A conversation.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW was recently the venue of a debate between two exiled writers from the Communist world, Milan Kundera and Joseph Brodsky. Too complex to be summarized in a brief editorial, their exchange nevertheless merits notice.

Kundera, the Czechoslovakian novelist, began an essay on the fiction of Diderot with a memory of the Prague Spring and its suppression. One consequence for him of that period was an aversion to the work of Dostoyevsky, whose "universe of overblown gestures, murky depths, and aggressive sentimentality"--associated, in his mind, with The Russian character, and particularly the Russian invasion--came to "repel" him. "The elevation of sentiment to the rank of a value," he realized, "date[d] back quite far. . . . The history of Christian society is an age-old school of feelings," beginning with the Crucifixion (which "taught us to cherish suffering"). "But from the Renaissance on," Kundera continues, "this Western sensibility has been balanced by a complementary spirit: that of reason and doubt, of play and the relativity of human affairs. It was then that the West truly came into its own." And so on to Diderot.

Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet, spends most of his reply defending Dostoyevsky. But he also corrects some of Kundera's Will Durant-ish history, with regard both to Russia, and to the entire West. "The atrocities that were and are committed in [the Soviet Union] were and are committed not in the name of love," but of a "concept of historical necessity" that was "the product of rational thought. . . . In short, on seeing a Russian tank in the street, there is every reason to think of Diderot. . . . Western civilization and its culture . . . is based first of all on the principle of sacrifice, on the idea of a man who died for our sins. . . . Shedding blood is no joy; it may not even qualify as a small imitation of Christ; but as long as man is prepared to die for his ideals, those ideals are alive."

The debate may be said to reflect, on a literary and aesthetic level, some of the same tensions explored by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov in their exchanges of letters during the Seventies (Kundera refers in passing--critically--to Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement address). It is a subject of interest to all Western men, and especially, given the two debaters, to the men who inhabit their countries. And isn't it a crime, and yet one more indictment of the system Kundera and Brodsky have both fled, that it has to be fought out in the pages of a newspaper published on a different continent?