In Proofs and Three Parables (1992), a novella by the distinguished scholar and critic George Steiner, the collapse of communism is seen through the fading eyes and broken heart of an aging, Italian proofreader, known to his comrades as "Professore." As a proofreader, Professore is a master craftsman, bringing to his job an attention to detail that reflects the high standards by which he lives. But he faces a personal crisis, the realization that he is losing his sight.

Professore had been a lifelong Communist Party regular until 1968, when his objection to the ruthless Soviet suppression of the Prague revolution led to his being drummed out of the party. He has joined a group, the Circle for Marxist Revolutionary Theory and Praxis, largely made up of expelled dissidents like himself carrying on the principles of Karl Marx, despite their impotent status as party outcasts. Together with his comrades, he watches the television scenes of Communist governments being overthrown in Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, and Budapest, appalled at the triumph of consumer capitalism and the illusion of freedom it offers. In a rich, rhetorical exchange with another member of the group, a Marxist Catholic priest, he sees communism's fatal flaw in having "overestimated man," having held too high an opinion of human beings, unlike the church, which offers the illusion of an afterlife, and capitalism, which distracts the people with toys and gadgets. The priest replies that communism's mistake lay in trying to ram its truth, if truth it is, down the world's throat. He praises America for its take-it-or-leave-it attitude--that is, its freedom.

Eventually the group, fearful of a neo-fascist takeover of the Italian government, agrees to dissolve. Professore, his eyesight seriously deteriorating, travels to Rome to visit a now-defaced memorial to a group of partisans, tortured and killed by the Nazis in World War II. While there, he has a sexual encounter with a woman whose mother was a partisan, an experience that leads to a kind of reawakening. When he returns to his city, he applies for readmission to the old party, confirmed in his conviction that he had never really left it. He descends the dark stairway of the party building, realizing that "he had not held on to the banister. Not even once. But then one doesn't need one, does one, when coming home." Steiner seems to be suggesting that, like the Professore, communism had become blinded, having lost its way in the pursuit of power. Any possibility of its resurgence would depend upon its ability to regain the original ideas and ideals with which it began. This is the task of a proofreader: the correction of error, the restoration of the original intention. There is nothing to suggest that the author considers such a renewal possible or desirable; what he does seem to imply is the nobility of the effort.

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