A Postscript: The East-West Divide

The discussion is not over yet. Quite the opposite—it is as alive today as ever. The Russians themselves made an attempt at overcoming the duality by creating, in the intellectually fertile period around the time of the Revolution of 1917, the concept of Eurasia.^[32] But the East-West divide was not healed. In 1985, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera penned a strong indictment of Russian culture:

In his celebrated Harvard speech, Solzhenitsyn places the starting point of the current crisis of the West squarely in the Renaissance. It is Russia—Russia as a separate civilization—that is explained and revealed by his assessment . . . the Russian mentality maintains a different balance [from the European] between rationality and sentiment; in this other balance (or imbalance) we find the famous mystery of the Russian soul (its profundity as well as its brutality). . . . When feelings supplant rational thought, they become the basis for an absence of understanding, for intolerance. . . . The noblest of national sentiments stand ready to justify the greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swelling with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred name of love.

Although the supremacy of feeling is a phenomenon that, in Kundera's view, came about with the birth of Christianity, the Renaissance introduced into Europe this other, rational tradition, which Kundera claims as his own. This leads him to be repelled by Dostoevsky but attracted to Diderot, and it underlies his combination of rationality and irony. The supremacy of feeling is not considered by Kundera to be an alien, non-European tradition, and therefore he does not "expel" Russia to Asia. He nevertheless summons the tradition of anti-Russian writings ("the famous mystery of Russian soul") and asks, to use Lotman's terms, that Europe be left in peace, in the neutral sphere of ironic rationality, neither sacred nor profane.^[33]

Kundera's entire novelistic work has as its main protagonist a man who tries, against the pressures of the extreme politicization of everyday life, to live according to the principles of an ironic (and hedonistic), rational, secular mind. This man even claims a territory for himself—the land of Central Europe—a mythical Middle Europe that denotes "a culture or a fate" rather than geography and, therefore, is

[32] See Riasanovsky, 19–29.

[33] Milan Kundera, "An Introduction to a Variation," The New York Times Book Review, January 6, 1985.

above traditional divisions. In an article about this spiritual entity, Barbara Torunczyk includes as its citizens intellectuals and writers Milan Kundera, Tomas Venclova, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Adam Zagajewski, Mircea Eliade, and Witold Gombrowicz. All but Brodsky, who was born in Leningrad and grew up there, are or were exiles in the Western world from what is called Eastern Europe. Brodsky, too, tries to liberate art from the tyranny of politics. However, in an answer to Kundera's article, he emphatically rejects the East-West divide and a concept of culture in which there was no place for Dostoevsky.^[34] And he eloquently attacks Kundera on his own territory, that is, Europe.

Mr. Kundera is a Continental, a European man. These people are seldom capable of seeing themselves from the outside. It they do, it's invariably within the context of Europe, for Europe offers them a scale against which their importance is detectable. The advantage of stratified society lies precisely in the ease with which the individual may appreciate his advancement. The reverse side of the coin, however, is that one senses limits, and beyond them, expanses where this individual's life appears irrelevant. That's why a sedentary people always resents nomads: apart from the physical threat, a nomad compromises the concept of border. The people of the Continent are very much a people whose existence is defined by borders, be it that of a nation, community, class, tradition, hierarchy—or of reason. Add to this the mesmerizing bureaucratic structure of the state, and you get a man with no sense of contingencies, either for himself or for his race. Never having heard of multiple options, he can at best only contemplate a wholesale special alternative, one like what he already has—East or West.

Brodsky refers back to Diderot when he points to the Western origin of Marxist ideology, and he reproaches Kundera's "sense of geography . . . conditioned by his sense of history." But Brodsky's sense of geography is mystifying: he writes that Kundera is from "Eastern Europe (Western Asia to some)" but also calls him "Continental" and calls Europe "The Continent," as if Brodsky were an Englishman, or an islander of some sort, or perhaps American. And he himself operates within the binary oppositions, the terms of which define each other. Although he refuses to accept Kundera's divisions as binding—if he did he would find himself in Asia—he uses these divisions nevertheless. As much as a nomad compromises the idea of border, he is necessary for the existence of the very concept of sedentary people. So is the East for the existence

[34] Joseph Brodsky, "Why Milan Kundera Is Wrong About Dostoyevsky," The New York Times Book Review, February 17, 1985. Barbara Torunczyk's article is entitled "Kings and Spirits in the Eastern European Tales," in Cross Currents 7 (1988): 183–206.

of the West. Brodsky attempts to transcend this division by proposing a community of free people to which both "the laughter of Diderot" and "the sorrows of Dostoevsky" belong.

But it turns out that for Brodsky too the West of free people exists in opposition to the East of enslaved masses. In a complicated travel essay, Flight from Byzantium, Brodsky establishes the border between these two communities.

Dreading a repetition, [he writes self-consciously and with irony] I will nevertheless state again that if Byzantine soil turned out to be so favorable for Islam it was most likely because of its ethnic texture—a mixture of races and nationalities that had neither local nor, moreover, over-all memory of any kind of coherent tradition of individualism. Dreading generalizations, I will add that the East means, first of all, a tradition of obedience, of hierarchy, of profit, of trade, of adaptability: a tradition, that is drastically alien to the principles of a moral absolute, whose role—I mean the intensity of the sentiment—is fulfilled here by the idea of kinship, of family. I foresee objections, and am even willing to accept them, in whole or in part. But no matter what extreme of idealization of the East we may entertain we'll never be able to ascribe to it the least semblance of democracy.

A historical illustration follows, of a castration, somewhere around the year 1000, of an emperor's uncle so as "to eliminate any possible claim to the throne."^[35]

Isn't Brodsky's flight from Byzantium a flight into the old categories? Certainly, he does point out where we are, and ubi leones . Although geographic divisions became fuzzy, the need to know who we are, it seems, makes us search out the others. And, it seems, there are always plenty of them.

[35] Joseph Brodsky, "Flight from Byzantium," Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986), 393–446; the quotation is on p. 417.