SOURCE: Coetzee, J. M. “Zbigniew Herbert and the Figure of the Censor.” Salmagundi: A Quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences 88-89 (fall 1990-winter 1991): 158-75.

In the following essay, Coetzee examines the ways in which writing under Polish state censorship informed Zbigniew Herbert's poetry. The author of this essay, a South African novelist, is the author of Barbarians at the Gate.

Under pressure at the 1934 Soviet Writers' Congress to embrace socialist realism, Isaac Babel announced that he would prefer to practice “the genre of silence.” In the Soviet Union, in what may rightly be called the heroic phase of their resistance to ideological prescription—a phase lasting till Stalin's death and the end of the Stalinist terror—Boris Pasternak and other prominent writers maintained an obdurate silence. Widely understood as a refusal to accommodate their art to the demands of the state, their silence had an enduring moral...