The Politics of Culture [antikvár]

The Socialism That Came in from the Cold by Jean-Paul Sartre The voices heard in this book were raised between 1966 and the first months of 1968; a timid dawn shed its light on the Slovakian Carpathians, the Moravian plain, the mountains of Bohemia. Had there been just a bit more light, we might have seen these men— men who had been hidden from our eyes by clouds ever since we turned them over to the Nazis in return for twelve months of peace—in broad daylight. It was not dawn, no lark was singing; since then socialism has been plunged back into the long night of its Middle Ages. I remember what my Soviet friend used to tell me around 1960: "Be patient; it will take time perhaps, but you'll see. The process is irreversible." But sometimes I have the feeling that nothing has been irreversible except the continuous, implacable degradation of Soviet socialism. These Slovak and Czech voices remain, bouquets of snipped-off puffs of breath, still warm and alive, disavowed and unrefuted. One cannot hear them without feeling ill at ease; they speak of a sinister and grotesque past, they tell us that it is buried forever, and yet this resuscitated past has once again become the interminable present of Czechoslovakia; they prudently 3