In this passage from his 1953 book “The Captive Mind”, Czeslaw Milosz tells us about the experiences of artists in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries that came under its influence. In particular, the effects of the dictatorship of the one Method manifest in individual self-censorship and the gradually sedimenting conviction that things cannot be otherwise. (The Method referred to here was dialectical materialism as the official ideology of the Marxist-Leninist Party and social realism in all cultural production).
“The objective conditions necessary to the realization of a work of art are, as we know, a highy complex phenomenon, involving one’s public, the possibility of contact with it, the general atmosphere, and above al 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 criticism. 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 that a work of art incompatible with socialist realism will be worthless. Then I place the artist in conditions 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 universaly accepted principles (in practice, this comes down to descriptions of nature and of one’s feelings for friends and family); 3) understandable. Since a poet who is not allowed to think in his verse automatically tends to perfect his form, he is accused of formalism.
… things cannot be different… And mental discipline and the obligation to be clear are undoubtedly precious.”
Czeslaw Milosz (“The Captive Mind”, 2001 [1953])
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