Mémoire du mal, tentation du bien: Enquête sur le siècle (review)

Tzvetan Todorov, Mémoire du mal, tentation du bien: Enquête sur le siècle (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2000), 353 pp.

Once the proponent of an impersonal formalist-structuralist literary theory, Todorov has emerged, over the past decade, as an impassioned, highly personal philosophical thinker, whose writings on the Holocaust and the political life of postwar France are especially apropos in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. A Bulgarian exile, living for the past forty years in Paris, Todorov understands, as have few of his fellow literary theorists, that the totalitarianisms of the early century—fascism and communism—are two sides of the same coin and that they appeal to intellectuals because of their utopian cast, while democracy, messy and imperfect as it is, continues to be misunderstood and sometimes maligned. The "aesthetic" perfection of communism, Todorov argues, masks its dependence, even in hypothetical cases, on permanent revolution, struggle, violence, and war. It appeals to those who long for some form of secular transcendence—a reality that democratic governments must take into account. To illustrate his thesis, Todorov gives us chapters on individual heroic figures—Vassili Grossman, Margaret Buber-Neumann, Primo Levi, and others—who bear witness to the twin totalitarianisms of the century. I found these chapters somewhat less compelling than the overall thesis, but Mémoire du mal is a brilliant and deeply moving book that deserves the widest dissemination.