Vaclav Havel, was among the many Praguers who loudly protested the closure; when eventually the Slavia reopened in 1998, Havel spoke of the saving of a national institution.
That night in the 1980s it seemed more like a national memorial. Who are the most numerous frequenters of public literary establishments, so-called? In the 1960s in Dublin I found no Behan or Kavanagh in McDaid's or Mulligan's, and when I was in Paris and walked past the Cafe Flore or the Deux Magots - what penniless young Irishman on his first Paris visit would dare venture inside such frighteningly suave and expensive places? - 1 saw a lot of American tourists, but no sign of Sartre or de Beauvoir hard at work over their cahiers and cafes. The customers in the Slavia that night did not look likely litterateurs to me. They were young, poorly dressed and bored, or middle-aged and dowdy; only in the elderly among them, I thought, was there discernible the still-surviving glow of an intellectual spark. I remember one night in Dublin in 1987 arguing with Joseph Brodsky and Susan Sontag about yet another letter they and other East Coast luminaries had written to the New York Review of Books protesting the imprisonment of intellectuals in the Soviet Union. Did they ever, I demanded - the wine was flowing, and I could hardly see Brodsky behind the clouds of cigarette smoke in which he was forever enveloped - did they, he and his American friends, ever think to protest about the imprisonment of a Russian street sweeper, or charlady, some poor nobody who had not even written a subversive poem but still had ended up in prison? Sontag was adamant on the need to keep pecking away at the vast repressive machine that was the Soviet Union, and no doubt she was right. Brodsky, however, a fine, just and courageous man, conceded that, yes, 'we do tend to look after our own.' Recently I read a memorial tribute to Brodsky, who died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of only fifty-six, by the Russian essayist and fiction writer, Tatyana Tolstaya. She wrote of how she had urged him after 1989 to return to Russia - a thing he was superstitiously unwilling to do: she quoted a poem written in his youth in which he prophesied Neither country nor churchyard will I choose/Til come to Vasilevsky Island to die - so that all those who had revered him as their spokesman when he was in exile might have the comfort of seeing him back amongst them in St Petersburg, even if it meant risking a visit to Vasilevsky Island. 'What about all those little old ladies of the intelligentsia,' Tolstaya had reminded him, 'your readers, all the librarians, museum staff, pensioners, communal apartment dwellers who are afraid to go out into the communal kitchen with their chipped teakettle? The ones who stand in the back rows at philharmonic concerts, next to the columns, where the tickets are cheaper?' Tolstaya was right. We know about the great ones, the Solzhenitsyns, the Brodskys, the Sa-kharovs, but when, even in those dark days before the Fall of the Wall, did we think about the 'little old ladies of the intelligentsia', those sustainers of the spark, those no less heroic guardians of the light?
Philip had arrived that day from Bucharest, where he had been seeing one of his dissident poets - although the adjective is superfluous, since to write poetry in Romania then was automatically to dissent. I was interested to hear a first-hand account of life there, suspecting, as so many of us in the West suspected, that reports of the gaudy excesses of the Ceau§escu regime must be in part at least inspired by the American Central Intelligence Agency. Philip was there to enlighten me, however. He is one of those wised-up people, is Phil, who see themselves both as social outsiders - dissidents, if you like - and as players strenuously engaged in the great game of world politics. Whatever you vaguely believe, whatever fuzzy opinion you may hold, whatever way you choose to account for world-historical
That night in the 1980s it seemed more like a national memorial. Who are the most numerous frequenters of public literary establishments, so-called? In the 1960s in Dublin I found no Behan or Kavanagh in McDaid's or Mulligan's, and when I was in Paris and walked past the Cafe Flore or the Deux Magots - what penniless young Irishman on his first Paris visit would dare venture inside such frighteningly suave and expensive places? - 1 saw a lot of American tourists, but no sign of Sartre or de Beauvoir hard at work over their cahiers and cafes. The customers in the Slavia that night did not look likely litterateurs to me. They were young, poorly dressed and bored, or middle-aged and dowdy; only in the elderly among them, I thought, was there discernible the still-surviving glow of an intellectual spark. I remember one night in Dublin in 1987 arguing with Joseph Brodsky and Susan Sontag about yet another letter they and other East Coast luminaries had written to the New York Review of Books protesting the imprisonment of intellectuals in the Soviet Union. Did they ever, I demanded - the wine was flowing, and I could hardly see Brodsky behind the clouds of cigarette smoke in which he was forever enveloped - did they, he and his American friends, ever think to protest about the imprisonment of a Russian street sweeper, or charlady, some poor nobody who had not even written a subversive poem but still had ended up in prison? Sontag was adamant on the need to keep pecking away at the vast repressive machine that was the Soviet Union, and no doubt she was right. Brodsky, however, a fine, just and courageous man, conceded that, yes, 'we do tend to look after our own.' Recently I read a memorial tribute to Brodsky, who died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of only fifty-six, by the Russian essayist and fiction writer, Tatyana Tolstaya. She wrote of how she had urged him after 1989 to return to Russia - a thing he was superstitiously unwilling to do: she quoted a poem written in his youth in which he prophesied Neither country nor churchyard will I choose/Til come to Vasilevsky Island to die - so that all those who had revered him as their spokesman when he was in exile might have the comfort of seeing him back amongst them in St Petersburg, even if it meant risking a visit to Vasilevsky Island. 'What about all those little old ladies of the intelligentsia,' Tolstaya had reminded him, 'your readers, all the librarians, museum staff, pensioners, communal apartment dwellers who are afraid to go out into the communal kitchen with their chipped teakettle? The ones who stand in the back rows at philharmonic concerts, next to the columns, where the tickets are cheaper?' Tolstaya was right. We know about the great ones, the Solzhenitsyns, the Brodskys, the Sa-kharovs, but when, even in those dark days before the Fall of the Wall, did we think about the 'little old ladies of the intelligentsia', those sustainers of the spark, those no less heroic guardians of the light?
Philip had arrived that day from Bucharest, where he had been seeing one of his dissident poets - although the adjective is superfluous, since to write poetry in Romania then was automatically to dissent. I was interested to hear a first-hand account of life there, suspecting, as so many of us in the West suspected, that reports of the gaudy excesses of the Ceau§escu regime must be in part at least inspired by the American Central Intelligence Agency. Philip was there to enlighten me, however. He is one of those wised-up people, is Phil, who see themselves both as social outsiders - dissidents, if you like - and as players strenuously engaged in the great game of world politics. Whatever you vaguely believe, whatever fuzzy opinion you may hold, whatever way you choose to account for world-historical
Similar Books
