Every generation of intellectuals finds a way of coming to terms with the limits of their agency. Brodsky’s chose poetry; mine and Gessen’s took the train downtown. It’s not a strict binary, of course: these two tendencies can coexist in the same individual and express themselves in different ways. But we might consider that switching off, for Brodsky, was a way of performing his social responsibility, not shirking it. In Brodsky’s view, politics was one level of human existence, but it was a low rung. The business of poetry, he thought, is to “indicate something more … the size of the whole ladder.” He held that “art is not a better, but an alternative existence … not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate it.” What compels a poet to write is less “a concern for one’s perishable flesh” than “the urge to spare certain things of one’s world—of one’s personal civilization—one’s own non-semantic continuum.”

I think this was his answer to Gessen’s challenge. When there is scarce room for political maneuvering, when the prevailing cultural values are sucked of all significance, making art that rejects tired tropes and social themes may not be simply an expression of personal freedom, the luxury of the secure and uninvested. It can model independent thought and attentiveness, preserving not just the integrity of the self but also that of the culture one sees being degraded before one’s eyes.

This is not art for art’s sake; it needn’t be quietist or resigned. We can believe in the power of art and defend it vigorously without indulging in fantasies of its social utility. In times like these, we need critics. But we also need poets, who can transmute experience into art and sniff out platitudes. Those who search for possibilities in foregone conclusions and hearts in fiery motors.

[...] Humor is a meditation upon death. It is by this difference that we are best able to understand the nature of a life lived in the comic mode. The fact that I will not live two hundred years, let alone forever, is what is preventing me from writing my gelastical magnum opus. It is also what makes gelastics possible in the first place: that we are mortal, and therefore doomed. [...]

One of Salih’s fundamental insights is about what she calls the conundrum of nationalism. She and her comrades believed that they stood at the center of a political map: “To the east the socialist camp, to the west the capitalist one and in the middle, at the very beating heart, the national independence movements of the third world.” But her small Marxist contingent would be quickly consigned to this map’s margins. “The only struggle in town, the only one of real interest to the masses,” Salih writes, was nationalism: it was the real foundation of the students’ political consciousness—whether they knew it or not—and it trumped their radical but often superficial leftism at every turn.

It was also the means by which the young Egyptian regime could be sure to guarantee its own survival. Any attempt to question economic inequality and political repression could be recast as an attack on the newly independent nation. “The explosion of the student movement onto the political scene was the result of a crack in the walls of the regime’s house, a house of which it was still, nonetheless, the undisputed master,” Salih writes. “The masses were sympathetic to the student movement because it ‘pressured’ the regime, not because it sought to overturn it. … The people’s worst fear was the destruction of the regime at the hands of the country’s enemies.”

Just like the student activists of Salih’s time, the secular progressive activists who had found themselves lionized, briefly, as “revolutionary youth” in Egypt in 2011 were quickly sidelined by Islamists, the military and foreign powers. They continued to take to the streets for several years but drew dwindling crowds. They discovered, like their predecessors, that they were a vanguard with only temporary, contingent mass support. Soon they were accused of being foreign agents, puppets in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, Qatar, Israel, the United States: the same enemies who had supposedly orchestrated the initial protests against President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 with the purpose of weakening Egypt.