Volume 26, Number 16 · October 25, 1979
Waiting for Revolution
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
Burger's Daughter
by Nadine Gordimer
Viking, 361 pp., $10.95
Nadine Gordimer, like many of the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century, lives in two worlds at the same time. She lives, as the Russians did, in a police state, and she also lives, as they did, in the wider culture of the West, receiving the reflections of the kinds of freedom that the West has enjoyed over two centuries or more. But it is more than a question of living under a police state. A whole analogous social structure is involved. Whites in South Africa, in relation to blacks, have much in common with the nobility in tsarist Russia in relation to the serfs. Turgenev and Tolstoy rejected serfdom but were nonetheless themselves distinctive products of a leisured serf-owning society. South African whites constitute an aristocracy of pigmentation, and even if they do not want to belong to it, they still do belong. A great writer in South Africa—and I believe Nadine Gordimer is a great writer—is living and working in a culture that is closer to nineteenth-century Russia than it is to the contemporary West.
Review, 5397 words
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