http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no13/ugresic.html
http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no13/ugresic.html
"In the noncommercial East European cultures, there were no divisions into good and bad literature. There was literature and there was trash. Culture was divided into official culture and underground culture. Underground literature, as a resistance movement, occupied far more space (justifiably or not) on the unofficial scale of literary values. East European writers moved in a world of clear aesthetic coordinates; at least that's what they believed. In their underground literary workshops, they diligently tempered the steel of their literary convictions. In return, they received abundant moral and emotional support from their readership. Both writers and their readers had endless amounts of time at their disposal, both everyday and "historical" time. And for someone to have any idea at all of what is really good, he needs time.
"When East European writers finally began crawling out of their underground, they stepped into the global literary marketplace like self-confident literary arbiters, as unfailing connoisseurs of difference. They brought with them an awareness of their chosen position in this world (the Muses decided, not them), and a conviction that they had an unalienable right to literary art.
"Their encounter with the literary market was the biggest shock of their writing lives, a loss of the ground under their feet, a terrible blow to their writers' ego.
"Oh, you're a writer?"
"Yes," our Easterner replies, trying to sound like a modest and well-brought-up person who does not want to humiliate those who have not been chosen.
"What a coincidence! Our ten-year-old daughter is just finishing a novel. We even have a publisher!"
"And this is the first insult that our Easterner has to swallow. He himself does not even have a publisher. And he will soon discover that the world of the literary marketplace is densely populated with the "chosen," with his fellow writers. His fellow writers are prostitutes who write their memoirs, sportsmen who describe their sporting lives, girlfriends of renowned murderers who describe the murderer from a more intimate perspective, housewives bored with daily life who have decided to try the creative life; there are lawyer-writers, fisherman-writers, literary critic-writers, innumerable searchers after their own identity, a whole army of those whom someone has offended, raped, or beaten up or whose toes have been stepped on and who rush to inform the world in writing of the drama of their long-repressed injury.
"Our Easterner is profoundly shaken...."
