Since the Prague Spring [antikvár]

. ¦ !, i Foreword It is always necessary to ask how old a writer is who is reporting his impressions of a social phenomenon. Like the varying depths of a lens, the mind bends the light passing through it quite differently according to its age. When I first experienced Prague in the late sixties, the Russians had only just entered with their armies; writers (almost all of them self-proclaimed Marxists if not Party members) were still unsure of their fate under the new occupation, and when some thirty or forty of them gathered in the ofHce of Liszty to "interview" me, I could smell the apprehension among them. And indeed, many would soon be fleeing abroad, some would be jailed, and others would never again be permitted to publish in their native language. Incredibly, that was almost a decade ago. But since the first major blow to the equanimity of my mind was the victory of Nazism, first in Germany and later in the rest of Europe, the images I have of repression are inevitably cast in Fascist forms. In those times the Communist was always the tortured victim, and the Red Army stood as the hope of man, the deliverer. So to put it quite simply, although correctly I think, the occupation of Czechoslovakia was the physical proof that Marxism was but one more self-delu-sionaiy attempt to avoid facing the real nature of power, the primitive corruption by power of those who possess it. In a word, Marxism has turned out to be a fonn of sentimentalism toward human nature, and this has its funny side. After all, it was initially a probe into the most painful wounds of the capitalist presumptions; it was scientific and analytical. What the Russians have done in Czechoslovakia is, in effect, to prove in a Western cultural environment that what they