Lately, I have been reading East-European—including Soviet, of course—dissident fiction to the exclusion of almost everything else. For two or three years now, I have been going to bookstores only to find another Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, etc., novel or collection of stories. Entire continents leave me cold… Why is this so? What leads me down this treacherous and lonely path? Compassion? Homelessness? Guilt? A premonition of the collective future? A germ of misplaced voyeurism, perhaps? I do not know, and I do not feel compelled to find an answer. Not yet, not yet… What I want to figure out now, today, as soon as possible, is the proper way of asking this question. To put it simply, do I wish this arrested subcontinent, lodged awkwardly someplace between the two worlds, the two paradigms, and the two abominations, to perish or to persist—as an index of the great battle that, sometimes invisible, threatens to destroy the very planet we still happen to inhabit? Which way do I wish the scales to ultimately tip, at first hesitantly, and then with certainty and decision? To put it even more simply, whose side am I really on? This is the question I indeed appear to share with the inmates from these lands of uncertainty…

Addendum I (November 2, 1988)

There’s a saying that shame’s not smoke; it won’t burn your eyes. I think it does. People are alive and human as long as they have their sense of shame. All is not yet lost.

From Vladimir Voinovich’s The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986 (first published in 1985), p. 191.

Addendum II (February 12, 1990)

There is no reason for beating around the bush: my pathetic question was no less than prophetic. Now that the mirage of socialism has been mercifully trampled into the mud for good, now that East Europe has become a picturesque laboratory in laissez faire, I feel that my eager rejoicing is far too flat and hollow. In the last analysis, I was an enthusiast of suspension. I was an artist of equilibration. To my shame, I was an invisible champion of the status quo.