A year or so ago, the journalist Nick Cohen, reviewing a book by the English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, made the mistake of guessing what Hobsbawm's obituaries would look like. Those who shared Hobsbawm's political commitments would laud his work, Mr Cohen predicted. Those who did not would say "his loyalty to totalitarianism disfigured his writing". There would be little agreement between the two camps.
大约一年前,在点评英国马克思主义史学家埃里克•霍布斯鲍姆(Eric Hobsbawm)写的一本书时,记者尼克•科恩(Nick Cohen)曾猜测霍布斯鲍姆的讣告会是什么样子。科恩预言道,政治信仰与霍布斯鲍姆相同的人士会在讣告中赞美他的工作,而与霍布斯鲍姆持不同政见的人士可能会说,"他对极权主义的忠诚使他的作品变得丑陋"——这两个阵营对他的评价会非常不同。
Hobsbawm died last week at the age of 95 and Mr Cohen turns out to have been wrong. Whatever the view in recent years, there is today a remarkable consensus about Hobsbawm. Almost no one makes big claims for the communism that he professed, but almost no one dissents, either, from the view that places him among the great historians of his time.
上周,95岁的霍布斯鲍姆去世了,而事实也证明,科恩的预言是错误的。不管近些年来的思潮如何,今天人们对霍布斯鲍姆的评价却是惊人的一致。尽管几乎没什么人极力主张他所信仰的共产主义,但与此同时,也几乎没什么人反对将他列为他所处的那个时代的伟大史学家。
No matter how loudly Hobsbawm proclaimed the communist dogma, his cast of mind was independent. It was too independent for the Soviet Union, which translated none of his sweeping narratives on nationalism, industrialism, imperialism and globalism. Whether or not Hobsbawm is considered a radical communist, he was an impenitent communist. He clung to his party card through the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and past the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was sometimes biased. He blamed the liberal democracies for Stalin's decision to ally himself with Hitler.
不管霍布斯鲍姆曾经多么大声地宣扬共产主义教条,他的思想都称得上独立。而对苏联来说,霍布斯鲍姆的思想显得过于独立,因此,虽然他撰写了许多关于民族主义、工业主义、帝国主义以及全球主义的影响深远的论述,苏联却一篇也没有翻译。不管霍布斯鲍姆算不算得上是激进的共产主义者,他都肯定算得上是顽固的共产主义者。即便在苏联入侵捷克斯洛伐克和匈牙利的时候,即便在柏林墙倒塌之后,他也紧握他的党证不放。他的看法有时会有些偏激。比如斯大林(Stalin)决定与希特勒(Hitler)结盟一事,他就把这件事的责任记在自由民主国家头上。
That Hobsbawm "whitewashed" the crimes of communism is largely a canard. In The Age of Extremes, he suggested that the deaths due to Stalinist terror are more likely "measured in eight rather than seven digits. In these circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a ‘conservative' estimate nearer to 10 than to 20 millions or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification". Short of abandoning history for autobiography, he could hardly go further.
有人说霍布斯鲍姆试图掩饰共产主义的罪行,这种说法在很大程度上是谣言。他在《极端的年代》(The Age of Extremes)一书中指出,斯大林主义恐怖导致的死亡人数更有可能"是8位数,而不是7位数。在这种情况下,我们是选择一个接近于1000万人、而不是接近于2000万人的‘保守'估计数字,还是选择一个更大的数字,实际上并无太大区别:它无论如何都是一个不光彩的数字,不可能让人感到宽慰、更别说成为谁的辩护理由了。"
People can differ on whether Hobsbawm's Marxism should matter to his reputation. He thought it should. "Without Marx I would not have developed any special interest in history," Hobsbawm wrote in 1997. He refused to apologise for his politics or to couch them in any kind of soft-minded evasion about "good intentions". That he defended a cruel and misguided project did not mean he was misguided about everything.
至于霍布斯鲍姆的马克思主义信仰对他的声望有没有影响,人们有着各种不同的看法。霍布斯鲍姆自己认为是有影响的。1997年他写道:"没有马克思的话,我对历史就不会产生特别的兴趣。"霍布斯鲍姆拒绝为自己的政治观点道歉或以任何形式的关于"善意"的软性借口来表述它们。不过,他为一个残酷而受到误导的事业辩护,并不等于他对所有事情的看法都受到了误导。
Hobsbawm's assertion in Nations and Nationalism (1990) that traditional nationalism was losing its hold on the loyalty of citizens was much ridiculed when the war in Yugoslavia began months later. But today he looks more right than wrong.
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