The calvary of the emigre writer.

MANY YEARS AGO, while teaching at a small Northwestern university, I decided to write a short story in which Hitler and Stalin, two refugee professors of political science, meet in early September for registration at a "typical small university somewhere in America." Before the incoming students, who had never heard of them ("How do you spell your name, Professor Hitler?"); the two look at each other, burst out in laughter or tears--I had not decided which--and embrace. The best of colleagues from then on--comrades in exile.

Not all refugees get along so well. Bankers or scholars can pursue their careers in the United States without too much dislocation, since the language of finance and scholarship is almost universally translatable. But the novelist, the poet, the essayist faces a tragedy. In his homeland he had achieved maturity and fame; as a refugee he is torn not only from the sights and sounds that enchanted his childhood, but also from his mother tongue. It is an irreplaceable tool; the true writer sees and comprehends the world through language. No object is the same in another tongue, not the trees, not the sky, not joy, suffering, or love. The scholar can turn to multilingual files and reflect on what he has learned in English one day, and in German the next. But Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Milan Kundera cannot do so; they would first have to relearn the world.

Still, there are degrees of exile, so to speak. The Cuban poet Armando Valladres, freed from Castro's Gulag, plunges into an ocean of Spanish-speaking people. His poems from the dungeon, with their fresh imprint of suffering, can be read in Spain or Argentina. Not so the nvoels and poems of Hungary's greatest writers, Sandor Marai and Gyula Illyes: Alien to the cozy family of Indo-European languages, Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish are very nearly untranslatable. The exiled writer of isolated tongues is exiled twice over.

But this is not the end of the refugee writer's calvary. (Even a Solzhenitsyn--how long can he remember, in Vermont, the smell of the dust on Russian roads, the feel of Russian trees, the sound of streams through Russian meadows?) A third exile waits for him. While he struggles against despair in foreign lands, the language that gave substance to his art is itself changing, evolving, degenerating in the homeland. Soviet Russian is no longer the language of Tolstoy. Hungarian under Communism has been brutalized; it has become an obscenity. The Party language, with its lies, propaganda, and false promises, debases the word; realities break down into slogans, and no writer gives them immortal life. In the schools, a few courageous teachers instill the love of words. But by and large diversity has disappeared along with "class society"; Party newspeak prevails, heavy, stereotyped, plodding from one safe formula to the next.

For whom does the refugee writer write? For a vanishing public. His fellow exiles--his potential readers--have also had to start a new life abroad, among different nations and cultures. Some now speak their native tongue only haltingly; their vocabulary becomes limited and coarse, and their children forget the language altogether, let alone the sweet flavor of its sounds. The writer himself, like the paper he writes on, is being recycled. He writes for an almost invisible public, his books printed by ephemeral publishing houses and sold at charity gatherings. A Life Divided

In short, in the midst of freedom of speech, he turns into a samizdat author, stealing time here and there for his writing, since he works from 9 to 5 in an office or at some menial job. Rare visitors from the old country or from the diaspora come to see him. For a moment, he basks in the feeble light of recognition, and the old beloved words flow unimpeded like wine or vodka. Until the moment when the conversation turns to the present and local events. Then the old words no longer suffice, talk slips into English, Spanish, German.

The refugee writer is torn; he wears a mask on which one painted eye cries, the other laughs. But, you say, at least he has the comfort of his fellow writers, in whose company he can roll the golden words and sonorous phrases. You are mistaken. As a class, writers, scholars, intellectuals are vain, more jealous of each other's successes than Olympic champions or opera stars. Their emigre associations are vipers' nests. They fight over the few crumbs of recognition, the fragile publishing houses, the magazines that seem always to publish the rival poet or short-story writer. Every writer knows exactly when his competitor left the mother country, because the date of dissidence infallibly indicates the degree of servitude to the hated regime that the new refugee was willing to accept: By the date of their dissidence shall you know them. Obviously, the more recent the dissidence, the more suspect the newly arrived writer. Obviously too, he deserves no financial assistance, no friendly help. The country from which he has escaped knows how to exploit these conflicts and jealousies, how to weaken and tempt the exiled writer. Solzhenitsyn's new book, Our Pluralists, is a good illustration of the developing vipers' nest among Soviet emigres. In it he charges his fellow dissidents--liberals, socialists, social-democrats--with the sin of succumbing to Western temptations. Going Home

The exiled writer's last resort is also the saddest. As age approaches, his allegiances are torn between the homeland he had to flee and the new home in which he remains a foreigner and leads an alien existence. So the writer tries to go home, to the place where his vision and style were born. To go home gradually, as it were, by first making a few "diplomatic" moves toward the hated regime. He seems now to beg: Give me a last chance to express myself, to be printed and heard in my native tongue, in touch with the only public which, after all that has happened, can still understand me. The language is debased, youth is brutal and arrogant, the Party all-powerful--but the orchards along the country roads smell delightful in the spring, and the garden fence in the village is of the same mouldering wood as before.

Thus the long road back begins, and a price must be paid. Writer X, in exile for decades and a tower of opposition to the regime, now publishes articles in magazines, speaks on the radio, and occasionally he quotes Marx and Engels. Not yet Lenin or the local leader, but that will come too. They promise to publish a book or two of his, expurgated of course. The writer then undergoes an astonishing metamorphosis. The regime methodically strips away his self-respect. Thus while not really gaining support from home, the writer loses his moral capital in exile. Why does he find himself in this predicament? When all is said and done, it is because the value of words is stronger, more important to him than all his hopes, fears, human ties and interests, stronger than principle and integrity. If he dies in exile, his grave will not become a national symbol, a gathering place for future generations, soil in which resistance to a future oppressive regime may germinate. Instead, he will be one of many unknown soldiers, his grave traceless, somewhere in the wide world.

His words, flying back home, are then the sole link to the past, to the earth, to the roots of meaning. Solzhenitsyn may be the prince of exiled writers, Czeslaw Milosz may receive the Nobel Prize, Valladares may mix in his crown of laurel the leaves of martyrdom--they still inhabit that strange land, Exiledom. Their patron saint was not himself a writer, yet a man of rather substantial ideas, called Socrates. Offered a choice between exile and death, he did not hesitate for a moment. True, had he choisen exile, he would have remained in Greek-speaking territory; but no stream in Thebes or Corinth flows as sweetly as agile Ilissos, and the groves where he talked with eager young men provided a shade softer than those of Thessaly or Megara.