Collapse and Survival

Abstract

‘The whole world doesn’t collapse at once.’ Serge began The Long Dusk (1946) with this characteristic sentence, terse and unlaboured yet terribly sharp in what it implies. The most prescient writers now felt that it was touch and go for the species — that the most extreme situation conceivable might well have been reached. The French writer Michel Leiris said that in ‘Guernica’ Picasso ‘sends us our announcement of our mourning: all that we love is going to die’.¹ Orwell’s alternative title for Nineteen Eighty-four which he was thinking about from the middle of the war, was The Last Man in Europe.² At about the same time Anna Seghers was writing in The Seventh Cross: ‘if we were to be destroyed on that scale, all would perish because there would be none to come after us. The almost unprecedented in history, the most terrible thing that could happen to a nation, was now to be our fate’.³ In what may well be the classic message to come out of the Stalinist Soviet Union, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, the writer constantly speaks as though for a people who have gone under for the last time, in the faint but enduring hope that there may be someone on the far side to hear her words: