MURTI-BING
549
have a lasting value, he would not hesitate. He would earn his living
through some more menial job within his profession; write or paint
in his spare time; and never worry about publishing or exhibiting
his
work. He believes, however, that in most cases such work would
be artistically poor; and he is not too far wrong. As we have already
said, the objective conditions he once knew have disappeared. The
objective conditions necessary to the realization of a work of art
are, as we know, a highly complex phenomenon, involving one's
public, the possibility of contact with it, the general atmosphere, and
above all freedom from involuntary subjective control.
I can't write as I would like to [a young Polish poet admitted to
me]. My own stream of thought has so many tributaries, that I barely
succeed in damming off one, when a second, third or fourth overflows. I
get halfway through a phrase, and already I submit it to Marxist criti–
cism. I imagine what X or Y will say about it, and I change the ending.
Paradoxical as it may seem, it is this subjective impotence that
convinces the intellectual that the one method is right. Everything
proves it is right. Dialectics: I predict the house will bum; then I
pour gasoline over the stove. The house burns; my prediction is
fulfilled. Dialectics: I predict that a work of art incompatible with
Socialist realism will be worthless. Then I place the artist in condi–
tions in which such a work
is
worthless. My prediction is fulfilled.
Let us take poetry as an example. Obviously there is poetry of
political significance. Lyric poetry is permitted to exist on certain
conditions. It must be: ( 1) serene; (2) free of ,any elements of
thought that might trespass against the universally accepted princi–
ples (in practice, this comes down to descriptions of nature and of
one's own feelings for friends and family); (3) understandable.
Since a poet who is not allowed to
think
automatically tends to
perfect his form, he is accused of formalism.
It is not only the literature and painting of the popular democra–
cies that prove to the intellectual that
things cannot be different.
He is
strengthened in this belief by the news that seeps through from the
West. The Western world is the world of Witkiewicz's novel. The
number of its aesthetic and philosophical aberrations is myriad.
Disciples imitate disciples; the past imitates the past. This world
lives as
if
there had never been a second World War. Eastern
