"In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return"
About this Quote
“In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return” is a line built to sound like testimony, not memoir. Chambers reaches for the Lazarus story because it carries two crucial meanings at once: resurrection and accusation. Lazarus doesn’t merely come back to life; his return is proof that forces everyone else to take a side. That’s Chambers in 1937, stepping out of the Communist underground and back into public moral time, making his very survival a kind of evidence.
The phrase “impossible return” does heavy lifting. It admits that leaving a totalizing ideology isn’t a clean conversion narrative; it’s a crawl back through fear, compromised relationships, and the knowledge that your former comrades will treat you as either a corpse who should have stayed buried or a traitor who must be erased. Chambers frames his shift not as an intellectual change of mind but as an ordeal, an exit from a sealed world. The biblical reference also borrows the authority of religious language without sounding pious; it’s a rhetorical credential, suggesting he’s not shopping for a new politics so much as escaping spiritual death.
Context sharpens the intent. 1937 sits inside the era of Stalin’s purges and the disillusionment of fellow travelers. Chambers later became the star witness in the Hiss case, and this Lazarus pose anticipates that role: a man returning from the dead to tell the living what they don’t want to hear. It’s self-mythmaking, yes, but effective self-mythmaking: he casts defection as a moral resurrection that will demand a reckoning.
The phrase “impossible return” does heavy lifting. It admits that leaving a totalizing ideology isn’t a clean conversion narrative; it’s a crawl back through fear, compromised relationships, and the knowledge that your former comrades will treat you as either a corpse who should have stayed buried or a traitor who must be erased. Chambers frames his shift not as an intellectual change of mind but as an ordeal, an exit from a sealed world. The biblical reference also borrows the authority of religious language without sounding pious; it’s a rhetorical credential, suggesting he’s not shopping for a new politics so much as escaping spiritual death.
Context sharpens the intent. 1937 sits inside the era of Stalin’s purges and the disillusionment of fellow travelers. Chambers later became the star witness in the Hiss case, and this Lazarus pose anticipates that role: a man returning from the dead to tell the living what they don’t want to hear. It’s self-mythmaking, yes, but effective self-mythmaking: he casts defection as a moral resurrection that will demand a reckoning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reinvention |
|---|---|
| Source | Whittaker Chambers, Witness: A Memoir (1952), memoir; contains the line “In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.” |
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