Saturday, January 11, 2014

From the Archives: Part 102 of The Self and its Sources




In the May 1993 New York Review of Books was published an article by Vaclav Havel entitled “The Post-Communist Nightmare” , this was the text of a speech he gave at George Washington University in April 1993.
NYRB link here.

This was replied to by Joseph Brodsky in personal letter published in NYRB a month later.
“… what you call “communism” was a breakdown of humanity, and not a political problem. It was a human problem, a problem of our species, and thus of a lingering nature. Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil—terminology, I should add, invented by evil to obscure its own reality. “

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