Sometimes PEN World Voices Festival offers sporting opportunities. After the critics finished being critical at the Austrian Cultural Forum, I had thirty minutes to complete a mad dash from 53rd and Fifth Avenue to 37th and Fifth Avenue, a.k.a. CUNY’s Graduate Center, for the Orwellian-sounding panel, “Utopia and Dystopia: Geographies of the Possible.” Along the way I had to suck down supplements: an iced coffee and granola bar. Aside the race against time (and hunger), PEN WVF also includes the Olympic feat of having to switch mental gears suddenly. But that’s just one more reason to adore this weeklong festival.
Changing gears from the critical mentality to one of abstract geography was easy to do with this panel. Alberto Mobilio led the participants across the stage, pageant-style, and introduced the following, fascinating line-up: Inga Kuznetsova (Russia, with translator), Jonathan Lethem (U.S.), Eshkol Nevo (Israel), and Andrzej Stasiuk (Poland, with translator).
The empty chair sat in stark reminder that many writers around the world may never have the same chance to speak in front of a crowd, to share their secrets, passions and desires for a utopia with an appreciative audience. Or, as Kuznetsova would later remark, writers living under repressive regimes often wrote passionately, but only for their desk drawer. Let us not forget…
Before I comment on some of the highlights of the conversation, allow me to extend a quick congratulatory note to Mobilio. Moderating panels with so 
many voices is often not as easy as it looks, and those who do it well often go overlooked. Kudos, then, to Mobilio for his moderating prowess—he came prepared, kept the discussion flowing smoothly, and gave equal attention to all of the writers. Bravo!
Rather than give a play-by-play of the afternoon, I’ll distill what became apparent to me through the course of the conversation. As the discussion drew to a close, two distinctions emerged, which can crudely be described as “East” and “West” idealizations of “Utopia” (I capitalize utopia to emphasize the ideal concept, versus the common usage of the term). For the West, Lethem led the charge with Nevo in tow. For the East, Kuznetsova proved strong, with backing from Stasiuk. This is not to say lines were drawn on stage, nor did the conversation turn into an “us versus them” debate. But the ideas, once floated, seemed to meander to one camp or the other.
To give some context, here are some of the questions Mobilio floated to the panelists, often directly to one or two of them: Is the notion of creating the possibility of a utopia actively pursued or avoided by the writer? Does imagination carry some risk or can it implicate a writer? Are the rules of Utopia malleable? Is Utopia game-like in its structure? Can one choose to participate or not participate in Utopia?
Lethem and Nevo seemed to suggest that Utopia shaped the individuals. In other words, Utopia has parameters under which the ideal society behaves. Kuznetsova and Stasiuk, on the other hand, believe that Utopia can be found in the absence of control. Their understanding is more chaotic and anarchic.
Jonathan Lethem claims that the act of asserting another world is very much at stake in literary culture. New or alternative political realms are not actively engaged because everything we know of or experience in the organization of our society is taken as a given. One can even use the ideas of the U.S. and Israel as attempts at achieving a Utopian state: it was asserted that these two lands would be created; once achieved, the state began to define its inhabitants.
Eshkol Nevo’s ideas echoed those of Lethem: as an Israeli, he noted, one cannot underestimate the power of the idea of Utopia. Israel, after all, has its origins in documents and imagination. That is, writers and thinkers dreamt of the idea of Israel, put the concepts into paper, and (Old Testament aside), and voila! A state was born.
At the same time, however, to be an Israeli is also to understand the concept of Dystopia. The War of 1948 may have created a Utopia for Jews, but it simultaneously created a Dystopia for the Palestinians who were occupying the land at the time. The creation of a Utopia for one people resulted in the creation of a Dystopia of another people.
Between their discussions on their home countries, both Lethem (U.S.) and Nevo (Israel) emphasized the role and power the state has in creating Utopia. Later in the discussion, Lethem took the point further, likening Utopia to games and temporary autonomous zones (like the Burning Man Festival), where people come together for a certain amount of time, agree on certain rules of behavior, and then dissolve the Utopia when the game/moment has been achieved. Often, he suggests, it is the making and creating of these Utopias that is the point, not necessarily experiencing the end results (which is why they must be dissolved and begun anew). This train of thought lends to the idea that creating the idea of the United States of America was more Utopian than its actual manifestation. [My note: Does it follow that the U.S. must now be dissolved and begun again for Utopia to be realized?]
Kuznetsova and Stasiuk would have none of this. One suspects their experiences under different governing structures fuel their lifestyle philosophies. Inga Kuznetsova, who spoke each time with an infectious, barely contained excitement, distrusts the role of the state in creating Utopia. When people take on a common problem, the struggle for power inevitably erupts, ushering in Dystopia.
Further, and for her poetic angle, because it aims for the good of the common denominator, the state is terrible for fostering creativity. The greater the distance between the writer and the state, she remarked (through translator), the better the conditions are for literature. She reiterated this point by reading a poem about Plato’s ejection of the poets from the city of Athens, a historical event that she reads not as a dismissal of the poets, but rather as a freeing of the poets from the confines of the state.
People live between Heaven and Earth, Kuznetsova says, and literature helps to bring these two worlds together. “I think that poetry is Utopia. When the reader and writer are immersed in the craft, they are in Utopia, in Paradise.”
Where Kuznetsova was poetic, Andrzej Stasiuk was disarmingly charming. Though his voice was guttural, his translator was melodious, conveying that the thirty years he spent under a “Utopia” in Poland was… boring. He finds contemporary times to be more interesting because there is less state control. For the same reason he left the Polish army—without a war in which to fight, the military and its structure was boring. Art and literature are answers to boredom and fear.
Unlike Lethem, Kuznetsova and Stasiuk are less interested in rules, and more interested in personal freedoms and chaos. Rules, Stasiuk quipped, are… boring.
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