In
attempting to present to the world my highly unorthodox version of history, I
used to be much bothered by the standard scientific requirement to ‘prove my
allegations.’ (After all, this is my very peculiar personal vision of
history, and even though I am entitled to it, I can’t escape the judgment of
the “objective” critics! Getting myself into the position of one against all, I
also realized my big handicap. Although the history of scientific thinking
tells us that genuine revolutions mostly occur when everybody is wrong, and
only one is right, the public is customarily convinced that there is a truth
in numbers, that is if everybody has been repeating the same thing over and
over again, they must know what they are talking about, and whoever
contradicts them, does not.
“How
is it possible that everyone says one thing and you alone say another?!,”
I was routinely asked, when I offered my audiences my controversial facts
and interpretations, and then I would become defensive, and I would tell them
essentially the same thing that no, I cannot prove my allegations but at least
they do make a lot of good sense and that they are new and they are fresh and
finally that they, my audience, are certainly free to make up their own mind
about them…
But,
nevertheless, I still cared about my handicap of proof and tried to go around
it to the best of my ability. I wanted to give the public my version of history
in such a way that the critics would not be able to assail it for being
unconventional and me for rewriting history without any formal documents
to prove me right.
Initially,
I tried to present my version of history in the form of a fictional novel,
titled The Lost Russia. No matter how prejudiced anybody could be
against my historical material, at least they could not dismiss its
lawful right to exist under the constitutional protection afforded to all work
of fiction. I wish I would have stuck to my guns, but, unfortunately, Mike
Bessie’s (he was then Chairman of the Board of Harper & Row) basso
ostinato, to the effect that what I know “non-fictionally” was
more interesting to the publishers and to the public than anything that I could
give offer as fiction, and ergo, the publishers would always be
tempted to put pressure on me to extract my nonfiction with the bottom
line being that they would thus conspire (the word conspire is not his,
but a part of my recap) to block any work of fiction coming out of my hands
until I had sufficiently whetted their appetites with my precious nonfiction.
(Apparently, Bessie was taking a cue in this from his wife Cornelia Bessie, whose celebrated dictum: “If
you can say to yourself, when that manuscript goes to the printer’s, this is
the best book that this person can write at this time, then you’ve done your
job,” meant, in my case, that a work of fiction was not “the best
book” expected from me at that time.
Having
seen my Lost Russia thus hopelessly blocked I decided to change my
tactic presenting them with an acceptable compromise: my Secret History of
Soviet Russia where history spurted out of me as a “stream of
consciousness” (for the record, this last phrase was introduced into literary
psycho-parlance by the graces of my by now good, albeit flawed friend William
James, who actually coined it, but didn’t apply it to literature in its
most common sense) with no footnotes, no attributions, and-- hopefully-- no
need to prove anything to anybody. This ploy, however, did not work out,
either. It was explained to me that my effort wasn’t going to be rewarded by
publication, unless I spelled out scrupulously and unflinchingly all my
exceedingly splendid sources, whose illustrious names the public was going to
be most anxious to hear and use as its authority on what had really
happened.
Eventually,
I caved in again, with Stalin, and Other Family being the fruit of my
labor. The agents and the publishers were dutifully satisfied with Molotov said
this and Voroshilov said that, but the book was never published for another
reason, perhaps, the most important of all. The dust of history was a “sacred”
dust that was sanctified by the official historical accounts of what had
happened, and no “intruder in that dust” (yes, it is an allusion to
William Faulkner, unless anyone thought I wanted to sneak this phrase in
without proper attribution!) was to be ever allowed to commit such a
sacrilege with impunity.
Now
that my books have failed to be published anyway, I have repented my former
compromises, and that old “burden of proof” business doesn’t
bother me anymore. As Bob Dylan so adorably nasalizes, “I
used to care, but things have changed…”
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