I am currently in the Georgian capital, participating in the Tbilisi International Festival of Literature. The subject of the festival is protest — a very timely topic in Georgia with national elections just weeks away.
There are writers, novelists and poets from all over the world here, and one panel discussion involved three writers from Georgia, Ukraine and Armenia. All three countries have had democratic revolutions with mass street protests in the last couple of decades. All have issues with the expanding Russian empire. And in all three countries, according to the writers who spoke, there is an extraordinary degree of unity among writers and artists.
As the Georgian writer put it, there is not a single person, not one, who he knows who does not support the struggle for democracy in this country. It was clear that similar sentiments were felt by the Ukrainian and Armenian speakers.
Of course I am on their side. Obviously one cannot support authoritarian movements or regimes. Obviously democracy is preferable to the alternative. And obviously when confronted with an aggressive foreign invader, one has to choose sides.
But as I listened to the speakers, acutely aware of the fact that they all came from former Soviet republics, I grew increasingly uncomfortable. And I was reminded of a Hebrew expression that I learned in Israel: sifrut m’guyeset. Roughly translated, that means “mobilised literature”. I tried to look up the precise meaning of this phrase but found just a short Wikipedia entry in Hebrew — and in no other language. Strange, because it’s not something unique to Israel — and here I was meeting it again in the South Caucasus.
To me, it means literature in the service of a cause, or a state. And this would have been common in the young state of Israel where writers and other artists did feel a responsibility to contribute in their own way to the new society being built there.
But it can also mean the controlled art and literature of a totalitarian state, like the Soviet Union.
And in that case, “mobilised literature” means not only that artists and writers serve the interests of broader society and the state, but that dissident views are not tolerated.
Worse that that, it means that artists and writers whose work focusses perhaps on their personal lives would be seen as useless because their writing does not contribute to the greater struggle.
This year’s festival was organised by PEN Georgia, PEN being the international organisation that supports and defends writers. PEN campaigns for writers who have been unjustly arrested and jailed for the “crime” of writing that does not suit the current regime in their countries.
Fortunately, this is not happening in the three countries whose authors sat on the panel. But as one of them pointed out, depending on the results of the upcoming Georgian elections, that might change. He suggested that we prepare for the possibility of writers being punished for writing what they really think. In my view, he was not wrong.
But just as we must defend artistic freedom against a repressive state, we must also defend the right of people to speak their minds, even when that doesn’t perfectly suit our agendas.
As Trotsky put it in the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, which was signed by
André Breton and Diego Rivera, revolutionary socialists must speak out against “those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of ends foreign to itself … To those who urge us … to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula complete freedom for art.”
“Mobilised literature” and “complete freedom for art” cannot co-exist; one or the other must be chosen. In free societies, regardless of challenges and threats, one thing we should all agree on — perhaps the only thing — is freedom itself.
This article appears in this week’s issue of Solidarity.