Czeslaw Milosz - from The Captive Mind - I

Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize for his book "The Captive Mind," an outstanding treatise on the affects of working under Soviet domination, originally published in 1953.  Poland only emerged from the Soviet Union's sway when communism collapsed in the late 80's... Up to that point, the country had been dominated by the socialist dogma imposed upon them by a series of Soviet leaders, beginning, of course, with Stalin, who cast a long, enduring shadow over Eastern Europe...  Below is the first of many passages I've been thinking about as I read this book, a profoundly influential piece of writing from this intellect in exile, who defected to America rather than live under the sway of Stalin....  

From Milosz's Preface:

"For several years I carried on a debate with those of my friends who were yielding, little by little, to the magic influence of the New Faith...As the nerve centers of [Poland] were mastered, on after the other, by the adherents of Moscow, I was forced to abandon my philosophic beliefs one after another, if I was to keep from throwing myself into the abyss.  The abyss for me was exile, the worst of all misfortunes, for it meant sterility and inaction.

In the end, I found myself driven to the point where a final choice had to be made.  This was when "socialist realism" was introduced into Poland.  This is not, as some think, merely an esthetic theory to which the writer, the musician, the painter or the theatrical producer is obliged to adhere.  On the contrary, it involves by implication the whole Leninist-Stalinist doctrine.  If writers and painters are not forced to become members of the Party, that is because such a step is unnecessary.  So long as they act in accordance with "socialist realism," they are automatically and inescapably enrolled among the followers of Stalin.  "Socialist realism" is much more than a matter of taste, of preference for one style of painting or music rather than another.  It is concerned with the beliefs which lie at the foundation of human existence.  In the field of literature it forbids what has in every age been the writer's essential task - to look at the world from his own independent viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so to keep watch and ward in the interest of society as a whole.  It preaches a proper attitude of doubt in regard to a merely formal system of ethics but itself makes all judgment of values dependent upon the interest of the dictatorship.  Human sufferings are drowned in the trumpet-blare: the orchestra in the concentration camp; and I, as a poet, had my place already marked out for me among the first violins..."