THE VELVET PRISON
Artists Under State Socialism
Miklos Haraszti
New York: Basic Books, 1987
165 pp., $14.95
The Oxford English Dictionary defines dissident as "one who disagrees," or "one who dissents from the established or dominant form of religion." In East Central Europe, that religion goes by the name of communism, and those who dissent must therefore set themselves against the formidable power of the state. As a rule, these courageous men and women are apostates, disappointed idealists and quondam believers who were forced to look on as their dreams of emancipation and redemption turned into nightmares of oppression and damnation. That is certainly the testimony of Milovan Djilas, the archetypical East Central European dissident. While still a young man, the tough Montenegrin threw in his lot with the communists, fought in World War II with Marshal Tito's Partisans, and took his place as a prominent member of postwar Yugoslavia's ruling elite.
It was not long, however, before the rebellious temperament that Djilas inherited from his forefathers stirred within him. In 1957, he shook the Yugoslav government and the entire communist world by publishing in the West The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, a searing indictment of the dictatorship he had done so much to invent. In the long years since the book first appeared, he has lived the life of a dissident, one who cannot publish in his own country and who must be prepared to endure surveillance, harassment, prison, and public calumny.
And yet, Djilas has steadfastly refused to consider exile; come what may, he will live in Yugoslavia on his own terms. It is a decision that others from his part of the world have also made. One thinks in this regard of Adam Michnik in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. The most celebrated Hungarian dissident is Gyorgy (George) Konrad, a sociologist and novelist who has to his credit several outstanding works, including The Loser, an extraordinary novelistic history of Hungary from World War II to the present, and Antipolitics, and essay in criticism of the Yalta Agreement. "Caught between the United States and the Soviet Union," Konrad writes, "we Europeans can assure peace only if we detach ourselves from them militarily by mutual agreement, and then go on to draw the two parts of a divided Europe together again." That is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future, and in the meanwhile Konrad makes his home in Janos Kadar's Hungary, where he counsels all who will listen to "be dissidents, don't wait for the official outbreak of constitutional democracy."
In his fatherly introduction to this new book from the wicked pen of Miklos Haraszti, a younger and more radical dissident, Konrad describes the author as a "true socialist" whose romanticism "blends perfectly into the universalism of today's new human rights ideology." Proud and stubborn, Haraszti refuses to cut his losses and run. Even after a crazed would-be disciple bludgeoned his mother to death early in 1986, he would not heed Konrad's advice: "'Go away from here,' I told him at the time. 'This is not a good place for you.' I've learned by now that he will never leave. He wants to prove it here. Prove what? His truth, of course. For in Budapest there is a powerful, sensitive truth called Miklos
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