy New York Jews disturbed by his socialism and American Zionists aghast at his well-publicized suspicion of their project.

For Miłosz, Krasnogruda—“red soil”—was his “native realm” (
Rodzinna Europa
in the original Polish, better translated as European Fatherland or European Family).
¹
But for me, staring over this stark white landscape, it stood for Jedwabne, Katyn, and Babi Yar—all within easy reach—not to mention dark memories closer to home. My host certainly knew all this: indeed, he was personally responsible for the controversial Polish publication of Jan Gross’s account of the massacre at Jedwabne.
²
But the presence of Poland’s greatest twentieth-century poet transcended the tragedy that stalks the region.

Miłosz was born in 1911 in what was then Russian Lithuania. Indeed, like many great Polish literary figures, he was not strictly “Polish” by geographical measure. Adam Zagajewski, one of the country’s most important living poets, was born in Ukraine; Jerzy Giedroyc—a major figure in the twentieth-century literary exile—was born in Belarus, like Adam Mickiewicz, the nineteenth-century icon of the Polish literary revival. Lithuanian Vilna in particular was a cosmopolitan blend of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Russians, and Jews, among others (Isaiah Berlin, like the Harvard political philosopher Judith Shklar, was born in nearby Riga).

Raised in the interwar Polish republic, Miłosz survived the occupation and was already a poet of some standing when he was sent to Paris as the cultural attaché of the new People’s Republic. But in 1951 he defected to the West and two years later he published his most influential work,
The Captive Mind
.
³
Never out of print, it is by far the most insightful and enduring account of the attraction of intellectuals to Stalinism and, more generally, of the appeal of authority and authoritarianism to the intelligentsia.

Miłosz studies four of his contemporaries and the self-delusions to which they fell prey on their journey from autonomy to obedience, emphasizing what he calls the intellectuals’ need for “a feeling of belonging.” Two of his subjects—Jerzy Andrzejewski and Tadeusz Borowski—may be familiar to English readers, Andrzejewski as the author of
Ashes and Diamonds
(adapted for the cinema by Andrzej Wajda) and Borowski as the author of a searing memoir of Auschwitz,
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
.

But the book is most memorable for two images. One is the “Pill of Murti-Bing.” Miłosz came across this in an obscure novel by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz,
Insatiability
(1927). In this story, Central Europeans facing the prospect of being overrun by unidentified Asiatic hordes pop a little pill, which relieves them of fear and anxiety; buoyed by its effects, they not only accept their new rulers but are positively happy to receive them.

The second image is that of “Ketman,” borrowed from Arthur de Gobineau’s
Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia
, in which the French traveler reports the Persian phenomenon of elective identities. Those who have internalized the way of being called “Ketman” can live with the contradictions of saying one thing and believing another, adapting freely to each new requirement of their rulers while believing that they have preserved somewhere within themselves the autonomy of a free thinker—or at any rate a thinker who has freely chosen to subordinate himself to the ideas and dictates of others.

Ketman, in Miłosz’s words, “brings comfort, fostering dreams of what might be, and even the enclosing fence affords the solace of reverie.” Writing for the desk drawer becomes a sign of inner liberty. At least his audience
would
take him seriously if only they could read him.

Fear of the indifference with which the economic system of the West treats its artists and scholars is widespread among Eastern intellectuals. They say it is better to deal with an intelligent devil than with a good-natured idiot.

Between Ketman and the Pill of Murti-Bing, Miłosz brilliantly dissects the state of mind of the fellow traveler, the deluded idealist, and the cynical time server. His essay is more subtle than Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon
and less relentlessly logical than Raymond Aron’s
Opium of the Intellectuals
. I used to teach it in what was for many years my favorite course, a survey of essays and novels from Central and Eastern Europe that included the writings of Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Ivo Andrić, Heda Kovály, Paul Goma, and others.

But I began to notice that whereas the novels of Kundera and Andrić, or the memoirs of Kovaly or Yevgenia Ginsburg, remain accessible to American students notwithstanding the alien material,
The Captive Mind
often encountered incomprehension. Miłosz takes for granted his readers’ intuitive grasp of the believer’s state of mind: the man or woman who has identified with History and enthusiastically aligned themselves with a system that denies them freedom of expression. In 1951 he could reasonably assume that this phenomenon—whether associated with communism, fascism, or indeed any other form of political repression—would be familiar.

And indeed, when I first taught the book in the 1970s, I spent most of my time explaining to would-be radical students just why a “captive mind” was not a good thing. Thirty years on, my young audience is simply mystified: why would someone sell his soul to
any
idea, much less a repressive one? By the turn of the twenty-first century, few of my North American students had ever met a Marxist. A self-abnegating commitment to a secular faith was beyond their imaginative reach. When I started out my challenge was to explain why people became disillusioned with Marxism; today, the insuperable hurdle one faces is explaining the illusion itself.

Contemporary students do not see the point of the book: the whole exercise seems futile. Repression, suffering, irony, and even religious belief: these they can grasp. But ideological self-delusion? Miłosz’s posthumous readers thus resemble the Westerners and émigrés whose incomprehension he describes so well: “They do not know how one pays—those abroad do not know. They do not know what one buys, and at what price.”